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| The Cyborg (Fe)Man/ual |
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Cautions We begin with a range of cautionary questions and caveats about what it means to "make a cyborg. We (and Haraway and others) assume that a cyborg is sentient. We have to keep in mind what makes a cyborg, and what separates a robot from a cyborg. We have assumed its sentience and self-conciousness, its capacity to reflect on itself as a self, and its ability to act on knowledge. First, One of the things Donna Haraway has required us to think about is: is our cyborg built from scratch or is it a modified human? Early in our discussions, we decided that ours would be a constructed creature but we also realized as we talked that this doesn't mean this (Fe)Man/ual is not useful for thinking about other kinds of cyborgs, such as ourselves. At a certain point in our conversation, some, like Ivy, wanted to define the cyborg (and its purpose) so we could have a baseline from which to answer our questions. Others, like Ann, suggested that it was useful not to have a definition precisely so that we would not be limited by an idea of the cyborg, even as we recognized that most of us had some idea of what s/he/it looked like. In short, we have decided that it is not useful to decide whether this cyborg is constructed from the ground up or in another way, or even to be constrained by recognizing that we are all cyborgs in one way or another. This enables us to ask these questions in a wide-ranging way that doesn't restrict us or the people of the future. Despite that, we also recognize that we would have to define what a cyborg is if we had the material resources to construct one. In short, the cyborg we ended up talking about was more like Yod in He, She, and It than any one of us, modified by technology, machinery, or gadgets. Yet, again, this doesn't mean that we might not be the cyborg we are querying here. Second, we need to recognize we can't think of everything: It is likely that this (Fe)Man/ual will be flawed and omit central questions. In fact, we want to recognize that aiming for perfection is inherently problematic. (Donna Haraway's cyborg is not perfect. It explores gaps and explodes totalities.) If future thinking is always shaped by the conditions of its imagining, then we recognize that what follows are situated questions. Third, as a result of the above, we propose that this (Fe)Man/ual works against the cyborg's perfection and purpose in a critical manner. Perfection is another kind of totality that we are suspicious of. Yet, at the same time, there were tensions in our group because some (especially Elijah and Gaia) wanted to endow it with qualities that would give it the best possible chance. The idea of the MWOKDB (see below) is evidence of this. Yet, at the same time, we are concerned about both what it would mean to make a perfect cyborg for the cyborg her/him/itself, as well as what the assumption that we could make a perfect cyborg would do for the process of making it/him/her. What kinds of assumptions would we have to make in imagining it to be perfect? Whose ideas of perfection would it embody? Fourth, we also ask: to what extent are we trying to approximate human child-rearin' and makin'? (Libby wanted us to say rearin' and makin'). In asking this question, we get closest to the observation we came to in class that the questions we are asking about the cyborg (whatever form it takes) are questions about human agency, personhood, and capacities. The fact that we ask this question means that we recognize the intimate relationship between making a child and making a cyborg. We recognize, though, that what it means to make a child is historically and culturally specific. We think about education and child raising in our specific time and place, which is very different than even 50 years ago. In a sense, our response to this question is contingent upon how we respond to the rest of the questions in this (Fe)Man/ual. It gets back to the question: why we are doing this in the first place? It raises the tensions that seem to have existed in our group about the "purpose" of this cyborg and the "imperfectability/perfectibility" of this cyborg. One response might be that the question itself raises tensions among the factions of the group that have envisioned this project in a similar light to that of raising a child and those who have been more wary of approximating the cyborg project with child-rearing. Another tension: that of the purpose of the cyborg. We ask do any makers of sentient beings (i.e. babies) have purposes? We recognize that some do, for example for the purpose of a child's labor, to carry on a legacy, and to ensure a genetic linee. On the other hand, contemporary, middle class, white Americans think of children as those who should seek out their own purposes. This also relates to questions of desire and self-fashioning. "You can be anything you want" is already culturally specific -- within a set of limitations. Parents may not want their child to be "on drugs" or "a punk rock lesbian." But this raises important questions about our cyborg: one of the ways we have envisioned the cyborg is something that has been altered/enhanced by drugs or computer programming! How is this different from the cultural context of the punk rock lesbian or druggies? In the end, then, we still have no final response to our desires to approximate human child bearing and rearing.... because some of us have different ideas about it. This final point is, perhaps, the most important to bear in mind. The cyborg also de-links us from traditional methods of reproduction and biology. It allows us to rethink "parenthood/creation" and what we really are. Which leads to the next question:. Fifth, then, What is our relationship to it? Are we its parents, makers, gods, owners? Or (David's suggestion) its demonic genitors? We recognize that there is a possibility that we may not be looked upon kindly for our creation, either by our cyborg or our society. In Marge Piercy's novel He, She, and It, Yod the cyborg was not happy with his creator Avram. Our relationship to it (structurally) is, like this (Fe)Man/ual, fraught with a series of tensions. Ann said: perhaps we could be thought of as "assemblers" of many things: mechanics, knowledge, an archive, the culturally specific questions, and the culturally specific responses to these questions. The ambivalences are about having to come up with a series of guidelines and a series of questions even as we don't have control over a future cyborg. Our relation to the project itself is ambivalent because of the tensions within the project itself and also because we may be held responsible for the consequences of this project in the future. This also lead to Elijah's question: should we copyright this (Fe)Man/ual? Others asked in response: what are the implications of that? To what extent do we want control over the future use of this (Fe)Man/ual? There are pros and cons to copyrighting? Will it inhibit "progress," creativity, and collaboration? Don't we want this (Fe)Man/ual to be part of a critical process? Sixth, we want to account for our own situatedness: We would ask then: Who is involved in the programming? Who are we or they (the makers)? What kinds of people are we/they? what do we/they look like? where are we/ they from? what class are they/we? who do we/they feel accountable to? We note, looking around the classroom, that we are all pretty white and at SLC. We are primarily women, although some of us have complicated relationships to age, class, gender, sex, race. We recognize that there are potential consequences of a the production of a document like this. We feel accountable to: humans, the future, David Valentine, ourselves, our children, and to the cyborg. (Ann feels like, at this point, that asking so many questions makes her feel like she's at the Passover Seder.) Finally, we ask: why are we doing this if we are all cyborgs already? Well, we are only cyborgs in the Haraway-an sense. Dale said: "Ok, why don't we just have a kid and get it a cell phone?" Someone else proposed that we're doing it because we're engaged in a series of complex and vital questions about what personhood, agency, power, gender, sexuality, race, knowledge, visions of the future are in the first place, and if someone makes one of these things, they need to think about that too. Some other questions we never go around to thinking about directly: What are our investments in having the cyborg need a sense of self (which Ann realized, as she typed, is abbreviate-able as SOS)? It seems appropriate that we leave some of the questions unanswered so that future cyborg makers can ponder them themselves. |