Friday, November 11, 2016

Haraway's cyborg as a vision of Derrida's monstrous future

From Derrida's Of Grammatology
The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue. 

From Bakhtin's Discourse in the Novel
Language--like the living concrete environment in which he consciousness of the verbal artist lives--is never unitary.
As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. 

From Diane Price Herndl's The Dilemas of a Feminine Dialogic
In feminine texts it is never clear who speaks, where the speaking is coming from, but it is clear that there is always more than one speaker, more than one language because it is always "an-other's" speech, serving "an-other's" language. A feminine language lives on the boundary. A feminine text overthrows the hierarchies. It is absence-silence-madness present-speaking-sane. It proves the hierarchies mistaken. Like the voices Bakhtin hears in the novel's carnival, the female voice laughs in the face of authority. 

From Donna Haraway's A Manifesto for Cyborgs
Contests for the meanings of writing are a major form of contemporary political struggle. Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious. The poetry and stories of US women of color are repeatedly about writing, about access to the power to signify; but this time that power must be neither phallic nor innocent. Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. 
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OK folks - that was a long-winded way of implying that I'm going to posit Haraway's cyborg as an embodiment of Derrida's monstrous future. Hybrid and heteroglot, the cyborg is a composite of material and dialogic interaction, provides a glimpse into the terrible future beyond Western metaphysics/(phal)logocentrism, etc. 

Here's my general plan:

If the Derridean monstrosity is that which exceeds boundaries, spills out, is un-certifiable, and flows from the fissures of the structure as it is now, then we can look at it as the precursor of the cyborg.

"In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense; a "final" irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the "West's" escalating domination of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space" (Haraway, 2191)

At once comprised of and surpassing the heteroglossia and hybridity that occupy the borders of our social systems, the cyborg calcifies those notions into a hardened subject that is monstrous, futuristic, and outside of everything we know. 

The centrifugal forces of language and society have blown through their boundaries and are then reconstituted in the composite form of the cyborg. Dialogism creates a vision of the monstrous, and that monstrosity is the precursor of the cyborg. 

That's about all I have so far, but it would be helpful to hear from y'all if you think this notion can carry any weight. Also, is tossing Bhabha into it too much? I have 20 pages to explore this idea, so I need to have something to talk about, but don't want to get in over my head. Let me know what you think.

Also, here's a cyborg-inspired haiku I wrote about IUDs:

as the moon fills up
i feel my metal twisting
witch woman robot




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