I had quite a busy week. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I ran all day workshops – 9-5 non-stop while in the evening I was fitting in reading Haraway and Hayles. Thursday and Friday I was working with my friend and colleague Judy (face to face as I am in the States at the moment) to fine tune a chapter we are writing together. Judy has also read Haraway and Hayles this week and quite amazingly Hayles proved very pertinent to the ideas we have developed on our chapter – which gives an overview of the development of qualitative data analysis tools and how we see the future in Web 2.0 tools. Hayles gave us the vocabulary for ideas we didn’t have the words for. I used Tumblr which fed into my lifestream to pull out key quotes to reflect on. Haraway was new to me and as I didn’t have the time to read her in one sitting. I was initially frustrated as I felt she was really addressing issues about the direction of feminism and couldn’t figure out initially where cyborgs fit in. I noticed in the tweets that others were having problems, too, so I searched the web for material on her and the Cyborg Manifesto and found something that gave information on her background and provided a good summary of the manifesto which I tweeted to the class. I also benefitted by other class members doing the same and tweeting links to other articles and videos about Haraway or Hayles. I felt twitter worked this week as a good medium to help each other find material to elucidate two challenging texts.
I had to keep reminding myself that Haraway was writing in the mid-eighties before the World Wide Web and with her background in biology, a lot of her notions of cyborg come from medical developments of the time, organ transplants, pacemakers etc. I have always been sympathetic to arguments that challenge dualisms so her vision of the cyborg as taking us out of dualistic thinking is attractive – although I find also a bit fuzzy. I understand that the cyborg is outside of the male/female dualism as being neither and that our relation with machines is intermingled with us – we create machines, we use machines, they do not dominate us, they are us – an aspect of our embodiment. And I guess while the thrust of her argument is about feminism, what we can take from her for digital culture is that the notion of cyborgs can support an embodied view of digital culture.
I found Haynes more accessible. Her mapping of the history of cybernetics, the politics involved, the erasures of certain ideas, the re-writing of history illuminated for me the background to some of the dominant ideas of digital culture
By turning the technological determinism of bodiless information, the cyborg, and the posthuman into narratives about the negotiations that took place between particular people at particular times and places, I hope to replace a teleology of disembodiment with historically contingent stories about contests between competing factions, contests whose outcomes were far from obvious. Many factors affected the outcomes, from the needs of emerging technologies for reliable quantification to the personalities of the people involved. Though overdetermined, the disembodiment of information was not inevitable, any more than it is inevitable we continue to accept the idea that we are essentially informational patterns. p. 22
For me, the most illuminating quote was from an interview with Hayles earlier this year – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBhFYkaift4
…what we see with digital media is not so much the death of the author, as the distribution of the author function in new ways. …if you create a digital work, you are collaborating with the software you are using to create that work. And the people who created the software, in a sense, are your remote co-collaborators. And you are also collaborating with the computer hardware. And all of these have constraints and possibilities that you can explore. Hayles, N.K. (2009) Interview with Stacey Cochran, YouTube – 28 March 2009
It is the idea of distributed cognition, which Hayles mentions later in the same interview, that makes us posthuman. We are interacting with machines, with software, with applications which shape and are shaped by us.
