notes on subjectivity, eugenics, cyborgs:

There are competing definitions of ÔsubjectivityÕ - the commonsense understanding of ÔsubjectÕ is in opposition to object, between self and other. There is an oft-repeated notion (especially when attempting critical work) that somehow each of you is a distinct individual - phrases like Òwell, itÕs just my opinionÓ, Òthis is what I thinkÓ as if these opinions are not the result of social and historical conditions; in the circumstances of time, place and structure.

Such an opinion assumes a fixed, stable identity, a rational, centred, individual subject. The ÔindividualismÕ of this philosophical position fails to account for the role played by social relations and language in determining, regulating and producing the Ôthinking subjectÕ.

need to see these definitions as colliding:
1. From political theory, the citizen is a subject of the state; subjected to power and lack of freedom.
2. From idealist philosophy, the thinking subject as the site of consciousness.
3. From grammar, the subject of a sentence, text, and discourse; that which the action is determined by.

To return to the student quotes: therefore, we are all subjects of various agencies (those of parents, legal apparatus, commerce, cultural characteristics) - a range of competing, multiple, decentred, unstable identities. Similarly, whatever the text is/has been about, the subject is always produced in the act of reading.
Subjectivity is therefore a way of conceptualising text/reader relations without taking either as fixed unitary definitions. It is also a way of recognising that cultural products employ strategies to try to fix subject positions (to persuade, to sell, etc). In some textual analysis this is taken to an extreme to suggest that texts produce our subjectivity (as false consciousness) - as subjects in ideology. perhpas this is too deterministic but it is a useful counterpoint to the student commonsensical anti-theoretical position Òin my opinionÓ.

decentred subjectivities

Some commentators think things have fundamentally changed. For Poster, decentralisation is at the very core of technology and in the ways in which subjectivity, and meaning are being produced in what he calls Ôthe mode of informationÕ (as opposed to the Ômode of productionÕ). He dismisses the critical tools inherited from the industrial age, as it Òpresupposes the fixed, stable identities of its members, the exact assumption the Internet puts into questionÓ (Poster, The Second Media Age, p.35). In this schema, the rational, centred, individual subject of modernism has been superseded by multiple, decentred, unstable identities. Poster claims emancipatory politics is based on the idea that autonomous agents can free themselves from externally imposed constraints, as if subjectivity itself was not the result of its own set of social and historical conditions. Rather Poster reckons:
Òthe issue now is that the machines enable new forms of decentralised dialogue and create new combinations of human-machine assemblages, new individual and collective ÔvoicesÕ, ÔspectresÕ, ÔinteractivitiesÕ, which are the new building blocks of political formations and groupingsÓ (Mark Poster, ÒCyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public SphereÓ, p.210).

cyborgs

NOTES on Donna Haraway, ÒA Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science. Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980sÓ, in, Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism, Routledge 1990.

From/content of the essay Ò... is an effort to build an ironic political myth... Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honored within socialist feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.Ó (Haraway, pp.190-191)
why is the cyborg a good model?
ÒA cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction....
Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality.Ó (Haraway, p.191)
For instance, she sees this working against heterosexism.
ÒCyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization at work... Modern war is a cyborg orgy... FoucaultÕs biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics...Ó (Haraway, p.191)

Foucault theorised the body and technology as bound together in the construction of power. Foucault maintains that there is no unitary human subject except that which is produced through discursive processes and forms of rationality that produce the subject as the object of knowledge -in the complex relationship of knowledge/power.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the body was continually made subject to medical and psychological examinations to render ruling capitalist and imperial ideology as ÔtrueÕ knowledge. This is the normalising power of the Ôcarceral networkÕ that did not exercise power directly on the body but on the body as the object of knowledge.
This imperialist/fascist impulse, employed new technologies for all the wrong reasons reversing its democratic potential. Elsewhere, it is argued that the fascist mentality of the Freikorps troops exhibits the armoured bodyÕs fear of erotic contact, preferring the totalitarian machinery of military technology to exert violence and excess on the bodies of others.
This image evokes many cyborg figures, such as the ÔTerminatorÕ, as well as NazismÕs death wish in the Ôfinal solutionÕ and drive towards self-destruction. (See, Justin Lorentzen, ÒReich Dreams: Ritual Horror and Armoured BodiesÓ, in, Chris Jenks, Visual Culture, op cit., p.166. He is referring to Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies).
New eugenics is just as obsessed with the cleansing of deviancy and the present assault on the (the poor, sick, foreign) body expressed in the deployment of biotechnologies in the service of the new world order. Critical Art Ensemble, in Flesh machine, describe this accordingly: ÒThe time is right for the second wave of eugenics because the economic foundation has been laid. Eugenic complements the grand pancapitalist principle of the total rationalisation of culture. [but] In order to truly accomplish the goal of making eugenic activity a part of everyday life, the public must be convinced that rationalised processes of reproduction are superior and more desirable than the non-rational means of reproductionÓ (Critical Art Ensemble, Flesh machine, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness, Autonomedia 1998, pp.136-7). In other words, rationalised production needs to turn to rationalised consumption and desire to have its wicked way.
Haraway says:
ÒCommunications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodiesÓ (p.205)
She goes further in thinking we are cyborgs.
ÒThe cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of Western science and politics - the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.Ó (p.191)
For instance in the context of sexual politics, it operates:
Ò... in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis... The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world; it has no truck with bisexuality...Ó (p.192)
It is also a break with Western humanist model of subjectivity (the plot of original unity that Marxism and Psychoanalysis is predicated on). Rather:
ÒThe cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private... Nature and Culture are reworked; the one can no longer be a resource for appropriation and incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of FrankensteinÕs monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden, that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and the cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot return to dust.Ó (p.192-193)
In this way, she is ÔblasphemousÕ of her project of socialist feminism and its methods as it is constructed on the foundations of that which it aims to question (this is the filter of postmodernism circa mid. 1980s).
ÒThe main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.Ó (p.193)
ÒBut basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve manÕs dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author of himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was to be paranoid. Now we are not so sure... [now] Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.Ó (p.194)
She is keen to emphasise the Ôleaky distinctionsÕ between animal-human and machines and their associated ideological struggles - based on dualism and the revolutionary subject.
She imagines a cyborg world Òabout lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision [what she calls the Ôgod-trick of infinite visionÕ] produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.Ó (p.196)
This is her version of Ôaffinity politicsÕ in recognition of fractured identities - affinity not identity, to counter endlessly splitting and searching for a new essential unity. Rather,
ÒI prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and the body politic. ÔNetworkingÕ is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy - weaving is for oppositional cyborgs.Ó (p.212)
ÒMicroelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra, that is, of copies without originals. Microelectronics mediates the translations of labor into robotics and word-processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures... Communications sciences and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are are very intimate terms. The ÔmultinationalÕ material organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated.Ó (p.207)
In her questioning of the logics and practices of domination as expressed in dualisms (self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made. active/passive, total/partial, God/man), she maintains:
ÒHigh tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.Ó (p.219)
There are many examples in science fiction and mythology - from Rachel in Bladerunner to AtwoodÕs The HandmaidÕs tale to hermaphrodite - and this essay itself is after all myth too. She concludes:
ÒCyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia... It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, spaces, stories. Although both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.Ó (Haraway, p.225)