This Blog is About “The Lawnmower (wo)Man”

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Your naive idiocy makes me VERY ANGRY!

Woman as Assemblage

Alright, this post isn’t about The Lawnmower Man. Not even a little. Men don’t even really enter into it (*phew* says Donna Haraway). But according to my blog stats, I get a coupla hits a day from people looking for The Lawnmower Man, so I figure I should pander to my target audience a little. If you came here looking for that, this post actually is about that movie.

Usually I try to tie those tangents into my argument like I do it all intentional and planned and such, but not this time. Won’t even pretend that wasn’t totally superfluous.

So, what is actually, uh, fluous to this week’s post? We’re looking at Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs, a masterfully polemic and maddeningly enigmatic piece of rhetoric if ever there was (worth reading if you have twenty minutes to spare). As much as we discussed in class the importance of its context (or more specifically, our lack of awareness of its context), I’m not convinced our collective confusion was entirely based upon the datedness of Haraway’s article. Certainly, it was written to respond to a specific time and place, but it strikes me as one of those

pieces that’s not really bound to one milieu.

Certainly the article has enjoyed an uncommonly long shelf-life, with Haraway’s ideas continuing to be thought of as current while most writing by her contemporaries is rapidly reduced to the status of artifact, of interest only to a sort of cultural archaeologist. This is because Haraway’s writing is not chained to the spec tech of her day; she doesn’t ramble on for paragraphs about a distant future replete with phones without wires or the possibility of a paperless office.  Haraway describes the technology she’s interested in in a single line:  “Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electro-magnetic waves, a section of a spectrum.” Although beautifully written, the sentence tells us next to nothing about the technology (luminology?) upon which she bases her argument; it certainly doesn’t sound like cybernetics or any of the other strains of post/transhumanism I’ve been hammering into the ground on this blog the past coupla weeks.

Which is because it isn’t.  Haraway is talking about the cyborg in terms of pure theory, an ideological avatar, as concrete as “these sunshine belt machines” she conjures. Our class’ comprehension problem isn’t a result of Haraway’s context, but of our own. We have become so used to discussing the social implications of invasive technology like Kevin Warwick’s that we are somewhat blindsided by something which treats cybertech as a metaphor rather than as an imminent literality. Consider:

“Late-twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”

Haraway is essentially using the synthetic destruction of binaries which the cyborg innately suggests as a kind of loophole to subversion. Haraway’s Man, the blind Lovecraftian monolith of patriarchy, conceives of the world as orderly and systematic, things that are One and things that are Other, because this gives him a logical basis upon which to justify his dominance. Confusion is to be avoided, as are unaccounted-for interminglings. Kevin Warwick’s project, while more idealistic than Haraway’s dystopian view of “the militant labour of masculinist politics,” is still at heart a utilitarian, serial exercise. One evolutionary step after another, one more way we can impose our will upon the world and shape it to our needs. It moves from one position of certainty to another.

Haraway advocates not being understood, and thus easily categorized and dismissed, as a means to strength and self-determination. She delights in being seen as an Enemy of the comfortable organic Self, has a sense that the quest for indifferent equality has failed and that ironic dualism holds more promise than any idealized monism. When she talks about “reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts,” she’s not just talking about a future where we can telekinetically switch on the TV and summon a bottle of Blue from the fridge. It’s connected to all sorts of feminist theory, from repatriating the vagina (“Not in my backyard!”…) to establishing women as a political body, and it involves augmenting oneself not only with technology but with theory and philosophy and ontology.

The goddess is an ideal, and a deception. The cyborg is a real, and deceptive.

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I don't know what this is meant to represent, but it was on the page I found the Haraway article at, and it's just too goddamn hilarious to not draw attention to.

More search engine terms for my blog: Lawnmower Man, Jeff Fahey, optical illusion, Stanley Aronowitz, boobs