In her essay "A
Cyborg Manifesto" Donna Haraway gives a detailed definition
of the cyborg
cybernetic organism made of flesh and technology. The
cyborg, more than any other concept, manifestly reveals one of
the most striking discoveries in the recent scholarship in the
philosophy: not only God is dead but also
Nature.
Indeed what can be defined as "natural" these days?
Neither gender nor race, neither family nor reproduction.
Thanks to new technologies (microelectronics, biotechnology,
genetic engineering) almost anything can be discussed using the
semantics of the cyborg, as everything, humans and objects, can
be conceptualized in terms of assembly and disassembly. Any part
can be connected with any other one according to common codes
elaborated by Language and Technology.
"Biological organisms have become
biotic systems, communications devices like others"
In her attempt to build "an ironic political mith faithful
to feminism, socialism and materialism" Donna Haraway develops
a complex network of thoughts (a sort of rhyzome ), all related,
in a way or another, to the "cyborg" concept.
The cyborg concept allows Haraways :
to find a perfect subject for her feminist theory of objectivity
based on the situated, partial and embodied knowledge (the cyborg
has a deconstructed identity, escaping the classical distinction
between man and woman) to go over post-modernist theories that
see technology only as a powerful mechanism of control (the cyborg
represents a positive vision of the relationship between man
and technology to re-think the unity of the human being thanks
to the cyborg virtuality of a body that is a mix of organism/technology
and can be seen as a "material-semiotic generative node"
because it is a sort of platform for multiple codes of information
from genetics to computer science.
A number of striking correspondences clearly
illustrate the ways in which the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo
(1907-1954) is an example of the cybernetic icon.
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