Potential or threat?

mind-boggling blogging about the (cy)borg...

My dear co-blogger, I agree with your discomfort with the idea of a feminine cyborg identity, and I appreciate your futuristic vision and appeal for an identity which is not confined to the real life social demarcations of gender into male or female. However I see that as the ultimate goal for cyberspace, but my concern is that as of now the cyberspace is still very masculine in nature and form, therefore perhaps the next immediate step is to a feminization of this space, after which a complete de-gendering is possible. Your point about the virtual space extending and perhaps imitating the real space is well taken. I agree that progress only in the virtual space is not enough. Now if we were to look more closely, at this virtual space and the question of identity, the debate becomes more complex. Take an Orkut profile for instance, I can choose to be male or female or a bird. I can put any image that may not even be remotely associated with my real self. I can write in a language I do not understand etc. The phenomena of Orkut deaths still fascinates me, additionally can also continue to live in the virtual space even after having no existence in the real space. So, can technology especially the technology of the new media which offer us the possibility of being anonymous or of being in control of our identity/the constitutors of our identity. Can such a technology be looked at as a potential threat or does it have an advantage? Perhaps the simple answer is both. But are we so consciously aware of the negative and positive aspects of such a phenomenon, to use them to our benefit? Has the medium become so powerful that it has become the identity? What happens when the screen persona acquires more importance than the real-life persona? Looking at psychoanalytic literature on cyberspace and the “cyber-identity-games” according to them the cyberspace is not a non-space, ‘on the contrary it is an actualization of a potentiality of life, and in that sense it can the quality of the virtual, as that which is “becoming”. How does one become, someone that one is not? What one is not is perhaps what one can be in the virtual space. Is this a potential or a danger?

Untitled....thoughts and musings.....

I am not sure if I would want a “feminine” version of the cyberspace (which is not to say that am happy with it in its current masculine form). I would rather it was a space that was more egalitarian for not just women and men, but also for LGBTs.

The question however of how to “take away the authorship of cyber-culture from male hands”, is still paramount.

How does one go about the process of “resignification”, ensuring that the existing power structures don’t get duplicated? The question is not just about the extent of power or space new technologies offer us. Considering the difficulty in demarcating the boundaries between the “real” and the “virtual”, how does one make sure that the hangovers of the “real” world, with its existing power structures don’t get translated into the “virtual” as well? And, is an alteration of power relations in the “virtual” world alone enough? Is it even possible to think of such changes without sufficient progress of the same in the “real”?

Haraway’s answer is that science and technology with the “fresh power” they bring with them should move towards creating “effective progressive politics”. She approaches the question from the other end, saying that “Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make socialist-feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics.” The question “how…” then is answered…. We need to look more closely at science and technology not as “technological determinism,” but more as a “historical system depending upon structured relations among people”, because, be it communication sciences or modern biologies, it’s all ultimately “The translation of the world into a problem of coding” where there is a constant search for a “common language” that satisfactorily dissolves differences and resistance to “instrumental control".

Considering all this, I think we need to dwell more upon a “feminine cyborg identity”. If a resignification of the entire space is possible so that the hierarchies of gender are disregarded, if it is impossible to “essentialise” the self into one single identity, doesn’t the umbrella term “feminine cyborg identity” become redundant? Don’t we need to think more in the lines of “affinity” that Haraway mentions rather than crystallize identities? If so, how then will we locate a cyborg self?

Calling the attention of all cyborgs... male or female? If others.. please specify..

The following post attempts to look at some of the arguments around cyberspace and gender. But before that, I would like to comment on the question that my co-blogger and I had posed in our introductory post regarding the boundaries of the cyborg and cyberspace. Quoting Donna Haraway in the 'Cyborg Manifesto' , “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 that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” The idea that is being put forward here and through her writings about the cyborg ‘myth’ is that the cyborg is the final abstraction with partial identities. Perhaps the cyborg is and can be the next leader of political revolution because it is through the cyborg that the idea that reality cannot be defined has taken shape. ‘We’ cannot dictate the shape of reality for ‘them’.

This takes us to the next set of ideas. I recently read about ‘cyborg feminists’ who say that, ‘'we' do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage”. Very inspiring! but who are these cyborg feminists? Haraway has written extensively about cyborg and women. Her major argument is that cyborg can be used as a tool to combat the male/female binary and the patriarchal, capitalist structures of society. However while it is important to note the significance of the possibility of creating new forms which challenge traditional notions of both femininity and gender by virtue of the location of the cyborg within a post-gender world. A few questions remain unanswered: how does one take away the authorship of cyber-culture from male hands in order to create a feminine version of the cyberspace and the cyborg identity? Also are women able to control the machines, how do we explain gendering of technology in this context?

links: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
http://cyberartsweb.org/cpace/cyborg/haraway.html

It has begun... dhan ta naa..

We are a part of the cyberspace now.
When were we not a part of it?
So were we always already cyborgs?

In today’s post modernist culture of simulation, where the boundary between the virtual world and the physical world is becoming increasingly blurred, a cyborg is not far too difficult to imagine.

When the primitive biological organism created and began to interact with technology, the scene was set for the birth of a cybernetic- organism or cyborg. The cyborg today resides within the cyberspace (and out of it) and because of the rapid advancement and the increasing complexities of the cyberspace, the definition and understanding of the cyborg also needs to be and perhaps is getting more nuanced.

Interestingly, our discussion of the cyberspace and the cyborg is happening within the ‘cyberspace’. If we were to think about the same ideas outside of this space, would our discussions be any different? What do you think are the boundaries, if any, of the cyberspace?

Post written by Bhargavi and Manasi