Tranimalities and Cyborgs @tranimalitiesandcyborgs - Tumblr Blog

The question for me has since become this: to what extent are contemporary cyborg subjectivities implicated in the coloniality of being? … To think the coloniality of being is, to a significant extent, to think about conditions wherein subjects are forced to navigate life in terrains shaped by the non-ethics of war. There is a way in which the valorization of the cyborg works only for those beings with the ability to exercise some degree of autonomy in their utilization of technologies of becoming. For others, features of cyborg ontology are experienced not as posthumanizing but as dehumanizing. … If we’re going to embrace the queer potentiality of cyborg ontology we must be simultaneously attentive to these necropolitical instances of cyborg embodiment. These examples allow us to think Haraway and Maldonado-Torres together: if cyborg ontology has become generalized in what we refer to, variously, as late capitalism, late liberalism, or Western hyper-modernity, then the origins of cyborg ontology lie deep in the coloniality of being. Malatino 185-186

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

Cyborg 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 is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. Haraway 67-68

Who builds, who destroys? Do we, does the cyborg, does Candida? Is the cyborg a companion species, or does ze only create/possess companion species? What gives one cyborg power over another?

#cyborg #kinship

In this project, I’d like to employ the feminist rhetorical practice of critical imagination, as described by Royster and Kirsch, to consider the trans* uses of Haraway's cyborg. In doing so, I’m also drawing on Ede, Glenn, and Lunsford’s crossings of invention and memory. As I critically imagine, I listen (backwards) to the emergence of the feminist cyborg, (across) to zir resonances in posthumanist gender theory and the animal turn, and invent/imagine zir trans* humanimal futures. It’s an exploratory project--I don’t have m/any solid answers here. I want to know, what does it mean to write as a [trans/gendered] cyborg in a time of pandemics? How can ze disrupt our discourses of bodies and boundaries, of meaning and writing, of what it means to be/do human?

#introduction

It’s bold of us to assume that only humans can be cyborgs, or that only post-human cyborgs can write theory about it. A virus can be a cyborg, albeit one that doesn’t attend to feminist notions of consent. It connects and reconnects indiscriminately--I hesitate to say queerly, although queerness has existed in paradox to viruses before (cf. Zach Blas On Queer Viralities 2012)--rewrites out cellular codes (animal, human, animal), and we rewrite or reify our social contracts, draw more firmly or blur the lines between hum:an:imal. Our biopolitics and necropolitics are in stark relief as it becomes clear whose bodies are considered human and worth saving, whose bodies are racialized and animalized as dangerous crossings or vectors for disease, whose bodies are denied care and rendered collateral damage. As I write this, I’m sitting in my car outside the Broken Arrow St. John’s Hospital. My wife is inside waiting to be seen for what are hopefully anxiety and not COVID-19 related symptoms. Next to the Emergency Room entrance (where they are only allowing patients, no visitors), a line of cars winds through the parking lot for drive-through testing. A hospital worker in full PPE garb stands by the windows, talking to the drivers. Across the street, construction workers in fluorescent yellow shirts work on a new clinic, unmasked.

#Introduction

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

A normal human body is thought to be composed of over one trillion cells, of which only about 10 percent are animal (i.e. human), some of which have been shown to “profoundly influence” human metabolism and physiology. How do we understand human subjectivity and identity in this cacophony if, as Donna Haraway suggests, “to be one is always to become with many?” Bates 36

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

Potent fusions, joint kinship, tight couplings, avid affinities, the manifesto offers an analytic imaginary saturated with geographies of contact and connection across multiple scales. The cyborg is an imploded object of non-optional entanglements and architectured intimacy. The manifesto is an essay in six parts that don't together compose a whole, that articulate (that form a joint, are jointed) around fractured identities and destabilized feminist political economies and epistemologies. The careful joint work of Chela Sandoval's oppositional consciousness touches close to the conceptual assemblage Haraway wants to make out of cyborg (dis)identifications (1991, 155-56). Orr 275

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

The cyborg is an #assemblage. The cyborg isn’t an organic or self-contained body, although it contains organic bodies within itself. Rather than melting all of its human/animal/machine components together, the cyborg cultivates irony and tension between its components. To borrow from the definition in the next section, the cyborgs humanimachine components are certainly already active objects—“the cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed" (Haraway 11) and the cyborg troubles or undermines our cultural narratives—and they are deliberately combined into a new context.

But is it a good assemblage?

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

Maybe. It could be.

As Arola and Arola point out, an assemblage is “a purposeful gathering of already active objects within a new neighborhood, a new context” (209) and carries no moral or ethical determination on its own. An assemblage becomes good or harmful by how it is used. Therefore, working through a lens of Indigenous rhetorical sovereignty, Arola and Arola propose that a good assemblage attends to the benefits of communities and has a responsibility to the communal good. Furthermore, a good assemblage engages in what they name creative repetition, that is, “repetition without an essence” (207), or repetition that can respond creatively to novel situations and create futures for the community. Arola and Arola acknowledge that all assemblages are active but “not all assemblages are transformative” (209). To recognize good assemblages that engage communal ethics and creative repetition, they propose the following criteria:

A good assemblage is responsive, responding to situations and enacting new functions;

A good assemblage is innovative and productive;

A good assemblage is novel, opening up new ways of thinking, seeing, and living; and

A good assemblage does all of this with a focus on the “we” as opposed to the “I,” always considering, “Whom does this assemblage benefit?” (211)

The cyborg, like any assemblage, has multiple possibilities. For Haraway, this is a political struggle that asks us to “see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point” (15). The two perspectives referenced here refer to the cyborg’s potential for both domination—“the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia 1984)” (Haraway 15)—and for joint resistance against domination, instead of the grid world, a world about “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” (15). If these descriptions of the cyborg and its potential are run through Arola and Arola’s criteria for a good assemblage, several criteria are quick matches. The cyborg is novel and opens up novel ways of thinking through its use of partiality, irony, and blasphemy. It’s responsive through its preference for recoupling and hybridity, and this responsiveness is closely tied to innovation. The criterion that comes to the forefront when asking when the cyborg is a “good” assemblage is the final criterion of Arola and Arola’s list: “A good assemblage does all of this with a focus on the ‘we’ as opposed to the ‘I,’ always considering, ‘Whom does this assemblage benefit?’” (Arola and Arola 211)

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

What can the cyborg do as a good assemblage?

Haraway’s cyborg is ironically socialist-feminist, but she (Haraway) recognizes the splintered nature of that identity. If the cyborg is acting for a socialist-feminist “us,” that “us” is already multiple and internally contested over questions of identity. What does it mean to be a “woman,” “working-class,” a “feminist?” Haraway acknowledges that these identities are already formed through oppressive uses of power, and asks

And who counts as ‘us’ in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called ‘us,’ and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women’s dominations of each other. (17)

Although feminism has often turned to unity (cf Second Wave rhetorics of “sisterhood”) in the face of these internal divisions, Haraway gestures towards what will become a marker of Third Wave and contemporary feminism, coalitional politics. By moving towards affinity rather than unity-based politics, cyborg feminists can denature seemingly-organic categories, a perverse perspective that allows these categories to be analyzed as components of an information-based power system. Haraway investigates the dichotomies of “mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized” (32) with an eye for a feminist politics, but I’m interested here in what a good cyborg assemblage could do for a trans* politic.

In discussing the role of information and power, Haraway writes that everything is “subdivided by boundaries differential permeable to information. … The biggest treat to such power [that of universal translation] is interruption of communication” (34). She goes on to write about the slide from biology to biotechnology in merging organics and technologies for the purposes of information transfer and labor (an example, perhaps, of a cyborg assemblage that is not working in a good manner). I’m interested in bringing the cyborg into conversation with contemporary trans* theory because trans* and gender nonconforming people have been having parallel conversations about the potentials of humanimachine convergences since approximately the same time Haraway wrote her manifesto (the eighties seemed to be a fruitful time for resistant science theories). In an information economy, trans* people have already been taking pleasure in the confusion of boundaries (biological, social, religious) and embracing both animal and machine components. I’m thinking here of the literal—there’s a long history of biohacking gender transition through silicone, black market testosterone, synthetic estrogen derived from horse urine, etc.—and the mythological. As María Lugones writes in “The Coloniality of Gender,” the binary heterosexist gender categories that much of trans* theory devotes its time to deconstructing were formed under the matrix of settler colonialism as ways to hierarchically divide the white settlers from the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, marking the settlers, and their/our sexual and gendered practices, as human and the Indigenous people as animalistic, because of their gendered and sexual practices. If the cyborg can be a good assemblage in the context of trans* theory and activist praxis, coalitionally aligned with Haraway’s socialist-feminism, it’s this history that will determine its “we” for whom it acts. A good trans* cyborg assemblage has this history as a component of its assemblage and must act on behalf of trans* people of color who have been most harmed by the systems of gender to which the cyborg is disloyal. In doing so, the cyborg might disturb not only the information categories of the cisheterosexist gender system, but also disturb the residual whiteness of academic trans* theory.

This brings us to questions of #embodiment.

#assemblage #embodiment

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

A normal human body is thought to be composed of over one trillion cells, of which only about 10 percent are animal (i.e. human), some of which have been shown to “profoundly influence” human metabolism and physiology. How do we understand human subjectivity and identity in this cacophony if, as Donna Haraway suggests, “to be one is always to become with many?” Bates 36

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

Potent fusions, joint kinship, tight couplings, avid affinities, the manifesto offers an analytic imaginary saturated with geographies of contact and connection across multiple scales. The cyborg is an imploded object of non-optional entanglements and architectured intimacy. The manifesto is an essay in six parts that don't together compose a whole, that articulate (that form a joint, are jointed) around fractured identities and destabilized feminist political economies and epistemologies. The careful joint work of Chela Sandoval's oppositional consciousness touches close to the conceptual assemblage Haraway wants to make out of cyborg (dis)identifications (1991, 155-56). Orr 275

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

The cyborg is an #assemblage. The cyborg isn’t an organic or self-contained body, although it contains organic bodies within itself. Rather than melting all of its human/animal/machine components together, the cyborg cultivates irony and tension between its components. To borrow from the definition in the next section, the cyborgs humanimachine components are certainly already active objects—“the cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed" (Haraway 11) and the cyborg troubles or undermines our cultural narratives—and they are deliberately combined into a new context.

But is it a good assemblage?

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

Maybe. It could be.

As Arola and Arola point out, an assemblage is “a purposeful gathering of already active objects within a new neighborhood, a new context” (209) and carries no moral or ethical determination on its own. An assemblage becomes good or harmful by how it is used. Therefore, working through a lens of Indigenous rhetorical sovereignty, Arola and Arola propose that a good assemblage attends to the benefits of communities and has a responsibility to the communal good. Furthermore, a good assemblage engages in what they name creative repetition, that is, “repetition without an essence” (207), or repetition that can respond creatively to novel situations and create futures for the community. Arola and Arola acknowledge that all assemblages are active but “not all assemblages are transformative” (209). To recognize good assemblages that engage communal ethics and creative repetition, they propose the following criteria:

A good assemblage is responsive, responding to situations and enacting new functions;

A good assemblage is innovative and productive;

A good assemblage is novel, opening up new ways of thinking, seeing, and living; and

A good assemblage does all of this with a focus on the “we” as opposed to the “I,” always considering, “Whom does this assemblage benefit?” (211)

The cyborg, like any assemblage, has multiple possibilities. For Haraway, this is a political struggle that asks us to “see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point” (15). The two perspectives referenced here refer to the cyborg’s potential for both domination—“the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia 1984)” (Haraway 15)—and for joint resistance against domination, instead of the grid world, a world about “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” (15). If these descriptions of the cyborg and its potential are run through Arola and Arola’s criteria for a good assemblage, several criteria are quick matches. The cyborg is novel and opens up novel ways of thinking through its use of partiality, irony, and blasphemy. It’s responsive through its preference for recoupling and hybridity, and this responsiveness is closely tied to innovation. The criterion that comes to the forefront when asking when the cyborg is a “good” assemblage is the final criterion of Arola and Arola’s list: “A good assemblage does all of this with a focus on the ‘we’ as opposed to the ‘I,’ always considering, ‘Whom does this assemblage benefit?’” (Arola and Arola 211)

#assemblage

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

A normal human body is thought to be composed of over one trillion cells, of which only about 10 percent are animal (i.e. human), some of which have been shown to “profoundly influence” human metabolism and physiology. How do we understand human subjectivity and identity in this cacophony if, as Donna Haraway suggests, “to be one is always to become with many?” Bates 36

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

Potent fusions, joint kinship, tight couplings, avid affinities, the manifesto offers an analytic imaginary saturated with geographies of contact and connection across multiple scales. The cyborg is an imploded object of non-optional entanglements and architectured intimacy. The manifesto is an essay in six parts that don't together compose a whole, that articulate (that form a joint, are jointed) around fractured identities and destabilized feminist political economies and epistemologies. The careful joint work of Chela Sandoval's oppositional consciousness touches close to the conceptual assemblage Haraway wants to make out of cyborg (dis)identifications (1991, 155-56). Orr 275

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

The cyborg is an #assemblage. The cyborg isn’t an organic or self-contained body, although it contains organic bodies within itself. Rather than melting all of its human/animal/machine components together, the cyborg cultivates irony and tension between its components. To borrow from the definition in the next section, the cyborgs humanimachine components are certainly already active objects—“the cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed" (Haraway 11) and the cyborg troubles or undermines our cultural narratives—and they are deliberately combined into a new context.

But is it a good assemblage?

#assemblage

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

A normal human body is thought to be composed of over one trillion cells, of which only about 10 percent are animal (i.e. human), some of which have been shown to “profoundly influence” human metabolism and physiology. How do we understand human subjectivity and identity in this cacophony if, as Donna Haraway suggests, “to be one is always to become with many?” Bates 36

tranimalitiesandcyborgs

Potent fusions, joint kinship, tight couplings, avid affinities, the manifesto offers an analytic imaginary saturated with geographies of contact and connection across multiple scales. The cyborg is an imploded object of non-optional entanglements and architectured intimacy. The manifesto is an essay in six parts that don't together compose a whole, that articulate (that form a joint, are jointed) around fractured identities and destabilized feminist political economies and epistemologies. The careful joint work of Chela Sandoval's oppositional consciousness touches close to the conceptual assemblage Haraway wants to make out of cyborg (dis)identifications (1991, 155-56). Orr 275

#assemblage #kinship

A normal human body is thought to be composed of over one trillion cells, of which only about 10 percent are animal (i.e. human), some of which have been shown to “profoundly influence” human metabolism and physiology. How do we understand human subjectivity and identity in this cacophony if, as Donna Haraway suggests, “to be one is always to become with many?” Bates 36

#assemblage

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 center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. Haraway 5

#cyborg

Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. Haraway 55

#cyborg #writing

Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control. Haraway 56

#cyborg #writing

Cyborg politics are the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. Haraway 57

#cyborg #writing

The prefix “trans-” surrounds the “animal” with a pluralizing effect: tranimal. This portmanteau word describes those who traverse species, bodies and other taxonomic categories. Tranimal are difficult to capture--with their flesh in flux, their agency grows and diminishes as their roles shift between companion, model, and revolutionary. Although tranimal sneak between and across physical and intellectual categories, they are occasionally trapped within discursive and physical sites akin to menageries, written historically as “laboratories of life” and symbols of empire and conquest (Veltre 26). Tranimal work--they labour to donate cells, carry and express genetic modifications. As service animals and as routinely sacrificed laboratory animals, they develop visible and invisible physical and affective bonds with other animals, human and non-human. Kelley 98

#tranimal #embodiment

To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals--in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the service of the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too many. Haraway 59-60

#embodiment

It is not a clear intellectual or political task, twenty-six years out, to write in patterned relay with a cyborg manifesto, a knotted text that Haraway felt was already collectively authored through multiple webs of relation and intellectual debt (1991, 244-45nl). It is not certain what kinds of touch are possible now, or necessary, walking too often with seemingly empty hands down the institutionalized corridors of neoliberalizing post knowledge projects. Haraway has moved in the past decades from the cyborg to its close kin, "companion species," as an animating figuration for storytelling today. And you? My companion. My intimate coauthor. What forms of moving touch, what techno-arti-facts of proximity and distance, are collectively authoring you? Orr 277

#embodiment #kinship #time

Scales of spacetime are crucial in the relationships between Homo sapiens and Candida albicans. From a human perspective, Candida are internal, microscopic, invisible, simultaneously short lived (days) and immortal. Can we comprehend how Candida might perceive time? Is it the time of intracellular communications between host and self or the temporality of reproduction and replication – when one cell becomes two, identical, yet separate? If self is constantly replicated, when is one born? Does one die? How is a life measured? Is Candida time the temporality of consumption, when food appears and reappears? Does it recognise periodicity as intervals of infection; an exuberant fecundity, or as length of mycelial growth? Much work is yet to be done in understanding how other species understand temporality let alone those as radically different as Candida. Bates 39

#embodiment #time

In sum: the cyborg contains in itself the seeds of a liberating, disrupting figure. It is a figure that finds itself in the middle ground between the technological and the human. Haraway (1985) tried to present it as a new way to dissolve the obsolete binary categories of Western thought and as a promising figure to postmodern feminist postures, a figure by which it could be possible to overcome the rigid patriarchal structures of gender. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the temptation to jump from a technological – human body, to a body that is no more a meaty body, to a hyper-sexualized body, an omnipotent body which does not have to confront any more the imperfections and limitations of the organic body, is certainly a big temptation – one which, in most cases, the fictional cyborg does not appear to be able to avoid. This is the reason why I would like, next, to present the figure of the grotesque body as an alternative to the problematic figure of the cyborg. Shabot 227

#embodiment

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