SO MANY BINARIES!

So....Binaries and the destruction of binaries. Donna Haraway's Manifesto for Cyborgs essentially discusses the concept of the cyborg versus the human, that is....go figure...another binary. Or is it? Donna Haraway's claims that a cyborg is a combination of a human and organism and therefore cybernetic organism. However that is not to say that all humans with a prosthetic limb, or a pacemaker, steel hip replacement or any other form of non-biological body part, consider themselves a cyborg, or half human half computer...In fact compared to where they would be without those non-biological parts, (i.e. dead, handicapped, physically impaired etc.) they are even more human and more able to perform daily tasks and live their lives normally.

And back to the binaries. The article put forth by Haraway completely discusses binaries but not as objects that are completely untouchable, but more so as binaries that are to be broken down, subverted into one another and eventually broken. It is in this way that the cyborg human binary has been blended, and the possibilities for binaries that can be blurred are long listed. Chaos can be seen in order, rich lifestyles in financially poor individuals, the old 'happy to be leaving but sad to go" feeling and so on and so forth. This blending of polarities and blurring of the lines can also be applied to a male-female binary that controls everything in the world. In a male dominated world, we are slowly seeing an advance of female power, growth and hopefully eventual equality.

With the growth and increased female power the male female binary is slowly being blurred and blended and may eventually lead to equality. There are women working in male dominated industries and vice versa, and men and women are becoming more respectful and understanding of one another. Is it the case where women are the cyborgs and men are the humans? Where we realize that women are becoming more and more like men and they are encroaching on the forefront of manhood? If that is what Haraway is saying then it is quite a scary thought. She compares cyborgs and humans, that they were once a 'caricature of the masculinist productive dream'. Why has it never been that women are the humans and men are the cyborgs? We (that is males like myself) are always trying to understand what women are thinking, how they tick, how to make them happy, etc. And physically, men are becoming better groomed personally, with chest waxing, hair removal, tanning, and being more sensitive (even in drastic cases being what has been coined 'metrosexual' and essentially being feminine but not homosexual. It could be possible that it is not a movement of one binary trying to become more like another but more so a mutual shift into a closer unity with contributions on the part of both sides. While 30-60 years ago I would argue that it is mainly a women becoming more like men, I now think we are in a time where men and women are both trying to be more autonomous and more like one another.

So is Donna right? wrong? or neither? She could be both? While she may be right in her definition and discussion of cyborgs, her comparison to cyborgs as the other, that is as females versus the human males, may be wrong. While there are other 'other' comparisons in her article there isn't enough room on this blog (or time in my Saturday night) to discuss them all. However it is important to consider that perhaps there is not other? perhaps there are simply two sides of this binary that are encroaching on one another and may eventually blend and blur so far that there it becomes impossible to differentiate between machines and humanity insofar as the cyborg is concerned.