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...
Interpretation
Cyborg writing focuses on empowerment and survival rather than a return to an idealized past.
In this quote, Donna J. Haraway emphasizes that cyborg writing should not nostalgically idealize a time before technological and linguistic interpretations shaped our identities. Instead, it should recognize the strength in embracing technology and using it as a means of survival and self-expression, marking the world in ways that reflect diverse experiences and identities shaped by 'otherness.'
In practice
In a discussion on the future of literature and technology.
In a sense, a cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense β a βfinalβ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the βWestβsβ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.
It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.
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.
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 humour an serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism.
Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.
This England never did, nor never shall, _x000D_ _x000D_ Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.
You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.
I can doubt everything, except one thing, and that is the very fact that I doubt. Simply put - I think, therefore I am
It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.'
At the back of it there lies the central citadel of obstinacy: I will not give up my right to myself--the thing God intends you to give up if ever you are going to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Jerusalem doesn't belong only to Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims and Jews, but to the world.
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