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.
Interpretation
Irony involves holding contradictory ideas together, revealing deeper truths through humor and tension.
In this quote, Donna J. Haraway explores the nature of irony as a complex interplay of contradictions that do not necessarily resolve into a singular understanding. She emphasizes that irony allows for the coexistence of opposing ideas, illustrating its value as a method in both rhetoric and political discourse, particularly within socialist-feminism, where embracing complexity is essential for impactful dialogue.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture on the nuances of feminist theory to emphasize the importance of embracing contradictions.
In a sense, a cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense – a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ 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.
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...
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.
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.
What was once justified as sanctioned by God is now properly reviled as an unconscionable violation of human rights.
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.
Do you know my friend that each one of us is a dark mystery, a maze of conflicting passions and desire and aptitudes?
Our aim in studying the Godhead must be to know God himself better. Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God’s attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are.
Most of the real bad guys in the world are people like you and me; they're not stupid, and you can't smell their horns.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.