Page 170 - Cyberculture and New Media

Leman Giresunlu 161
______________________________________________________________
In this respect, the current cyborg goddess imagery that I propose in
this study may appear to embody the replica of a male-centric understanding
of science and technology as progress: an understanding which appropriates
into its womanless world feminine metaphors as the goddess. However the
cyborg goddesses, as represented in the films and literature work, which I
analyze in this study is a display of the changing perceptions in regard of
female representations in film media through time. Especially in current film
media a transformative aspect is more and more visible. Differently than a
cyborg only understanding as suggested by Dana Haraway for matters of
offering a way out from the duality, the cyborg goddess imagery instead
purports to achieve the very transformative aspect, by means of compensating
for the spiritual side deemed to be missing within the high-tech environment.
In this respect R. L. Rutsky in his work High Techne: Art and Technology
from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman points out to recent conditions
regarding the relationship between the high-tech and the spiritual:

In an age of high tech, however, this return of the magical
or the spiritual in representations of technological life no
longer seems to be seen as simply monstrous or
threatening. Thus, for example, movements and discourses
as various as techno-paganism, “new-edge” science, cyber-
shamanism, and rave culture have drawn on magical,
spiritual, and metaphysical discourses to figure their own
relation to a technology, to a techno-cultural space or
world, that often seems to have taken on a life of its own.
Techno-pagans, for example, see the techno-cultural world
as magical, as inhabited by unseen forces, spirits, gods.
They therefore interact with technology not simply as an
instrument or tool, but as something with its own autonomy
or agency, which is not simply under their control. Yet,
they do not then see this technology simply as dangerous,
“out of control,” or monstrous. Their relation to it is more a
matter of interaction, cooperation, respect—of allowing
that technological agency to go on in its own terms and
10
even to be guided by it.

However earlier Haraway’s ironic dream divided the spiral dance of
the cyborg, and the goddess from each other in saying: “though both are
11
bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
Haraway’s stance was for purposes of political positioning especially
contingent with an evolving understanding of multiculturalism in the United
States in the 1980s which was needy of reconciliation within a technological
rhetoric as a corrective for the deficiencies of a self and other dialectic. In this