Page 171 - Cyberculture and New Media

162 Cyborg Goddesses: The Mainframe Revisited
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respect Haraway’s relativistic and hybrid cyborg is a genderless, non-
totalizing entity that is wary of all boundaries as well as their
“deconstruction.” However otherwise than Haraway’s argument, with the
goddess pertaining to the mythological, and the cyborg to the technological
as separate, they both appear recombined in one catering to current fantasies
awaiting “entertainment” in current film media. Therefore it appears that a
spiral dance of entertainment and fun combined along with information and
knowledge is inseparable from each other. Such inseparable dance partners as
well as the cyborg and the goddess intertwined is a reminder of a DNA spiral
with multiple combinations. This visual, literal as well as metaphoric imagery
laden with a potential for cultural exchange obviously differs from what a
singular oppositional cyborg may propose as a political entity. One hopes that
the cyborg goddess may carry on the promise of multiple sets of performative
exchanges to the future. However to argue for the potentialities of the self
and the other from the perspective of mere dynamics of oppression in the
current technological era does not appear as a viable cue anymore. At this
point Haraway seems to discard diversified exchanges among different
individuals as a root for a multiplicity of performances in the sciences and
culture. Instead, her wary yet deconstructive stance which places and
removes the individual at different positions of self-hood renders this opening
altogether obsolete by proposing it as a mere illusion only:

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. High-tech culture
challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear
who makes and who is made in the relation between human
and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in
machines that resolve into coding practices. In so far as we
know ourselves in both formal discourse (for example,
biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework
economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be
a cyborg, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms
have become biotic systems, communications devices like
others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in
our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of