Page 174 - Cyberculture and New Media

Leman Giresunlu 165
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Differently from Haraway’s lonesome cyborg, the cyborg goddess also as a
creature of complete fiction functions as a fusion of multiple values,
deliberately making use of the factual, mythical, scientific, fictional as well
as her sexy body image as tools of material reality and utopia in achieving the
social, cultural, and political tasks Haraway designated earlier in her Cyborg
Manifesto.
However Haraway’s preference, which appears to be on the side of
the cyborg rather than the goddess, and therefore dividing them from one
another, is a position she takes to the detriment of subscribing to the very
problematic divisiveness the western binary mindset ever dictated. This
stance is highly consistent with Haraway’s materialist political position. With
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Sadie Plant in The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics , it is
also possible to understand Haraway’s binary divisive approach as a
legitimization tool, a mask, or a veil she puts over the real innovative and
challenging and material intent her article promises. Although her stance
appears innovative, she simultaneously appears to undo it by concealing with
her divisiveness. This concealment bears the very mechanism Sadie Plant
refers to in her article The Future Looms: weaving as a feminine practice
projected by men onto women for purposes of masking a blatant nature. In
this respect Haraway’s concealment of the materiality of her cyborg becomes
possible through acquiring a divisive attitude and therefore siding with the
binary. Therefore Haraway resides within and without the material. In Plant’s
view this concealment mechanism is inherent in women’s centuries-old act of
weaving. Theoretically she highlights this point with Freud and Luce
Irigaray. In her article Plant mentions of computer’s history along Babbage’s
the Difference Engine and later the Analytical Engine that Ada Lovelace
brought into fruition as an idea after Jacquard’s weaving method which paved
the way to the modern day computers’ underlying technique. According to
Plant weaving as an inspiration bears Freud’s imprint who argues for the
following:

weaving imitates the concealment of the womb: the Greek
hystera; the Latin matrix. Weaving is woman’s
compensation for the absence of the penis, the void, the
woman of whom, as he famously insists, there is ‘nothing
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to be seen.’

Plant further mentions Luce Irigaray who argues that “Woman can,
it seems (only) imitate nature. Duplicate what nature offers and produces. In
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a kind of technical assistance and substitution” . In this respect, Sadie Plant
reminds that: