Haraway also slightly extends the conversation about the lack of differentiation between humans and animals (or perhaps I just comprehended it better). I also understand more of where Haraway herself stands on this issue, as well as others. As we discussed in class, Hayles brings up points in a different sort of pattern, where she cites a lot of people and does not really bring in what she thinks until the end. Haraway, on the other hand, states:
Language, tool use, social behavior, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. (293)
Though I admit Haraway does not overtly claim to align herself with these "many branches of feminist culture," it is easy to fill in the blanks. After reading these texts, How We Became Posthuman seems like the kind of person at the party who wants to tell you all about everyone in the room (though of course you've already met them all and so some boring background explanations can be skipped) and everything she knows about the stories of the previous owners, because that matters to the history of the house, and, after all, we are in a house, right?! The information on your flash drive for that huge presentation tomorrow is only as important as the device it is stored in, especially if your house were to burn to the ground. You really want to understand her, but you keep getting mixed up between Terri and Kerri even after she's told you five times, and then you proceed to spend the whole night wandering around the kitchen trying to keep her from finding your matches. "The Cyborg Manifesto," on the other hand, tells you the end of the story as you are walking in the door, enough that you catch the names of some of the movements she cites (because you weren't sick that one week in theory class, were you?) before she's telling you why it matters to everyone in this room right now, and you think you want to agree with her but she seems to be agreeing and disagreeing with How We Became Posthuman in equal measure, who gave you such detailed explanations that sounded so right, and you realize maybe you should have gone to that other party that Kerri went to where they were just playing games...or was that Terri? Maybe that's just me.
While Hayles is more concerned with giving information back its body, Harroway has much more of an overt political bent. She argues that, because cyborgs have no history, they are not subject to the same constructed categories that dominate discourse; they "would not recognize the Garden of Eden. [They are] not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust" (293). She states that race and gender are historically produced, and that we need to stop trying to come together for a revolution at the expense of marginalizing others. Shortly after this, Hayles and Harroway come together when Harroway says, "In relation to objects like biotic components, one must think not in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints" (301). When I first read this, I thought about the section in How We Became Posthuman that dealt with homeostasis and the troubling uncoupling of information from context. Then I thought that Haraway was more on board with information as code then Hayles, but a second reading made me change my mind. Along with that, both authors also agree that scientists see information as "just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, base of unity) which allows universal translation" (303) and that "we are not dealing with technological determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured relations among people" (304). However, the hints of feminism I saw in Hayles are much more on the agenda for Haraway.
One of the parts I found really compelling in Hayles' text was the story about Janet Freed. Hayles states that Freed, unlike the male scientists at the conference, would never forget the intersection between information and materiality, because she was the one doing the labor in that situation by transcribing the Macy Conferences. I couldn't help but think about this when I was reading Haraway (and her deskilling brought me back to Johnson), though Hayles was not as concerned about economics. In the work of Catherine Bateson, another woman Hayles dicusses in the same chapter, Bateson acknowledges her sadness about the death of her child, and how that influenced her view on the scientists' discussions of what constituted life. According to Haraway, "that women regularly sustain daily life partly as a function of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new" (305). Hayles uses Bateson (and Freed) as examples to show that the observer is always part of the system; Haraway expands on that to overtly address that more women are entering the workforce and how we need a new sense of unity and experience beyond totality (310).
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Overall, both authors are all about the power of narrative and writing. Hayles carves out a special place for literary texts in representing and dissecting what scientific works cannot, and she describes in a really cool way the narrative of science. Haraway describes the empowerment that comes with being able to signify, especially for colonized groups. One of my favorite quotes from the piece is "Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious...Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recording communication and intelligence to subvert command and control" (311). She talks a bit about how students had trouble reading some of these texts after works in the cannon, but I was hoping to hear more about why we teach what we teach and how that fits in to the system of testing and reconsidering pedagogy, but I guess that's another text entirely...
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