Why would anyone write anything if they didn’t intend for their words to change their reader?

I listened to the video below. Certainly it gives a far more digestible account of the writing of Haraway (2007). The youtube content producer Jon Clerk (2014) gives a descriptive account of the article, covering his views on the main themes well. Certainly in more detail than I was initially able to draw out.

I am left wondering though what his thoughts on WHY Harroway wrote the article? What was the point behind creating the article if it was not an attempt to influence the thoughts of others.

The idea that we should embrace our very nature of animal, machine and human makes me wonder if I’ve missed something in Harroway said. If the machine is being programmed with a series of expectations from the cyborg mind. It will not be immune to imperfections of the programmers. There is no steady state implied merely through the act of coding or otherwise instructing a machine. There is genesis, it started somewhere that can be traced. The creation of a cyborg had its roots somewhere that could be called its birth. There is still room for evolution. If the human adapts to its cyborg state, then it could change to become something, but does that change anything. Is it merely that the cyborg has large parts of its human biology removed that makes the ideal for a society that’s free from concern of gender?

 

Clerk, J (2014)  ‘Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: A Brief Overview’. Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqglzX_y5wM [online] Accessed: 2nd February.

Hawaray, D. (2000) ‘A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology and social feminist in the late twentieth century’, BELL, D; KENNEDY, B. The Cybercultures reader. London: Routledge, pp. 291-324.

 

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