Critically assess Donna Haraway’s assertion that ‘By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism. In short, we are cyborgs’.In searching for a web references for a proposed answer to this question, my first recourse was keyword searches using the search engine "Google". I then reviewed the premise and content of each link the search retrieved, and followed available citations, links, and references and assessed their credibility and the inherent assumptions and conditions of theoretical expectation implicit in the authors' approach to Haraway's conceptual framework of cyborg identity. My search placed primary reference on texts which took Haraway's "
Cyborg Manifesto" as a focal point of critical assessment.
I found
Wikipedia's article on
Donna Haraway useful. While of course Wikipedia, as a source, requires intense critical appraisal and the utmost in caution towards citations and secondary resources prior to the appropriation of its content for any serious purpose, as a means of acquiring general background information towards contextual appreciation of Haraway's oeuvre, it is not without a certain usefulness. I would use this source, and the secondary sources it references, in my hypothetical essay to be able to assess, in the light of her disciplinary background in Zoology and Philosophy, the origin of her approach to post-digital identity.
As a nexus of resources related to the question of the Cyborg Manifesto, "
Hyperlink to Donna Haraway" would be particularly helpful. The content of the site is in itself a collection of critical assessment of and commentary on Haraway's manifesto, and, though it is important to note the implicit ideological bias in the assembled references through their apparent selection by a proponent of Haraway's work, as a collection of positive critical appraisal it is valuable to the analysis of Haraway's quoted assertion.
In contrast to these references supportive of Haraway's work, an article such as Bill Joy's feature in
Wired, "
Why the future doesn't need us", does not subscribe to the essentially humanistic conceit of Haraway's work; that, however modified, it is the future of humanity which is and should be the central concern of theorists of identity in the technology-pervaded present and the digital future. Though not addressing Haraway in a direct sense, Joy's pessimistic vision of post-human futurity is an interesting counterpoint to the cyberfeminist assumption that a future inclusive of a strong interrelationship between humanity and technology would be beneficial.
William Grassie's article "
Cyborgs, Trickster, and Hermes: Donna Haraway's Metatheory of Science and Religion" would be valuable. It places Haraway's own philosophical/idealogical framework for the consideration of theories of identity in the digital age within a greater conceptual structure of mythology, critical and feminist theory, epistemology, hermeneutics, and philosophy, and provides for an improved perspective on her ideas in the context of a more widely-considered system of thought. In assessing Haraway's concept of our cyborg status Grassie's article provides a metaconceptual system for understanding her work which I would use in part to establish the way in which Haraway is both bound by and capable of overcoming the arguably patriarchal legacy of the system of Western rationalist thought.
For another, albeit overtly functionalist, examination of the systems of thought to which "The Cyborg Manifesto" is heir, Robert Young's article, "
Science, Ideology and Donna Haraway" is interesting. Young discusses the science/ideology dichotomy and the possibilities for subverting or overcoming that dichotomy, and demonstrates Haraway's work in overcoming it to produce research based on a more unified approach. Though primarily concerned with her researches which do not primarily take identity theory as their focal point, and though it must be borne in mind that Young acknowledges himself to be "generously cited" in Haraway's work and she in his, as an additional data point on the ways in which we are now, in the digital/post-digital age, subverting the traditional dialectical approach to understanding, it would be a useful contribution.
Ingrid Hoofd's "
Cyborg Manifesto 2.0: discussions in feminist figurations, new technologies and social change", as well as being a consciously and deliberately extremely hypertextual project, would be useful for analysing Haraway's quoted assertion in the light of its effect across our time. In evaluating its relevance to the time at which it was written, taking the perspective of a subsequent period allows for the capacity, in retrospect, to consider its validity with the benefit of hindsight. Critical assessment of a concept which is theory of its own contemporary within the perspective of the nature of that contemporary is assisted by a certain distance.
My primary direction in an essay assessing Haraway's assertion would be to analyse the role of myth and the conception of a collective identity underpinned by pervasive technology in modern cultural perceptions and critical theory. The implicit assumptions both of Haraway's work and of critical response to it also bear examination; it would also be interesting to establish the degree to which her self-proclaimed ironic and blasphemous approach is self-sabotaging. The theoretical environment in which her argument is constructed was not unconscious, and so it is difficult to consider her statement prima facie without being forced to take that ideological context into account.
