On the blogs, commenters fell, generally speaking, into one of two camps: Haraway or Stiegler. In terms of Haraway, two major themes sprung up: Haraway’s politics and Haraway’s connection to or lineage from McLuhan. It seems the former is the more fertile ground for discussion–probably always the case with politics. As we picked up the thread of McLuhan in seminar, the conversation seemed to fizzle, and there’s not much in terms of explicit lineage between McLuhan and Haraway, so we’ll record the highlights of this thread below, but it seems as if the political was more generative terrain for discussion.

Nathaniel put his finger on a theme that strung across a number of posts: Haraway and politics. While hesitant to connect an ironic cyborg figure back to identity politics, Nathaniel is drawn to Haraway’s brief discussion of ecofeminism as a continuation of Renaissance humanism and sees Haraway as a harbinger to the turn to post humanism. Noah picks up on some of these themes in his post, noting his dissatisfaction with feminist approaches that are overly reductionist. Like Nathaniel, Noah sees Haraway as moving away from traditional notions of Humanism, which he contrasts to McLuhan’s embrace of human-centeredness. Joe picked up on the shift away from humanism as well, and sensed a bit of hope in the movement toward a post-human cyborg, though Nathaniel wondered if “hope” is too rooted in a humanistic project. Hassan picks up on these political issues as he highlighted Haraway’s invocation of the cyborg as an antidote to the seemingly intractable problems of oppression as manifest through social and cultural systems.

David’s concern with Haraway shifted a bit toward the monster imagery, though his concerns seem to parallel others who see politics as central to her work. His concerns trend alongside Nathaniel’s and Noah’s most closely as he questions the usefulness of the cyborg as a political antidote.

Back to McLuhan, Aden, alongside Joe and Noah, observed some intellectual cross-over with Haraway, as did Courtney. Both Aden and Courtney, though, brought the concept of “the informatics of domination” into the discussion. The takeaway, from all of the blog posts centering on Haraway, it seems, is an abiding interest in politics as they interface with technology. Those concerns are as contemporary as they are historical, which is perhaps why they surfaced in many of our readings of Haraway.

Stiegler had fewer takers on the 7006 blog-o-sphere, thought the discussion was healthy. Hassan and Diana discussed Stiegler’s take on technology preceding or shaping human capacity. This has come up in seminar as well in terms of how technologies shape the possibilities of the present. Todd approaches this issue as well insofar as he seems to read Stiegler as positing a technical system as a life form, or as technology as inventive of the human ala Kittler. Joe’s post touched on Kittler’s determinism from the past week as well, though in relation to Haraway and not Stiegler.

For the Stiegler bloggers, the concern that seemed to implicitly hover over the discussion had to do with determinism. We had discussed the concept of techno determinism in prior weeks (cf. Kittler), so that is perhaps why the concern, although perhaps understated, remains. This is an open loop that we’re not sure we resolved, either on the blogs or in seminar: how do we understand Stiegler in relation to the concept of technological determination?

For the Haraway bloggers, the issue of politics surfaced as the most common concern. In the blogs and seminar, the political issue seemed to gain more traction. We began a discussion of Haraway’s approach to categories in her manifesto, though it was perhaps left as a bit of an open loop. How does she see categories, and how do they overlay with a turn toward the affinity as an organizing political principle? And what are the implications of shifting a political stance away from identity and toward affinity?

In seminar, we began with Scott explicating Stiegler’s “deep opacity of contemporary technics.” This began to illuminate why Scott paired Haraway and Stiegler: both believe that technology is far beyond our understanding. Scot remarked “We don’t understand what is going on in technology. We can’t.” We might be able to successfully fire off an email, but the circuitry in the keyboard, the architecture of the computer’s processor, the intricacies of TCP/IP, etc. are all “opaque” to us because those processes are too numerous and too complex for any singular human mind to fully wrap itself around. Scott outlined for us that the big difference is that, while both Stiegler and Haraway believe that we are subject to a technology that is beyond our ability to fully grasp, Stiegler’s approach is an existential one while Haraway’s is political.

When discussion was opened up to the class, we focused primarily on Haraway, trying to figure out what a cyborg is and how it is connected to the problems Haraway sees with identity politics. Diana and Kelly wondered how literal this cyborg was and how it connected to feminism, with Kelly asking “Is there something feminists can learn from the cyborg?” Noah pointed out that Haraway wants to “get away from essentialism” and the suggestion was made that this might be Haraway’s issue with identity politics. Nathaniel expressed the idea that identity politics can be “atomizing,” with identity categories becoming so specific that political movement becomes almost impossible since “unity” cannot occur if we are all unique collections of various identity-categories. However, we still felt uncomfortable, unsure of if we could figure out what Haraway’s figure of the cyborg does to move us past identity politics.

Kelly and Joe got us closer, with Kelly focusing on Haraway’s “commitment to irony” and the difficulty that gives us in figuring out where she’s earnest and where it’s tongue-in-cheek, and with Joe asking that we take the “manifesto” part seriously. Scott interjected at this point to say Haraway says “irony is a rhetorical strategy which should be embraced by socialist feminism. That we should hold incompatible things together.” This ties the irony, the cyborg (an incompatible thing), and Haraway’s feminist politics together.

Scott went back to Stiegler, pointing out that Stiegler’s philosophy is “prehistorical.” Historicity, for Stiegler, is technological since it requires writing, giving technology primacy over history, which, as Scott points out, is the usual deconstructionist move of pointing out a binary, pointing out the privileged of the two terms, and then flipping it and entertaining the idea of the subordinate term being the dominant. So, instead of history and man shaping technology, as is the dominant idea, Stiegler offers up an existentialism where history and man is shaped by technology. Stiegler isn’t really giving us a politics, but both “give us our inability to distinguish between technology and ourselves.”

Finally, Scott gave us a nice model for distinguishing the theorists we have read so far:

McLuhan – At center is essential human. We simply don’t understand our extensions via technology.

Kittler – Determinist and anti-humanist.

Stiegler and Haraway– Not essentialist or determinist. There’s no way to externalize the thing you’re studying enough to say that it is X or Y.