Excerpt from Master Thesis, Please Watch Over Me
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P O L I T I C S O F T H E P O S S I B L E
Performance As Pervasive Agency
The Cyborg 1
Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Social-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” uses the cyborg as a metaphor for the postmodern subject, positioning humans and machines as mutually inclusive, yet still separate entities. Moving beyond binary logic, Haraway rejects theories of origins or wholeness and claims that the very being of the postmodern subject is constituted by its hybridity. Like many post-structural theorists, Haraway does not define a singular identity or truth for the cyborg subject: the cyborg exists in a perpetual state of indeterminacy.
In 1991, Haraway’s essay was a celebratory announcement of the cyborg subject as an empowering liberation from a singular identification. After nearly twenty years, the growth of media and technology makes Haraway’s cyborg subject even more relevant. The increase of human dependence on 
technology affects how one establishes reality and identity. Technology has given individuals the ability to define their reality, move fluidly through spaces, and break down boundaries. Technical media, such as social networking sites, television, and surveillance systems, dictate human interactions and, as a result, society has never been more “wired.” The explosion of alternate and global realities has enabled the extraordinary speed of reproduction as well as the social acceptance of voyeurism, making it difficult to distinguish between real and reproduced experiences.
As real events disappear and reappear in reproduced forms, reality becomes accessible and established through technology-driven interfaces and representations. A person’s identity and the very validation of his or her existence are based on recognition by technologically engineered systems that produce images, modes of perception, and human actions. More than ever, Haraway’s claim seems applicable: that the cyborg is a “creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” 3
In his seminal work, Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard hypothesizes that “simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” 4 As one’s reality and place is dictated by recognition from technological systems, individual experiences are sacrificed for centrally collected and viewed images and information—for simulations of the real. In its move away from individuality and toward dependence on technological media, the cyborg subject is prone to feel a loss or lack of knowledge of its origins. The result is a cycle: identity becomes even more dependent on, and subservient to, a series of omnipresent technological systems. Haraway’s cyborg subject of empowerment still exists, but it is not untroubled in its terms and relationship with technological systems. In my work, I try to break the loop and examine the possibility for new contracts between the individual and the system.
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1 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, and London: Free Associations Books, 1991), 149.
2 Ibid., 160.
3 “Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulations – I. The Precession of Simulacra,” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-i-the-precession-of-simulacra/.
// Laura Alesci, 2010 //
