Re: AUT: Is Haraway making fun of pomo?

[Ben Hoh <jebni@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 3/2/02 9:49 PM, "Michael Handelman" <mhandelman1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I get the feeling that Haraway is making fun of
> Postmodernism, but at the same time, I think some of
> this is extremely useful for the revolutionary project.


I don't think Haraway's being ironic in the sense of sarcastically taking
the piss out of pomo rhetoric, if that's what you mean. I think she
playfully mobilises some of that rhetoric for interesting political
purposes, often against the grain, but that's a different kind of irony, I
think.

I think the Cyborg Manifesto is historically quite important as a nuanced,
non-reductive challenge to both essentialist and vulgar Marxist approaches
to feminism, while retaining the really cool philosophico-historical method
of the Communist Manifesto, which is "look at where things at now -- so
scary and yet so full of possibility" (as opposed to the Stalinist and
social democratic readings of historical materialism, which reified a bunch
of universal laws about the supposedly inevitable progress of management
techniques). No doubt the same kinds of utopian socialists who were appalled
by Marx's amoral mutations of bourgeois economics and philosphy, and his
location of resistance in the belly of the helpful capitalist monster, are
equally appalled by Haraway's ambivalent visions.

The other really useful thing about that essay is that it proposes an
ambivalent model for contemporary subjectivity (revolutionary or otherwise)
and strategic affiliation, the general lack of which I think is the reason
you get these useless debates between vulgar Marxism and identity politics.

And notice that I didn't mention the fetishised category of "technology"!


Ben



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