Ian Murray wrote:
>that BC weed shouldn't be given to islanders.
Max Sawicky thinks my hallucinations come from eating too much beans.
Seriously, though, they are not MY hallucinations. The mythological (or
neurotic) cyborg represents something real but unspeakable. A search on two
search engines indicates that there are a little more than one and a half
times as many web pages containing the terms cyborg and manifesto as there
are pages containing commodity and fetish. As an article in a recent Wired
magazine noted, Donna Haraway's 1984 essay, The Cyborg Manifesto, "has
become part of the undergraduate curriculum at countless universities."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway.html
To me, Haraway's essay appears as an untenable hash of undigested concepts,
marxish/feminish gleanings, fey posturing and unmitigated hype. I suspect,
however, that if I hired a hall and invited her to give a lecture, it would
attract a large audience. If I invited Moishe Postone, I might be able to
round up a few friends (maybe Ian would drive up from Seattle). This
realization both repels me and attracts me. There is something here I think
I can almost put my finger on.
For all the cyber-this and cyber-that we've seen in the eternity since the
internet blossomed, there doesn't seem to be a lot of clear realization that
Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics to refer to the computer's
function as a _control mechanism_. What the mechanism ultimately controls,
according to Marx, is a labour process. The grotesque image of a fusion of
body and machine turns out to be not a new idea at all but a clearly
developed theme in Marx's discussion of the capitalist production process.
It is symptomatic that Haraway "discovers" and superficially glosses
something that Marx dissected thoroughly more than a hundred years earlier,
just as Gary Becker churns out tomes on a fantasy of "human capital" that
Marx had tossed out in two sentences. In spite of her declared intentions,
Haraway's cyborg IS the heroic proletariat of traditional Marxism. So, in a
perverse way, is Becker's wily accumulator of human capital. That heroic
proletariat is not quite yet Marx's proletariat, though. It is, rather, an
affirmation from "without" of a subjectivity that needs to be criticized
from within.
I showed a Ukrainian artist a Chase National Bank advertisement promoting
profit sharing from a 1946 Fortune magazine and she laughed, "socialist
realism!" which had been exactly my reaction and was the reason I had showed
it to her. Perhaps smoking a little BC weed would make it easier to
visualize the all-encompassing cultural bolshevization that presents itself
as ersatz liberal capitalist restoration.
What am I trying to say? It has something to do with how ripe the fruit is.
We are not at the End of History as Francis Fukuyama supposed a decade ago
but tantalizingly close to its beginning.
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC
