Abstract
Donna Haraway’s Cyborg lived between fiction and fact in a real and virtual world and in the 1980 s even ignited its own manifesto. Currently the ontology of the so called material turn is high on the feminist (and elsewhere) theoretical agenda. I argue that the material turn can benefit from insights from Haraway’s early work on the Cyborg that are often forgotten. The Cyborg opposed strongly the distinction between nature and culture, the social and the technological or sex and gender. The Cyborg Manifesto is a pointed warning against continuing to relate to meaning or culture as something distinct from nature. Moreover it means that the material-semiotic understands nature as something changeable and in movement. Today Karen Barad is often mentioned as central to the renewed interest in feminist theories of materiality. I discuss her concept of ‘agential realism’ in more detail to establish a conversation between ‘agential realism’ and the Cyborg. Barad’s ideas are heavily dependent on her new reading of Niels Bohr and quantum mechanics. The Cyborg solves questions of materiality in other ways, through the concept of the material-semiotic, a concept that explicitly includes politics/criticism and which could greatly contribute to feminist theory and research practices.
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Notes
- 1.
This contribution is a thoroughly revised version of “Hva skjedde med kyborgen?” which was published in Tidsskrift for kjønnsforskning in 2014, vol. 38.
- 2.
My readings of these debates are located in a setting where translations from other languages, i.e. mostly Anglo-American concepts and theories, constitute a particular kind of work. Such work has its advantages as well as creating extra work and challenges. Thus it is important to consider location when dealing with conceptual understanding and methodology in relation to current debates on materiality. This constitutes a background for my text, yet, I will not explore further the issue of travelling concepts in the following.
- 3.
The combination of technology and science into “technoscience” is an attempt to express a similar interwoven relationship between what we usually refer to as two separate categories.
- 4.
Barad has an intriguing understanding of the concept “phenomenon.” In Barad’s understanding, a phenomenon includes the person who “sees” (the researcher), what is being “seen” (the object) and the measuring instrument (the method, technique or machine) by which it is “seen.” In other words, intra-action includes these three elements and the way/process through which they are entangled.
- 5.
I hesitate to use the concept of “data” here as it is often narrowly understood as a particular type of information but could not find a better word for it.
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Berg, AJ. (2019). The Cyborg, Its Friends and Feminist Theories of Materiality. In: Kissmann, U., van Loon, J. (eds) Discussing New Materialism. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22300-7_4
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