Baghdad Burning: Cyborg Meets the Negative

Abstract

This chapter attempts to locate an appearance of the public sphere within a critique of the “re-privatization” of women’s work regimes. The marginalization of the public sphere is shown to be coterminous with the marginalization of women’s work, so that the remnants of public sphere practices are still discernable within private sphere settings and their representations. In this chapter, I compare Donna Haraway’s views on the technological public sphere with Herbert Marcuse’s. According to Donna Haraway, new political visions and identity formations for the neoliberal, postnational age assume a surpassing of the private/public split of industrial capitalism, whereas Marcuse believes that the private sphere’s continued temporal, spatial, and conceptual “outsidedness” gives it the symbolic force of a radical alternative. Moreover, Haraway bases her analysis of cyborg culture on the idea that markets have taken over where nation-states once were, reducing all social values to values gained through positionings in the market (so that the private is just another market position), whereas Marcuse sees the private sphere as a check, an “outside,” to the indefinite expansion of nation-state-backed private interest.