cyborgs are everywhere

In my quest to further explore (and hopefully understand!) Haraway’s article, I came across a very interesting synopsis on, of all things, a yoga blog. SCIY (Science, Culture, and Integral Yoga) states that their mission is “to explore trends within the contemporary science and culture fostering the co-evolution of integral spirituality, scientific research and emerging planetary culture.” While this synopsis (by Carolyn Keen) was not written explicitly for the blog, I do find it interesting that I was lead to it first above others. I think my favorite excerpt from the piece details why cyborgs are so foreign to the human experience:

The cyborg thus evades traditional humanist concepts of women as childbearer and raiser, of individuality and individual wholeness, the heterosexual marriage-nuclear family, transcendentalism and Biblical narrative, the great chain of being (god/man/animal/etc.), fear of death, fear of automatism, insistence upon consistency and completeness. It evades the Freudian family drama, the Lacanian m/other, and “natural” affiliation and unity. It attempts to complicate binary oppositions, which have been “systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals” (177).

The cyborg challenges everything we as a society have come up with to define ourselves. Thanks to this article, I think I have finally managed to grasp Haraway’s arguments. I’m also a fan of the image SCIY selected to head the article on their site. It’s a mixture of the goddess and the cyborg- a dual reality with which modern society will most likely have to come to terms. Is this our utopia?