From: Michael Current <mcurrent-AT-picard.infonet.net>
Subject: Re: diasporal evasions
To: baudrillard-AT-world.std.com
Date: Sat, 21 May 1994 00:05:35 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: technology-AT-world.std.com (PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY LIST)


Raul Sanchez writes:
> 
> Which brings me back to where I was a second ago.  
> What's the difference between ourselves and our machines?  If we don't 
> know that, then how can we speak of their effects on us? 
> 
"The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and 
machine.  Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always
the ghost in the machine.  This dualism structured the dialogue between
materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called
spirit or history, according to taste.  But basically machines were not
self-moving, self-designing, autonomous.  They could not achieve man's
dream, only mock it.  They were not man, an author to himself, but only
a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream.  To think they were
otherwise was paranoid.  Now we are not so sure.  Late twentieth-century
machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural
and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed,
and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.
Our machines are frighteningly alive, and we ourselves frighteningly`inert."
-Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto

Michael

-- 
---------------------------Michael J. Current----------------------------
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