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Flânerie for Cyborgs
Rob Shields
University of Alberta
As a literary figure or conceit, Haraway’s cyborg is kin to Dumas’ and Balzac’s flâneur. As a social science fiction, crossing and mixing categories, the cyborg is an abject quasi-body who does not fit the Enlightenment model of the political subject and actor. The ‘Manifesto’ has a geography of sites - Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital and Church - which this article updates and to which it adds the Body and the Web. However, Haraway’s ‘cyborg-analysis’ directs attention to the nanotechnological scale of biotechnology. The spatialization implied in the ‘Manifesto’ is more like a surface, a site of regeneration, not a space of the body or of rebirth or the space of institutions such as the Market or School. The cyborg cannot be an Enlightenment political actor, but challenges the traditions, scale and space of the public sphere even as she carries ethical qualities and potentials for less normative forms of politics.
Key Words: biotechnology • cyborg • ethics • feminism • flâneur • Haraway • literary • metaphors • nanotechnology • politics • spacialization • spatial scale
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Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23, No. 7-8,
209-220 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276406069233
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