The following links lead to online articles that are strongly influenced by Haraway’s writings. I have excluded articles that seem to mention her in passing or apply her metaphors casually. Some of the included articles are academic, some are not. The annotations are generally taken from the authors’ abstracts or introductions.
Artificial Human Nature, by Warren Sack.
Artificial intelligence (AI) critics repeatedly ask whether humans can be replaced by machines: Can “human nature” be duplicated by machines and, if so, are humans then just a special sort of machine? By examining the present and history of AI criticism it is possible to identify moments where specific critics have fixated on particular qualities as the “essential” qualities of “human nature.” Reason, perception, emotion, and the body are four qualities that have been championed by AI critics (and proponents) as “essential” and (un)implementable as hardware or software machinery. I will argue that AI criticism’s preoccupation with the identification of “essentials” of “human nature” has left it blind – or at least short-sighted – to the cultural and ethical implications of AI: the ways in which AI technologies can influence the scope and boundaries of “human nature.” (Author’s introduction)
I approach the theme of vampires and the living dead in cinema with some trepidation, not only because it’s the right time of year for them to be popping out of their coffins and peeping invisibly into our mirrors, but also because I know that this is a theme with a long history in cultures in which I have little expertise. So as to dispel any illusions from the outset, I am not going to say anything very new about the cultural and cinematic significance of Dracula, vampires, golems, and so on, but I am, hopefully, going to show you some of the exciting permutations which these take on in the cinematography of late twentieth-century Mexico, as part of an on-going study of the re-configurations of late-modern and postmodern urban culture in that haunted and distorting mirror which Europeans often see when they look at Latin America.
The Body Machine and Feminine Subjectivity, by Silvia Vegetti Finzi, Psychomedia 10-11 (2000).
Ever since philosophy abandoned the concept of soul it has been difficult to define personal identity. For Freud identity had its roots in the body. But the body ego (considered as a system of drives) is captured in a system of dialectics with the other subject. When the subjective body and the objective body intercross, then the image of the body is produced, an image that changes following the development of child sexuality and that individuals model according to their own temperament and history. In communicational relationships with others, the body expresses that for which adequate words cannot be found. Freud calls hysterical symptoms “organ language”. But in the technological age the physiological body extends and strengthens itself with accessories such as the telephone and actual prostheses, like pace-makers or transplanted organs. Where then does Anzieu’sskin-Ego< begin and where does it end? Cyberpunk science-fiction saw in advance the intimate connection between man and machine, as well as the production of androids, extracting from this hypothesis very interesting consequences. Instead of condemning bio-technology, Donna Haraway makes an effort to capture its aspects of emancipation and social utopia. Taken in by the great net of global communication, personal identity risks becoming dissipated into a thousand masks. What then does the unity of the subject consist in? In imaginative, mythopoietic creativity, which alone can contrast the depersonalization of globalization processes and the anonymity infused by the presence of technology. (Author’s summary)