Odd Project The Second Hand Stopped Raritan
The canoe was stabilized in the slush and I felt comfortable adjusting my gear to warm my hands. With the wind in my favor and dressed in white coveralls, I walked along observing where the fox stopped to sit, waiting for sound or scent to betray the location. I had only a split second to react and get the camera focused. Howard the Duck (the duck, the myth, the legend)HOWARD the DUCKReal Name: Howard; his last name appears to have 5- 6 letters. Dwight Clive, Critic. Odd Project The Second Hand Stopped Raritan. 9929 Cuatro Poetas En Guerra, Ian Gibson 1137 Student Solutions.
Who would have guessed that 130 years ago, it was home to an elephant?
Odd Project The Second Hand Stopped Raritan Valley
To be fair, the Jersey shore was once home to two elephants, and both, while bigger than life, were man-made. The still-surviving Lucy stands between apartments and retail establishments on Atlantic Avenue in Margate. The South Cape May elephant, however, perished at the relatively young age of 16, the victim of a bad business plan.The mid to late 1800s was a busy time for developers along the Jersey shore. Entrepreneurs were grabbing up as much waterfront property as they could, with visions of selling lots and building entire communities. Some like Alexander Whilldin saw opportunities to extend their personal ideals, while others were purely in it for the financial gain.
Among the latter was Theodore Reger, who, with partners, formed the Cape May City Land Company to purchase 225 acres just south of an already-popular vacation haven. To advertise the resort community they envisioned there, Reger and his partners took a page from James Lafferty, who'd already used Lucy to draw buyers to a similar settlement about 40 miles up the shore in Margate. They bought the rights to erect a 58 foot high elephant which they called the Light of Asia, fully expecting lightning to strike twice.
More than 13,000 square feet of tin was used to sheathe the wooden elephant, covering about a million pieces of wood, 250 kegs of nails and six tons of bolts. She was completed and opened for business in 1884. For a ten cent admission, visitors could get an expansive view of the ocean and surrounding beachfront from the Light's howdah, or seating platform, perched on the elephant's back 40 feet above the sand.
If a zoning board had to classify the Light of Asia, they might have an interesting time of it. While the howdah was a sightseeing platform, the belly of the beast was intended to hold a concession stand. Reger used another part of the structure for a real estate office. When the Cape May City company failed, he and his partners incorporated two successor ventures, the Neptune and Mount Vernon Land Companies, the latter of which was the final owner of the elephant.Things didn't turn out as well for Reger and his partners as they did for Lafferty. First off, while the Light of Asia was an inspiring name, folks came to call the elephant Jumbo, after P.T. Barnum's popular beast. And though sightseers flocked to take in the sight of the beach-dwelling pachyderm, the number of people who paid admission to climb its legs to the platform was far below what Reger's group had anticipated. It seems that if they had any mind to get a high-up view of the area, people preferred to climb the Cape May Lighthouse for free.
Unsuccesful as a venture, the Light of Asia became a billboard for one of Reger's other local businesses, the New Mount Vernon Hotel. Meanwhile, vagrants moved into the elephant as it became increasingly more dilapidated. It was finally torn down in 1900.
A few buyers were convinced to settle in the vicinity, enough to incorporate as the town of South Cape May, but the town's history was brief as large swaths were lost to erosion and major storms in 1944 and 1950, Finally, what was left became a grazing pasture and then was converted to fresh water wetlands as the Nature Conservancy's South Cape May Meadows, host to migrating birds and resident species alike.
There's no knowing whether the Light of Asia would have withstood the storms (though I doubt she would have fared very well), but I'm rather tickled by the idea of a larger-than-life elephant standing amid marsh grass and dunes. Ol' Jumbo might have been a pretty neat hawk watch platform.
reproductive technologies, thefilm succeeded in crystallizing some of the fears,uncertainties, and desire that surround the coming of thepostmodern. Curiously, this updated story is a betterreplication of the original than any of the adaptations thatgesture toward the period of the novel, including KennethBranagh's recent version, which pledges fidelity in its verytitle, Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein.
Blade Runner conveys the advent of a new age by theparadoxical means of marking its end. The flight of the owl isone of many apocalyptic touches that define for the viewer thelimits of a period, the far end of an epoch just now gettingunderway. Hegel's words from my {54} epigraph refer to thewisdom that comes only with hindsight, the retrospectiveunderstanding available at the end of an epoch. But the film'suse of the owl is not exhausted by this insight. There issomething more in the image, something that unsettles thisvenerable sign of closure. One can identify the extra featurein a number of ways -- as irony, parody, self-reflexivity, thesimulacrum -- and each of these labels invokes a familiarconception of postmodern art. Like other contemporary texts,the film relies upon a gesture that it simultaneouslydismantles.
Before indicating how the film pulls off this trick, I want tosay that my purpose is not to catalogue the deconstructivestrategies of postmodernism. That task, useful as it once was,has been performed often enough. My purpose, rather, is to lookat the relation of postmodern theory to the history that makesit possible. I shall argue that postmodern theory is enabled bythe exclusion of one set of historical connections and relianceon another, very different set of historical links. Thecircuits that make this theoretical creature go, so to speak,are not the only circuits etched in the recent past.
The owl has spread its wings, though. What has the power todeconstruct so evocative an image? A monster, of course. But atfirst the viewer is unaware that a monster has entered thescene. As the bird settles serenely back onto another perch, ahandsomely dressed woman strides into the room, introducingherself with a question: 'Do you like our owl?' Dekard, apolice officer played by Harrison Ford, has come to Tyrell toexamine one of its new generation of cyborgs. 'It'sartificial?' he replies. Still advancing, the woman answers,'Of course it is.' The camera lingers on her face, forging alink between owl and woman. The implication that both areequally artificial flickers to consciousness before beingsubmerged in a more powerfully sexual suggestion -- that bothare property, objects to be bought and sold. 'Must beexpensive,' Dekard comments, the innuendo audible in his voice.The camera remains focused on the woman's face. 'Very,' shereplies, then adds, as if to underline the association, 'I'mRachel.'
The image of the owl is destabilized in at least three ways --as artificial creature, as commodity, and as woman -- which inthe film's {55} terms turn out to be the same way, as monster.These three complications are significant because they representplaces where postmodern discourse reveals its affiliations,establishes its links to a particular version of the past bywriting the history of its break with that past. Artificiallife, commodification, and gender are some of the principalcontact points, where lines of force intersect and where energyis relayed from one system to another. They are places, inother words, where the transfer from modernity to postmodernityis accomplished. Book after book explores one or more of thesecontact points to demonstrate postmodernism's break with astable conception of identity, say, or with the universality ofreason. Such highly charged nodes, however, can have multipleeffects. They can also be places where wires cross,short-circuiting the system, interrupting the standard flow ofcurrent.
I became interested in this possibility when I noticed howpredictably the same historical pattern was traced in works onthe postmodern. In keeping with the logic of 'post-,'definitions of postmodernism usually construct an account ofwhat preceded it. This history has three crucial stages, andone glaring gap. The first stage is the Enlightenment, which isseen as the source of the philosophical and political projectsof modernity, the origin of its faith in reason, individualism,and science. The second stage comes some hundred and fiftyyears later, in the early decades of the twentieth century, whenthe Enlightenment project is seen as culminating in thetechnocratic rationality and bureaucracy of modern life. Thethird stage is still evolving, but it is variously identifiedwith the coming of advanced capitalism, a postindustrialsociety, or an information age. What is missing from this neathistorical scheme, of course, is the entire nineteenth century,and particularly, Romanticism. Postmoderntheorists invariably ignore the many complex relationshipsbetween nineteenth-century culture and the contemporary world.It is as if Romanticism could have no conceivable link with thepresent, as if the circuit that led from the Enlightenment, tothe high modern era, to postmodernity would be disrupted by anymention of the Romantic movement.
There are connections, however, junctures that form a concealed{56} circuit within the walls of the vast structure ofpostmodern discourse. Romanticism and postmodernism share thedistinction of being the two most significantcounter-Enlightenment discourses the West has produced. Indeed,they represent the West's only sustained internal oppositions tothe Enlightenment project of modernity. Romanticism's challengecame at the beginnings of that project, while postmodernism'schallenge arises at the other end, when some believe that theproject has run its course; but the two discourses are unitednot only in many aspects of their critiques but also in some ofthe utopian alternatives they propose. Think, for a moment, ofthe similarity between Romantic and postmodern perspectives onreason, technology, and the environment. If these parallelallegiances have not prompted theorists to consider therelationship between the two periods -- not even to chart theirdifferences -- then perhaps one should ask: What work isperformed by this absence, what difficulties are evaded? Onepreliminary answer is clear: by ignoring the Romantic critiqueof the Enlightenment (wiring around the nineteenth century as itwere), postmodernism conceals its own possible affinities withRomanticism. But like all repressed knowledge, this problemcomes back to haunt contemporary theorists. Romanticism loomsas a dark presence within postmodernism, something like itscultural unconscious.
Odd Project The Second Hand Stopped Raritan Nj
To move beyond this preliminary answer, let me introduce someobservations on history made in 1975 by HélèneCixous. In 'The Laugh of the Medusa,' Cixous speculates thatthe introduction of woman as a category in history alwaysunsettles conventional schemes, depriving scholars of what shecalls the 'conceptual orthopedics' of periods or epochs:'Because she arrives, vibrant, over and again, we are at thebeginning of a new history, or rather of a process of becomingin which several histories intersect with one another. Assubject for history, woman always occurs simultaneously inseveral places. Woman un-thinks the unifying, regulatinghistory that homogenizes and channels forces, herdingcontradictions into a single battlefield.'
{57} Twenty years after its publication, this essay seems verymuch of its period. Its invocation of a 'universal womansubject,' for example, seems at odds with today's emphasis onhybrid subjectivities, constructed by the particulars of race,sex, class, and nationality, to name just the most frequentlyinvoked categories. But considering Cixous's essay as aproduction of the seventies helps one to see not only how itaided in the emergence of postmodernism but, more surprisingly,ways in which it mirrors positions found in the nineteenthcentury. Interestingly, Cixous's essay manages to make contactwith all three nodes mentioned above. Cixous could bedescribing Rachel, the figure who arrives to open up thepossibility of new histories, at the very moment when the owl inflight had symbolized the closure of an epoch. Rachel 'occurssimultaneously in several places,' incarnating both Minerva'saustere intellect and the horror of a monster like Medusa.Cixous could also be describing the effect of the film's greatprecursor, MaryShelley's Frankenstein. Shelley's novel, which hasbecome a much discussed work in recent years, seems to many ofits best readers to inaugurate new histories, new ways ofthinking -- or un-thinking -- historical schemes, including, Iwould add, the scheme that lies behind current understandings ofpostmodernism.
One of the oddest things about this odd and compelling novel isthat it simultaneously adopts both anti-Enlightenment andanti-Romantic positions. Take the novel's critique of science, perhaps its mostenduring legacy. Frankenstein and his monster have becomealmost obligatory references in any attempt to challenge thetechnological pride of the modern era. The nuances of thiscritique, however, are still not widely appreciated. Nounthinking opponent of science, Shelley was the inheritor ofmany of the attitudes of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft,including her Enlightenment beliefs in progress, the virtue ofeducation, and the rationality of women. These positive viewsare visible in Frankenstein, particularly in the firstedition of 1818, alongside the indictments of scientificoverreaching. Her portrait of the ideal man of science --Victor Frankenstein's admired professor Waldman -- issympathetically drawn: it combines an aversion to pedantry,dogmatism, and 'petty experimentalis[m]' [1.2.7] with frankness, {58} goodnature, and a commitment to a well-rounded, liberal approach tolearning. In two passages that were cut from the novel in its1831 version, which is the version most readers, know, Victor'sfather teaches him the properties of electricity, by imitatingBenjamin Franklin's experiment with a kite, and Victor himselfworks hard to acquire the main scholarly languages of the ageand to master practical scientific advances such asdistillation, the steam engine, and the air pump. As Anne K. Mellor has shown, Shelleydistinguishes between 'good' and 'bad' science, the formerepitomized by what she saw as Erasmus Darwin's respect fornature, the latter by HumphryDavy, Luigi Galvani,and Adam Walker's interventionist approaches.
Still, despite these qualifications, most readers come away fromthe book with an overwhelming impression of the dangers ofscientific hubris. Particularly in the first edition of 1818,the cautionary tale zeros in on the consequences of too zealousan investment in Enlightenment science. Frankenstein's warningto Walton, for example, imitates the balanced cadences of aneighteenth-century moralist: 'Learn from me; if not by myprecepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is theacquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is whobelieves his native town to be the world, than he who aspires tobecome greater than his nature will allow' [1.3.4].
The novel's measured critique of Enlightenment science is oftenassimilated to its more flamboyant denunciations of the Romantic ego because bothsurface in the chapters describing Frankenstein's creation ofthe monster. These two dimensions of the book, however shouldbe kept distinct. The difference, which was present in theoriginal version, is underscored by the 1831 revisions. To thelater text Shelley added numerous passages that emphasizeFrankenstein's 'fervent longing to penetrate the secrets ofnature' [1.1.7], to rend theveil of this world with a willful and distinctively masculineviolence. The purpose of these passages is not to amplify thecritique of science but to lay bare the dangers of the Romanticwill. The balanced cadences of her earlier criticism havevanished in this typical addition: 'So much has been done,exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein -- more, far more, will Iachieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer anew way, {59} explore unknown powers, and unfold to the worldthe deepest mysteries of creation' [1.2.7]. In these additions, onefinds Romantic motifs of madness and guilt, impenetrablemysteries, the tumult of the internal being and the swellingheart, clearly marked as evidence of Frankenstein's sublime (andhence terrible) error.
By distinguishing these two strands of the text, one is able tosee Shelley's unusualhistorical position. Unlike most of her prominent malecontemporaries, she did not phrase her objections toEnlightenment science in Romantic terms. At the same time, shedid not use her resistance to aspects of Romanticism as anexcuse for a conservative return to prior values, the pathchosen by some of the most popular female writers of the time.Shelley's position in relation to the principal intellectualcurrents of her era is so distinctive that existing categoriesfail to encompass it. Most critics have resorted to definitionby negatives, just as I have in the preceding paragraphs: sheis neither one thing nor another, conforms to neither this trendnor that movement. Consequently, one frequently hears of her'resistance,' her 'subversion,' or her 'ambivalence.' Such amarginalized position is highly prized in the contemporaryintellectual climate, and it is the ground on which Shelley'snovel has entered the university curriculum. But accounts ofsubversion, like definition by negatives, always locate a workin relation to a dominant tradition. Despite the intent toundermine, the work is still dependent on what it wouldchallenge. More important, this strategy conforms to thecritical predilections of postmodernism, the very discourseunder question.
One can see this strategy deployed at the end of an essay thathas had immense influence on postmodern thought, JacquesDerrida's 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of theHuman Sciences' (1966). Faced with the impossibility ofdescribing the unnameable in positive terms, Derrida chooses asignificant figure to fill the void, that of a monster. Writing of thebeginning, as he took it to be, of a new kind of inquiry, heincludes himself among those who 'turn their eyes away whenfaced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself andwhich can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in theoffing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in theformless, mute, infant, and {60} terrifying form ofmonstrosity.' According to Derrida, one has no choice but toturn aside, to look at something else when confronted with theunknown. His gesture of turning away his eyes is the customaryresponse to monstrosity -- lifesaving, in most versions of thestory, if the monster is Medusa -- but it helps to establish thediscourse of the unnameable as the only available language ofpostmodernism.
Is Shelley's novel doomed to enter history only under thespecies of the nonspecies, a formless, mute, infant, andterrifying form? Certainly that has been the burden of muchcontemporary criticism, which presupposes that it can accountfor the terror of a work that cannot speak within the discursivenorms of its period only by deeming it subversive. But perhapsthere is a different way of encountering the unnameable, a wayof approaching with one's eyes open, as it were. The challengeis to find positive ways of describing the position of a worklike Frankenstein. For all its deconstructive intent,postmodernism's method of dealing with the unknown ends uppositing it as the other of a single, unified history, a historyit then designates as modernity. If several histories intersectin Shelley's novel, then the more radical approach would be toacknowledge the positive character of those histories, tospecify where they come together, how they contradict oneanother, and why they construct one monstrous creature ratherthan another. This approach does not mean reconciling thevarious, partial accounts of the past, for that would be onlyanother way of constructing a universal history. Still lessdoes it mean turning a once marginal tradition into a newcenter, a counterhistory that is valued because of itsopposition to the of official heritage. (This latter gesture,to the extent that it locates the critic in Satan's party,inadvertently signals postmodernism's affinity withRomanticism.) What this approach does call for is a recognitionthat every history has its limits. Although these limitsnecessarily circumscribe inquiry, preventing certain kinds ofinsights, they also make other kinds of insights possible. Theybecome a contingent foundation for knowledge. The intersectionof these limits -- the contact points of different histories --may create something unnameable, but that does not mean one mustlook away.
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The advantages of specifying the positive character of differenthistories become apparent when one compares works that have beenconsidered marginal to their respective periods. To pursue theexample at hand, there are many points of contact betweenShelley's novel and Cixous's essay, and juxtaposing the two canserve as a first step in establishing alternative traditions forthe present. Obviously, both works focus on a monster. Inaddition, both treat the topic of looking, which Derridabrought up in a figurative way, with disturbing literalness.Etymologically, monster is derivedfrom the Latin, monstrare,' to show,' and most monstrousbeings represent something horrible to behold. Although themonster in Shelley's novel is hideous to look at, Frankensteinhimself feels more keenly the horror of the creature looking athim. In this respect, Shelley reverses the terms ofmonstrosity. Frankenstein cannot bear to see the eyes of hiscreation watching him. Indeed, the eyes themselves seem to bethe most horrid organs the creature possesses. From the firstmoment that Frankenstein sees 'the dull yellow eye of thecreature open,' he is repelled by this feature, by the 'wateryeyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun whitesockets in which they were set' [1.4.1]. That night, when themonster visits Frankenstein's bed, what disturbs him most is thefact that the creature's 'eyes, if eyes they may be called, werefixed on me' [1.4.1].Ultimately, Frankenstein has visions of disembodied eyeswatching him wherever he goes: 'I saw around me nothing but adense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but theglimmer of two eyes that glared upon me' [3.4.10].
Mary Shelley's image of disembodied eyes plays on a similarimage in her husband's poem of 1816, 'Alastor.' When the figure ofthe Poet in 'Alastor' dreams of 'two eyes, / Two starry eyes,hung in the gloom of thought' [lines 489-490], they areanything but dull, yellow, and watery; these 'serene and azure'[line 491] orbs lurethe Poet to his death because of their ideal beauty. Thedynamics are clear: the danger of the eyes in Percy Shelley's poem liesnot in their power to glare down at the Poet but in theirtantalizing status as objects to be seen. Mary Shelley {62}inverts these dynamics, allowing the monster to possess thepower of sight, but this inversion clearly does not return thetheme of vision to the provenance of Enlightenment lucidity.
One can amplify this contrast by comparing Mary Shelley's viewof monstrosity with her husband's seldom discussed poem aboutMedusa. Unpublished during his lifetime, 'On the Medusa ofLeonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery' was assembled frommanuscripts by Mary Shelley in her edition of her husband'sPosthumous Poems (1824). In this powerful fragment, whichdescribes a painting of Medusa's severed head mistakenlyattributed to Leonardo, Percy Shelley complicates the dynamicssketched above. Although the poem focuses on 'the beauty andthe terror' of Medusa's head, its opening and closing linesstress Medusa's own power of sight, stubbornly persistent evenin death. 'It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,' the poembegins, and five stanzas later, is still insisting: 'A woman'scountenance, with serpent-locks, / Gazing in death on Heavenfrom those wet rocks.' The poem is more sympathetic to Medusathan most accounts prior to Cixous's. As W. J. T. Mitchell hasobserved, Percy Shelleytransforms Medusa into a symbol of revolution, 'a victim oftyranny whose weakness, disfiguration, and monstrous mutilationbecome in themselves a kind of revolutionary power.' Since theimage of Medusa was widely employed by conservatives in popularrepresentations of the Terror during the French Revolution, oneunderstands why a political radical such as Percy Shelley wouldbe tempted to depict her in positive terms. The poet also findswarrant for this association in the prehistory of Medusa, forthe Gorgon was originally a beautiful maiden, raped by Neptunein the temple of Minerva, then turned into a monster by thegoddess of wisdom as punishment for the 'crime' of beingraped.
In addition to these associations, the poem appears to have hada relationship to Frankenstein which has not previouslybeen noted. Written in 1819, the year afterFrankenstein was published, the work's revolutionarysubtext resembles what Percy Shelley himself, in an essay entitled 'On'Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus' (1818), called the'direct moral' of his wife's book: 'Let one being be {63}selected, for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind. . . and you impose upon him the irresistibleobligations -- malevolence and selfishness.' Percy Shelley'sportrait of Medusa appears to comment on his wife's vision ofmonstrosity, particularly in the final stanza, which MaryShelley omitted from her edition, where Medusa is called 'anuncreated creature.' One wonders if Mary Shelley was promptedto leave this stanza out because of her consciousness of itsbearing on her novel. Certainly the poet's conception of the'everlasting beauty' of a face where 'Death has met life, butthere is life in death' romanticizes the spectacle of adismembered female body as nothing in Mary Shelley's noveldid.
Like Mary Shelley, Cixous unsettles the relationship betweenmonstrosity and vision. Cixous challenges men to gaze directlyat the monster they fear, thus mocking the familiar Freudianreading, which sees Medusa as representing men's fear ofcastration: 'Too bad for them if they fall apart upondiscovering that women aren't men, or that the mother doesn'thave one. But isn't this fear convenient for them? Wouldn'tthe worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren'tcastrated. . . ? You only have to look at the Medusastraight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautifuland she's laughing.' This requirement -- to look at the Medusastraight on -- is naturally premised on one's having sight. Butthe possession of sight is the very thing at stake in the myth.One may remember that the Medusa story has an earlier chapter inwhich Perseus goes to the cave of the Graiae, three sisters whoshare a single eye, hoping to learn from them the secret of howto defeat Medusa. Perseus forces the sisters to betray thesecret by stealing their eyeball when one sister takes it out ofthe socket to hand it on to another. Cixous switches theownership of vision, much as Mary Shelley does, by advising allmonsters to keep their eyes on the heroes who come to murderthem: 'Look at the trembling Perseus moving backward towardus.. . . What lovely backs! Not another minute to lose.Let's get out of here.'
A scene in Blade Runner vividly captures the interplay ofvulnerability and power evoked by the possession of eyes. Twoof the escaped cyborgs, who are trying to locate their creator,stop at a genetic engi- {64} neering outlet called 'Eye World.'While Roy, the leader of the cyborgs (played by Rutger Hauer),questions the genetic technician, the other cyborg picks up twoexceedingly watery and yellow eyeballs, and delicately placesone on each of the technician's shoulders. The terrifiedworker, an Asian-American caught in an economy of specializationthat prevents him from knowing the answers the cyborgs seek,tells Roy that he made his eyes. 'If only you could see what Ihave seen with your eyes,' Roy answers, amplifying a prominentmotif in the movie: the monster sees. This episoderaises questions about racial stereotypes, postindustrialoutsourcing of parts -- here, body parts -- intertextuality, andmore. Other scenes associate a female cyborg, who is working asa snake dancer, with Medusa, and the opening credits superimposethe reflection of disembodied eyes on an aerial view of LosAngeles at night. But I bring up Blade Runner againprimarily to underscore the concern with sight in thiscollocation of stories.
Monsters who stare back at their would-be murderers, horrificsights with the power of seeing. What does one make of suchdisturbing phenomena? Cixous makes laughter, and so, at onepoint, does Shelley. In the final chapter of the novel,Frankenstein swears an awful oath, promising to pursue themonster who has caused him so much anguish until one or theother of them perishes. This bit of Byronic posturing is greeted byan eerie sound: 'I was answered through the stillness of nightby a loud and fiendish laugh. It rung on my ears long andheavily; the mountains re-echoed it, and I felt as if all hellsurrounded me with mockery and laughter' [3.7.2].
The current flows strong between Frankenstein's monster andCixous's Medusa. Their laughter crackles along a circuit thathas been long concealed. To test the capacity of this circuit,let me bring in a final monster, one still closer to our ownday, Donna Haraway's cyborg.
Published in 1985, Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late TwentiethCentury' was immediately recognized in feminist circles as adisturbing challenge to some aspects of liberal, materialist,and French feminist {65} thought. Reprinted a number of times,the focus of symposia, translated, and widely quoted, it bore amessage that was virtually unique at the time. It argued thatwomen should embrace the monstrous identity of the cyborg as anironic political strategy for dislodging traditional images ofthe feminine. Making this gesture would require a willingnessto explore one's complicity with technology, one's implicationin the 'integrated circuit' of the contemporary world. It wouldalso mean acknowledging the fragmented, partial, constructednature not only of one's identity but also of one's verybody.
Haraway's essay makes contact with Frankenstein at anumber of places. Both works focus on monsters because, asHaraway puts it, monsters define 'the limits of community inWestern imaginations.' Both are profoundly concerned with'taking responsibility for the social relations of science andtechnology.' Both play on the relationship between femalewriting and the creation of monstrous beings. And both havedeveloped into 'ironic political myth[s].' These points ofcontact help one see relations between the two monstersthemselves. Both Shelley's creature and Haraway's cyborg aredeeply embodied beings. In the wake of science fiction'sappropriation of the Frankenstein myth, one sometimes forgetsthat Shelley's creation was not a robot. As Chris Baldick puts it, theoriginal monster 'has no mechanical characteristics.' With thecyborg, the Frankenstein myth comes full circle. By dissolvingthe boundary between the human and the artificial, the cyborgeliminates the mechanical dimension once again. With the adventof genetic engineering and cybernetic technologies, notions ofartificiality have changed; the monster is no robot but aflesh-and-blood construction like ourselves. Indeed, as Harawaycontends, most people in the West today are cyborgs. They haveinternalized technology so completely that their identities havebeen transformed.
I can illustrate this point by moving from Haraway's utopianspeculations to the mundane level of everyday existence. Thinkof how one's character has been reshaped by the totalintegration of technology with the body. Many people would bedifferent beings without the glasses or contact lenses that letthem see. How would one's self-con- {66} ception and behaviorbe changed without the availability of contraception (one formof which can be permanently implanted in women's bodies)? Whatabout mood-altering drugs such as Prozac or body-altering drugssuch as steroids and estrogen? For that matter, what about thefar older technology of vaccination? In terms of moreinterventionist procedures, think of people whose lives havebeen transformed by pacemakers, prosthetic limbs, sex-changeoperations, cosmetic surgery, and more. Haraway's vision is notas outlandish as it might at first appear. But she would notwant her manifesto domesticated entirely; she needs her monsterto remain shocking, for political reasons most of all. And itdoes remain shocking because of the complicity it establishesbetween the individual, as a cybernetic system, and thecommercial, bureaucratic, and military systems against which theliberal subject has often defined itself.
Before I go on, let me mention a few ways in which Haraway's'Manifesto' appears to differ from its predecessor. To beginwith, Haraway explicitly distinguishes her cyborg in onerespect: 'Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, thecyborg does not expect its father to save it . . .through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate.' This pointforms part of Haraway's critique of the Oedipal triangle and ofher hope for the disappearance of gender, which will beconsidered below. It comes back in contact with Frankenstein'smonster in the next sentence, though, where Haraway says thatthe cyborg has nothing to do with the 'organic family.' Asecond difference: Haraway's cyborg is no giant, ungainly beinglike Frankenstein's monster; instead, it is made possible by themiracle of miniaturization. But this change is an outgrowth ofalterations in the experience of monstrosity. 'Miniaturizationhas turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautifulas pre-eminently dangerous.' Hence the cyborg is notstartlingly visible either. Unlike Shelley's monster, thecyborg can disorient because of its occasional invisibility: whoknows what technology lies buried inside the body? But, again,this point brings Haraway back to Shelley's position. Theownership of vision becomes all the more important when medical'technologies of visualization' make bodies 'newly permeable toboth 'visualization' and 'intervention.'
{67} Although Haraway, like Cixous before her, has many pointsof contact with Shelley, neither twentieth-century writerparticularly resembles the other. In truth, Shelley's monsteris closer to Cixous's Medusa and Haraway's cyborg than either ofthese later conceptions are to one another. For example,whereas Cixous assimilates all women into a universal femalesubject, Haraway opposes the search for an essential unity andasserts that 'There is nothing about being 'female' thatnaturally binds women.' Haraway was among the vanguard offeminists in the eighties who proclaimed the value of alliancerather than identity politics and promoted an interest inpartial subjects, in the kinds of agency available in borderzones, in the pleasures and possibilities enabled by hybridslike her cyborg. In contrast with another theme in Cixous,Haraway does not want to base her politics on a rhetoric ofvictimization: 'Innocence, and the corollary insistence onvictimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enoughdamage.' Finally, whereas Cixous celebrated the attractions ofbisexuality, Haraway declares that the 'cyborg is a creature ina post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality. . . or other seductions to organic wholeness.' Thislast point may be one of the things that has made her workappealing to queer theorists as diverse as Judith Butler, SandyStone, and Cathy Griggers.
The fact that Haraway's cyborg is not a direct descendent ofCixous's Medusa points toward the value of attending to themultiple histories that intersect in a writer such as Shelley. The critic shouldbeware of forcing different lines of connection into amonolithic counterhistory, an alternative tradition thatmirrors, in its linearity and reliance on the logic ofresemblance, the very tradition that omitted them in the firstplace. Only by tracing the separate connections back to theirnineteenth-century precursor can one see the relations amongthese monsters that haunt the boundaries of the human.
I began this essay by calling postmodernism a theoreticalcreature, one with great power on the contemporary scene andwith a proportionate ability to provoke terror in some circles.In truth, all periods {68} might justly be compared toartificial lifeforms. They lumber forth, on specifiedoccasions, to serve their maker's ends, and their shapes oftenreflect the nature of those ends as much as the true diversityof the times they try to epitomize. My point is not thathistorical writing inevitably fails to reflect reality. Thatargument, which concerns the fictionality of history, hasstimulated a vigorous debate of its own but is not really atstake here. Rather my point is that periods are heuristicconstructs. They enable critics to ask a question -- or a rangeof questions -- about the past, such as 'What did the Romantics think aboutnature?' or 'How did Enlightenment thinkers conceive ofreason?' Change the people included in the termsRomantic or Enlightenment and you may change notonly the answers but even the relevance of the questionsthemselves. Postmodernism, then, is neither a fiction nor areality but a conceptual tool. Contesting the term does notmean arguing about its validity as a description of the world;it means debating the term's usefulness for asking the kinds ofquestions one wants answered.
Alternative traditions are subject to exactly the sameconditions. The truth or falsity of their perspective is notthe only issue that needs assessing. Sometimes counterhistoriesare said to be 'corrective,' and, without doubt, the discoveryof neglected writers and overlooked positions has remediedone-sided, even discriminatory, views of the past. Ultimately,though, the notion of correcting history, supplementing therecord in the hopes of providing a more adequate account,reaches a limit. First of all, the historical record is notinfinitely expandable. As with the canon, there is a limit tohow much material one can realistically add. History involvesmaking choices; a truly comprehensive model would consume morespace than the world it tried to describe. Second, thecorrective approach reproduces assumptions about the unity ofexperience across race, class, and gender lines, whichpostmodernists, at least, would generally reject. Finally, thelimit encountered by the corrective approach is that ofdifference itself, of genuinely incommensurable attitudes. Atthis limit, one must acknowledge the inadequacy of one'sconceptual tools and look around for other terms. Ifpostmodernism must repress its connections with {69} Romanticismin order to clear a space for its own conception -- if, at thesame time, it fails to account for connections between anineteenth-century writer such as Mary Shelley and contemporarywriters with good claims to be considered postmodern -- then itmay be necessary to develop new ways to think about thepresent. But there is no reason to throw out the good with thebad. Postmodernism may remain a perfectly useful way offocusing attention on some contemporary problems, even if itobscures other, equally important, questions. As Dekard saysabout cyborgs: artificial creations are 'either a benefit or ahazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.'
The owl takes wing at twilight. Hegel, a great theorist ofhistorical periodization, was probably not thinking of Minerva'sancient enmity to Medusa when he wrote the aphorism with which Ibegan this essay. There is an irony, however, in the fact thatall three writers pit their monsters against Minerva. Theycontinue a struggle between wisdom and what wisdom once found itnecessary to shut out. If one conceives of this struggle atleast in part as a conflict between the closed circuit traced byhistory and the monstrosity of what remains outside thatcircuit, then one can see why connecting these writersrepresents a challenge to postmodernism. For postmodernism hasoften cast itself as one of the monsters too. Imagine thehorror of discovering that postmodernism has been on the side ofMinerva all along.