Evidence what you are decide with specific pieces of Haraway's text (this means direct quotes) and feel free to extend out to include other readings from class to support your response.
250-300 words. Engage with others.
Due: Tuesday, May 1, 2012 by class time.
I think that Haraway would claim that the promise of monsters is a differing view of the self. She says, “Both sets of monster generate distinctly diffracted views of the self, evident in beliefs and practiced in relation to vulnerability and mortality.” This quote reminded me of two topics we have read about concerning monsters. The first one being from Rai’s third blog post and the fear of the abnormal and the second being from Halberstam’s article about contradictions of the monsters.
ReplyDeleteHaraway compares the diffracted views of the monster’s self to a person living with AIDS. Just as an AIDS victim refuses to accept that they are a victim, the monster refuses to accept his monstrosity. In his eyes, he is normal because this is who he is. He can’t be anything else. Again we see the subject of monster not being able to choose their monstrosity; they must accept it as an essential part of who or what they are.
Secondly, the monster refuses to accept his own vulnerability. He believes that his immortality is absolute when it is not. This is most evident in Dracula. Dracula does not fear Harker, Van Helsing, Holmowood, Morris, and Mina until it is too late. He assumes that because the cannot die a natural death, that he has escaped death altogether, but this is not the case. Once the “band of knights” sets out to destroy Dracula, his vulnerabilities leave him very exposed and he is therefore able to be defeated.
Haraway points out that yes, monsters are different from humans, but the main promise of a monster is their view that they are different from who they truly are. Because they cannot see themselves as monsters and as having weaknesses, their downfall in inevitable.
Haraway says, “[Artifactualism] means that nature is made for us, as both fiction and fact. If organisms are natural objects, it is crucial to remember that organisms are not born; they are made.” I found this to be a bit confusing because isn't artifactualism a term that deals with the creation of man-made objects? Why, then, is Haraway saying that artifactualism is the reason, or the cause, of a natural world that is made for us? If it is artifactual, isn't it created by us? In this case, the promise of monsters must be a divergence, or perhaps an equilibrium between two of its essential aspects. One of the aspects is the part that humans create. The other aspect can be understood from an evolutionary perspective. This second aspect deals with the creation of the monster before humans. In this case, the monster is not created by us, but rather exists as a completely separate entity. It's evolution is a result of natural selection, rather than human driven artificial selection.
ReplyDeleteI think Katherine's idea of the promise of monsters is very similar to my idea. She says, “monsters are different from humans, but the main promise of a monster is their view that they are different from who they truly are.” The eternal balancing act that I mentioned previously, between the monsters as a human creation and the monster as a product of evolution is like Katherine's idea of the two separate views of monsters. However, instead of talking about two theories surrounding the creation of the monster, she instead talks about two of the characteristics that it possesses in its post-creation period.
But, the ideas of vulnerability and mortality can tie back into my question concerning the promise of monsters being a equilibrium pertaining to the origin of the monster. The monster is, in some regard, unaware of his own vulnerability due to the historical aspect of evolution. He believes that he is immortal, simply because he has lived for a very long time without feeling the effects of age or disease. Unfortunately, this does not prevent him from being fatally mislead.
I agree with Eric in his diagnosis that the monster is both a human-created entity and the result of evolution. However, both the human-created entity and the independent result of evolution are viewed as something completely other. Haraway says, “Excruciatingly conscious of nature's discursive constitution as "other" in the histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, and class domination of many kinds, we nonetheless find in this problematic, ethno-specific, long-lived, and mobile concept something we cannot do without, but can never ‘have’.” The promise of monsters, according to this quote and some extrapolation, is that we can extrapolate our feelings of the monstrous onto an inhuman being.
ReplyDeleteNow back to my first point that the monster is simultaneously two mutually exclusive things: the human-created entity and the result of evolution. The monster is a human-created entity in that we as humans have made monsters to give us a physical force to fight against our abstract fears. We create monsters to give us something to literally fight against instead of battling the abstract concepts of, for example, sexuality, immortality, nuclear weapons, and even colonialism. We can view many of these abstract concepts as monstrous and by applying them to monsters we allow the heroes (ourselves) to fight against them and destroy them. The monster is also the result of evolution. It is well documented that the origins and specific nature of monsters changes with the times. In this sense, Haraway would argue, the monster does not need a human creator and is rather a byproduct of the way of life of humans. Again these monsters deal with the monstrous in society, but there is not a human creator, bur rather a inhuman creator that is natural selection.
Monsters are inevitable. Just as Rai said, monsters are created from excess. They are as Billy said, “a byproduct” of our fears and desires. From this excess, human society’s thought is pushing past evolution and the present. With high deductive reasoning, humans have the remarkable ability to look and think ahead. There they create a facet of time where the what-if exists.
ReplyDeleteBeing a wanna-be/almost science fiction nerd, I have watched enough Firefly and Battlestar Galactica to know that science fiction depicts futures that are hauntingly similar yet different. As Haraway says, science fiction is “crafting the important consensual hallucinations about "possible" worlds that go into building "real" ones.” These figments of our imagination to Haraway represent another dimension that has evolved from advance thought. Since “science fiction is generically concerned with the interpenetration of boundaries… and with the exploration of possible worlds in a context structured by transnational technoscience.” The promise of monsters is the promise of continued evolution into thinking and neurological science where the line of thought and reality become blurred. The fears of human nature is translated into the monstrous atrocities of science fiction (human race being annihilated, forced to be evacuated, or being killed by our own creations). We are reaching a point in evolution where the human-created entity lives within its own spatial dimension.
I agree with Katherine that the tragic flaw of the monster is his inability to grasp his downfalls. As Katherine pointed out,“Just as an AIDS victim refuses to accept that they are a victim, the monster refuses to accept his monstrosity.” Since the monster is such an individualistic being, usually with immortality, he or she reflects inwards. Their singular, selfish desires mean that they are narcissistic to the point of being oblivious. Self-preservation is the goal of any human. Monsters and science fiction depict a fear of this preservation reaching a point that it sacrifices the whole race for the singular. This is why monsters are self-absorbed, they represent our worst fears.
One of Haraway’s “promises of monsters” is the “inappropriate/d other,” in which “an “inappropriate/d other” means to be in critical, deconstructive relationality, in a diffracting rather than reflecting (ratio)nality….To be inappropriate/d is to be neither modern nor postmodern, but to insist on the amodern.” To me it seems that the “monster” of the postmodern world has caused views to remain strictly “modern” or “postmodern,” “reflective” rather than “diffractive.” The predominantly western, masculine view of the world has left room for only “self” and “other,” which, according to Haraway, does not provide universal inclusiveness.
ReplyDeleteAnother of the “promises of monsters” includes representation. Haraway argues that “the power of life and death must be delegated to the epistemologically most disinterested ventriloquist,” referring to the fact that the party most detatched must become the representative of those who are not able to speak for themselves. She goes on to say that “the scientist is the perfect representative of nature, that is, of the permanently and constitutively speechless objective world…his passionless distance is his greatest virtue…” Because of scientists’ “passionless distance,” they are able to protect “the represented” from “the environment.” The environment, though surrounding and very close, is apparently too close and is thus threatening to the represented.
The “promises of monsters” are extensive, as provided by Haraway, but the monster itself consists of the “postmodern world.” I disagree with Katherine (and several others) in that “the promise of monsters is a differing view of the self.” It seems to me that Haraway is actually arguing for a completely different view, devoid of “self” and “other.” Instead of accepting the postmodern worldview in which western and masculine viewpoints have dominated, Haraway is calling for a different scientific process in which the “inappropriate/d other” dominate and control the new articulation. This articulation must be seen in a new context based on the amodern, rather than the “modern”, “postmodern”, or “traditional.”
Monsters are always present throughout history. While each different culture and time period may have different interpretations of what a monster is, the creation of a monstrous being is, like Chelsea said, inevitable. We as humans have speculated about the extent of our own humanity, often going to the extremes to see what life would be like if something changes. The form of the monster is created through the “what-ifs” of the human mind. Haraway says that “SF conventions invite-or at least permit more readily than do the academically propagated, respectful consumption protocols for literature- rewriting as one reads”. She is speaking about the revision of writings to make them flow “differently” than originally expected, but I see this quote as a sign of our changing times. The monster’s form may change, but the principle behind it stays the same.
ReplyDeleteAs Katherine pointed out, the monster is normal in its own eyes. It usually refuses to accept its monstrosity, reflecting the points of view of some real-world monsters, such as Al Capone or Adolf Hitler, who never accepted that they were monsters, instead believing that they were working towards the greater good and that they would survive throughout eternity, not in body, but in principle. The monster will always exist in principle; however, the principle that it stands for is not the greater good, but rather the outer limits of humanity, the fringe on which we as humans pile our fears and desires.
We are frightened of what we do not know, and yet we are always seeking to personify this fear. Since the monster refuses to accept that he is a monster, we must take a deeper look into ourselves. We might insist that we are not monsters, but are we really just refusing to see our true forms?
“It is crucial to remember that organisms are not born; they are made in world-changing technoscientific practices by particular collective actors in particular times and places”. This is something that we have come across before. In terms of monsters, they are not simply a punctum, they are an evolution that has built upon itself over and over.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of the promise of monsters, I really agree with Katherine (and other people) when she says that in its own eyes, the monster thinks he is normal because “this is who he is”. Looking at the monster of terrorism – Al Qaeda, an Islamist organization, calls for Jihad. They take the Quran literally and do what they believe is necessary to fulfill any request. They believe that they are doing it in the name of their god, failing to see the evil that they have caused and will continue to cause. Like Zach said, Hitler believed that what he did was normal to preserve the purity of the Aryan race.
Haraway says that “human beings use names to point to themselves and other actors and easily mistake the names for the things.” I agree with Zach, who said that “the form of the monster is created through the ‘what-ifs’ of the human mind”. We like to speculate things, to judge things intrinsically, however, this keeps us from seeing the actual monstrosity behind the monster. We see changes in the monster and look at it as a punctum, when we need to look at its evolution, and how it truly became that way.
I agree with Eric and Billy that the monster is both a human construction and a product of evolution. But, I disagree with Billy that the two concepts are mutually exclusive. I think that monsters undergo a process of evolution and society acts as the agent of natural selection by deciding what they’re willing to pay for and what they aren’t. What is naturally profitable survives and what doesn’t have any appeal dies out.
ReplyDeleteI think that Harraway is suggesting that the “promise of monsters” is too begin to break down what she sees as artificial distinctions between scientific studies and cultural, political and societal studies. She spends a lot of time talking about how we need to stop seeing nature as something natural but instead recognize it a “artifactual” – or produced. She says that, “The emerging social subjects called "inappropriate/d others" inhabit such worlds. SF-science fiction, speculative futures, science fantasy, speculative fiction-is an especially apt sign under which to conduct an inquiry into the artifactual as a reproductive technology that might issue in something other than the sacred image of the same, something inappropriate, unfitting, and so, maybe, inappropriated,” where she defines inappropriated as, “The term "inappropriate/d others" can provoke rethinking social relationality within artifactual nature.” The inappropriated Other is the monster, which she suggests is a vehicle for challenging a given society’s dominant conception of whatever is being considered via mediums like the science fiction genre. What’s important isn’t what is being challenged, but instead that something can be challenged, thus the monster proves that things aren’t objectively true or natural, but instead dynamic and artifactual. Harraway seems to think that this breaks down the methodological distinction between the hard sciences as an objective truth seeking vehicle and cultural and societal studies as relative truth seekers. She’s trying to prove that natural doesn’t mean static and she suggests that the promise of the monster is its ability to demonstrate evolution, thus proving that natural doesn’t mean static – meaning that science can become a part of cultural, societal and political studies.
I think that she also tries to break down the distinction between “natural studies” and “cultural, societal and political studies” by inserting a lot of scientific language into what’s arguably a humanities paper. Using words and phrases like “trophic,” “immune system” and “frictionless curved planes” in a paper on media ecology all suggest that scientific studies don’t necessarily have to be kept separate from cultural studies – which is the main point of the paper and coincidentally the “promise of the monster.”
Sorry it's a little over, I used a really big quote.
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ReplyDeletegood point Abi
DeleteThe “promise of monsters” is viewpoint. Haraway references the idea of the “indifferentiated other”, which is grounded in the representation of the monster in the eyes of a foreign individual. In this case, this individual is the human being, the one who is interpreting the medium, or the message as McLuhan would so enthusiastically put it. The author believes that it takes a completely new vantage point in order to discover characteristics that were never known before. In the same way, our understanding of vampires is completely different from the understanding that characters in certain novels hold for these mythical creatures. For example, Harker in Bram Stoker’s Novel, Dracula, sees the Count as a friendly host at the beginning of his stay. His initial encounters with the creature raises some alarms for the reader. Stoker hints at the idea that Dracula could be a vampire, a relentless, repulsive creature of the night. Harker is completely ignorant to this possibility, and requires the vantage point of the reader in order to truly understand this monster. Haraway explains how “"each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point." This idea stems for the fact that certain perspectives yield new understandings that before could never be seen. In fact, this works the opposite way around too. The vantage point of the vampire can also offer insight to our nature as human beings. Perhaps the vampire’s activities are simply reflections of our inner desires and animalistic instincts. However, another vantage point is necessary for complete understanding of oneself or one another.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Katherine when she states that the monster requires our understanding of the creature in order to accept its existence. The monster, as she puts it, denies its monstrosity, just as the AIDS victim denies his illness. However, true understanding and acceptance only comes from looking at the world through another person’s (or entity’s) eyes. Eric, I don’t think that Haraway is trying to explicitly state that the vampire and the human are different entities. Instead, the author is trying to say that these two entities rely on each other in order to reach a complete understanding.
I found Haraway's comparison of monsters to AIDS interesting. In my literary review one of the articles I chose to an article to synthesize involving Remus Lupin and the relationship of his nature as a werewolf and the resulting relation to incurable diseases such as AIDS. This preaches the lesson that the fear of AIDS victims like the fear monstrosity represented by lycanthropy are irrational and the result of the differing public opinion contrasted against self perceptions.
ReplyDeleteThe whole concept that “Monsters generate distinctly diffracted views of the self,” caught my attention because it is a question that I constantly ask about the world. For example, we as Americans see terrorists as a form of monstrosity. It embodies many of the things we fear and it stands for many things we are pledged to fight against. However, the extremists we fight against do not see their cause as unjust. They believe that they are doing their duty as human beings. They are biologically not different, there is no gene that sequences for terrorism. So it is entirely the environment that they grew up in and the eventual ideals that were built. We are a monster to them, but our perception of ourselves is as a noble watchdog. This idea that a monster's perception of itself is far different from that perceived by others is an overarching rule in relationships. Haraway's theory that “Both sets of monster generate distinctly diffracted views of the self, evident in beliefs and practiced in relation to vulnerability and mortality,” applies beyond the realm of monstrosity to almost every perception of others we create upon our own preconceptions.
Monsters are a diffusion and metamorphosis of our own fears and yearnings; assembled, reconstructed, and freshly transfigured from the past manufacturing to present-day imagery. Although each culture, time period, and person encompasses an individualistic viewpoint, the conjecture stems for the global intuition that the promise of the monster is the perspective. Outlook is substantial in all realms. “It is crucial to remember that organisms are not born; they are made in world-changing technoscientific practices by particular collective actors in particular times and places”. (Thanks Steph!) The ever-fluctuating world cultivates a wide array of individuals with oscillating perspectives. As Haraway mentions, “Human beings use names to point to themselves and other actors and easily mistake the names for the things.” Once again the epitome of this statement eludes back the standpoint one possesses.
ReplyDeleteThe monster was formulated through the could’as, should’as, and would’as of the human mind. The though process and creativity of each being’s visionary mind yields the monster. I agree wholeheartedly with what Zach remarks. ““The form of the monster is created through the ‘what-ifs’ of the human mind”. The vantage point one holds produces idiosyncratic outcomes. For instance, Harker’s viewpoint of Dracula at the beginning of the novel is solely focused on the seemingly genuine cordiality of the monster, overlooking the frightening facets and letting pleasant factors take a front seat, to the back-burner horrors. This point of observation is skewed until Harker obtains another point of visualization. In turn, displaying to him the reasoning behind why acquiring another outlook on Dracula is vital for security and sanity. Viewpoints are linked to circumstances and personal experience. For example the reader of Dracula attains a unique connection to the text and characters, especially Dracula, depending on previous knowledge and the point in time one is encountering the novel.
As McLuhan states vehemently, the medium is the message. Thus, the placement of viewing one takes, or is positioned in, determines the sight that is seen. Thus, to entirely capture the meaning of a monster, a cultivation of a multitude of points are necessary in the execution of the depiction, as well as the interpretation.
After several hours of work, I determined that Harraway is just about the most difficult to understand theorist I have ever attempted to understand. What I finally determined from her ramblings however, was that perspective is key in the analysis of a monster. The promise of the monster is that it is a contradiction and yet it is what you make it to be. The ideas one brings. Her idea of the inappropriate/d other, that which is related to something, but not set in its definition, to me seems to sum up the promise of the monster very well.
ReplyDeleteThe monster is not set in stone in any way, especially because in all actuality the monster is not real. This means that the perspective you bring into the idea of the monster ends up defining the monster somewhat for the person regarding it. The monster is different to everyone; it is not originally fixed by difference from anybody, because it is perspective that ultimately defines the monster for a certain person. A feminist view of the cyborg is infinitely different from that of someone who has never examined the idea of feminism.
Billy claims that the vampire is both a human-created entity and the result of evolution. This follows my idea of perspective being key in analysis of the vampire. Simultaneously, his idea about evolution shows that even though the monster is not completely set in its identity, through the concept of inappropriate/d other, it still has somewhat of an identity that will be met in any analysis of it. It is a person’s perspective that fills in the details.
Haraway symbolizes the monster through the cyborg. She then compares this cyborg to feminists, which I found to be a very insightful connection. Since she discusses how perspective is key when viewing the monster, this implies a duality to seemingly singular concepts. She uses an example of a nature activist group who were opposing the expansion of technology. These members wore shirts with a picture of the world on the front. She then makes the point that “there is, however, a jarring note in all this, even for the most devout. That particular image of the earth, of Nature, could only exist if a camera on a satellite had taken the picture, which is, of course, precisely the case.” Here we see a good example of how a group that views themselves as so independent of technology, the thing they oppose, are actually creating their views through its use (i.e. duality within a seemingly strict singular message group). Through this cyborg monster, a combination of both human and technology (one of her discussed border crossings), the duality that exists in perception is embodied. This is the promise of the monster—the hypothesized future where people recognize the codependence that seemingly opposing concepts possess. Haraway summarizes this idea well when she discusses the crossover of two ideas and states that "each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point." I feel that Steph grasped this point as well when she said that “Haraway is suggesting that the promise of the monster is to begin to break down what she sees as artificial distinctions between scientific and cultural studies.” The “breaking down” that Steph references is what I am expanding beyond the one example of nature and technology, to encompass all aspects of interdependence and connection that we ignore. This is the promise of the monster.
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