October Meeting (Cyborg Theory)

"Cyborg Manifesto"

by Donna Haraway

&

"The Computer Reprograms Me"

Michael Chorost

The second meeting of MATCH centered around what was dubbed "Cyborg Theory" inspired by a lecture and workshop advertised over the summer around Michael Chorost's recent books Rebuilt & World Wide Mind. Leigha McReynolds and Erin Vander Wall lead the discussion, including an excerpt from Chorost's first book and Donna Haraway's foundational essay, "the Cyborg Manifesto." 

The conversation functioned across a variety of interlocking topics. On one level, all members were interested and comfortable with the invitation to think along with "Post-Humanism" to imagining bodies (including the human body) not as a discrete subject, but as an array of changing, exchanging, and permeable systems of objects (which may possess different degrees of subjectivity). On a second level, we parsed Chorost's attempts to draw strict distinctions between things such as Cyborgs, Androids, Robots, and Humans. We developed our own working understanding of the terms (apart from Chorost) but generally agreed that such beings in life and literature often seen to cross or straddle these categories despite our attempts to pin them down. On a third level, we contemplated Chrosost's attitudes towards gender, sexuality, and disability which appeared strikingly to work hard to assert hierarchical and defined differences in bodies, despite his concentration on how his own body and identity is deconstructed by his hearing-aid; this attitude was then compared with Haraway's proposals for an inter-penetrating material feminism.

September Meeting (Low Theory)

The Queer Art of Failure

by J. Jack Halberstam

As the inaugural meeting of MATCH (Mobilizing an Active Theory Community in the Humanities) it is perhaps pointed that we began by reading the chapter on "Low Theory" from J. Jack Halberstam's book the Queer Art of Failure. There was the added benefit to all that Halberstam would be joining George Washington on a week-long residency, coinciding with the release of his new book GaGa Feminism. This gave us all a chance to familiarize ourselves with his work before his visit.

Attention circulated around the invitation to make what we read, write, and discuss personal and not to be afraid to fail in the process. Critiques were levied however around the difficulties that the open risk-taking and counter establishment methodologies called for by Halberstam have for those in vulnerably positions within the academy, especially graduate students. Embracing failure and snubbing the ivory tower may be all and well for a professor well tenured and secure in public opinion, but may be the death-blow for those that are just trying to break into the field. All in all, however, the book's invitation and lively style was exciting and we certainly took the invitation to be open and radical to heart, at very least in communities such as MATCH were we can be more free to fail. This is not a working group for masters, but peers, who are willing to take on such fellowship, wherever their current profession, station, or discipline.