Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour an serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism.
Interpretation
Irony involves holding contradictory ideas together, revealing deeper truths through humor and tension.
In this quote, Donna J. Haraway explores the nature of irony as a complex interplay of contradictions that do not necessarily resolve into a singular understanding. She emphasizes that irony allows for the coexistence of opposing ideas, illustrating its value as a method in both rhetoric and political discourse, particularly within socialist-feminism, where embracing complexity is essential for impactful dialogue.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture on the nuances of feminist theory to emphasize the importance of embracing contradictions.
In a sense, a cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense – a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.
It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.
Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other...
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.
Few revolutions succeed, and when they do, you often discover they did not gain what you hoped for, and you condemn yourself to perpetual fear, as the parties you defeated may always regain power and work for your ruin.
Rich Mullins was the uneasy conscience of Christian music. He didn't live like a star. He'd taken a vow of poverty so that what he earned could be used to help others.
That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom.
Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility with regard to everything that has life.
It is very significant that some of the most thoughtful and cultured men are partisans of a pure vegetable diet
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