More Human than Human
I see a lot of what Harraway discusses in her Manifesto in ArchAndroid. If you scroll through the playlist and simply look at the names of the songs, some seem very esoteric and some make sense. In the Cyborg Manifesto Harraway wants us to think about Cyborgs in an ironic political sense while also keeping it faithful to feminism and post humanist ideology. When listening to the lyrics of the songs in ArchAndroid they are very centered around the “self”. Yourself and Myself, these individual churnings of thought, how everything in the world is so crazy, how dreams of things getting better stay forever, so many expressions of love, to need someone, to not need someone, to walk the thin rope of expression and thought, to speak up and speak out and the insanity that can potentially come with it. If we were to truly think of these in the way that Harraway intended, we’d be here for hours. which leads me to my next few points, I want to touch upon a few songs from the album itself.
Dance and Die is an interesting song, in Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto she wants us to look at Cyborgs as ourselves or rather a way to view ourselves in a personal way. within this song many people are described. Those who are suicidal, those who cry for help or more accurately crying for someone to listen to help, “zombies’ with no thought, children that kill each other, some that go to join the army, men who want to be free, men who want a stronger nation. this song is filled with so much strife and yet the title gives you two options die or dance. To dance as I see it is to keep moving forward even when you wish for it to end. To Dance to your own rhythm and like the song says, whether you are a cyborg, Android, decoy or human, these dreams will persist. How fluid the “human” is, how fluid the very consciousness that such simple and seemingly hopeless things persistent no matter what you are.
I will not lie, I feel a lot of my peers if they did something similar would probably point to “Oh, Maker” and I think it is infinitely smarter to do so when talking about these songs and how they relate to Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, but I simply must talk about Sir Greendown. It is such an esoteric and dreamy song. when looking at the lyrics it practically makes no sense a song potentially full of metaphors and questions. who is ‘Sir Greendown’, where exactly is this taking place, what tower is she speaking off? When I mentioned the word “dreamy” I was not joking, the melody is meant to give off the sense that it is a dream, but I believe the more interesting thing to observe is the Song itself. I believe this relates to Harraway’s Manifesto because Harraway uses the Cyborg to breakdown the distinctions between physical and nonphysical and what is more nonphyscial than a dream? Here is a dreamlike expression of love an ask of the person to wake them up at night, to come to their tower and whosk them away. Instead of a land of Milk and Honey we have a town of Walking dolphins and Cyborgs who know exactly what to do. but what happens when we awake? will Sir Greendown be here at the tower to take us away to allow our love to be reciprocated? who knows, it is a nonphysical expression something outside of the normal something that anything could dream of.
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