Deconstructionists like to disassemble the world through exposing binaries. Foucault and his contemporaries put the lie to concepts of normality, gender, and punishment by showing how these ideas are artificial constructs. These constructs impose what seems to be a self-evident truth through black and white distinction. In a world beyond these ideological polarities we can see that committing a singular crime or homosexual act doesn’t make one 100% criminal, or homosexual. What many theorists have been trying to tell the world is that there is a spectrum of stances between compulsive killer, and starving thief. A simple blanket label of criminal, or in Foucault’s terminology, abnormal, demolishes the complexity of reality into socially constructed and ignorant binaries.

Donna Haraway, author of “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, rails against certain draconian binaries: “’Western’ science and politics – the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the production of culture“ (29). All of these embattled conceits were, and remain, the ideological enemies of many literary critics.

Most violent rhetoric is somewhat self-defeating in assaulting binary constructs, like race, or gender, for instance. Attacking the white male to further another race or sex, may bring change, but it also feeds into the two dimensional world by affirming the existence of the binary. And in the end, pushing with violent abandon in one direction, without pause for balance, will lead to hypocrisy. A world where white males are the pariah class is just as backward, if not more ironic, because the critics who would create that world should presumably know better than the puritan slaveholding colonists who created this one. What is unique in this essay is not this tired list of human failings, but a new prophecy for a technocratic future.

Balance is key; Haraway gives us the great leveler in the form of the cyborg. Human conceits can be leveled by the digital medium. She argues that, “no longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations” (29). As humankind assimilates into this new digital world the old dimensions and signifiers continue to lose relevance. The almost holy boundaries between human and animal, between the races, even between the genders are all being empirically exposed as nothing more than superstitions, or lines drawn in sand. The development into cyborg culture tears down another wall, the one between human and machine, while giving us a venue to develop into a culture without binaries.

After looking at the title of this paper and seeing the word ‘socialist’ I thought, “oh Christ, another one of these,” and though the language and style seemed more obtuse and metaphysical than scientific, I’ve convinced myself to go along with the author to some extent, and to work toward an understanding beyond binary charlatanry. While the appeal of a truly egalitarian ideology cannot be denied, I find it hard to believe that people will abandon the binaries that structure their understanding, not only of the world, but of themselves. Can a person identify themselves without the labels, positive or negative, of some social construct? At first I had planned to tell a joke about how posing as someone of the opposite sex in chat rooms, just for a laugh of course, could constitute a leveling of binaries. But it doesn’t. Trolling desperate men while posing as a teenage girl doesn’t destroy the structure, it perpetuates the binary of gender through absurdity. If you look at the most popular websites, facebook and the rest, you will see pictures, IM services have little icons or avatars, even the games, like Warcraft, are full of monsters, but they are gendered. Haraway may have had a hope for this new medium, but it is clear that humans have brought their baggage along. An egalitarian world doesn’t stop two dimensional labeling; it only makes it acceptable to be the nerd, or whoever you like. The label itself and the false logic behind it are still at large; Donna Haraway calls herself a feminist without irony.