Quoting the remark by Maureen McHugh that "soon, perhaps, it will be impossible to tell where human ends and machines begin," the editors of The Cyborg Handbook argue: "There are, after all, more important distinctions to make, between just and unjust, between sustaining and destroying, between stable and erratic, between pleasure and pain, between knowledge and ignorance, between effective and ineffectual, between beauty and ugliness" (13).
Such blurring boundaries between man and machine provides Donna Haraway, who has taught an entire generation of theorists to think in terms of the cyborg paradigm, to found a theorical approach that can counter the destructive dualisms that she believes inform the western tradition:
Certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systematic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals -- in short domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. The self is the One who is not dominated. . . High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in two intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices. [Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, 177]
How does such an approach embody Derrida's deconstruction of oppositions?
