I found Haraway and Stiegler diametrically opposed to one another at times, although they may be concerned with similar things in the end. I should preface by admitting that picking out certain passages in Stiegler, and in some degree Haraway, seems to be an injustice to their larger project of determinacy, reflection and speculation. I hope to get a more unifying sense of Stiegler’s primary concern, especially in light of his encounters with Heidegger and his anthropological debate with André Leroi-Gourhan, in class tomorrow. But for now, it might help to quell some confusion about both Haraway and Stiegler by making some connections between the two.

Haraway may see the cyborg as a particularly effective antidote to oppressive hegemonies and social realities concerning women and minorities, in that the cyborg (as a being) escapes origin, and is thus non-historic. It escapes origins, especially the oedipal kind that bound gender to domestic roles, but also dismantles socialist-feminist power structures and Marxist concepts like alienated versus un-alienated labor.

For Stiegler, on the other hand, beings do not simply evacuate themselves from the past, perhaps due to their congruencies to technics, to skill, and to extension and exteriorization. The anticipation of tool formation somehow designates temporality itself (I don’t even want to think about how speed is slower than time); it also gives way to the simultaneous differentiation of cortex and tool. Past learning is then enveloped into present awareness of “already-thereness”, by way of what Stiegler calls “the vector and accumulator of past epigeneses, a singular epigenetic plasticity of the cerebral structure”. (177)

I feel that both Haraway and Stiegler are pointing to some untapped gestalt of memory and present, cognition and utility. Stiegler’s philosophy may not be rooted in questions of salvation, but perhaps Stiegler’s pre-human has important lessons for Haraways post-human. Is forgetting the lesson (as is the fault of Prometheus’s foolish brother)?