The new process for Lovecraft to get fame forms a living system that is of historical characteristic and contingency, an autopoiesis of multi-culture tolerance. The traditional top-down way of promoting new talents, singers or units by big entertainment companies may still work, as the Korean popular music groups, but these bottom-up autopoiesis community turn out to be more intense in member relationships, highly self-identical and unlikely to collapse. Not only is Nico Nico, actually the every branch related to Akihabara sub-culture shares similar features. They have their distinct and individual
identity, ”[interacting] independently with any observer” (Johnston 190-91), inner structural
changes is always undergoing, metabolizing as an unity.
We may apply another Haraway’s notion, “discursive construction,” to discuss the case of Cthulhu Mythos. This construction—or an organic embodiment—is “[always] radically historically specific, always lively, bodies have a different kind of specificity and effectivity;
and so they invite a different kind of engagement and interventions” (Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” 67). The “coterie” traits have always been a central notion for
Lovecraft. In the present world the circulation and cross-fertilization has come to an era with an unprecedentedly high and fast emergence. In games and subcultural terrain, Cthulhu has become not only a digitally synthesized tool in terms of the second creations but also an Artificial Life, especially when the Cthulhu Mythos invades the virtual world as a new cultural symbol. He is an implosion (Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” 71) of the technical, capital, political, organic and commonly popular.
Now it’s time to come to Haraway’s cyborg feminist-socialism narrative. Haraway’s definition for cyborg is various. For an umbrella definition, “[a] cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 291); or, we could also roughly divide Haraway’s cyborg into three main categories: a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, as well as a creature of both fiction and lived social reality. Haraway also argues that “[by]
the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism” (Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 292). By saying so we may explain her words as “human after late-twentieth century are all chimeras, or narrowly defined, cyborgs.” This is not hard to understand. After the post-industrial era arrives, human has become much more dependent on machines. Some called it one of the features of the Post-human. Recent issues on bio-politics have discussed how human life is bond with machine; computer and cellphone/smartphone, iPads become our prosthetic, and our lives tied to the cyber-network. The more inseparable the two becomes, the more we blur
the boundary of human and those who are originally subjects of minority discourses (here we refer to cyborgs). The hybrid of machine and organism suggests the extinction of “purebred”
human beings from the Garden of Eden. Cyborgs’ position, compared to that about ten years before, is no longer placed with dogs and coyotes, terms signified as the Other, but leveled up to be an alternative term for post-/human. Optimistic and de-stigmatized it may seem in the surface, underlying dark streams are still flowing.
According to Haraway’s definition, we can thus describe Cthulhu in postmodern era also as a cyborg, just as us, but diverse since the cyborg discourse becomes more elaborated.
To discuss the Great Old One as cyborgs, we must apply situated knowledge (Haraway,
“The Promises of Monsters,” 89), something grass-root or locally contingent, to delve into the blooming of Cthulhu Mythos in present era. Becoming cyborg may be another
side-phenomenon of globalization, since “daily-use” machines such as cellphones and digital cameras were also distributed by cross-national enterprises such as Samsung, SONY,
Microsoft, let alone Apple. Here what comes first is that Haraway puts cyborg in the
fabrication of Western egocentrism and metaphysics, a key idea in Haraway’s discourse that may not fit in the case. Haraway discusses cyborg in “Cyborg Manifesto” as follows:
“The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into higher unity…the 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”
(292).
For Haraway, a cyborg is far from the frames and limits of a world of definitions on gender, labour, and Post-Freudian aftermath. Haraway elaborates on the argument further as follows:
“The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it
is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust…Cyborgs are not reverent;
they do not remember the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection”
(293).
We can see from these two quotations some very basic factors of Western cultural
“quintessence” such as Marxism, Oedipal symbiosis, the Fall, and most of all, the omnipresent binarism, male/female, culture/nature, whole/part, active/passive,
maker/made…which Haraway expounds upon as “[one] is too few, but two are too many”
(Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 313); every of them playing their indispensable role of the formation of the Western ideological system being as such. For Haraway, the cyborg can be
“a local possibility to take a global vengeance” (Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 316).
However, for the tentacle-faced evil god with no mercy, her approach may not be totally effective. Still, with some slight reversal and adjustment, Haraway’s key ideas are still feasible in analyzing the Great Old Ones.
Here is when Haraway’s articulation (Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” 91) comes into play. Haraway elaborates, “Discourse is only one process of articulation. An articulated world has an undecidable number of modes and sites where connect- ions can be made” (Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,”106). Even if the acts of Cthulhu and his followers in every subcultural genre are touching or disgust-triggering, they are extremely
“humanized” (or we can say anthropomorphism?), the articulation are of human calculation, or to put it in a narrower way, of Lovecraft and the followers of his cult. Connections and possibilities in Lovecraft’s world are made through human articulation. To be voiced, they need a ventriloquist. Cthulhu, like many Others, “cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” 87), 23 no matter how “unspeakable”
and “unnamable” they are. Their subjectivity remains, and the articulated soliloquy is
23 In the original text, Haraway quoted the line from Edward Said in her opening epigraph. To discuss this in a post-colonial context may be slightly far from the topic. Yet under the context of postmodernist discourses, the voicing of the minority groups may be of the same nature, or at least, of the same means or intetions.
arranged and sifted through the filter of standard human emotion, or even sentimentalism. By forever evolving in subculture, the figure of Cthulhu has openly become something tied to capitalism, for the proceeds of such Dionysian event must be considerable.
In Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway also brings about William Gibson’s suggestion,
“Cyberspace seems to be the consensual hallucination of too much complexity, too much articulation” (Haraway, The Promises of Monsters, 107). The tolerance for diversity brings hurly-burly to cyberspace, and the lack of regular rules and common grounds has always been the defect of cyberspace. However, Haraway also argues that “[to] articulate is to signify.
We articulate; therefore, we are. Who “I” am is a very limited, in the endless perfection of (clear and distinct) Self-contemplation.” (Haraway, The Promises of Monsters, 106). The articulation even through Cthulhu is a way of self-contemplation, of how people identify to the virtual world. The mass production of related works makes one wonder if humans are envying the (imagined) “elsewhere” they were dwelling; or humans are just so lonely in this cosmos that we not only embarks on (imaginary) journeys to the extraterritorial but also created our cyber colons, in a twisted and anti-human way, so to seek for a certain
carnivalesque liberation. To find the answer, as Haraway suggests, “articulation must remain open” (Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” 110), for everyone need their own voices, and the right to represent themselves. At least, in the Western metaphysical context, “[cyborg]
imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 316).
For the artificial Cthulhu(s), “the machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our process, an aspect of our embodiment…We are
responsible for boundaries; we are they” (Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 315). In our
imagination, Cthulhu longs to be worshipped and rise as the stars in the right place. Cyborg is not a choice in this era anymore, but a fact, and so do capitalism and state socialism. The image of Cthulhu may reflect the present condition of us, only through His way of living, He
may not only be a pop icon but an approach to “answer” our own questions, a way of getting away from the cage/matrix but in a way express our resignation to our limitation, leaving the possibility that pieces of remains will be preserved…like all the other human creation, we may not trying to be god, but just finding the way out. “S/he is not utopian nor imaginary;
s/he is virtual” (Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” 112).