A Cyborg Manifesto

I found this article to be extraordinarily difficult to understand. I submitted the url to a website that tests readability according to three different algorithms, and it literally scored off the scale for two of them in terms of difficulty. The third one yields a number on a scale of 100 -- the higher the number, the easier the page is to understand. Web content is encouraged to fall between 60 and 70; this article scored 31. I found most of the article to be grammatically correct, but so abstract and filled with purposefully obscure words as to make it nonsensical. I do not see this as a sign of superior intellect, but of poor communication skills, exhibited by someone trying very hard to sound intellectual. It didn't help that it was packed with countless typos and spelling errors. Literally, there was a point in this essay in which I asked myself if I might have missed a disclaimer stating that the article was a long and elaborate implementation of the cut-up method on a real essay.

Much was said throughout the essay about race, gender, politics, economics, and other things, but I truly cannot summarize what this article was about. Much of the article doesn't seem to be saying anything about cyborgs, and I can't even follow what the author's definition of a cyborg is. She starts with a thesis that seems simple enough:

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.

But almost immediately she continues to discuss cyborgs in a way that is nearly impossible to understand:

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 a higher unity. In a sense, 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, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.

What on Earth does any of this mean? Even though I've had some basic introduction to Marxism, and I know what alienated labor means, I can't come close to comprehending how any of it fits into what she's saying.

As much as I wish I had something more insightful to say about this essay, the fact remains that I was unable to penetrate its spectacularly unclear writing style. I cannot comment on what it accomplished because I honestly couldn't follow what was being said. I almost recognized some feminism in it, and I certainly saw a lot of references to Marxism and socialism, but I cannot say what any of it amounted to.