Donna Haraway Read My Mind, Or, Fractal Identities as Thinking Technologies
In an interview entitled "Cyborgs, Coyotes, and Dogs: A Kinship of Feminist Configurations and There Are Always More Things Going on Than You Thought: Methodologies as Thinking Technologies" in the Haraway Reader (2004), Donna Haraway expounds on the purpose and utility of categories - including thinking technologies - and how employing them is not to "fix" ideas or engage in reductionism:
"First ... categories are not frozen. . . . [T]here are always more things going on than you thought . . . 'It matters which categories you use to think other categories with.' You can turn up the volume on some categories, and down on others. There are foregrounding and backgrounding operations. You can make categories interrupt each other. . . . They are not merely ideas, but thinking technologies [emphasis mine] that have materiality and effectivity. These are ways of stabilizing meaning in some forms rather than others . . . " (p. 335)
She continues this thought by stating:
". . . I find it important to make it impossible to use philosophical categories transparently. There are many philosophers who use cognitive technologies to increase the transparency of their craft. But I want to use the technologies to increase the opacity, to thicken, to make it impossible to think of thinking technologies transparently." (Ibid)
Is she not describing exactly what fractal identities are?! This concept is more than a concept; it is a cognitive tool, a thought experiment, a grand metaphor, and evocative object/object-to-think-with, all at once and, sometimes, not at all. In other words, the tool/mechanism/metaphor/technology that is fractal identities exists in a state of paradox or contradiction, that is, it is at the same time attempting to add clarity to the world while obscuring part of it. It is exactly what Martin Heidegger speaks of in Question Concerning Technology with regard to technology. It is an object that conceals as it is revealing or un-concealing. You cannot have one without the other. As soon as you bring one thing into focus, that means by default something else is pushed out of range, out of focus, out of sight. Haraway echoes this in her comment about "foregrounding" and "backgrounding."
More importantly, like Turkle, I regard fractal identities as an object-to-think-with that plays into the concept of bricolage, that is, it adopts an "aesthetic [that] has to do with manipulation and recombination" [emphasis mine] (Life on the Screen, p. 47). Fractal identities mix and match concepts both playful and serious, concrete and abstract. It is designed to appropriate cultural elements such as videogame avatars and social networking profiles as it attempts to reconfigure (and more fully understand) the idea of identity. Again, I defer to the expert who summarizes it thusly:
"Cultural appropriation through the manipulation of specific objects is common in the history of ideas. Appropriable theories, ideas that capture the imagination of the culture at large, tend to be those with which people can become actively involved [emphasis mine]. They tend to be theories that can be played with." (Ibid, p. 48)
Ultimately, fractal identities is about playing with the idea of identity and contemplating its many permutations - all the ways it can be tranformed and be transforming - in environments main online but offline as well.
