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embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of everyday life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. …It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories.»(181) Thus, the cyborg is far from an abstraction: rather it is a specific and momentary network of bonds and links. Of course, everyday life is already a net of relationships, but the cyborg embodies one more thing—«writing» or what might be thought of as a conceptual framework that makes identities and relations mutable, mixed and transitory. In this way, Haraway’s vision of the cyborg is akin to conceptual art that is also a piece of and a reflection on everyday life. [18]
We know that the cyborg body is not a container, nor does it stop at the skin. It should not then be surprising to know that cyborg egos can introject, overlap and intermingle with other beings and things. My sense of embodiment, for instance, overlaps with my computer as well as parts of my husband, family, cat
and friends. Consider that my computer was and is part of myself; when it doesn’t work, my mind becomes confused as if had suffered an injury. However, my computer is not a second self or container for my ego as much as it is a space where minds meet. When I lost my husband, I lost part of myself and the space-in-between us as well—so I was no longer cyborg, no longer a writer. Two years of mourning and depression passed before I dared to open my deceased husband’s computer. It was promised to a young student and had to be booted up and prepared for her. What I dreaded and now desired was achieved when I pressed the on button. Everything was arranged and labeled like a mirror of my husband’s vocabulary and relation to space; I spend hours looking through the email that had been his life until a few days before he passed. Suddenly his portrait popped up; I was moved, grateful for the last intimate and embodied contact with my husband I shall ever know. Then I selected his files and clicked erase.
Chris Marker’s film, «Level Five,» (1996) concerns a comparable experience of a woman, Laura (played by Catherine Belkhodja), who is a writer and her lover, a