Why is Donna Haraway's writing so syntactically ambiguous in A Cyborg Manifesto? Is this intentional?
First, English is not my native language, but I consider myself a reasonably proficient reader of English.
I'm currently reading A Cyborg Manifesto, and I've found that the biggest difficulty isn't actually the concepts or references, but rather the grammar of some sentences, which often feels genuinely ambiguous.
For example, in the third paragraph:
>Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality.
I genuinely can't tell what "each" refers to here. Does it refer to "organism" or "machine"? To the "coupling between organism and machine"? Or to "cyborgs" or "couplings"?
Another example is from the second paragraph:
>The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century.
Should this be parsed as "a matter of [fiction and lived experience]", where fiction and lived experience are coordinated? Or as "[a matter of fiction] and [lived experience]", where lived experience is parallel to a matter of fiction?
Native speakers, did you have the same experience when reading A Cyborg Manifesto?
If this ambiguity is really present in the text (and not just a result of my English ability), I'm curious whether Haraway intended it, and if so, for what purpose. Why didn't she choose a more precise and syntactically transparent writing style?