You Must

I've been working on formatting this entry for an hour and can't get it right.  I'm leaving it alone as it is.  I've tried everything I can think of.  A mess. 

I love this sort of thing:

"The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code." 

(Donna J. Haraway, "Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature"}

It sounds fascinating.  It reveals the power of language.  It reveals power.  It cuts both ways.  I always love "must" statements.  It is a tremendous word, "must."  I like it best, though, when it is used to impute rather than command, as in "You must be an idiot."  Orders just make me break out.  But perhaps Haraway is using the word as a synonym for "ought" or "should."  I might not have noticed the statement, though, if she said "should" rather than "must."  We need the next sentence, of course, to understand.  Must in order to what?  Oh, that in order to what is where the fistfight breaks out.  But who cares to fight with a cyborg?  Not me.  No thank you.  You must be an idiot to do that.  

Don't get me wrong about this.  I like Haraway's work with the metaphoricity of science.  I believe in it wholeheartedly.  I believe in the metaphoricity of just about everything.  And it weighs on my consciousness all the time.  It is why I am not so very fun to argue with.  I don't argue the point so much as the language used to express it.  Slippery stuff.  Best not to put too much stock in it.  Gets you into too much trouble.  E. E. Cummings knew.