Notes on: Haraway. D. (2016) A
Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology, and
Socialist – Feminism in the Late 20th Century.
University of Minnesota
Press.https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fictionnownarrativemediaandtheoryinthe21stcentury/manifestly_haraway_----_a_cyborg_manifesto_science_technology_and_socialist-feminism_in_the_....pdf
Dave Harris
The idea is to develop an 'ironic political myth'
(5), from within the traditions of US politics. At
the centre is the blasphemous image of the cyborg.
Social reality is lived social relations, a
construction. Feminists have focused on women's
experience, consciousness as liberation, but the
cyborg changes what counts as women's experience.
There is no boundary between science-fiction and
social reality.
Science Fiction has lots of cyborgs, so does
modern medicine, there is even cyborg sex to
complicate heterosexism. Replication is not the
same as organic reproduction. Modern production is
a dream, compared to which Taylorism seems
idyllic. Modern war is a 'cyber orgy' (6). It is
an imaginative resource. It makes Foucault's
biopolitics 'a flaccid premonition of cyborg
politics' (7).
In the late 20th century we are all 'chimeras,
theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and
organism', cyborgs. It is a condensed image of
both imagination and reality. The relation between
organism and machine is normally a border war in
Western science, which is also racist, male
dominated, binary and the rest, turning on
territory, but this essay argues the pleasure in
confused boundaries and for 'responsibility in
their construction'. It is an attempt to
contribute to socialist feminism in
post-modernism. Cyborgs are outside of salvation
history, nor is it a form of progress to heal the
cleavages of gender. Non-Oedipal narratives can
still have 'a different logic of repression'
however (8).
Cyborgs belong in a post gender world. It is not
bisexual, pre-Oedipal, and alienated labour or
some kind of lapsed organic wholeness. It has no
actual origin story, but it might be the final
'awful apocalyptic telos' of Western domination, a
final stage of 'abstract individuation' free of
all dependency. There is no original unity,
however from which we split as from a phallic
mother, developed in both psychoanalysis and
Marxism, for H Klein. There is no original unity
or identification with nature with the cyborg.
Instead, it is 'resolutely committed to
partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity' (9).
It is oppositional and utopian. It is not
innocent. It reworks nature and culture. It puts
at issue the relation between wholes and parts,
including polarities and domination. It is not
associated with the dream of community, and some
return to dust. Cyborgs are not reverent. They
need connection but are wary of holism.
Unfortunately, they were produced originally from
'militarism and patriarchal capitalism' (9), but
luckily they have proved unfaithful to their
origins.
So a number of boundaries are broken down, and we
can trace them in this 'political – fictional
(political – scientific)' (10) account. Humans are
no longer separated from animals, except via the
culture of amusement parks (?). All the old
distinctions 'language, tool use, social
behaviour, mental events' no longer work.
Connecting humans and nonhumans can even be
pleasurable. Animal rights recognise the need for
a connection. Biology and evolutionary theory see
modern organisms as objects of knowledge, with the
boundary with humans reduced to 'a faint trace
re-etched in ideological struggle or professional
disputes'. She sees Christian creationism 'as a
form of child abuse'. Earlier scientific
explanations can now be seen as ideology. The
breached boundary requires more appreciation of
the pleasures of 'tight coupling', a new status
for 'bestiality'.
The second boundary to be broken is between
organic and machinic. Pre-cybernetic machines
often looked haunted with a ghost still in the
machine. Materialism was related to idealism in
various ways. Machines were not seen as
autonomous, not 'an author'(11). Now it is much
more ambiguous — machines are more lively while we
are 'frighteningly inert'. It is conventional to
grasp the issues through debates about
technological determination, but this is only one
way to think the new relations. Instead we can see
it in terms of 'the play of writing and reading
the world', althoughTextualisation has been seen
as utopian and ignoring domination. The
disappearance of boundaries has disrupted the idea
of organic wholes, but we can now no longer be
sure what counts as nature. And this means
'transcendent authorisation of interpretation is
lost' and with it conventional ontology. The
alternative is not cynicism, however. We have to
grasp politically what cyborgs will be, and how
nonhumans have politics.
The boundary between the physical and nonphysical
is also imprecise, quantum theory has become the
equivalent of 'Harlequin romances as a marker of
radical change in American white heterosexuality'
(12) even if popular accounts get it wrong. [could
be the prompt for Barad?] Modern
machines are microelectronic, and have
become irreverent upstarts. Writing now goes on on
molecular scales on silicon chips. Miniaturisation
has changed our experience of mechanism, and we
now see it as 'preeminently dangerous' — it has
had consequences for the ways in which machines
used be produced. Modern machines are far more
fluid than human beings, they are 'ether,
quintessence'. Cyborgs are deadly because they are
ubiquitous and invisible, hard to grasp
politically, 'floating signifiers', opposed more
effectively by the women of the Greenham
Camp than the traditional masculine militant
labour. It now turns out that the hardest of
silence is at the confused boundary. Cyborgs bring
with them a dream of post-industrial society,
which might include shifting work to women in
Asia: they also bring the best hope for effective
opposition.
The Cyborg myth is about transgression, fusion and
possibilities. Most American socialists and
feminists still operate with dualisms of the kind
above, from Marcuse onwards. Technics seemed
dominant and have to be resisted. Worldwide
domination is acute, but there might be a new way
to contest its meanings, to seek both power and
pleasure in technology.
One perspective suggests that the cyborg world is
the final grid of control, the first stage of
final masculinist wars. Another, suggests new
relived 'social and bodily realities'(15), where
people gladly adopt 'partial identities and
contradictory standpoints'. Cyborgs are monsters
and illegitimate, ideal 'myths for resistance and
re-coupling'. [She gives some lovely examples
including one of a group called Fission Impossible
offering a kind of loose and broad front affinity
group addressing political consequences of
nonconformity].
Feminism is now difficult to pin down, especially
since feminists are aware that naming often leads
to exclusion. Identities now seem contradictory,
even strategic. Class race and gender are no
longer essential, they no longer bind people
together. Just being female actually is an
achievement produced by contradictory social
realities. It makes talking about us particularly
difficult. Feminism itself is fragmented. Those
like her, white professional middle class female
and radicals, find it particularly challenging.
There have been endless splits and new unities.
Now there are new possibilities 'affinity, not
identity' (17)
Sandoval, for example talks about a coalition
based on '"oppositional consciousness"', a
coalition of those who realise how power works and
have been refused stable membership of the usual
categories. 'Women of colour' is a contested
identity, but also an historical development in
consciousness, a kind of post-modern identity,
made out of otherness.. There is no longer any
need for an essential criterion of identity: the
group has grown through an 'appropriation of
negation', and multiple negation as with Chicana,
excluded from all the usual categories. Now it is
possible to maintain differences while affirming
historical identities, in a 'self-consciously
constructed space', not a natural identification,
conscious affinity, no naturalisation. This is one
possible response to colonialist discourse, which
dissolves the old boundaries between the West and
its assumptions of supremacy compared to an
Orientalism. 'Women of colour' can bridge this old
division.
King talks about the mechanics of identification
'built into reading "the poem"' (19) in cultural
feminism, as a response to attempts to 'taxonomise
the women's movement' and see it as some whole
that transcends particular tendencies. It has also
produced a picture of a constant ideological
struggle among different types of feminism like
radical, liberal and socialist. These taxonomies
in effect 'police deviation' from official women's
experience. [I think the argument is] that women's
culture instead is produced by 'mechanisms of
affinity'(20) which include rituals in the arts
and academic practice [including poetry] — so we
want 'a poetic/political unity' without rigid
identities and taxonomies. This will reject all
organic or natural standpoints, including
patriarchal ones. Socialist or Marxist feminists
have also clung on too long to an epistemological
strategy at the expense of possible unities —
perhaps all epistemologies 'fail us in the task to
build elective affinities'.
Here, the 'acid tools of post-modernist theory'
and ontological discourse about revolutionary
subjects have helped, somewhat ironically. We are
now aware that we have 'a historically constituted
body' (20 – 21). We are no longer innocent, but
not guilty either. We need a new politics
embracing the partial and the contradictory —
which also needs to be 'ironically, socialist –
feminist'.
Political unity is more important than ever. A new
kind of unity is now possible because none of the
categories can dominate the shape of reality.
White women had to realise this and to accept that
they had been denatured. Cyborg feminists do not
want another matrix of unity or construction of a
whole. Nor do we want 'innocence, and the
corollary insistence on victimhood as the
only ground for insight' (21). There are no new
possibilities to weave other identities.
Marxist and radical feminisms have both
naturalised and denatured the category of woman.
Caricaturing a bit, Marxism is rooted in an
analysis of wage labour that reveals class
structure, so that abstraction and illusion rule
with domination. Labour is the privileged category
to overcome illusion, and it is humanising.
Socialist feminism allies itself with these
analytic strategies, while expanding the category
of labour to include what women did. The concept
of labour maintained a unity among women, but this
was also an 'essentialising move' (23). It also
incorporates a 'preeminently Western self'. It did
help denaturalise the issues though.
McKinnon's version of radical feminism is best
understood as a caricature of existing 'totalising
tendencies' grounding identity. Her theory erased
all policed difference. It turned on a theory of
experience and women's identity that became 'a
kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary
standpoints'. Unity was only achieved by referring
to experience of some power for 'radical nonbeing'
(24). This overcame humanist views, 'but at the
cost of radical reductionism', seeing sex or
gender as a generative relationship producing male
appropriation of women. This referred to some
strange nonbeing, where desire and identity is not
the product of labour. This is an arbitrary view
of consciousness and women's experience —
'anything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex
itself as far as "women" can be concerned' (24).
Feminists have to construct this form of
consciousness, come to knowledge of this 'self –
who – is – not'. Sexual objectification arises
from the structure of sex or gender, and this
produces illusion and abstraction. However woman
'in a deep sense does not exist as a subject'
since she owes existence as a woman to 'sexual
appropriation' following the desire of men. This
is a totalising theory which effectively
obliterates anyone else's political speech or
action. McKinnon might be right to say that
Marxism is inadequate to ground women's unity, but
this is 'an even more authoritarian doctrine of
experience'. All difference among women has been
erased, seen as non-essential. We have to see all
activity and labour as sexualised, reproduction as
exclusively rooted in sex.
Both varieties do not see themselves as partial.
This is conventional in the West. Each annexed
other forms of domination by expanding its basic
categories 'through analogy, simple listing, or
addition', while keeping silent about race.
Taxonomies attempted to domesticate polyvocality
[there is a summary diagram of the 'caricature' of
difference between the two feminisms page 26].
Kristeva argued that women only appeared as an
historical group along with others, like youth,
after the Second World War. She reminds us that
race did not always exist, nor class, nor
homosexuals. The old symbolic system has broken
down as networks of connection among people have
multiplied [shades of Durkheim on moral density]
calling this advanced capitalism or even the West
is no longer adequate [in Marxist feminism]. There
is a whole anxiety about the end of human
existence with this disintegration, among women as
well, and this might have prompted essentialist
theory. However, it also shows 'unreflective
participation in the logics, languages, and
practices of white humanism' (27), searching for a
single ground for domination. Now we risk its
opposite 'boundless difference' without any
attempt to make partial or real connections. Some
differences are playful, some are engaged in
domination: '"epistemology" is about knowing the
difference'.
There could be a possible unity requiring
worldwide social relations tied to science and
technology change. She sees it as a movement 'from
an organic industrial society to a polymorphous
information system', and has a chart of
transitions (27 – 29). The new version is 'the
Informatics of domination'. We cannot see the key
categories in either case as naturalistic. We
can't go back ideologically. Everything has
changed with microelectronics. We now need to
think not in terms of essential [biological]
properties but things like 'boundary constraints,
rates of flow, systems logics'(30). Sexual
reproduction is just one kind of strategy among
many. Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no
longer rely on sex or sex role as organic
practices in natural objects [even porn suggests
that].
We need to understand race in terms not of
parameters like blood groups or IQ scores, let
alone categories like primitive. Instead, there is
a new emphasis on '"experimental ethnography"',
where organic factors give way to 'attention to
the play of writing' (31) which includes racist
and colonialist transformations into development
and underdevelopment. There are no natural
architectures any more, even with the distribution
of financial districts or free-trade zones. All
can 'now be formulated as problems in
communications engineering (for the managers) or
theories of the text (for those who would resist)'
— 'cyborg semiologies'.
We will increasingly expect control to focus on
things like boundaries and interfaces, rates of
flow, not on defending the boundaries of natural
objects. Preserving the Western self will now be a
matter of decision procedures and expert systems.
For example reproductive technology for women is
considered in terms of population control and goal
achievement — rates, constraints, degrees of
freedom. Humans see themselves increasingly as
'localised in a system architecture' (32),
operating with probabilities. There are no sacred
objects, no boundaries beyond an interconnecting
code. This is an extension of the universalism of
capitalism analysed by Marx. Similarly, there is a
particular 'privileged pathology': 'stress —
communications breakdown'. The cyborg is not
controlled by Foucault's biopolitics but by
simulated politics [the cyborg simulates politics
is actually how she puts it] which is 'much more
potent'.
Inadequacies in feminist analysis appear, if they
are based on the old dualisms. They have now been
'cannibalised' since all the dichotomies are now
in question. The actual situation of women turns
on their integration or exploitation into a world
system of production reproduction and
communication — 'the Informatics of domination'
(33) there are no protected spheres any more, but
new and emerging consequences for growing
interfaces. The social relations of science and
technology need to be urgently addressed — 'the
cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled,
post-modern collective and personal self. This is
the self feminists must code'
Communications technologies and biotechnologies
are re-crafting our bodies and embodying new
social relations. We can understand them as
'frozen moments ...of fluid social interactions'
but also as instruments to enforce meanings, as
much as do myths — 'indeed, myth and tool mutually
constitute each other'.
There is a search for a common language, a code,
implementing full instrumental control and
reducing all heterogeneity to 'disassembly,
reassembly, investment, and exchange' (34).
Cybernetics and feedback control systems theories
are increasingly applied. The key questions are
defined in terms of direction and flow of
information. Information is a 'quantifiable
element' that permits universal translation and
thus 'unhindered instrumental power (called
effective communication)'. There is a metaphor —
C3 I 'command — control — communication —
intelligence' which also happens to be a military
symbol for operation theory.
Translation of problems into coding is seen in
modern biology, molecular genetics evolutionary
theory and immunobiology. Instead of organisms as
objects of knowledge, we are now researching
'biotic components, i.e. special kinds of
information processing devices'(35). The ecology
is modelled as a system, immunobiology involves
coding and recognition systems that construct
bodily reality. 'Biology here is a kind of
cryptography'. There are still problems as system
stress leads to communication breakdown.
Differences between self and other are also
breaking down, as with animal transplants into
humans, or in apparently socially focused immune
system diseases.
There is also a 'mundane, largely economic
reality' to support the claim of change.
Communication technologies and their effects which
range from welfare state administration to
pornography and religious evangelism.
Microelectronics produce simulacra — 'copies
without originals' (36). They also translate
labour into advanced technologies, redesigning
materials and processes. Above all 'the difference
between machine and organism is thoroughly
blurred', there is multinational production and
reproduction and increasingly common 'symbolic
organisation of the production and reproduction of
culture and imagination'. The boundaries between
base and superstructure, public private, material
and ideal are 'feeble'. Grossman shows how women
are particularly affected. There is no
technological determinism, but instead 'social
relations of science and technology'. Latour is
right to insist that these analyses require
attention, and there are clear implications for
socialist feminism in the 'rearrangements of race,
sex, and class' especially in those 'rooted in
high-tech-facilitated social relations'.
There is also a new worldwide working class, new
sexualities and ethnicities. Capital is globally
mobile. Familiar groupings are weakened. There are
implications for gender and race. White men are
probably now more vulnerable to job loss, while
women are perhaps more employable, especially in
electronics. There is a wider picture, such as
changes in the life of high skilled women in
technology, and how they manage their existing and
more remote kin and community in a 'microcosm of
conflicting differences' for example in Silicon
Valley. Gordon calls this 'the "homework economy"'
(38) meaning a restructuring of work that is
broadly female. Feminisation of work increases
vulnerability, including vulnerability to changes
in time spent in work as well as contract. This
makes women even more out of place. There is
large-scale deskilling, although new areas of
skill are also emerging. Above all 'factory, home,
and market are integrated on a new scale' centred
on women their relations and differences. There
has been an accompanying attack on privileged
white male unionised jobs. All this is made
possible by '(not caused by)' (39) new
technologies. Results include impact on family
wages and the growth of capital intensive jobs;
there is also a collapse in the welfare state with
increased demand on women to sustain daily life.
There is 'feminisation of poverty' because wages
are still not seen as equal. Women heading
households is more common. These developments
offer a better integration with capitalism — for
example the particular pressures on American black
women, or teenage women in the Third World who are
now the main source of cash wages.
Jameson's three stages with three aesthetic
periods for capitalism can also grasp how specific
forms of families are 'dialectically' related to
these developments. There might be several types,
schematically: (1) patriarchal nuclear family,
with a split between public and private and the
'white bourgeois ideology of separate spheres'
(41); (2) the modern family supported partly by
welfare state and family wages, developing
'a-feminist heterosexual ideologies' including
those in Greenwich Village; (3) the modern family
with women headed households, and 'explosion of
feminisms', and a 'paradoxical intensification and
erosion of gender itself'. This is the context in
which worldwide structural unemployment will have
an effects with the development of robotics and
other technologies, and as offices become
automated. American black women already can see
the results on black men '("feminisation")'.
Sexuality family and community life have changed,
and differences between white and black women
emphasised. 'Cross gender and race alliances' will
be necessary 'on issues of basic life support
(with or without jobs)' (42).
There are worldwide issues, including hunger and
food production, much of it still in the hands of
women without high-tech. Gender relations have
been affected, including by 'differential gender
migration patterns'. There is wider privatisation
— militarisation, right wing family ideologies,
increased links between corporate and private
property. Communication technology eradicates
'"public life"' which strengthens 'the high-tech
military establishment'(42) especially against
women. Technology penetrates private life with
video games and TV, and these are oriented to
competition and warfare and provide 'gendered
imaginations'. Technology has also permitted
tourism to emerge as an industry — 'that perfect
practice of mobility and exchange' (43). Some
right-wing accounts of social relations have
emerged, such as 'socio-biological origin stories'
with their inevitable male domination. The body is
seen as a biotic component or communication
system. New medical technologies have changed the
boundaries of women's bodies including practically
producing new feminist politics. Especially
sinister are technologies of visualisation which
'recall the important cultural practice of hunting
with the camera and the deeply predatory nature of
a photographic consciousness' (44). (N 24 refers
to her own work on the link between hunting with
guns and cameras for American males]
There is a danger of technology producing a
divided social structure, core and periphery.
Feminists must urgently address what role women
can have in the 'production of knowledge
imagination and practice', and how this can be
turned into progressive political movements. It's
partly a matter of accountability [more like
solidarity]. Can there be an antimilitary action
group for example, uniting Silicon Valley hippies
and women of different ethnic groups?
The place of women used to be understood best in
terms of the 'distinction of public and private
domains', (45) with an accompanying division of
gender into personal and political. Instead of
dichotomies, a network with a 'profusion of spaces
and identities' and permeable boundaries is now
more suitable, and we can pick up on networking as
a strategy of solidarity.
We can trace out the specifics by looking at
different women places — 'home, market, paid
workplace, state, school, clinic – hospital, and
church' (46). They might be linked to each other
as in 'a holographic photograph'. Each can help us
see the impact of technology on social relations.
None of them are exclusively places for women, but
the differences and contradictions are crucial to
'women's cyborg identities'. Tracing networks
might also lead to new coalitions. There is no
unitary self, and 'the task is to survive in the
diaspora' (46)
[And then more detailed analysis of women's
relations in these various places — in homes we
find among others women- headed households, old
women alone, electronic cottage industries, and
domestic violence. In markets we find increasing
consumption powerful women, affluent markets,
commodification of experience, and the
sexualisation of consumption. In paid work places
we find sexual and racial divisions of labour
although there are also growing 'privileged
occupational categories', technological impact on
clerical service work, new working arrangements to
integrate with the home, still two-tiered labour
structures, increasing marginalisation. The state
offers continuing erosion of the welfare state,
increased surveillance and control,
militarisation, reduction of civil service jobs,
more high-tech forms of personal and public life,
'citizenship by telematics' (48). In school public
education is penetrated by high-tech capital,
still 'differentiated by race, class and gender',
there are managerial reforms, 'growing antiscience
mystery cults', relative scientific illiteracy,
industrialisation of higher education, and a
highly educated elite in a divided society. In
clinics or hospitals we have 'intensified machine
– body relations' (49) intensified reproductive
politics, new diseases, struggles over meanings
and meaning of health, feminisation of health
work, popular health movements in American
politics. In the church we have 'electronic
fundamentalist "supersaver" preachers', the
continuing relevance of spirituality and an
increasing potential to resist the militarised
state.]
Overall, there is an informatics of domination as
an 'intensification of insecurity and cultural
impoverishment' (49), a collapse of substance
networks for the most vulnerable, and thus an
urgent need for socialist feminist politics, for
example developing forms of collective struggle,
new involvement in labour organisation 'involving
community, sexuality and family issues' (50). We
need not be fully depressed by the implications.
Marxists get depressed over what looks like the
spread of false consciousness, but if we look at
women's point of view in particular, there is
often 'virulent forms of oppression, nostalgically
naturalised'. Marxists need a more subtle
understanding of the pleasures experiences and
powers of the new forms. There are also new
emerging bases for unity across race gender and
class. Hardship has intensified worldwide,
although it is still difficult to explain this
experience and build collective models of it.
She sees herself as an Irish Catholic girl with a
PhD in biology, whose entry to university followed
the impact of Sputnik on science education policy.
She is 'as much constructed' by the Cold War as by
the women's movement. This shows the contradictory
effects of politics — those aimed at producing
loyal American technocrats also produced 'large
numbers of dissidents' (51).
Feminist politics is inevitably limited by the
'permanent partiality of feminist points of view',
but it should not aim at some totality, some
perfect way to name experience, which would be
'totalising and imperialist' (52). Nor can
contradictions be resolved by dialectics. Instead
'we can learn from our fusions with animals and
machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of
Western Logos'. There is pleasure in 'potent and
taboo fusions', and this might even produce a
feminist science.
She ends with a story about identity and
boundaries, drawn on accounts of high-tech worlds
written by 'theorists for cyborgs (53) '. They
include Mary Douglas showing the link between body
imagery, worldview and political language. There
is Irigaray and Wittig on the erotic cosmological
and political images of embodiment. American
radical feminists have changed our political
imaginations, by opposing the organic to the
technological, drawing on ecofeminism, and
feminist paganism. It all makes better sense as an
oppositional ideology to capitalism. Other
possibilities of the breakdown of boundaries
between organism and machine include trying
to learn from 'personal and political
"technological" pollution' in feminist science
fiction.
Women of colour might be seen as a cyborg
identity, a fusion of outsider identities
sedimented together in various 'political –
historical layerings' (54), mapped in various
material and cultural grids. There is a novel by
Lorde — Sister Outsider — who is an
'offshore woman', treated as an enemy by American
workers, and when brought nshore she shows a
potential rapidly exploited by the need for a
manipulable workforce, especially in the
science-based industries. So young Korean women
are both in the sex industry and in electronics
assembly, and are very often highly literate, in
contrast to the usual 'Orientalist stereotypes'.
Literacy is actually a 'special mark of women of
colour', the education often achieved at some
cost. Writing is also crucial. The usual myth
distinguishes oral and written cultures in terms
of primitive and civilised, until recently
challenged [by Derrida --yes and Levi-Strauss and
others?]. Writing by women of colour is now part
of contemporary political struggle, helping to
develop the notion of power that is 'neither
phallic nor innocent'(55). Cyborg writing must not
revert to a story of the Fall. It should focus on
the power to survive, using tools that mark them
as other in reverse.
These tools are stories, different versions,
sometimes origin stories. They can 'subvert the
central myths of origin of Western culture' which
have dominated all of us, especially 'a longing
for fulfilment in Apocalypse'. These
phallocentrism stories are built into technology,
including microelectronics that have helped to
textualise our bodies. The point is to recode
'communication and intelligence to subvert command
and control'. (56). As examples of contemporary
writing by women of colour, there is work on
Chicana identity [in Moraga] where the poetry is
'the same kind of violation as Malinche's [the
heroine] mastery of the Conqueror's language',
illegitimate but allowing survival,
'self-consciously spliced'with other remnants, a
'chimeric monster' not claiming an origin. Sister
Outsider lives on the boundaries. She affirms her
own identity rather than taking on the categories
of the coloniser. She was some early earth mother.
[Looks like an early example guiding Barad on
Anzaldua — rather better -- same conference?]
Cyborgs struggle for language, 'against perfect
communication, against the one code', the 'central
dogma of phallogocentrism' (57). They value noise
and pollution, and 'illegitimate fusions of animal
and machine', problematising conventional sexual
divisions, and the dominant notion of desire. This
subverts the whole notion of Western identity and
its origins, nature and culture, body and mind. It
is a necessary response to liberal politics and
epistemology, especially individualistic versions.
There is no intention to assume arrival privileged
position or some original innocents. This sort of
work can revitalise feminism and Marxism still
based on Western imperatives, trying to construct
a revolutionary subject from analysis of the
conventional hierarchy and from moral superiority,
even 'greater closeness to nature'. There is no
original communism or common language, no 'finally
privileged reading or salvation history'. Politics
does not have to be rooted in these identities all
parties, or some notion of purity. Instead, 'the
"bastard" race' values the margins and earth
mothers, literate, teaching survival.
This is not just literary deconstruction. It aims
to undermine every notion of original innocents,
return to wholeness, individuation separation and
the birth of the self, the fall into alienation.
All these are 'reproductive politics' (59)
assuming some perfect rebirth. They all assume
women are somehow weaker, less of a self, less
autonomous. A better route passes through [actual]
women and illegitimate cyborgs who refuse
ideological victimisation and opt for a real-life.
They are not threatened with disappearance in
industrialisation, not of primitive or organic
group. Instead they are 'actively rewriting the
texts of their bodies and societies' [the
references to some women in electronics industries
[a note refers to a conference for women of
colour at Michigan October 85]. They break
dualisms, especially those involved in domination
of others [the usual list], where the self is
simply the one is not dominated, but who controls:
however, even this self knows about the dependence
on others, the illusion of autonomy. To openly
celebrate otherness is 'to be multiple' (60).
High-tech culture challenges dualisms as well, for
example the one between humans and machines, so
that it is no longer clear what is mind and what
is body. Both formal academic disciplines and
daily practice recognise this blurring: biological
organisms have now become communication devices,
while films like Blade Runner offer a
fictional version. We feel more connected to our
tools as a result as in 'the trance state
experienced by many computer users'. Paraplegics
and others can also experience 'complex
hybridisation with other communications devices'
(61), as in a McCaffrey novel. Machines can be
animated and organisms mechanised, and the
distinction between them is now redundant. We can
imagine machines as 'prosthetic devices, intimate
components, friendly selves', in a way which gives
us a sense of 'impermeable wholeness' just as in
'organic holism'.
Katie King has written things like The Female
Man, which do not rely on the pleasures of
identification, or some search for innocent
wholeness, heroic quests and the like. It is about
four versions of one genotype, which are not
united in a whole, but which resolve various
dilemmas of moral action or 'the growing scandal
of gender'. She is as challenging as any modernist
writer. Samuel Delany also mocks stories of
origin. James Tiptree was seen originally as a
classically male author until she was revealed as
not: she writes apparently about non-mammalian
technologies in reproduction like 'male brood
pouches'. John Varley creates a cyborg as a
supreme being and she is 'a mad goddess – planet –
trickster – old woman – technological – device'
capable of symbolises. Octavia Butler talks about
African sorceresses in time warps — one leads to a
modern American black woman going back into
slavery. Another one involves how humanity might
be transferred through genetic exchange with
extraterrestrials lovers [Dawn, 1987].
McIntyre writes a novel where no one is simply
human, there are genetically altered people who
can communicate with animals and who get bionic
implants to achieve new jobs: their senses can
change as well as a result. Her novel draws on
feminist theory and colonial discourse.
Haraway has also offered readings of this
particular piece Superluminal. Colonialism
has been identified in science fiction previously,
and McIntyre was actually a writer for Star
Trek!.
The ancient Greeks had centaurs and Amazons who
were disruptive and polluting. Early modern France
had unseparated twins and hermaphrodites who were
able to refer both to natural and supernatural
discourses. In evolutionary and behavioural
science, monkeys and apes occupy 'multiple
boundaries'(65) .
Cyborgs should not simply be identified as
enemies, because our own bodies resemble them as
'maps of power and identity'. Cyborgs remind us
that they are not innocent do not seek unitary
identity, do not occupy 'antagonistic dualisms
without ends' and take 'irony for granted'. They
take pleasure in skill including 'machine skill'.
They are not just animated by us, 'the machine is
us'. We are responsible for boundaries, however,
but there used to be a fixed one between females
and males: being out of place in those terms
involves intense pleasure, and has even helped
seeing relations with machines as organic,
'appropriate to females'. There is an overall
picture of 'partial, fluid sometimes aspect of sex
and sexual embodiment' (66).
We can even approach the feminist issue of what
counts as every day experience. Some feminists say
that women are much more integrated with daily
life which gives them 'a privileged
epistemological position potentially'. This does
revalue female activity. However there is also
female ignorance, failures of knowledge and skill.
Men can also access daily competence in
construction work or play. There might be other
embodiments, including a cyborg agenda. They might
be actually necessary to the other divisions:
'race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory
of wholes and parts' rather than a total theory.
They tell us about experience of boundaries,
construction and deconstruction, they offer a
potential 'myth system waiting to become a
political language', maybe even challenging the
Informatics of domination.
Holistic politics based on organisms still depend
on metaphors of rebirth, which necessarily
involves reproductive sex. Cyborgs offer
regeneration instead. Some animals regenerate
limbs, sometimes in a monstrous form. All of us
require 'regeneration not rebirth'(67), and we
should all 'dream of the hope for a monstrous
world without gender'. Cyborg imagery helps here.
First it denies the need for totalising theories
which necessarily miss 'most of reality'. Second
it takes responsibility for the social relations
of science and technology, refusing any easy
demonisation, and offering an engagement to
reconstruct daily life. Of course science and
technology offer human satisfaction as well as
domination, and cyborg imagery can help break out
of any dualism. We are not aiming for 'a common
language' but rather a 'powerful infidel
heteroglossia' (68), a 'feminist speaking in
tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the
super savers of the new right'. We must both build
and destroy 'machines, identities, categories,
relationships, space stories' — 'I would rather be
a cyborg than a goddess'
[Extensive notes include a citation of
Fausto-Sterling, n 3 (68). M5 says that Foucault
described 'a form of power at its moment of
implosion' and that biopolitics should now give
way to 'technobabble'. N 10 acknowledges Trin
Minh-ha as a Third World speaker helping to
develop coalition politics. N 17 gives the
original version of cyborg manifesto date of 1985
N 28 has an abbreviated list of feminist
science fiction underlying themes of this essay:
Octavia Butler, Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind,
Kindred, Survivor; Suzy McKee Charnas,
Motherlines; Samuel R.Delany, the Nevèrÿon series;
Anne McCaffery, The Ship Who Sang, Dinosaur
Planet; Vonda McIntyre, Superluminal, Dreamsnake;
Joanna Russ, Adventures of Alix, The Female Man;
James Tiptree Jr., Star Songs of an Old
Primate, Up the Walls of the World; John Varley,
Titan, Wizard, Demon.
N 31 acknowledges Derrida but also Lévi-Strauss
and others.
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