gcraighobbs /201 /1031

10/31 - Cyborgs

Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

Donna Haraway's radical treatise A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s is/was designed to challenge socialist feminism(s) and radical eco-feminism(s) at a time when, historically, these feminism(s) reigned supreme. Haraway used the cyborg as her embodiment of a feminism freed from epistemology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and various other dogmas against which she rails in the cyborg body.

Haraway's project is mind-bendingly complex at times, although subsequent readings of this text reveal more and more her open-ended, technocentric agenda. Haraway's playful abuse of language seeks to affect the reader, enacting upon the text aspects of a radical critique of knowledge acquisition, reification, and transmission. It is disturbing, enlightening, frustrating, fun, and deadly serious all at the same time.

Haraway states, "This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction." And in this way reveals her project as post-modern, non-naturalist, genderless, in a world without beginning or end. She takes psychoanalysis and Marxism on for a good lashing and then releases them into the intellectual ether to free-float as possibilities.

Impressively, she takes on the most powerful figures of her time - notably Catherine Mac_Kinnon - in a relentless critique. She writes, "Catherine Mac_Kinnon's version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action." Haraway calls for affinity, not identity, and does so in her ideal form - the cyborg. For Haraway, the cyborg myth she constructs is about "transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities."

Haraway's critique does not end with feminism, patriarchy, or epistemologies. She is relentless in her efforts to unearth oppression within the systemic application of textual readings. She takes on one of the classics, "Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism." At the time, I can only imaging the degree of resistance and rejection she must have experienced in the larger world of feminism and identity politics.

The essay is full of quotable material. The prose is complex, yet playful; dense, though navigable; and at times exhilarating and dangerous. And it is the image of the machine/ animal hybrid - the cyborg - which allows Haraway incredible freedom of discourse. Granted, she creates this freedom by definition, through risk, and as a result of intellectual agency.

So what is Haraway's goal? Beyond shredding the playing field, what does she seek so intently to reveal. Perhaps this quote is one of those reveals, "It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man - and so the essence of woman - breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex."

So, Haraway is a utopian technocrat! But of course, it is not that simple.

Haraway proceeds to define the "Informatics of Domination", a charting of old hierarchical dominations to the "scary new networks". She articulates the transformation from an industrial to an information society, addressing "systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations." And she prophetically (for the 80's) suggests that communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. In as much as microelectronics drive and control these systems, the computer and the microchip create the possibilities for inscription, encryption, rendering, reading/ analysis, and manipulation.

Haraway, in defining the role of women within the integrated circuit, expands dominate notions (circa 1985) of feminism, and techno-praxis. And her critique is remarkably contemporary 20 years later. Haraway does possess a degree of hope in her weaving of the cyborg myth. Toward her conclusion she suggests, "There are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new kinds of unity across race, gender, and class, as these elementary units of socialist-feminist analysis themselves suffer protean transformations." She calls for a focus on hope, rather than defeat. And states quite clearly that a totality is not necessary to work well.

For Haraway, the complexity of the intellectual enterprise is tempered by the autonomy and agency required of women living outside of academic privilege. It is why she has created an inter-being, the cyborg, as a site of being for the fractured boundaries of feminism and identity politics in a technological and scientific world. She calls for a struggle of language, imperfect communication against one code that translates all meaning perfectly. She insists on "noise" and advocates, "pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine." And completely rejects a kinds of organic holism rooted in mother earth origin myths.

I have read Haraway. I have faced the Cyborg, once again. Each time I feel imbued with a sense of relief that the Cyborg has spared me. I fall into the place between, I am the genetic code re-engineered. I am the offspring of an industrial civilization gone wrong, and the by-product of an information society seeking to map and encode its way out.

As the unknowing victim of biological warfare gone wrong (genetic mutation as illness), my journey as an immunological guinea pig begins with Haraway's infamous essay. I am just too young at the time to comprehend it. This seed, this Cyborg, awaited my appearance to activate. Once activated it is a being through which I find agency, empowerment, and ingenuity within the oppositional matrix. But my Cyborg walks over this matrix, and its view is one of the triangulation of meaning, not its false conclusion or infinite suspension, but of interlinking, interweaving, and infinite openings.

Haraway then is a type of hero to me. A hero who redraws the terms of engagement, shreds the dogmatic mandate, and opens wide the potentialities and possibilities through affinity, hope and compassion based on common threads giving due to respect to irreconcilable differences and the infinite complexities therein.

However, I do not pretend she is a hero to all. We should choose our heros carefully. And when they no longer serve their purpose - be heroic enough ourselves to allow their influence to dissolve.