NOTES on Donna Haraway's, 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science. Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s'

This is an influential essay, and has appeared in many collections but probably most notably in her own collection: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, in 1990 (for a critique, see the Judith Squires essay 'Fabulous Feminist Futures' on the booklist. This title reveals a lot about the connections between technology and nature, and the author at the time of writing was a Professor of Biology - so particularly interested in the 'nature as culture' issue - as well as the stated: feminism, socialism and materialism. The essay is as much about feminist methodology, in processing some of the claims of postmodernism at this time - I think it was actually written mid 1980s). I think you can begin to see some of the useful connections being made between animals, humans and machines and that the stories that surround them are often presented as scientific fact (in one account she talks about the scientific laboratory experiments and field work on chimpanzees reflecting the debates about the family - you could trace the influence of feminism on sexual politics against the way people addressed the study of apes - no surprise of course really - in turn, this is often characterised as the 'science as culture' debate).  

In the manifesto, she states her purpose  '... is an effort to build an ironic political myth... Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honored within socialist feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.' (pp.190-191)
Why is the cyborg a good model? 

'A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction....
Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. 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.' (p.191)

For instance, she sees this working against heterosexist binaries (and this cross-references back to Sadie Plant of course). The work of Orlan comes to mind too, similarly ironic perhaps and certainly focussed on the material body - though she says 'The body is my software...' following Artaud and the obsolete body (see also the work of Stelarc and many others in this genre of body art and post-body art). Haraway's essay is often used to legitimate cyborg fantasies when she is using it as a critical trope. Remember, she is not arguing that the body is obsolete - her subtitle is 'science, technology and Socialist-Feminism in the late twentieth century'. Her language is politicised in this direction:

'Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization at work... Modern war is a cyborg orgy... Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics...' (p.191).  

Biopolitics? Foucault theorised the body and technology as bound together in the construction of power. Foucault maintains that there is no unitary human subject except that which is produced through discursive processes and forms of rationality that produce the subject as the object of knowledge -in the complex relationship of knowledge/power. Throughout the nineteenth century, the body was continually made subject to medical and psychological examinations to render ruling capitalist and imperial ideology as 'true' knowledge.  This is the normalising power of the 'carceral network' that did not exercise power directly on the body but on the body as the object of knowledge. New eugenics is just as obsessed with the cleansing of deviancy and the present assault on the (the poor, sick, foreign) body expressed in the deployment of biotechnologies in the service of the new world order. Critical Art Ensemble, in Flesh machine, describe this accordingly: 'The time is right for the second wave of eugenics because the economic foundation has been laid. Eugenic complements the grand pancapitalist principle of the total rationalisation of culture. [but] In order to truly accomplish the goal of making eugenic activity a part of everyday life, the public must be convinced that rationalised processes of reproduction are superior and more desirable than the non-rational means of reproduction' (Critical Art Ensemble, Flesh machine, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness, Autonomedia 1998, pp.136-7). 
 
Haraway says: 'Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies' (p.205) 
She goes further in thinking we are already cyborgs.
'The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of Western science and politics - the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.' (p.191)

For instance in the context of sexual politics, the myth operates:
'... in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis... The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world; it has no truck with bisexuality...' (p.192) 
It is also a ironic break with Western humanist model of subjectivity (the plot of original unity that Marxism and Psychoanalysis is predicated on). 

In contrast to these methodologies (that clearly Socialist-feminism is predicated on too):
'The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private... Nature and Culture are reworked; the one can no longer be a resource for appropriation and incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster [the first cyborg], the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden, that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and the cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the Oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot return to dust.' (p.192-193)

In this way, she is 'blasphemous' of her former project of socialist feminism and its methods as it is constructed on the foundations of that which it aims to question (this is the filter of postmodernism circa mid. 1980s). But this argument is no postmodern relativism, it is deeply polemical as you'd expect from a manifesto.
'The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.' (p.193)

Whereas Haraway thinks of cyborgs as illegimate offsring, Judith Squires is more sceptical: for instance, in the section 'Cyborg as political paradox, she quotes Istvan Csicery-Ronay: 'Cybernetics is already a paradox: simultaneously a sublime vision of human power over chance and a multinational capitalism's mechanical process of expansion'; and to Shulamith Firestone: 'cybernetics like birth control, can be a double-edged sword. Like artificial reproduction, to envisage it in the hands of the present powers is to envisage a nightmare.' (in, Bell & Kennedy, eds, 2000:369).

But Haraway's project is to critique socialist-feminism in recognition that things have shifted and machines are self-regulating.
'But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author of himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was to be paranoid. Now we are not so sure... [now] Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.' (p.194) She continues: 'Microelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra, that is, of copies without originals. Microelectronics mediates the translations of labor into robotics and word-processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures... Communications sciences and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are are very intimate terms. The 'multinational' material organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated.' (p.207)

She is keen to emphasise the 'leaky distinctions' between animal-human and machines and their associated ideological struggles - based on dualism and the revolutionary subject. In this way, she imagines a cyborg world 'about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision [what she calls the 'god-trick of infinite vision'] produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.' (p.196)

This is her version of 'affinity politics' in recognition of fractured identities - affinity not identity, to counter endlessly splitting and searching for a new essential unity (this was the predominant way of socialist-feminists reconciling postmodernism at this time in the 1980s/early 1990s). Rather,  
'I prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and the body politic. 'Networking' is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy - weaving is for oppositional cyborgs.' (p.212)
Sadie Plant follows this trajectory as do many other commentators in thinking that there is something particularly non-masculine about the web (see Zeros + Ones). 

In her questioning of the logics and practices of masculinist domination as expressed in dualisms (self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made. active/passive, total/partial, God/man), she maintains:
'High tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.' (p.219)
There are many examples in science fiction and mythology - from Rachel in Bladerunner to Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale where women are simply cast as reproduction machines - and this essay itself is, after all, fabricated myth too. Throughout there is this artful tension between an authoritative manifesto and a tentative myth. She concludes:
'Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia... It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, spaces, stories. Although both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.' (Haraway, p.225)


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Haraway's cyborg holds some similarity to Negri's concept of the 'socialized worker' as: 'a figure operating at variegated sites throughout the circuits of capital, immersed in a technoscientific environment where computers and communications have become so commonplace as to constitute a second nature' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 178). In fact, it is explicitly recognised that subjectivity should be understood in terms of the cyborg. He crucial difference is between strategies of irony in Haraway or antagonism in Negri.