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

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Donna Haraway "A Cyborg Manifesto Science,
Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century
From Simians, Cyborgs and Women The Reinvention
of Nature (New York Routledge, 1991),
pp.149-181.

• E-Text http//www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/C
  yborgManifesto.html
• Secondary http//www.popcultures.com/theorists/ha
  raway.html
• Major Reference Cyborgs, Trickster, and Hermes
  
• http//www.users.voicenet.com/grassie/Fldr.Articl
  es/Cyborgs.html

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Outline

• Main Argument and General Questions
• 1. Cyborg and Three sacred boundaries challenged
  AN IRONIC DREAM
• 2. The Cyborg myth FRACTURED IDENTITIES
• Marxist dialectical materialism and feminist
  object -relation theory critiqued
• 3. Informatics of Domination
• 4. THE 'HOMEWORK ECONOMY' OUTSIDE 'THE HOME'
• 5. WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT
• 6. CYBORGS A MYTH OF POLITICAL IDENTITY
• Critique and Responses

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Main Argument and General Questions

• Cyborg A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a
  hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of
  social reality as well as a creature of fiction.
  
• Cyborg as a metaphor for feminist groups defined
  by affinity but not identification.
• Any examples? And possible problems? How is her
  stance different from or similar to that of
  Judith Butler?

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Cyborg

• (149/2269)
• This chapter is an effort to build an ironic
  political myth faithful to feminism, socialism,
  and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as
  blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship
  and identification.
• argument for pleasure in the confusion of
  boundaries and for responsibility in their
  construction. (150/2270)

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Cyborg (1) definition

• (151/2270) we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our
  ontology it gives us our politics. The cyborg is
  a condensed image of both imagination and
  material reality, the two joined centres
  structuring any possibility of historical
  transformation.
• The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world
  it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal
  symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other
  seductions to organic wholeness through a final
  appropriation of all the powers of the parts into
  a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no
  origin story . . .
• The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality,
  irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is
  oppositional, utopian, and completely without
  innocence.

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Cyborg (1) definition

• (151/2271)
• -- against origins e.g. the oedipal project, the
  Garden of Eden
• -- the illegitimate offspring of militarism and
  patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state
  socialism.

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Cyborg (2) examples

• Contemporary science fiction
• Modern medicine --Cyborg 'sex,' Cyborg
  replication,
• modern war

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Cyborg (3) ambiguous politics

• (154/2275) From one perspective, a cyborg world
  is about the final imposition of a grid of
  control on the planet, . . . From another
  perspective, a cyborg world might be 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.

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Feminist Cyborg Myth --conclusion

• 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 is an imagination of a feminist
  speaking in tongues to strike fear into the
  circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It
  means both building and destroying machines,
  identities, categories, relationships, space
  stories. Though both are bound in the spiral
  dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
  (Haraway 1991b, 181/2299).

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1. Three Boundaries Challenged

• 1) between human and animal
• Biology and evolutionary theory (e.g. the primate)

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1. Three Boundaries Challenged

• 2) between animal-human (organism) and machine
  --(152/2272-73)
• Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we
  ourselves frighteningly inert.
• -- the reconceptions of machine and organism as
  coded texts through which we engage in the play
  of writing and reading the world.
• Examples?

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1. Three Boundaries Challenged

• 3) physical and non-physical
• -- "pop physics books on the consequences of
  quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle
• -- silicon chip writing
• -- miniaturization ? clean and light or
  mobility and fluidity
• and spectacular-ization, too.

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II. FRACTURED IDENTITIES

• Group based on affinity but not unity ?
• Challenge the category of female p. 2275 -76
• Critiques the attempts at taxonomy p. 2277
• Critique of Marxist Feminism p. 2278
• ? The unity of women here rests on an
  epistemology based on the ontological structure
  of 'labour'.
• Critique of radical feminism 2279- the
  totalization built into this tale of radical
  feminism achieves its end - the unity of women -
  by enforcing the experience of and testimony to
  radical non-being.
• Taxonomy caricaturized 2281 ?

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The Limits of Identification

• The theoretical struggle against
  unity-through-domination or unity
  -through-incorporation ironically not only
  undermines the justification for patriarchy,
  colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism,
  scientism, and other unlamented -isms, but all
  claims for an organic or natural standpoint."
• "What kind of politics could embrace partial,
  contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions
  of personal and collective selves and still be
  faithful, effective and, ironically,
  socialist-feminist?" (157/2277)

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Informatics of Domination fundamental changes
in the structure of the world

• Critique and analysis of a new sets of dualism
  which marks transitions from the comfortable old
  hierarchical dominations to the scary new
  networks I have called the informatics of
  domination (161/2281-82)
• Biology and communication science In relation
  to objects like biotic components, one must not
  think in terms of essential properties, but in
  terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of
  flows, systems logics, costs of lowering
  constraints. (biological organism ? biotic
  components p. 2282 85)

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Communications technologies and biotechnologies

• Blurring of the boundaries p. 2284 between
  mind, body, etc. ? The cyborg is a kind of
  disassembled and reassembled, postmodern
  collective and personal self. This is the self
  feminists must code (163/2284).
• recrafting our bodies the translation of the
  world into a problem of coding

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Communications technologies and biotechnologies
e.g.

• e.g. 1) telephone technology, computer design,
  weapons deployment, or data base construction and
  maintenance
• 2) biotechnologies molecular genetics, ecology,
  sociobiological evolutionary theory, and
  immunobiology )
• Everyday life -- the translations of labour into
  robotics and word processing, sex into genetic
  engineering and reproductive technologies, and
  mind into artificial intelligence and decision
  procedures

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THE 'HOMEWORK ECONOMY'

• Definition a restructuring of work that broadly
  has the characteristics formerly ascribed to
  female jobs, jobs literally done only by women.
  Work is being redefined as both literally female
  and feminized, whether performed by men or women.
  To be feminized means to be made extremely
  vulnerable (2287)
• (many women are involved and affected.) ? p.
  167/2287 the loss of the family (male) wage (if
  they ever had access to this white privilege) and
  in the character of their own jobs, which are
  becoming capital-intensive for example, office
  work and nursing.

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THE 'HOMEWORK ECONOMY (2)

• 3 stages of capitalism //3 forms of families
• the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by the
  dichotomy between public and private// the white
  bourgeois ideology of separate spheres//
  Anglo-American bourgeois feminism
• the modern family mediated (or enforced) by the
  welfare state and institutions like the family
  wage// a-feminist heterosexual ideologies
• the 'family' of the homework economy //
  women-headed households // its explosion of
  feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and
  erosion of gender itself.

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WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT

• 'Networking' is both a feminist practice and a
  multinational corporate strategy -- weaving is
  for oppositional cyborgs.

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CYBORGS A MYTH OF POLITICAL IDENTITY

• Cyborg Writing
• Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not
  on the basis of original innocence, but on the
  basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that
  marked them as other. (2293)
• Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and
  the struggle against perfect communication,
  against the one code that translates all meaning
  perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.
  That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and
  advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate
  fusions of animal and machine.

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Hardings Critique

• In my view, Haraway's analysis is weakened by its
  still excessive containment within Marxist
  epistemological assumptions. This can be seen in
  her not so hidden assumptions that we can,
  indeed, tell 'one true story' about the political
  economy that in principle develop mental
  psychologies can make no contributions to our
  understandings of the regularities and underlying
  causal tendencies of historical institutions
  that we begin to exist as distinctive social
  persons only when we get our first paycheck or,
  if we are women, when we first begin adult forms
  of trading sexual favors for social benefits
  (Harding 1986, 194).

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Response "Situated Knowledges The Science
Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective"

• "our" problem -- how to have simultaneously an
  account of radical historical contingency for all
  knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical
  practice for recognizing our own "semiotic
  technologies" for making meanings, and a
  no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a
  "real" world, one that can be partially shared
  and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite
  freedom, ad equate material abundance, modest
  meaning in suffering, and limited happiness. . .
• . . . Immortality and omnipotence are not our
  goals. But we could use some enforceable,
  reliable accounts of things not reducible to
  power moves and agnostic, high status games of
  rhetoric or to scientistic, positivist,
  arrogance. (Haraway 1991b, 187 - 188)

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Response "Situated Knowledges The Science
Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective"

• Accounts of a 'real' world do not, then, depend
  on a logic of 'discovery,' but on a power-charged
  social relation of 'conversation.' The world
  neither speaks itself nor disappears in favor of
  a master decoder. The codes of the world are not
  still waiting only to be read. The world is not
  raw material for humanisation. . . The world
  encountered in knowledge projects is an active
  entity (Haraway 1991b, 198).