35410912 manifestly haraway a cyborg manifesto science technology and socialist feminism in the ...

A Cyborg Manifesto S C I E N C E, T E C H N O L O G Y, A N D S O C I A L I S T - F E M I N I S M I N T H E L A T E T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. A N I R O N I C D R E A M O F A C O M M O N L A N G U A G E F O R W O M E N I N T H E I N T E G R A T E D C I R C U I T This essay 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 identifica- tion. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States poli- tics, including the politics of socialist-feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insist- ing on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incom- patible 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 center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fic- tion. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21.

Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. political construction, a world-changing fiction. The interna- tional women’s movements have constructed “women’s expe- rience,” as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collec- tive object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppres- sion, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experi- ence in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social re- ality is an optical illusion.

Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs—creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds am- biguously 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 were not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg “sex” restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against hetero- sexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic repro- duction. Modem production seems like a dream of cyborg col- onization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic.

And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control -communication-intelligence, an $84 bil - lion item in 1984’s S. defense budget. I am making an argu- ment for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily A Cyborg Manifesto 6 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michel Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid pre- monition of cyborg politics, a very open field.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers struc- turing any possibility of historical transformation. In the tradi- tions of “Western” science and politics—the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradi- tion of the appropriation of nature as resource for the produc- tions 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. This essay is an argument for pleasure in the con- fusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construc- tion. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist cul- ture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempt- ing to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse.

As Zoë Sofoulis argues in her A Cyborg Manifesto 7 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, “Lacklein,” the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our 1 The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropri- ation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.

In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense—a “final” irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the “West’s” escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the “Western,” humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism.

Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psy- choanalysis, in their concepts of labor and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of 2 The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the West- ern sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to sub- version of its teleology as Star Wars. A Cyborg Manifesto 8 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, inti- macy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and com- pletely without innocence. No longer structured by the polar- ity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or 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 Franken- stein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden—that is, through the fabri- cation of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a fin- ished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time with- out the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of re- turning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy.

Cyborgs are not rever- ent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of hol - ism, but needy for connection—they seem to have a natural feel for united-front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the ille - gitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often A Cyborg Manifesto 9 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press.

All rights reserved. exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this essay, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary break- downs that make the following political-fictional (political- scientific) analysis possible. By the late twentieth century in S. scientific culture, the boundary between human and ani- mal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks: lan- guage, tool use, social behavior, mental events—nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal.

And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; in- deed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human unique- ness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evo- lutionary theory over the past two centuries have simultane- ously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes be- tween life and social science.

Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific culture for arguing the meanings of human ani- A Cyborg Manifesto 10 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. mality. There is much room for radical political people to con- test the meanings of the breached 3 The cyborg ap- pears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed.

Far from signaling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange. The second leaky distinction is between animal–human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the specter of the ghost in the ma- chine. This dualism structured the dialogue between material- ism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. 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 au- thor to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist repro- ductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to or- ganisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. Technological determination is only one ideological space opened up by the reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and A Cyborg Manifesto 11 Haraway, Donna J..

Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. reading the 4 “Textualization” of everything in post- structuralist, postmodernist theory has been damned by Marx- ists and socialist-feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived relations of domination that ground the “play” of arbitrary 5 It is certainly true that postmodernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (for example, the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature—a source of in- sight and promise of innocence—is undermined, probably fa- tally.

The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding “Western” epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological determinism destroying “man” by the “machine” or “mean- ingful political action” by the ” Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artifacts have politics (de Waal 1982; Winner 1980), so why shouldn’t we? The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and nonphysical is very imprecise for us.

Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equiva- lent to Harlequin romances6 as a marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially mi- croelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisi- A Cyborg Manifesto 12 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. ble. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality.

The silicon chip is a sur- face for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as preeminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wristbands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile—a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore.

People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence. The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs are precisely why these Sunshine Belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness—or its 7 They are floating signifiers moving in pickup trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch- weavings of the displaced and so unnatural women of the anti- nuclear Greenham Women’s Peace Camp, who read the cyborg webs of power so very well, than by the militant labor of older masculinist politics, whose natural constituency needs defense A Cyborg Manifesto 13 Haraway, Donna J..

Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. jobs. Ultimately the “hardest” science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure spirit, C3I, cryptography, and the preservation of potent se- crets. The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution as- sociated with the night dream of postindustrial society. The diseases evoked by these clean machines are “no more” than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, “no more” than the experience of stress.

The nimble fingers of “Oriental” women, the old fascination of little An- glo-Saxon Victorian girls with doll’s houses, women’s enforced attention to the small take on quite new dimensions in this world. There might be a cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita Jail8 whose constructed unities will guide effective opposi- tional strategies. So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities, which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work.

One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic for- mulations, and physical artifacts associated with “high tech- nology” and scientific culture. From One-Dimensional Man (Mar cuse 1964) to The Death of Nature (Merchant 1980), the A Cyborg Manifesto 14 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance.

Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies. From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final im- position of a grid of control on the planet, about the final ab- straction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bod- ies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia 1984).

From another per- spective, 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 iden- tities 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 produces worse illusions than dou- ble vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are mon- strous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.

I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the A Cyborg Manifesto 15 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. tools of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity group in my town.

(Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for an- other,)9 F R A C T U R E D I D E N T I T I E S It has become difficult to name one’s feminism by a single ad- jective—or even to insist in every circumstance on the noun. Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in “essential” unity.

There is nothing about being “female” that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as “being” female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. 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. And who counts as “us” in my own rhetoric? Which identities are avail- A Cyborg Manifesto 16 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21.

Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. able to ground such a potent political myth called “us,” and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Painful frag - mentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women’s dominations of each other. For me—and for many who share a similar historical location in white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies—the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the

S. left and S. feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another re- sponse through coalition—affinity, not 10 Chela Sandoval; 1984), from a consideration of specific historical moments in the formation of the new political voice called women of color, has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called “oppositional consciousness,” born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class.

Women of color, a name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorpo- rate, as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic breakdown of all the signs of Man in “Western” traditions, con- structs a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness, dif- ference, and specificity. This postmodernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said about other possible postmod- A Cyborg Manifesto 17 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.

ernisms. Sandoval’s oppositional consciousness is about con- tradictory locations and heterochronic calendars, not about relativisms and pluralisms. Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of color. She notes that the defini- tion of the group has been by conscious appropriation of nega- tion. For example, a Chicana or S. black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identi- ties, left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial cate- gories called “women and blacks,” who claimed to make the important revolutions.

The category “woman” negated all non- white women; “black” negated all nonblack people, as well as all black women. But there was also no “she,” no singularity, but a sea of differences among S. women who have affirmed their historical identity as S. women of color. This identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political 11 Unlike the “woman” of some streams of the white women’s movement in the United States, there is no naturalization of the matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely avail- able through the power of oppositional consciousness.

Sandoval’s argument has to be seen as one potent for mu - lation for feminists out of the worldwide development of an - ticolonialist discourse; that is to say, discourse dissolving the A Cyborg Manifesto 18 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. “West” and its highest product—the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman; man, that is, the author of a cosmos called history. As orientalism is deconstructed politically and semi - otically, the identities of the occident destabilize, including those of

12 Sandoval argues that “women of color” have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate the imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects of previous Marx isms and feminisms, which had not faced the conse- quences of the disorderly polyphony emerging from decolo- nization. Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and the political/poetic mechanics of identification built into read- ing “the poem,” that generative core of cultural feminism. King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary femi- nists from different “moments” or “conversations” in feminist practice to taxonomize the women’s movement to make one’s own political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole.

These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so that it ap- pears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types per- sisting over time, especially those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialist-feminism. Literally, all other feminisms are either incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit ontology and 13 Taxonomies of femi- nism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women’s experience. And of course, “women’s culture,” like women of color, is consciously created by mechanisms induc- A Cyborg Manifesto 19 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. ing affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certain forms of academic practice have been preeminent. The politics of race and culture in the S. women’s movements are intimately in- terwoven. The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identi- fication. The theoretical and practical struggle against unity- through-domination or unity-through-incorporation ironi- cally undermines not only the justifications for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scientism, and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint.

I think that radical and socialist/Marxist- feminisms have also undermined their/our own epistemo - logical strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all “epistemologies” as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to build effective affinities. It is important to note that the effort to construct revolu - tionary standpoints, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of identification. The acid tools of postmod- ernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological dis- course about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic al- lies in dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival.

We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a histor- A Cyborg Manifesto 20 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. ically constituted body. But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naïveté of innocence. But what would another political myth for socialist-feminism look like? 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?

I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dom- inations of “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” and ” I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible. None of “us” has any longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape of reality to any of ” Or at least “we” cannot claim inno- cence from practicing such dominations. White women, in- cluding socialist-feminists, discovered (that is, were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the noninnocence of the cate- gory

” That consciousness changes the geography of all previous categories; it denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein. Cyborg feminists have to argue that “we” do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give late-twentieth- century people pause as well. In the fraying of identities and in A Cyborg Manifesto 21 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. the reflexive strategies for constructing them, the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history. Both Marxist/socialist-feminisms and radical feminisms have simultaneously naturalized and denatured the category “woman” and consciousness of the social lives of ” Perhaps a schematic caricature can highlight both kinds of moves. Marxian socialism is rooted in an analysis of wage labor that reveals class structure. The consequence of the wage rela- tionship is systematic alienation, as the worker is dissociated from his (sic) product.

Abstraction and illusion rule in knowl- edge, domination rules in practice. Labor is the preeminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view that is necessary for changing the world. Labor is the humanizing activity that makes man; labor is an ontological category permitting the knowledge of a sub- ject, and so the knowledge of subjugation and alienation. In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism advanced by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. The main achievement of both Marxist feminists and socialist feminists was to expand the category of labor to accommodate what (some) women did, even when the wage relation was subordi- nated to a more comprehensive view of labor under capitalist patriarchy.

In particular, women’s labor in the household and women’s activity as mothers generally (that is, reproduction in A Cyborg Manifesto 22 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. the socialist-feminist sense) entered theory on the authority of analogy to the Marxian concept of labor. The unity of women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological struc- ture of ” Marxist/socialist-feminism does not “natural- ize” unity; it is a possible achievement based on a possible standpoint rooted in social relations.

The essentializing move is in the ontological structure of labor or of its analogue, women’s 14 The inheritance of Marxian humanism, with its pre- eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me. The contribu- tion from these formulations has been the emphasis on the daily responsibility of real women to build unities, rather than to nat- uralize them. Catharine MacKinnon’s (1982, 1987) version of radical fem- inism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding 15 It is factually and politically wrong to assimilate all of the diverse “moments” or “conversations” in recent women’s politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon’s version.

But the teleological logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontology—including their negations—erase or police dif- ference. Only one of the effects of MacKinnon’s theory is the rewriting of the history of the polymorphous field called radical feminism. The major effect is the production of a theory of ex- perience, of women’s identity, that is a kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary standpoints. That is, the totalization built into this tale of radical feminism achieves its end—the unity of A Cyborg Manifesto 23 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. women—by enforcing the experience of and testimony to radi- cal nonbeing. As for the Marxist/socialist-feminist, conscious- ness is an achievement, not a natural fact. And MacKinnon’s theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into humanist revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism. MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a dif- ferent analytical strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure of class but at the structure of sex/gender and its generative relationship, men’s constitution and appropriation of women sexually.

Ironically, MacKinnon’s “ontology” con- structs a nonsubject, a nonbeing. Another’s desire, not the self’s labor, is the origin of ” She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that enforces what can count as “women’s” experience—anything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as “women” can be concerned. Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness—that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not. Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism still has the epistemological status of labor; that is to say, the point from which an analysis able to contribute to changing the world must flow.

But sexual objectification, not alienation, is the conse- quence of the structure of sex/gender. In the realm of knowl- edge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and ab - straction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted by another’s desire is A Cyborg Manifesto 24 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21.

Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the laborer from his product. MacKinnon’s radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme; it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the au- thority of any other women’s political speech and action. It is a totalization producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing—feminists’ consciousness of the nonexis- tence of women, except as products of men’s desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of iden- tity can firmly ground women’s unity.

But in solving the prob- lem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marx- ian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unas- similable, radical difference made visible in anticolonial dis- course and practice, MacKinnon’s intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the “essential” nonexistence of women is not reassuring. In my taxonomy, which like any other taxonomy is a rein- scription of history, radical feminism can accommodate all the activities of women named by socialist-feminists as forms of labor only if the activity can somehow be sexualized.

Repro- duction had different tones of meanings for the two tendencies, one rooted in labor, one in sex, both calling the consequences of domination and ignorance of social and personal reality “false ” Beyond either the difficulties or the contributions in the ar- A Cyborg Manifesto 25 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. gument of any one author, neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view have tended to embrace the status of a partial ex- planation; both were regularly constituted as totalities.

West- ern explanation has demanded as much; how else could the “Western” author incorporate its others? Each tried to annex other forms of domination by expanding its basic categories through analogy, simple listing, or addition. Embarrassed si- lence about race among white radical and socialist-feminists was one major, devastating political consequence. History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to es- tablish genealogies. There was no structural room for race (or for much else) in theory claiming to reveal the construction of the category woman and social group women as a unified or to- talizable whole.

The structure of my caricature looks like this: socialist-feminism—structure of class // wage labor // alienation labor, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race radical feminism—structure of gender // sexual appro- priation // objectification sex, by analogy labor, by extension reproduction, by addition race In another context, the French theorist Julia Kristeva claimed that women appeared as a historical group after the Second A Cyborg Manifesto 26 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press.

All rights reserved. World War, along with groups like 16 Her dates are doubt- ful; but we are now accustomed to remembering that as objects of knowledge and as historical actors “race” did not always ex- ist, “class” has a historical genesis, and “homosexuals” are quite junior. 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 com- plex. “Advanced capitalism” is inadequate to convey the struc- ture of this historical moment.

In the “Western” sense, the end of man is at stake. It is no accident that woman disintegrates into women in our time. Perhaps socialist-feminists were not substantially guilty of producing essentialist theory that sup- pressed women’s particularity and contradictory interests. I think we have been, at least through unreflective participation in the logics, languages, and practices of white humanism and through searching for a single ground of domination to secure our revolutionary voice. Now we have less excuse. But in the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making par- tial, real connection.

Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. “Epistemol- ogy” is about knowing the difference. A Cyborg Manifesto 27 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. T H E I N F O R M A T I C S O F D O M I N A T I O N In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I would like to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture in- debted to socialist and feminist principles of design.

The frame for my sketch is set by the extent and importance of rearrange- ments in worldwide social relations tied to science and technol- ogy. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a move- ment from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, in- formation system—from all work to all play, a deadly game. Si- multaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the following chart of transitions from the com- fortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination: Organics of Domination Informatics of Domination representation > simulation bourgeois novel, realism > science fiction, postmodernism organism > biotic component depth, integrity > surface, boundary heat > noise biology as clinical practice > biology as inscription A Cyborg Manifesto 28 Haraway, Donna J..

Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. physiology > communications engineering small group > subsystem perfection > optimization eugenics > population control decadence, Magic Mountain > obsolescence, Future Shock hygiene > stress management microbiology, tuberculosis > immunology, AIDS organic division of labor > ergonomics, cybernetics of labor functional specialization > modular construction reproduction > replication organic sex role specialization > optimal genetic strategies biological determinism > evolutionary inertia, constraints community ecology > ecosystem racial chain of being > neoimperialism, United Nations humanism scientific management in > global factory/electronic home/factory cottage industry family/market/factory > women in the integrated circuit family wage > comparable worth public/private > cyborg citizenship nature/culture > fields of difference cooperation > communications enhancement A Cyborg Manifesto 29 Haraway, Donna J..

Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Freud > Lacan sex > genetic engineering labor > robotics mind > artificial intelligence World War II > Star Wars white capitalist patriarchy > informatics of domination Transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks of informatics of domination. This list suggests several interesting 17 First, the ob- jects on the right-hand side cannot be coded as “natural,” a re- alization that subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well.

We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It’s not just that “god” is dead; so is the ” Or both are revivi- fied in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechno- logical politics. In relation to objects like biotic components, one must think not in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints. Sexual reproduction is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment. Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no longer reasonably call on notions of sex and sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms and families.

Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically corporate executives reading Playboy and antiporn A Cyborg Manifesto 30 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly un- masking the irrationalism. Likewise for race, ideologies about human diversity have to be formulated in terms of frequencies of parameters, like blood groups or intelligence scores. It is “irrational” to invoke con- cepts like primitive and civilized.

For liberals and radicals, the search for integrated social systems gives way to a new prac- tice called “experimental ethnography” in which an organic ob- ject dissipates in attention to the play of writing. At the level of ideology, we see translations of racism and colonialism into lan- guages of development and underdevelopment, rates and con- straints of modernization. Any objects or persons can be rea- sonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no “natural” architectures constrain system design. The financial districts in all the world’s cities, as well as the export-process- ing and free trade zones, proclaim this elementary fact of “late

” The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communica- tions engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies. One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries—and not on the integrity of natural objects. “In- tegrity” or “sincerity” of the Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems. For example, control strategies applied to women’s capacities to give birth to new human beings A Cyborg Manifesto 31 Haraway, Donna J..

Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. will be developed in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decision- makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a sys- tem architecture whose basic modes of operation are proba- bilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.

Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analyzed so well. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress— communications breakdown (Hogness 1983). The cyborg is not subject to Foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations. This kind of analysis of scientific and cultural objects of knowledge that have appeared historically since the Second World War prepares us to notice some important inadequacies in feminist analysis that has proceeded as if the organic, hierar- chical dualisms ordering discourse in “the West” since Aristotle still ruled.

They have been cannibalized, or as Zoë Sofia (1984) might put it, they have been ” The dicho - tomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. A Cyborg Manifesto 32 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The actual situation of women is their integration/exploitation into a world system of production/reproduction and communi- cation called the informatics of domination.

The home, work- place, market, public arena, the body itself—all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others—consequences that themselves are very different for different people and that make potent oppositional international movements difficult to imag- ine and essential for survival. One important route for recon- structing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and prac- tice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings struc- turing our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.

This is the self feminists must code. Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and en- force new social relations for women worldwide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formal- izations,, as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instru- ments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable be- tween tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical sys- tems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.

A Cyborg Manifesto 33 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biolo- gies are constructed by a common move—the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange. In communications sciences, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by looking at cyber- netic (feedback-controlled) systems theories applied to tele- phone technology, computer design, weapons deployment, or database construction and maintenance.

In each case, solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key operation is determining the rates, directions, and prob- abilities of flow of a quantity called information. The world is subdivided by boundaries differentially permeable to informa- tion. Information is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, basis of unity) that allows universal translation, and so unhin- dered instrumental power (called effective communication). The biggest threat to such power is interruption of communi- cation. Any system breakdown is a function of stress. The fun- damentals of this technology can be condensed into the meta - phor C3I, command-control- communication-intelligence, the military’s symbol for its operations theory.

In modern biologies, the translation of the world into a prob- lem in coding can be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolutionary theory, and immunobiology. The A Cyborg Manifesto 34 Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21. Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.