Saturday, July 8, 2006

Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"

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

Hawaray's famous essay winds, triple-helix-like, around three politically-inflected considerations: feminism, socialism and materialism. Or, perhaps more precisely, she spins together a critical, (anti)definitional account of cyborg writing: the problem of agency, that is, in late twentieth century's emerging conditions of posthumanism and globalization as such forces "change what counts as women's experience" (149).

The essay is organized into the following sections:

I. An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit (149) (primarily definitional; a lot of giveth and taketh away or additive and subtractive defining of "cyborg")
II. Fractured Identities (155) (shift away from identity in favor of "affinity" and "affinities")
III. The Informatics of Dominion (161) (gets at the new conditions related to communications technologies and biotechnologies--a "writing technology" (164))
IV. The 'Homework Economy' Outside 'The Home' (166) (deals with labor and scene)
V. Women in the Integrated Circuit (170)
VI. Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity (173)

Haraway introduces three boundary breakdowns: 1.) the separation between human and animal; 2.) the distinction between organism and machine; and 3.) the distinction between physical and non-physical things. Furthermore, beyond boundary breakdowns, Haraway accounts for miniaturization and ubiquity (even invisibility) as factors complicating the "new scientific revolution" (153).

"The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence" (151).

"The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other" (164). This begins to blend with ecological psychology and related considerations of systems as arenas where materiality and mythology wash into each other.

"These sociobiological stories depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component or cybernetic [feedback-controlled] communication system" (169).

"'Networking ' is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy--weaving is for oppositional cyborgs" (170). Haraway gives us so much buildup--characterizations, descriptions, explanations of new and emerging dynamics. She might also be said to domesticate the figure of the cyborg; by establishing it complexly, Haraway becomes a kind of thin referent for all subsequent cyborg references.

"Intensifications of hardship experienced world-wide in connection with the social relations of science and technology are severe" (173). How might this be a more vigorous approach to questions of access? Is access synonymous with hardship? And why wouldn't we, then, always keep language fresh for its relevance to the technology access question?

"Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication" (176). The sites for this struggle and activity are elaborated in section IV, and a statement like this one moves the cyborg figure, its logic, nearer to composition and rhetoric. Maybe?

"Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?" (178). Another ecological psychology question.

"Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations" (181).

Related sources:

Winner, Langdon. The Whale and The Reactor: A Search For Limits In An Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986.

Grossman, Rachael. "Women's Place in the Integrated Circuit." Radical America 14.1 (1980): 29-49.

Posted by Derek Mueller at July 8, 2006 8:03 PM to Writing Technologies