Having now read, and started to digest, Haraway’s paper entitled the Cyborg Manifesto, I thought I’d try and capture some initial thoughts and impressions:
My interests in this paper stem, in part, from my interest in the role and imagining of civil dissent within digital culture. Adopting a deliberately ironic approach, characteristic of post-modern writing, Haraway seeks to outline her ‘blasphemous’ image of the cyborg. Haraway’s imagining of the cyborg (as a ‘myth system’ as opposed to an empirical phenomena) is in essence, an attempt to offer construct (or ‘weave’) a socialist-feminist narrative of science and technology at the latter years of the twentieth century. There are two primary motivations for this endeavour:
First, rapid changes in science and technology are reconstituting the social and economic life. Second, feminist (e.g. Marxist) theorising has historically re-enforced humanist, modernist, late-captialist, patriarchal binary distinctions, for example, by emphasising that women occupy a unique, privileged position of (essential) oppressive experience.
In this content, Haraway considers her imagining of the cyborg as blasphemous, because it seeks to re-construct what, to many feminists, are imagined as the very embodiment of patriarchal, capitalist thought (cyborgs). Yet the cyborg, for Haraway, is a conscious blending of science fact and lived experience – a chimera ‘theorised and fabricated’ through a blurring of modernist (patriarchal) binary oppositions created in culture and experience in everyday life (e.g. human-animal, man-woman, organism-machine, physical-non-physical). By existing in space between these binary opposites, the cyborg represents an imaginative challenge to patriarchal, capitalist distinctions of gender, and humanist notions of essential human qualities (such as autonomy and individuality). As Haraway states:
‘freed of the need to ground politics in ‘our’ [i.e. women’s] privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities.’ (2007: 54)
Thus, for Haraway, the imagining of the cyborg is (ironically) positive; as, far from being the embodiment of the patriarchal, capitalist vision of progress characterised by domination of nature … ‘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.’ (Haraway, 2007: 38)
Imagining (and writing) ourselves as cyborgs then, creates an ‘oppositional consciousness’ for socialist feminists that can be directed towards two crucial developments in the world’s globalised economy, which are facilitated (though not determined) through advancement in information and communication technology. These Haraway describes as the ‘informatics of domination’ and the ‘homework economy’.
Informatics of domination – Haraway uses this term to refer to a universalising tendency to translate women’s experiences, specifically through the translation of ‘the world into a problem in coding’ (2007: 45). In this context, the image of the cyborg (deliberately ambivalent, deliberately non-gendered, deliberately fusing animal-human, and organic-machine) serves as an embodied site of opposition to such totalising tendencies. The cyborg then is a political identity which socialist-feminists are urged to embrace.
The homework economy – developments in the globalisation of labour are increasingly leading to techno-cottage industries, to a decline in white, male unionized labour and a growth in vulnerable, uncertain, un-unionised, feminised, labour. In this context, the cyborg helps us to make sense of women’s (and men’s) experiences of this new techno-economic landscape. As with the informatics of domination, the identity of the cyborg provides a new site within which people can give voice to their lived experiences and organise their dissent.
So – what is the role and the weaponry of the feminist cyborg? According to Haraway, it is to re-write (literally) our experiences of digital technology in ways that serve to ‘subvert command and control’ (2007: 54). Stories, for Haraway, are the primary arsenal of the feminist cyborg – as these help to foster (or weave) a new imagining of feminist experience in ways that perform dissent from the narrative of patriarchal domination. To do so, according to Haraway, is to create ‘noise‘ and ‘pollution‘ within the (patriarchal) meta-narrative of the digital.
Thoughts: What I find very appealing about this argument (or call to arms) is the use of digital landscapes to de-essentialise feminism – effectively parting from claims to privileged insights into oppression due to an essential (natural) female sex. This playful embracing of ambivalence and contradiction, and the use of imagery and metaphor from within digital culture, creates new opportunities for unity (as opposed to division) and to multiple and disparate (even contradictory) imaginings to co-exist ; as opposed to expecting all members of the cause to subscribe to a unified totalising theory. I like Haraway’s imagining of the cyborg!
I see parallels to the operation and nature of the radical hactivist group Anonymous, though I have yet to shape my thoughts on the nature of this symmetry.
References
- Haraway, D. (2007) A cyborg manifesto. In: Bell, D., Kennedy, B. (Eds) The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge. Pages: 34-65.
Hi Nick!
I really got excited about Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto in IDEL, and I think this is a great recap. I also like the way the Manifesto explores ways of being feminist that can be intersectional with other kinds of disadvantage (like race or class).
In a later book, Modest_witnesss@second_millenium , Haraway uses this concept to reflect on the many people who make technological advances happen (all the lab assistants, cleaners, admin staff, grants officers, security, post-docs etc) who tend to get written out of the story of ‘great discoveries’–it’s a lot of white men getting Nobel Prizes, on the labour of a lot of invisible people.
This can be really useful to help us, say, watch the films in the first festival. How come it’s a white guy who gets to be the hero of the story (with a stereotypical white-haired man in a lab coat as the lead scientist), and not the Hispanic hacker or the woman who found a way to contact her boyfriend and rescue him? How come it was the white humanoid robot who got to drive the Cadillac down the Pacific Highway, while the brown-monster robot drove the mouse-engine?
I would LOVE to read someone assessing the character of Rachael (the replicant in Blade Runner not shown in the clip in the festival) as a cyborg through Haraway’s essay.
That was four unconnected responses, but her essay is so useful because it generates so many questions of our own!
Nick, I also found this a really well-done summary of the manifesto, and Katherine’s examples from the film festival give it extra force. One of the readings we have looked at in previous years, though not this one so far, is Katherine Hayles’ response to Haraway in which, while acknowledging the force of Haraway’s argument, she suggests that the cyborg’s focus on bodily augmentation and modification doesn’t go quite far enough for the more subtle algorithmic workings of contemporary digital culture, 20 years on. The paper is well worth a read – you can find it here:
http://www.sagepub.com/rose/Docs/Hayles.pdf