A Cyborg Manifesto

Citation

Haraway, Donna J. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. 1985. Reprinted in Manifestly Haraway, 3-90. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 9780816650484.

Abstract

“Electrifying, provocative, and controversial when first published thirty years ago, Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ is even more relevant today, when the divisions that she so eloquently challenges—of human and machine but also of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and location—are increasingly complex. The subsequent “Companion Species Manifesto,” which further questions the human–nonhuman disjunction, is no less urgently needed in our time of environmental crisis and profound polarization.

Manifestly Haraway brings together these momentous manifestos to expose the continuity and ramifying force of Haraway’s thought, whose significance emerges with engaging immediacy in a sustained conversation between the author and her long-term friend and colleague Cary Wolfe. Reading cyborgs and companion species through and with each other, Haraway and Wolfe join in a wide-ranging exchange on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human–nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.

The conversation ends by revealing the early stages of Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene Manifesto,’ in tension with the teleologies of the doleful Anthropocene and the exterminationist Capitalocene. Deeply dedicated to a diverse and robust earthly flourishing, Manifestly Haraway promises to reignite needed discussion in and out of the academy about biologies, technologies, histories, and still possible futures.”

Annotations

Cary Wolfe, Introduction (pp. vii-xiii)

“systems theory,” then called “cybernetics,” influence of Gregory Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind (vii).

Wolfe’s own work “rethinking the so-called “question of the animal”; “posthumanism (a term Haraway chafes against)” (viii).

“where else—in an era of academic stardom that was already well under way at the time—do we find a more generous citational practice (something Haraway takes very seriously, as readers of our conversation will discover)?” (ix).

“As she writes in “The Companion Species Manifesto,” “I have come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species” (x).

“there’s a need for flesh and earth here that gives the second manifesto a different feel” (x).

Flesh and earth are “site[s] of a more densely woven complexity—ontologically, ethically, and politically—than the circuit, the chip, or the algorithm” (xi).

The “purebred” is “biopolitical territory” (xi).

“the powerful trope of “the word made flesh” does important work in Haraway’s writing” (xii).

The word made flesh “provides an important counterlogic for [Haraway] to a certain binding, hegemonic matrix of secularism, Protestantism, capitalism, and the state form in the history of the modern United States” (xiii).

“A Cyborg Manifesto”

An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit

“This essay is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” (5).

// Already Haraway is introducing key terms. Irony and myth and dream will be key tactics. The “common language” and “integrated circuit” will be important critical themes. Feminism, socialism, and materialism are her commitments. She will talk a lot about feminism and socialism. She will not talk a lot about materialism. But I think a radical materialism in the spirit of Karen Barad syncs nicely.

The ironic political myth is “faithful as blasphemy is faithful ... Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously” (5).

“Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy” (5).

“Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into large wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together” (5).

“Irony is about humor and serious play” (5).

“At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg” (5).

// It is ironic and blasphemous because this center is centerless. The cyborg is not a whole, not unified, not capable of being a transcendental signified.

“Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction” (5-6).

"”women’s experience”” is both a “fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind” (6).

“The cyborg ... changes what counts as women’s experience” (6).

“This is a struggle over life and death ... the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (6).

“modern war is a cyborg orgy” (6).

“the cyborg [is] a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings” (7).

“we are all chimeras” (7).

“The cyborg is our ontology” (7).

“This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” (7).

// This is marvellous. The power of the boundary (cf. De Certeau). It can be pleasurable to confuse them, but we must also be responsible to construct them.

“The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history” (7).

// This is doubly problematic. First: how do we reconcile this with the messianism of the Frankfurt School and late deconstruction (i.e. Benjamin and Derrida)? Second: how do I reconcile this with my own soteriological convictions?

“The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world” (8).

“it has no truck with ... seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity” (8).

// We see the feminist commitment here. Gender is bad for all of us (cf. Harney and Moten, 2013).

// Similarly, we see the Derridean influence. No originary presence (“organic wholeness”), no transcendental signified. Also a repudiation of Hegel—no dialectical synthesis towards Absolute Idea.

“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[]”” (8).

// We see Haraway’s masterful navigation of boundaries. The cyborg is the telos of the West, but also anti- or un-Western. It emerges from within the West, in opposition to the West. It is tactical (cf. De Certeau).

“An origin story in the “Western,” humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity,” the “plot of original unity,” and the “task of individual development and of history” which would reclaim that unity: “the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism” (8).

// Profound critique of two members of the school of suspicion, Freud and Marx.

“The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence” (9).

// Key terms:

• partial – irreconcilable into a whole
• ironic – as defined above, irreconcilable into a whole
• intimate
• perverse
• oppositional – cf. Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”
• utopian – how is this different from messianism? Think this through...
• impure (?) – cf. Derrida

“the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household” (9).

// A polis of the oikos—signalling “homework” to come later in the essay.

“at issue in the cyborg world” are the “relationships for forming wholes from parts” (9).

// Ironic, partial

“the cyborg does not expect ... a restoration of the garden ... it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust” (9).

Cyborgs are “wary of holism, but needy for connection” (9).

// Intimacy

“cyborgs ... are the illegimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism” (9).

// Impure

“three crucial boundary breakdowns” (10)

(1) “between human and animal” (10).

There is a “clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture” (10).

“cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status” (11).

(2) “between animal-human (organism) and machine” (11).

“Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (11).

// Think HAL and Dave in 2001.

“machine and organism” are “coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world” (11-12).

"”Textualization” of everything” (12).

[5] Contra Foucault: “The clinic’s methods required bodies and works; we have texts and surfaces ... Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic (1963), History of Sexuality (1976), and Discipline and Punish (1975) name a form of power at its moment of implosion ... If we are imprisoned by language, then escape from that prison-house requires language poets” (69-70).

“the certainty of what counts as nature ... is undermined” (12).

“The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding “Western” epistemology” (12).

// Derrida: no transcendental signified.

“But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness” (12).

// Already noted in blasphemy as faithful

“chimpanzees and artifacts have politics ... so why shouldn’t we?” (12).

(3) “between physical and nonphysical” (12).

“Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible” (12-13).

“Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality” (13).

// Baudrillard, simulacra, divine irreference. Everything is dispersed. Balibar, dispersion of power.

“The silicon chip is a surface for writing” (13).

“Writing, power, and technology are old partners” (13).

“Cyborgs are ether, quintessence” (13).

“these Sunshine Belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness—or its simulation” (13).

“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 jobs” (13-14).

// Floating signifiers, because the signified is unmoored—another signifier.

// cyborg webs of power—presaging network, later.

“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 secrets” (14).

The new technologists are “sun-worshippers” (14).

// cf. Plato’s Cave and Irigaray

“women’s enforced attention to the small” becomes a new power navigating this web (14).

“my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (14).

“progressives have ... recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance” (15).

Haraway advocates for a “perverse shift” (15).

// Away from organicism and holism.

“From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet” (15).

// cf. De Certeau and the grid.

“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” (15).

// Kinship, partiality, contradiction

“Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate” (15).

// cf. Kearney Strangers, Gods, and Monsters

A new “political form” that “holds together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists” (16).

“Affinity: related not by blood but by choice” (16).

Fractured Identities

“Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic” (16).

“With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in “essential” unity” (16).

Female is a “highly complex category,” “constructed” and “contested” (16).

“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” (16).

So: “Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called “us”” (16-17)?

“endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity” in “coalition—affinity, not identity” (17).

“skills for reading webs of power for those refused stable membership” (17).

“postmodernist identity” built “out of otherness, difference, and specificity” (17).

“This postmodernist identity is fully political” (17).

“conscious appropriation of negation ... at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities ... a sea of differences” (18).

“there is no naturalization of the matrix” (18).

// The postmodernist identity cannot be naturalized because it is cyborg through and through. It is entirely constructed, but not arbitrarily so—it is a political construct.

This identity is constructed through a “discourse dissolving the “West” and it’s highest product—the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman; man, that is, the author of a cosmos called history” (18-19).

Man is replaced with a “disorderly polyphony” (18).

How do we “craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification” (20)?

This “theoretical and practical struggle ... undermines ... all claims for an organic or natural standpoint” (20).

Do “all “epistemologies”” (which rely on such an organic, natural, originary innocence or purity) “fail us in the task to build effective affinities” (20)?

// Thus an argument against systematicity. A system needs a unified origin. But cyborg affinity is built through irony, partiality, contradiction.

“We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body” (20-21).

“Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naïveté of innocence” (21).

// i.e. Those who have had to consciously appropriate their negation cannot appeal to the originary innocence of purity, nor can they feel the guilt of failing to return to that purity.

“White women ... were forced ... to notice ... the noninnocence of the category “woman”” (21).

“no construction is whole. Innocence ... has done enough damage” (21).

“In the fraying of identities ... the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history” (22).

“epistemology and ontology ... erase or police difference” (23).

“totalization built into ... the unity of ... radical nonbeing” (23-24).

// i.e. only a privileged man like Sartre can presume to an identity entirely void, to a translucent self—“radical nonbeing.”

“History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies” (26).

“the symbolic system of the family of man ... breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex” (27).

“woman disintegrated into women” (27).

Socialist-feminists, Haraway acknowledges, have been guilty of “white humanism” (27).

“But in the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection” (27).

// Cf. Levinas or Derrida and the other by whom I am infinitely obliged, taken hostage. Such is an evacuation of real and partial historical difference.

"”Epistemology” is about knowing the difference between” those “differences [that] are playful” and those differences that “are poles of world historical systems of domination” (27).

// So this is a tactical epistemology, within and navigating the web of power.

The Informatics of Domination

“we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game” (28).

This is also a movement from “the comfortable old hierarchical dominations” to “scary new networks,” the “informatics of domination” (28).

Some key transitions:

• representation \simulation
• realism \science fiction, postmodernism
• depth, integrity \surface, boundary
• nature/culture \fields of difference
• Freud \Lacan

“It’s not just that “god” is dead; so is the “goddess”” (30).

// We cannot go back and reclaim some “earth mother” wholeness. The organic system is gone.

“one must think not in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flow, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints” (30).

// Cf. Harney and Moten on “logistics.”

“an organic object dissipates in attention to the play of writing” (31).

The “universe of objects” is now “formulated as problems in communications engineering (for managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist)” (31).

“Both are cyborg semiologies” (31).

// This is more excellent deprivileging of a position. Cyborg semiology is intrinsically neither good nor bad, but negotiated.

“control strategies” focus on “boundary conditions and interfaces ... not on the integrity of natural objects” (31).

"”Integrity” or “sincerity” of the Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems” (31).

// Cf. De Certeau, and Harney and Moten, on “expertise.”

“The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress-communications breakdown” (32).

“the cyborg simulations politics” (32).

The “organic, hierarchical dualisms” of the West “have been cannibalized” (32).

“all can be dispersed and interfaced” (33).

//The cyborg is a dis/re-assembled postmodern collective and personal self.

“theory and practice” must address “the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations” (33).

“The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code” (33).

// We are Groot.

This new world is “recrafting our bodies” (33).

“tools embody and enforce new social relations for women worldwide” (33).

// This is a radical explosion of Heidegger’s workshop.

“Technologies” and “discourses” are “formalizations,” “frozen moments” of a “fluid” sociality (33).

But technologies and discourses are also “instruments for enforcing meanings” (33).

“The boundary is permeable between tool and myth” (33).

“Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other” (33).

“communications” and “biologies” are “constructed by” and construct reality through “the translation of the world into a problem coding” (34).

Such encoding is “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” (34).

// Thus the ironic search for a common language above. Cyborg semiology simultaneously effects the encoding of the world, but makes it impossible to found a whole or total common language. Proliferation terminates the soteriological dream.

A new “theory of language and control” emerges: “key operation is determining the rates, directions, and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information” (34).

“Information ... allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power” (34).

“The fundamental of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C³I, command-control-communication-intelligence” (34).

C³I is the “military’s symbol for its operations theory” (34).

// Cf. Harney and Moten on “logistics,” again.

C³I is the communications coding reality; “molecular genetics” is the biological coding reality (34).

// Cf. Baudrillard on the “nuclear” and the “molecular”

“Biotechnology” is “a writing technology” (35).

// Cf. De Certeau on “the scriptural economy”

“Biology here is a kind of cryptography. Research is necessarily a kind of intelligence activity” (35).

// Cf. Heidegger “Fundamental Question of Metaphysics” for the “reinterpretation of the spirit as intelligence” (49).

There is a “mundane, largely economic reality” to these “fundamental transformations in the structure of the world”: “electronics” (35).

“Modern states, multinational corporations, military power, welfare state apparatuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabrication of our imaginations, labor-control systems, medical constructions of our bodies, commercial pornography, the international division of labor, and religious evangelism depend intimately on electronics” (36).

“Microelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra—that is, of copies without originals” (36).

// That is to say, the superstructure of SIMULATION is linked with a base of MICROELECTRONICS.

// Microelectronics also signal the “integrated circuit.”

With microelectronics, “mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms” (36).

“The boundary-maintaining images of base and superstructure, public and private, or material and ideal never seemed more feeble” (36).

// Base-superstructure interpenetration, collapse of the form-content, signifier-signified model. Flattening of the matter (cf. Eco), lateralization of consciousness (cf. Laplanche).

“I have used Rachel Grossman’s (1980) image of women in the integrated circuit to name the situation of women in a world so intimately restructured through the social of relations of science and technology” (37).

“social relations of science and technology” indicates that “we are not dealing with technological determinism, but with a historical system depending on structured relations among people” (37).

It also indicates that these relations also “provide fresh sources of power, [and] that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action” (37).

The Homework Economy “Outside the Home”

In the world of the integrated circuit, the “picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption, and production” (38).

We see within the integrated circuit a “microsm of conflicting differences” (38).

“this new situation” is the ““homework economy”” (38).

The “homework economy” refers to the “restructuring of work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to female jobs, jobs literally done only by women” (38).

Work is being “feminized,” which “means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, [and exploited]” (38).

Laborers are “seen less as workers than as servers” (38).

“factory, home, and market are integrated on a new scale” (39).

// Think Etsy.

“The homework economy ... is made possible by (not caused by) the new technologies” (39).

“the new communications technologies ... integrate and control labor despite extensive dispersion and decentralization” (39).

Haraway argues that “forms of families dialectically relate to forms of capital” (40).

• “patriarchal nuclear” – “white bourgeois ideology”
• “modern family” – “welfare state”
• “homework economy” – matriarchal (? ish).

“It is no longer a secret that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community life are interwoven with this economic structure in myriad ways” (41).

“More than our imaginations is militarized; and the other realities of electronic and nuclear warfare are inescapable” (43).

// Both the imaginary and real are militarized, because the imaginary and real have collapsed into each other.

// Cf. Baudrillard and Heidegger both on the “nuclear.”

The nuclear/microelectronic paradigm is one of “ultimate mobility and perfect exchange” (43).

// Cf. Baudrillard

“sexuality” and “instrumentality” are linked (43).

The “body” becomes a “kind of private satisfaction- and utility-maximizing machine” (43).

The “body” becomes a “cybernetic communications system” (43).

“women’s bodies” are made “newly permeable” (43).

In “medical hermeneutics,” the “speculum” has given way to new “technologies of visualization” (43-44).

// i.e. the ultrasound.

“Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of personal and social possibility” (44).

“An adequate socialist-feminist politics should address women in the privileged occupational categories, and particularly in the production of science and technology that constructs scientific-technical discourses, processes, and objects” (44).

// Cyborg/postmodern forms: discourses, processes, objects.

Can “personal preferences and cultural tendencies be welded into [a] progressive politics” (45)?

Women in the Integrated Circuit

The “distinction of public and private” is a “totally misleading ideology” (45).

Haraway prefers a “network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic” (45-46).

"”Networking”” can be a “weaving ... for oppositional cyborgs” (46).

Every “idealized space[] is logically and practically implied in every other locus ... analagous to a holographic photograph” (46).

// Melange.

“there is no “place” for women in these networks, only geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women’s cyborg identities” (46).

// Cf. De Certeau space vs. place.

“If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life, we might learn new couplings, new coalitions” (46).

“The issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora” (46).

// Cf. Sartre “diasporatic”

“Home: ... reemergence of home sweatshops” (46).

“Market: Women’s continuing consumption work ... interpenetration of sexual and labor markets; intensified sexualization of abstracted and alienated consumption” (47).

// i.e. Pinterest, Glossier

“Paid Workplace: ... new time arrangements ... (flex time, part time, over time, no time)” (47).

“State: ... citizenship by telematics ... integration of privatization and militarization” (48).

// Cf. Byung-Chul Han critique of Flusser

“Clinic-Hospital: Intensified machine-body relations; renegotiations of public metaphors that channel personal experience of the body” (49).

“Church: ... central struggle over women’s meanings and authority in religion” (49).

The homework economy is an economy of “insecurity” and “impoverishment” (49).

Resistance to “high-tech culture” is not about a block or vanguard (50).

Cyborg resistance is a “subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game” (51).

“Intensifications of hardship experienced worldwide ... [are] not transparently clear” (51).

“I am conscious of the odd perspective provided by my historical position ...”

// Wonderful moment of acknowledgment of her personal citation, the quotation of voices (De Certeau) that she is.

“permanent partiality of feminist points of view” (51).

“The feminist dream of a common language ... is a totalizing and imperialist one” (52).

“dialectics too is a dream language” (52).

“we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man” (52).

There is a “pleasure in these potent and taboo fusions,” and in these there might be a “feminist science” (52).

Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity

Cites various writers, including Delany’s Nevèrÿon (52).

“theorists for cyborgs” (52).

“body imagery” is “fundamental” to “worldview, and so to political language” (53).

“eroticism”

“cosmology”

“politics”

“embodiment” (53).

There are “riches ... in the breakdown of clean distinctions” (53).

“the simultaneity of breakdowns ... cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities” (53).

The “sexual market, labor market, and politics of reproduction” are all together in the “integrated circuit” (54).

“Contests for the meanings of writing are a major form of contemporary political struggle” (55).

// Cf. Derrida Of Grammatology

“Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious” (55).

“Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. 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” (55).

// Seizing the tools of the scriptural economy from within.

“We have all been colonized by those origin myths, with their longing for fulfillment in apocalypse” (55).

“phallogocentric origin stories ... are built into the literal technologies—technologies that write the world, biotechnology and microelectronics—that have recently textualized our bodies as code problems on the grid of C³I” (56).

“Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control” (56).

These stories must use “language [that] is not “whole” ... self-consciously spliced, a chimera” (56).

The “myth of original wholeness” is a “deathly oneness” (57).

“Writing marks Moraga’s body” (57).

// Cf. Kafka “Penal Colony,” De Certeau

“Writing is preeminently the technology of cyborgs” (57).

“Cyborg politics are the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication” (57).

“cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in illegitimate fusions ... couplings ... [that] subvert[] the structure of desire,” which is “the force imagined to generate language and gender” (57).

Thus, these politics “subvert[] the structure and modes of reproduction of “Western” identity” (57).

"”We” did not originally choose to be cyborgs” (57).

// No originary innocence or purity. We are factical, thrown.

“With no available original dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile “masculine” separation, but written into the play of a text ... as fully implicated in the world” (58).

// Cf. Derrida “Structure, Sign and Play”

“the “bastard” race teaches about the power of the margins” (58).

“Every story that begins with original innocence ... imagines the drama of life to be ... war” (58).

“plots ... ruled by a reproductive politics—rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction” (59).

We must “pass through Woman” to “women” (59).

“real-life cyborgs ... are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and societies” (59).

“Survival is at stake in this play of readings” (59).

// Ahhhh, Haraway! Such a great line!

“dualisms ... of domination” (59-60)

• “self/other”
• “mind/body”
• “culture/nature”
• “male/female”
• “civilized/primitive”
• “reality/appearance”
• “whole/part”
• “agent/resource”
• “maker/made”
• “active/passive”
• “right/wrong”
• “truth/illusion”
• “total/partial”
• “God/man”

“The self is the One ... but to be One is to be an illusion ... a dialectic of apocalypse with the other” (60).

// Cf. Balibar, God replaced with the One of the subject

“One is too few, but two are too many” (60).

// Cf. Bhabha, less and more than one

“we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras” (60).

“There is no fundamental, ontological separation” between those three boundary breakdowns above (60).

Instead, we have “complex hybridization” (61).

// Cf. Bhabha, hybridity.

“Why should our bodies end at skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin” (61)?

Machines become “prosthetic,” “intimate,” “friendly” (61).

“intimate fusion” (63).

“promising and dangerous monsters” (63).

The “intersection of feminist theory and colonial discourse” shows how white feminists have contributed to domination, which Haraway owns (64).

“Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity” (65).

“A cyborg body is not innocent ... it takes irony for granted” (65).

“Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment” (65).

“The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of embodiment” (65).

“we are they” (65).

“Gender” is not a “global identity” but still has “profound historical breadth and depth” (66).

“There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction” (66).

“There is a myth system waiting to become a political language” (66).

“cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix” (67).

“regeneration” potentiates “twinning or other odd topographical productions” (67).

It can be “monstrous, duplicated, potent” (67).

// Monstrosity, duplicity, potency

Haraway’s is a “utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender” (67).

“taking responsibility ... means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all our parts” (67).

// Cf. again Derrida or Levinas, and Kearney. Difference between a deconstructive and hermeneutic hospitality.

“Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (67).

“This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia” (68).

“It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right” (68).

“Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (68).