Haraway-Cyborg Manifesto_RISD-web-reading

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into the larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatinle things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.

Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object.

Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. 

The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.

The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring ant possibility of historical transformation. In the tradition of 'Western' science and politics, - the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other...

This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture 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.

Hilary Klein(1989) has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour 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 escalation domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is an illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars. 

The cyborg is .... oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private... cyborg defines ... on a revolution of social relations in the .. household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be 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. 

The cyborg ... not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps ... if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy.

The main problem with cyborg .... they are the illegitimate offspring of militariem and patriarchal capitalism ... But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins ... Their fathers, after all, are inessential. 

Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight cupling. 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 machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was ... dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. ... but machines are not self-moving, .... to think they were otherwise was paranoid. Late twentieth-centry machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and .... many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.

'Textualization' of everything in poststructuralist, postmodernist theory has been damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived relations of domination that ground the 'play' of arbitrary reading. It is true that postmodernist strategies ... subvert myriad organic wholes (ex, poem, primitive culture, biological organism..). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature is undermined, probably fatally. 

The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, with 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 'meaningful political action' by the 'text'. Who cyborg will be is a radical question. The answers are a matter of survival. 

they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. ... Modern machines are ... everywhere and ... invisible ... is an irreverent upstart god,. 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.

The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these .. machines are so deadly. they are as hard to see politically as materially, they are about consciousness or it simulation. 

Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia ... whose constructed unites will guide effedtive oppositional strategies. 

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 formulations and physical artefacts associated with 'high technology' and scientific culture.

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 un to contest for meaings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies.

a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a star wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. 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... permanently partial identities 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 double vision or many-headed monsters. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Groupe, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the 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 another, avidity.)

Fractured identities

Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute.

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. ... is an achievement forced on us by ... contradictory social realities of patriarch, colonialism and capitalism.

the recent history for much of the US left and US 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 response through coalition-affinity, not identity. Chela Sandoval, ... 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... . 

she notes that the definition of a group has been by conscious appropriation of negation.

As orientalism is deconstructed politically and semiotocally, the identities of the occident destabilize, including feminist. Sandoval argues that 'woman of colour' have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate the imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects of previous Marxism and feminisms which had not faced the consequences of the disorderly poliphony emerging from decolonization. 

this reminds me of 하버마스's concern and stance about the deconstruction of mordern which seems no possibility which reflects human nature we observed during world war 2. He also mentioned dismantling and deconstructing reality could not become alternate as reality itself, therefore, cannot distinguish from cynicism.

King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists 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.

In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism is advanced by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. ... In particular, women's labour in the household and women's activity as mothers generally entered theory on the authority of analogy to the Marxian concept of labor

...since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be consistuted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the labourer from his product. 

..neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view have tended to embrace the status of a partial explanation; both were regularly constituted as totalities. Embarraseed silence about race among white radical and socialist-feminists was one major.... History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies. There was no ... room for race .... theory of ... category woman and social group women as a unified or totalizable whole.

but we are know accustomed to remembering that as objects of knowledge and as historical actors, 'race' did not always exist, 'class' has a historical genesis, and 'homosexual' are quite junior.

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. 

Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. 'Epistomology' is about knowing the difference.

The informatics of domination

I argue for politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race and gender .... crated by industrial capitalism;

For liberals and radicals, the search for integrated social systems gives way to a new practice called 'experimental ethnography' in which an organic object dissipates in attention to the play of writing. At the level of ideology, we see translations of racism and colonialism into languages of development and under-development, rates and constraints of modernization.

Any objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly. 

One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces ....  not on the integrity of natural objects. 'integrity' or 'sincerity' of the Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems. ... control strategies applied to women's capacities to give birth ... 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 .... degrees of freedom. Human beings ... must be localized in a system .... basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical.  No objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves ... any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard .... can be constructed for processing signals in common language.

consequences that themselves are very different for different people and which make potent oppositional international movements difficult to imagine and essential for survival.

Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. ... they should also be viewd as instruments for enforcing meanings.

.... a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears ... communication sciences problem in coding can ... looking by  cybernetic(feedback-controlled) systems theories applied to computer design, weapons deployment or database construction .... each case solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key operation is .... flow of ... information. Information is .... which allows universal translation, ... the biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication. ... this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, the military's symbol for its operations theory.

The US gay men and intravenous drug users are the 'privileged' victims of an awful immune system disease that marks confusion of boundaries and moral pollution.

Biology as a powerful engineering science for redesigning materials and processes has revolutionary implications for industry.... agriculture and energy. ... the boundary ...public and private or material and ideal never seemed more feeble.

I used ... 'the social relations of science and technology, to indicate that we are not dealing with a technological determinism, but with a tistorical system depending upon structured relations among people. But the phrase should also indicate that science and technology provide fresh sources of power, that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action. Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high tech facilitated social relations can make socialist-feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics.

The 'homework economy' outside 'the home'

The extreme mobility of capital and the emerging international division of labour are intertwined with the emergence of new collectivities, and the weakening of familiar groupings.

In the prototypical Silicon Vally, many women's lives have been structured around employment in electronics dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age. 

The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure is made possible by (not caused by) the new technologies.  ... attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men's unionized job is tied .... to control labour despite extensive ... decentralization ... consequences ... are felt by women both in loss of the family(male) ... and of their own jobs, which are becoming capital intensive; for example, office work and nursing. ...ensuing intensification of demands on women to sustain daily life for themselves as well as for men, children and old people.

the new technologies seem deeply involved in the forms of 'privatization' that Ros Petchsky has analysed, in which militarization, right-wing family ideologies and policies, and intensified definitions of corporate property as provate synergistically interact.