Philosophy of Technology: Haraway Response

"A Cyborg Manifesto" (1991)

 Background info on Haraway 

 

Reading Response:

A manifesto is a call to action, a verbal slap, an effort to use language to bring about change, and in Haraway’s case, political change. Haraway's essay is a response to those who (during the 1970s and 1980s) sought to define what woman truly is, believing that if the identity of woman could be defined, then a ground of collective political action might be secured (known as "identity politics"). Haraway finds this problematic and proposes instead that we are all hybrids.

She attempts to create what she calls "an ironic political myth" which combines postmodernism with socialist feminism. First, she introduces and defines the "cyborg." A cyborg is a:

• Cybernetic organism
• Hybrid of machine and organism
• Creature of both fiction and lived social reality

The cyborg for Haraway is a metaphor for the postmodernist interest in identity as well as the reality of living with new technology. The cyborg is a direct result of a world that has begun to live within and alongside machines—the line between the human body and the machine has been blurred. And it is a product of new media convergence (a result of cyberspace, artificial limbs, pacemakers, chat rooms).

Haraway is interested in revealing the ambiguity and irrelevance of nature-culture binarisms in the cyborg age. In fact, she also reveals that "natural" was never even so. She charts the differences between "comfortable old hierarchical dominations" (432) which have the appearance of "naturalness" since they are so embedded in our Western cultural consciousness, and the "scary new networks"(432) which came about after World War II. Haraway’s chart allows her to point out the problems with assumptions of a "natural" past: “the objects on the right-hand side cannot be coded as ‘natural’, a realization which 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 ‘goddess’" (433).

The cyborg, according to Haraway, resists what has gone before; it is more than the sum of its parts. In addition, the cyborg "is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (430).

Haraway feels that there are three major boundary breakdowns in the formation of the cyborg. The first is between human and animal: "Biology and evolutionary theory over the past two centuries have simultaneously 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 between life and social science"(431). The result is human animality or animal human.

The second boundary breakdown is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Not only are our household machines becoming more autonomous and taking on personalities and human features, but humans are coupling with machines for medical purposes (pacemakers, dialysis, artificial limbs and joints, hearing aids) and for research purposes (as is the case with Kevin Warwick, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.02/warwick.html).

The third boundary breakdown is between the physical/organic/animate and nonphysical/inorganic/inanimate. Haraway notes: "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…. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque"(431). Today’s machines are ubiquitous and invisible; they carry huge amounts of data on tiny chips hidden somewhere behind an attractive surface. This ethereal invisibility renders machines potent weapons: "They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness—or its simulation"(432).

Haraway attemps to use the cyborg myth as “one important route for reconstructing socialist-femminist politics” (434) by seeing from two perspectives: 1) that “a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet,” and 2) that “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"(432). The solution, she suggests, is to see from both perspectives at once (double vision); to be aware and critical of both aspects of the cyborg in the development of political identity. “Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common [feminist] language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.”