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Reading at Work
and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority:
A Reading of Donna Haraway’s
“Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”
“Thank you. Would you like to see my work?” Helva asked, politely. She instinctively sheered away from personal discussion…
“Work?” asked the lady.
“I am currently reproducing the Last Supper on the head of a screw.”
Isn’t there something — could it really be missing from the text above — urging us to read this passage from Anne McCaffrey’s series of science fiction tales about the young cyborg Helva as irony? Pin down (or up) that irony, and we admit at the same time: Our laughter only checks a more violent urge to dash the screw from Helva’s metal grip, to declare: “Fool, fool! Blind metal fool! For all your microscopic vision, that is no work at all!”
Work? we go on, to ourselves, stalled between laughter and rage in the uncertainty between responses that is irony’s sign. “Work!” we do not quite ejaculate into a silence that, for all we know, is as likely formed of Helva’s ignorance (she does not suspect the vanity of her labor) as by her terror (even at age twelve she must know what her audience — at least the male fraction — might do or say) as by her indifference (she is not human; she is only something we — the males among us — make: though, in this case, she has been written by a woman). The silence, now, is Helva’s: she is doing something — work — that is, maddeningly, not responding to us. A few (of us) may even notice what we have left out — that what is missing is our own terror at work on an historical indifference we can hardly bear and, therefore, will not bare… because it flies in the face of all (or only: male/heterosexual) desire. (Metaphorically identifiable with any other kind? by extension of any sort of logic or psychology?) “This is work?” we go on. “Oh, no! If that is what you think — ” we silently inveigh — “there is something decidedly missing. “As we perceive the futility of Helva’s task, our anger turns on her precisely as we would use it to unlock her silence, her ignorance, her error — this victim of an impoverished notion of production:
Angels on a pin?
Apostles on a screw?
We want to snatch its emblem — drawn and patterned so incisively by a woman — violently from her! Certainly writer McCaffrey intended something like this… from us. (“I bet she laves it,” grunts my grosser brother, with a snicker. “I believe this was her intention, ” declares my more refined, with a smile.) We want to commit some violence against this deflated notion of work that will leave Helva’s claw empty, will leave her lights and lenses and paint brush fixed or blinking or probing about in some brutal absence, an illuminated space from which an object has just vanished, a space that is saturated with meaning precisely because something is no longer there. (Art? Labor? What confusion of boundaries between presence and absence is written in that violent, violated, void locus whose legibility we would unlock — to read into it our own words, our own meanings — even as it fades to pure blankness, even as we watch, under the combined mechanical/human gaze — hers, ours — still, somewhere, backed by human brain?) Among the more articulate of us, this turn of the lock, this rape of the screw — this violence motivated wholly by a conflict of interpretation — goes on in silence even as we admit that the fictive creators of this metal and glass and nervous creature (whose genitals have already been removed, like a phrase snipped from the body of the text by the closure of parentheses) are our brothers. They exist only in the empty margin writer McCaffrey has assigned them, yet their operations stall us — the men, that is — on some confused level between experience and myth, before a contradictory gap in the logic or poetics of bodies or machines. For the moment we do not know which…
As of yet we cannot name it.
Something is still missing.
Still, in excess of the silence, of the absence, of the incompleteness, don’t we all understand (whether that “we” is the pathologically “socialized” few who sympathize with, or the morally “civilized” many who abominate) this rape fantasy by which we have just indulged in an ugly and overextended metaphor of desires we would rather not admit that we, some of us, have or admit that we, all of us, have seen rampant throughout “civilized” (read: patriarchal) society: despite whatever religious image has been incised on it by Helva’s vice-like virginal grip, certainly one screw less in this collection of metal and glass and wire that is cyborg Helva (extended or, better, constituted by her technology as much as writer McCaffrey, writing in 1959, was extended or, better, constituted by typewriter, printing, etc.), in which the organic — reduced to pure subject, pure ego, pure nerve (or over-wrought nerves) — is wholly hidden behind some hard and inanimate shell, couldn’t be a theft, an appropriation, a rape — could not possibly create an absence in any way missed or mourned in the face of any understanding of work, or art, or desire, or rage…
Well, as long as it remains only a fantasy… but what we all know now is that where all these ellipses, pauses, gaps hide, veil, cover, and even violently destroy the possibility of completion to the thoughts either side of them, obliterate the work that might have gone on within them, there is something wrong. For such elisions are the visible and resonant marks of an error we can all at last read: it is precisely in these moments of silence that fantasy returns to trouble — that is, to present us with the possibility of its realized fact that must, certainly, be based upon it, that must be construed, if not constructed, by it.
There, certainly, we can find — definitely — something troubling, something missing.
I
As they sit safely on the other side of the boundary between type fonts, as they hang over the border marked by our initial Roman numeral, squeezed and set off in the upper margin of our text along with the poor and prior epigraph they read with such distress, let us consider the above italics to be a bad dream — something which we would all, as would Helva, sheer away from rather than consecrate by personal discussion.