The unpleasantness will, certainly, return to trouble. (The boundary is clearly not all that secure.) But for now let us turn to Donna Har-away’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” to read, to work, to rework.
In a slow, careful, and even ponderous perusal of this 34-page text (41 with Acknowledgments and References), which first appeared in The Socialist Review for Summer 1985, a perusal where the labor was all in an attempt to negotiate a fixed and unitary signified (while all the interpretative work was allowed to drift lazily within the confines set out by a strongly fixed and socially commonplace ideological authority), it was fairly easy for me to read Haraway’s manifesto more or less as follows:
In an introductory movement (“An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit,” the title a play on a book of poems by Adrienne Rich), itself introduced by an alignment of “faithfulness,” “irony,” and “blasphemy,” the metaphor of the cyborg was worked upon: the cyborg (the cybernetic organism of Norbert Weiner, transformed by numerous science fiction stories into any combination of organic — usually neurological — and mechanical or electronic material) was discussed as “reality,” “fiction,” and “lived experience,” as suggesting the bisexual reproductiveness of ferns and invertebrates, as well as that eighty-four-billion-dollar item in the U.S. defense budget, C3-I (control- command-communication-intelligence). The cyborg suggests science and politics, “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” Perhaps even more important is what the cyborg avoids: it avoids “the seductions of organic wholeness” and “skips the step of original unity”; as well it escapes the polar structure of “public and private.” “The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the Oedipal project. The cyborg does not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust (p. 67), i.e., it is not subject to Freud’s “death wish.” For Haraway, the cyborg partakes of the delirium of the bodilessness of the miniature and post-modern silicon chip, “a surface for writing.” The hardest sciences, she notes, are the places where the boundaries have become most confused. “The new machines are so clean and light” (p. 71) — and deadly. The cyborg suggests a double myth, one that courts “the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet,” but, in opposition to that, courts as well the “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.” (p. 72)
With this account of Haraway’s introductory move, I suspect at least some of her delirious striving “for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” is a response to a “social reality” that several science fiction writers have addressed with various amounts of insight — sundry works by both Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Joanna Russ come to mind. Only as a society becomes more and more infrastructurally stable does it permit greater and greater superstructural freedom — of expression, of action, of belief. Conversely, as soon as the society is truly menaced at the in-frastructural level, then precisely those freedoms are the first to go.
The freedoms that we, in the West, are taught to think of as the foundation on which our society is built are actually — in historical terms — of recent vintage. They are very much on the surface of our culture — which is why so frequently they seem so easily threatened in less stable societies.
We must point out, then, that the two versions of Haraway’s cyborg myth do not function at the same social leveclass="underline" “the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet” is very likely to be an infrastructural grid, which alone allows the superstructural freedom of (some) people to explore “their joint kinship with animals and machines” in a fearless, Utopian union. What seems to be missing, at least from Haraway’s introductory move, is any sense of the darker, even tragic side of this situation — a side we enter with the graffito from Joanna Russ’s science fiction novel, We Who Are About to…: “Money doesn’t matter/When control is somewhere else!” Not only does money not matter in such a situation, neither does language or sexual freedom. To change things at the infrastructural level — to establish a different structure for the deployment of wealth, say — is a lot harder than the simple re-deployment of different people into the existing wealth structure. And in our society, the second process just cited is a self-repairing mechanism by which the existing oppressive wealth structure heals any infrastructural damages done to it.
Perhaps, I remark in passing, a little more faith in a more traditionally socialist approach (and a little less Baudrillardian exstase) might turn Haraway’s criticism to the larger lived realities of the vast majority of peoples in the U.S. — female and male, white, black, and Hispanic — whom the existing wealth structure wholly excludes from exploring any such Utopian kinships or boundary confusions with any joy at all.
Yet, that reservation comes to me as easily as her account, so that I was not particularly troubled by it in my progress through her text.
And here, at the end of this account of her introduction, I can think of no better place to give that introduction’s opening:
This essay is an effort to built an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful… Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously… Blasphemy protects us from the moral majority within… Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. (Socialist Review, Summer 1985, p. 65. All quotes are from this article unless otherwise specified.)
And a page later she writes:
This essay 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 post-modernist, 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. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history, (pp. 66–67)
A world without end is, of course, a world without science — is, indeed, the “pre-scientific” Salvationist modeclass="underline" for the great, scientific tragedy is the realization that everything runs down eventually, every fire burns out — the individual, the society, the species; the world, the sun, the universe. But Haraway locates her myth as myth. As such, it functions more as a literary irony — thus, as with my first reservation, I am not much troubled by it.
A premise of this essay is that “the need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But — ” Haraway proposes (and herein lies the energy and importance of her work) — ”a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically-mediated societies.” (p. 71)
As much as she approves of “oppositional consciousness,” what Haraway is proposing here is a kind of oppositional judo, a slight skewing of concepts, practices, programs, that may accomplish the same ends. Well, in a world where energy is such a threatened commodity, the suggested economy alone of her proposal privileges it in our attention.