In the section of her manifesto, “Fractured Identities,” Haraway looks to the plurality of women’s movements.
While the fragmentation and dissension among the various women’s movements has its painful aspect, Haraway tries not so much to unify them as to unpack from the various theoretical positions an encouraging polyvocality.
She looks approvingly at Chela Sandoval’s “women of color,” with its insistent lack of capitalization as well as its “oppositional consciousness,” which opens up, and finally deconstructs (i.e., makes radically undecidable) any hard-edged definition of what a woman of color is, save by the accrued negations of having been heretofore denied a place to speak from.
A similar approval is given to Katie King’s more theoretical enterprise. King “emphasizes the limits of identification and the political/ poetic mechanics of identification built into reading ‘the poem,’ that generative core of cultural feminism…” while opposing “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 tendency appears to be the telos of the whole.”
Thus, “[t]he common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification.”
When, after another brief theoretical foray, Haraway turns to look at Catherine MacKinnon, from the first sentence of Haraway’s consideration her sympathy becomes highly strained. (“Catherine MacKinnon’s version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action.”) By the end, if any sympathy was there to start, it has vanished:
MacKinnon’s radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme; it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any other women’s political speech and action. It is a totalization producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing — feminists’ consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of men’s desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground women’s unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, MacKinnon’s intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the “essential” non-existence of women is not reassuring, (p. 78)
This section of Haraway’s manifesto concludes with an appeal to the strength of “partial explanations”; thus she further reinforces her support for those feminisms that do not claim to explain everything. Here, Haraway invokes the explanatory excitement of Julia Kristeva’s notion that “women appeared as a historical group after World War II, along with groups like youth.” Haraway goes on: “Her dates are doubtful; but we are now accustomed to remembering that as objects of knowledge and as historical actors, ‘race’ did not always exist, ‘class’ has a historical genesis, and ‘homosexuals’ are quite junior.” Haraway could have extended this historical revisionism to include that literature does not begin till shortly after World War I (Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, an Introduction) and that racism and anti-Semitism are products of 1886 (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism).
My reservation here, in terms of Haraway’s critique of MacKinnon (which Haraway uses as the springboard for this terminal exhortation for a polyvocal feminism), is that in an attempt to maintain a theoretical level, she skirts the real danger of MacKinnon’s position. MacKinnon is after all a lawyer, and her enterprise is primarily a legislative one — the institution of laws against pornography and sexually explicit material that presumably degrade women. MacKinnon bases her whole program on the theoretical assumption that fantasies about actions and the actions themselves have a simple, direct, and uncritically causal relation — that, indeed, we should not consider any differences at all between them — a theoretical position that must certainly find itself hostile to, just for example, the whole complex fantasy element that motivates, controls, and that indeed represents the ends of Haraway’s manifest cyborg enterprise.
This is certainly a more troubling reservation than my initial one about infrastructural and superstructural levels, because this blindness to what strikes me as a basic hostility in the two positions seems either suicidal — or profoundly manipulative. And, frankly, if it’s the latter, I am not sure who or what is being manipulated nor to what end. I am still willing, however, to read an irony here.
This second section concludes:
Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. “Epistemology” is about knowing the difference, (p. 79)
The third section of the manifesto is “The Informatics of Domination.” It chronicles, by means of two comparable lists, a shift in sensibility that may, indeed, represent the sort of developmental discontinuity Foucault locates at the end of French classicism in Les Mots et les choses, when the science of wealth, natural philosophy, and general grammar transformed into political economy, biology, and linguistics.
What sort of change is really involved, Haraway asks, when questions of “Representation” give way to practices of “Simulation,” when the “Bourgeois novel” and “realism” are replaced by “science fiction” and “post-modernism,” when the notion of “organism” is driven out by that of “biotic component,” or when questions of “depth and integrity” become considerations of “surface and boundary”?
Her list runs on to 32 paired terms.
The first in each of her pairs (“… Perfection… Hygiene… Reproduction… Microbiology, tuberculosis… Freud… Sex… Mind…”), Haraway notes, are comfortable and hierarchical. The second in each pair (“… Optimization… Stress Management… Replication… Immunology, AIDS… Lacan… Genetic engineering… Artificial intelligence…”) are, in her words, “scary” and “new.”
“It it not just that ‘god’ is dead,” Haraway writes out of a consideration of her lists; “so is the ‘goddess.’”
Up to this point, even with my reservations, I found myself more or less comfortable with my first reading of the manifesto. And this was the point, in the midst of the third section, that I first looked ahead to note that there were, indeed, three sections to come: “The Homework Economy,” “Women in the Integrated Circuit,” and finally “Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity.” But it was also at this moment, cut loose from that initial and dedicated, original and unitary reading — precisely at that moment in Haraway’s argument that I, as a worker caught in the murky labor of reading, sat down on the job as it were and let my eye be tempted ahead to encompass the remaining pages of the argument — that, even before I left the still legible trace of the argument fading in my mind, I snagged on:
Any objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly… (p. 81)
And:
The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies. (p. 81)
Certainly my own ear, here, was shut down to any play of irony that might have informed this particular section — here. With my ears closed to all revoicing and my eyes wide before a blankness and impersonal starkness of white page and black print, in a moment of Speng-lerian vertigo I read: