Was not that Freud’s major insight in Civilization and its Discontents?
The thrust of what is written here will be to search out a way to reread Haraway’s manifesto — and my own reactions to it — both productively and provocatively. For during that “first” reading (another fiction, certainly, because — and I am aware of it — I have let much remain missing from all the various fictions I’ve so far indulged), I find them both — my reading of Haraway and my response to that reading — “human, all too human.” To mitigate their organic failures and their mechanical ellipses (my reading, my reaction, and what, rightly or wrongly, I have always-already taken to be Haraway’s mistakes), I need something more rigorous, almost scientific, technical.
If I am to deal seriously with my response to this argument that Haraway proposes and that I make my own by reading, I must, myself, become something of a cyborg to critique them… as she, indeed, claims in her paper I must.
Isn’t there an irony (as she so declares) here?
In the course of an “argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” Haraway writes: “Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.” For me, certainly, keeping the play between the two primary meanings of “construction” in mind in both sentences is to begin, at least, to read her argument most rigorously, richly, and usefully:
Construction: to build, to create from former materials.
And: Construction: to construe, to understand, to analyze, to tear down into its constituent parts.
If, in reading her, we privilege either meaning at the expense of the other, her argument becomes trivialized. Take “understanding/analysis” as the fixed reading, and the argument soon becomes ungrounded theoreticism at play around a rather flighty image. Take hard-headed “building/making” as the fixed reading, and the argument slides in among those endless demands for action and reformation without theoretical basis.
The boundary between them is more than confused enough today for our purposes. Pleasure? Well, perhaps.
Nevertheless, what, above all, Haraway’s paper urges us to do is to construct/construe the cyborg — that unwhole and unholy amalgam.
So let us turn, however tentatively, to the required work.
“We are cyborgs,” she has written. She tells us as welclass="underline" “Who cyborgs will be is a radical question.” She says: “Cyborgs are ether, are quintessence.” It is possible to read this progression as developmental. But it is also possible to read it as contradictory. (“Ether”—like “phlogiston” and the “world without end”—is something the development of science has told us does not exist. And Haraway knows it.) And I choose that reading.
In whatever understanding I pretend to, in terms of the text I question, as my lights and lenses illuminate, magnify, or as my brush reinscribes it, carefully, like a copy of a deeply venerated image ambiguously located between religion and art, there will always be something missing in my simulation to the extent that: I am not a cyborg, not a woman, not fully a man. Thus, however fleetingly, however impermanently I take on the image, however I would try to use a woman’s image to speak with or through, there will be something missing. (Who, now, would snatch these images in anger away?) I use this troubling imagery (ceded me by the prerequisite of a dream of rape I abhor) to remind all my readers, male and female, that any man’s argument (especially against a woman’s) is always troubled by such bad dreams as were called up by the tedious, exacting, ironic, and apparently trivial work of the cyborg we began with.
Most women, certainly, know them.
For my — or any man’s — argument to be useful, especially to a woman, women must not accept it whole. It must be analyzed, fragmented, sliced open, cut up, cut off, fragments of it recombined with what may at first seem wholly inappropriate technicalities, till all unity is struck from it (the very concept of unity only returns to trouble, to critique, to annoy), resembling rather some junk-lot of deformed monsters, part human, part machine, and then — perhaps — some part of it cut off or up or out for new use, while the rest is simply left missing…
Be assured: the process is painful, angering, violent, troubling to all involved…
Thus, these images of rape, dismemberment, and violence (metaphors that trouble the whole range of our language), are, in this discussion of a feminist paper, a kind of irony, a kind of blasphemy.
Why and for what reason, unify these images here?
Is it to reduce — or, indeed, reveal — the terroristic element that hides in the margins of all manifestos and thus invalidates a document consecrated to pleasure, to reveal a certain sadism fundamental to all pleasurable affects?
Certainly I would hope not.
What notion of unity, of totality, of power, then, do they disrupt? Once again I quote from the opening section of her manifesto: “This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”
Well, if such images as I have called in do, indeed, create confusion between what we would all approach as clearly defined categories of argument, ideology, and allegiance, they certainly don’t bring much pleasure. Don’t they place an intolerable strain on Haraway’s call for negative capability under the rubric of irony? Isn’t the introduction of them, here, to construct something that is the opposite of responsible argument?
Rather, I would say only this: blasphemy, as it represents just the aporia we have outlined, is — as Haraway has written — serious. And the boundary between the two meanings of construction is, clearly, nowhere near as clear as even a first deconstruction would have had us suppose: it is a truly dangerous one, and must be negotiated with great vigilance.
It is a boundary line.
It is an abyss.
Over it let us place the cyborg.
II
… But complete theories do not fall from Heaven, and you would have had still greater reason to be so distrustful, had anyone offered you at the beginning of his observations a well-rounded theory without any gaps; such a theory could only be the child of his speculation and not the fruit of unprejudiced investigation of the facts.
What renders the cyborg confusing?
In recent popular imagery, the Good Cyborg is, of course, Luke Skywalker, who, at the moment of his Oedipal shock in The Empire Strikes Back, when his hand is cut off (“I am your father…” Darth Vader tells him, in the midst of the agony), takes a ritual plunge of awesome dimensions (into the mythical abyss we wrote of above?), at the end of which, negotiating the whole effect of everything that came before, he is given a mechanical prosthesis: once the imitation skin is closed over the cam-shafts and circuitry, it remains hidden, unmentioned, invisible for the remainder of the trilogy. It is only suggested, at the climax of the final film, in a moment of Oedipal identification, when, after “breaking training” in a paroxysm of rage initiated by the paternal revelation of incest (“She is your sister”), Luke hacks off his father’s hand, to find Vader is already a cyborg of the same order: only wires and metal protrude from the severed wrist.