Castration, Freud tells us, is the way the subject is brought to civilization. Says Lacan, castration is what ushers the subject into the Symbolic Order… and claims to be saying more or less the same thing.
The phallus is, unlike the penis or the clitoris (Lacan goes on to say), manifested only in castration. The phallus is what remains to the Imaginary when the object of desire is veiled, removed, occluded, or snatched violently away from current Symbolically mediated experience. Its Imaginary occultation alone gives it its Symbolic power. And (cutting out a great deal more) we are strongly urged by many Lacanian commentators, many of them women and feminists (from certain rhetorical turns in Haraway’s text, we wonder if she wishes to be counted among their number), to take this as the inarguable reason why civilization is, and must no doubt remain, phallocentric.
Yet, as a theory, the castration explanation seems somehow incomplete.
Again something is missing.
That is to say, the lived experiences of women and men all around us are again and again in excess of the theory.
Again something returns to trouble.
The acceptance, the internalization, the sublimation of castration anxiety, be we male or female, is what is supposed to fit us into civilization. And yet, if that is the case, it would seem that none of us — male or female — is ever really castrated enough. Civilization doesn’t seem anywhere near as civilized as we would like it to be. All of us, for better or for worse, can conceive of a better one.
And as for the one we have, we don’t fit in.
Or, at least, for most of us, the fit can be described as only more or less comfortable.
To look at civilization anywhere around us is to criticize it: this civilization, for better or for worse, is just not civilized.
In brief, all the castration theory seems to cut us down to is the acceptance of phallocentric society. It seems to leave out what rankles and roils and complains and, more or less suppressed, carries on hysterically, like the adult “Dora,” Ida Brauers, inveighing to Dr. Deutch against the strictures of married life, twenty-four years after cutting off, in 1902, her therapy with Freud.
Perhaps phallocentric civilization has to construct image after image of castration — such as the cyborg.
But (and this is what I shall keep on looking for in Haraway, after this account is finished) it will also have to construe them: it will have to fix clearly on the missing parts, respond to them as completely as possible, describe them, and analyze them into their constituents, if it is ever to get beyond the desperately efficient self-replicating system by which our civilization, by which castration, repairs itself in the face of almost any wound to it, almost any attempt to cut it down or up.
For the record, I might as well say it here: I do not believe castration as Freud and Lacan have described it even exists. But I do believe — and I do not know how many times I can write this in a single essay and have it remain coherent — that something is missing.
This is something I desire — violently — be fixed in my own argument. Yet, moments after the reader’s eye has passed it, it will be gone, its “existence,” around which so much of my desire is organized, remaining only as the flicker of an afterimage, a troubling absence-presence that “is” no longer “there,” like the child’s spool tossed over the edge of the curtained cradle before it is hauled back on the confused and knotted string connecting memory to reality.
IV
The relation of the subject to the Other is entirely produced in the process of gap.
The pursuit of the radical metaphor — and the general consensus seems to be that castration (and cyborgs seem to be the figure of castration, the phallus, whether male or female) was once as radical a metaphor as any, though it is not at all one today — is a risky business; and it is arguable (indeed, it is philosophy’s classical argument against metaphor) that there is something inherently reductive and, by extension, conservative, in the very metaphoric process.
As we prepare to confront our mythical, or metaphoric, cyborg, here is one model of metaphor it may be helpful to bear in mind:
Object P, with aspects (a, b, c… A, B, C… (α, β, γ…), is compared with object Q, with aspects (1, 2, 3… A, B, C…, Ο, Δ…). The metaphor is logical because aspects (A, B, C…) are common to both objects. Logically, the resultant metaphoric system privileges aspects (A, B, C…), the aspects common to both objects, and dismisses the combined set of aspects (a, b, c… 1, 2, 3… α, β, γ… 
, Ο, Δ…). Thus the metaphorical logic is reductive, disjunctive, and conservative in its logical privileging power.
But this model, at least at this stage of elaboration, leaves out something very important. (… there is something missing.) It does not explain the vividness with which, from time to time, metaphors strike us. It suggests, rather, that the experience of newness, liberation, and daring with which so many metaphors register is, at bottom, simply nostalgia, a pure reassurance, the wholly sedimented and completely safe called up in a flash so bright and brief we do not recognize it for what it is.
I don’t think the suggestion corresponds to the lived experience of metaphor.
But to construe and critique our model in such a way that it yields something closer to what I believe to be the truth of metaphor, we must leave the logic of metaphor to read its murkier psychology.
Assume: We are reading.
As we move along through the text, negotiating a fairly familiar and coherent description of a scene or process, we encounter the mention of object P, whose syntagmatic placement (or paradigmatic displacement) announces it as metaphor. Immediately we are distracted from our familiar scene to consider the play of P’s aspects, among which, for the moment, we are not entirely sure which will be the logically privileged ones.
With the aspects of P still at play in our mind, we move on through the text, till we encounter mention of another object, Q, which, syntax and expectation tell us, is the metaphor’s referent. Now we are momentarily distracted from the play of P’s aspects by the aspects of Q. But we must not let that first set go. Attention heightens, to hold the play of aspects about both objects — aspects that, indeed, constitute both objects. (It’s important to note here that we have not yet perceived the logic of metaphor. We have perceived, rather, only the collective aspects of P and of Q.) From among the conjoined set of aspects of P and Q, the logic of metaphor must now be built up.
We set about pairing up aspects, identifying aspects from the metaphor with aspects from its referent, to create the logical link.
As these pairs (or identities) are located, they are, so to speak, psychologically set aside into that part of the mind reserved for conscious and conscientious systems; but what we are left with in the part of the mind that perceives, that visualizes, that imagines is the heightened image of many of those aspects of both P and Q that are in excess of those identities.
In brief, then: because of the heightened attention needed to create the logic of metaphor, it is those aspects in excess of the logical ones, highlighted by that attention, that constitute the metaphor’s psychological vividness.
If this psychological explanation for the vividness of metaphor (or for those which register as vivid) is correct, then the psychological affect of metaphor is conjunctive, playful, and intensifying — nor does it require a terribly vast metaphoric leap to see such a process as always having something of a radical and disruptive thrust. It is only when metaphors become so overworked and familiar that no heightened attention to the combined play of aspects is needed to locate the identities in the play of similar and dissimilar aspects that they are finally reduced to nothing but their disjunctive, logical sediments.