Every fully functioning metaphor, then, is a cyborg.
A more Bakhtinian notion of metaphor might be that the function of all metaphor is to compare objects in such a way that their identical aspects are formed into a logical system while their nonidentical aspects gain in psychological intensity through the very search process by which the system was created. Thus the logical system and the ex- tralogical play can be at once severed, systematized (into a logically closed side and a psychologically open one), and allowed to dialogize.
“Women and men are cyborgs.” A metaphor.
The logic of metaphor seems to be saying here that, for better or worse, women and men can be both unbelievably good and inhumanly terrifying, but are nevertheless castrated (civilized) and vanquishable. Our concept of both must be complex. But something is missing from each.
The psychology of metaphor seems to be saying that women and men and cyborgs all have about them both metal and flesh, nerves and circuitry, parts that we understand, parts that are mysterious, parts that are impossible, parts that are there, and parts that are missing: that both exist in relation to the human and to the technical in diverse and intricate ways; that some of the things they can do are real (i.e., political) and some of the things we would like them to do, or are afraid they might do, are ridiculous, or fascinating, or wonderful, or unbelievable; metal and flesh may be, either one, hidden inside the other, where either may be, surprisingly, supportive or subversive; all subjects are split, but in endless, myriad, angular, and often irreconcilable ways; and… well, it says many more things besides. But each of these is in turn a metaphor, with a certain logic, a certain psychology, each of which might be radicalized by work (work is in demand), in a process of unlimited semiosis.
At this point I choose to read Haraway’s own irony as applying to the conservative logic of the cyborg metaphor. The logical link is precisely what urges the totality even as the diversity of the elements compared suggests (always wrongly; never enough; something will be missing) the totality will not work. I read the blasphemy as fairly well restricted to that metaphor’s psychology. And as long as we clearly and responsibly retain the two (the logic, the psychology, and the highly uneasy, easily confused boundary between), then we can see that they are engaged in a serious and intense argument with one another. Here, the intensities are partial, local. They do not, together, form some mutually safe, supportive, totalized and unitary system. All right, then: I’ll go along with this cyborg metaphor and say, “Sure, in its complexity — in its dialogic conflict — it’s a very good one!”
But the conclusion I’ve arrived at (once again) is that metaphors by themselves are, finally, neither radical nor conservative. They gain their ideological slant only as they are read. And any attempt to pose a radical metaphor is only a more or less conscientious call for some hard work at a more or less radical reading.
With any metaphor, we must read it and ourselves closely and minutely in order to reach its radical potential.
It takes both effort and skill. (Possibly more than I possess, so that at best, here, only fragments of the process may be sketched, with much too much left missing.) It often resembles counting the angels on the head of a pin, if not carefully numbering there those we would have as our apostles. At the same time we must remain articulately aware our angels (or our apostles) are by no means original; they arise, rather, each and every one, from historical conditions of production, from freedoms and oppressions that we construct.
And no construction is whole.
V
Note: In The Language of Psychoanalysis (Laplanche and Pontalis) the entry on the word “gap,” used with some frequency by both Freud and Lacan, appears to be missing.
After this “metaphoric explosion” detonated by a mere wandering of attention, of happenstance in the midst of Haraway’s manifesto, we have escaped from none of our fictions — though hopefully all of them are somewhat revalued, recontoured, restructured by it, both those before and those to come.
Let us, then, continue our reading — somewhat less blind to its unitary presumptions, somewhat more open to its polyvocality.
In commenting on her twin lists in the third section of the manifesto, “The Informatics of Domination,” as she considers pairs such as “organism/biotic component” and “reproduction/replication,” Haraway writes:
Sexual reproduction is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment. Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no longer reasonably call on the notions of sex and sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms and families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically corporate executives reading Playboy and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly unmasking the irrationalism. (p. 81)
In an argument that I otherwise agree with, I find Haraway’s closing, marginal quip somewhat naive. As with her discussion of MacKinnon, that naivete involves a blindness to the fact that Playboy (and the “executives” who read it — though I suspect it is part of the same naivete to confuse the male executives in the advertisements in the magazine with the largely white- and blue-collar male readers of the magazine) and MacKinnon both push a world view in which fantasy and reality equal one another, an equivocation which alone justifies their respective enterprises — whereas a distinction between fantasy and reality is insisted on for its very survival by the commercial pornographic films and videos shown regularly in homes and sex-moviehouses in almost all medium-sized and larger cities in the country to their overwhelmingly male, working-class audience. Sympathetic (or unsympathetic) commentators on hardcore porn may well unmask some irrationalisms in our society and its sexual and/or pornographic organization. The oversimplification of the fantasy/reality relation that MacKinnon and Playboy finally share tries to uphold this notion: that softcore Playboy, in which women are always pictured in static photographs naked and alone, somehow says the same thing as hardcore commercial pornographic films, in which women are always pictured in motion, both clothed and naked, always both with and without men, almost always with other women and a large majority of the time with jobs. Playboy — regardless of what it claims — certainly wants to be read as hardcore pornography precisely as much as MacKinnon wants to read it that way. But the fact is, it isn’t. But such an uncritical fantasy/reality relation doesn’t seem a very strong position from which to unmask too much of anything.
Here is also perhaps the place to note that my metaphoric explosion/ insertion occurred directly after a somewhat dubious statement on race (and I am, after all, a black commentator, for whom, in this country, metaphors of rape court their own dangers):