“Likewise for race,” Haraway writes directly after the paragraph last quoted, “ideologies about human diversity have to be formulated in terms of frequencies of parameters, like blood groups or intelligence scores. It is ‘irrational’ to invoke concepts like primitive and civilized.” (p. 81) Alas, I remain historically dubious about these particular parameters of blood and intelligence, which would seem, centered in their own mythic systems of heredity and psychology, to have been precisely the white scene of the debate at least since Louis Agassiz.
I am not sure what is new, or cyborgic, here.
This is also the moment that precedes Haraway’s Spenglerian exhortation, in which “Control strategies applied to women’s capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the language of population control and maximization of goal achievements for individual decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom.” (p. 81) Is it so odd, in the face of such an analysis, to wonder how the imposition of such “control strategies… developed in the language of population control and maximization of goal achievements” could possibly leave, say, the yes/no “degree of freedom” in the choice of, say, whether to have an abortion or not, to the women in whose bodies the fetuses happen to be growing?
To me, with such control strategies developed in terms of what I know of such language today, it doesn’t seem likely.
Though I offer the suggestion with no sense of completing or finishing off Haraway’s twin lists, I wonder if “castration” (on the comfortable, hierarchical side) paired with “cyborg” (or, really, any “prosthesis,” on the new and scary side) might not have made a darker, more aggressive, but finally more difficult, sensitive and, possibly, self-critical array of concepts to draw from.
But the recovery of Haraway’s argument comes fairly quickly, when it talks directly about what, I presume, is behind some of these assertions:
One important route for reconstructing socialist feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the system of myth and meanings structuring our imagination. (p. 82)
Throughout Haraway’s piece is the feeling the women’s movement has been too reliant on notions of “the organic” and “the natural,” seen in an essential opposition to the technical and the scientific. The range of feminisms, at least those most popular, Haraway suggests, give small heed to the fact that “the natural” and “the organic” are empowered by, and indeed only exist as powerful conceptual and explanatory categories because of, modern science and technology. As an aid in the recuperation of science and technology for socialist feminism, Haraway writes: “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”
Haraway ends this section with a consideration (which also happens to work as a justification for her project so far) of the problem of such new coding options: “tool and myth,” she writes (and by extension instrument and concept, as well as historical anatomies of possible bodies and historical systems of social relations), finally and eventually “constitute each other.” In a passing move, as an ironic critique of her own formulation, she suggests that (along with a consideration of the ethical confusion around animal hearts in human babies), “Gay men, Haitian immigrants, and intravenous drug users are the ‘privileged’ victims of an awful immune-system disease that marks (inscribes on the body) confusion of boundaries and moral pollution.
“But these excursions into communications sciences and biology have been at a rarefied level.” (p. 84) This quaint recall of a moment in the AIDS epidemic by this manifesto written when the number of people with AIDS was closer to seven thousand than to the well over eighty thousand who have died from AIDS today, may, four years later, not look so rarefied at all.
Haraway brings the section to a close with a consideration of the transformation by which the tool of microelectronics (“the technical basis of simulacra, i.e., copies without originals,” a notion courtesy of Baudrillard) controls the conceptual shift from labor and typing into robotics and word processing; of sex into genetic engineering and reproduction technologies; of mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedure. Haraway uses Rachel Grossman’s image of “women in the integrated circuit” to name women’s place in this intricate technologically and scientifically restructured world — restructured at the level of mutually constituting tool and concept. Her last and modestly hopeful sentence here is:
Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make socialist feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics. (p. 85)
I suspect she is right, though I’m not sure how it’s going to happen. The next section is entitled “The Homework Economy.”
A new work force has been created. As a quick example, Haraway cites the women in Silicon Valley, whose work is structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs: “… their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating child care, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age.” (p. 85) More to the point, Haraway explains, this new class is made up of people — mostly women but not all — whose jobs have been feminized: “To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements both on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex.” (p. 86) This is what Richard Gordon has called “the homework economy,” wherever it takes place. Haraway goes on: “The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure is made possible (not caused by) the new technologies.” (p. 96) We are asked to consider this situation specifically for women in terms of “the loss of the family (male) wage,” “the collapse of the welfare state,” “[t]he feminization of poverty,” the new “integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy,” and the problem (particularly in third world countries) of “access to land.”
Fredric Jameson, Haraway reminds us, has suggested that, in terms of esthetics, realism goes along with commercial/early industrial capitalism and nationalism; modernism goes along with monopoly capitalism and imperialism; and post-modernism goes along with multinational capitalism and multinationalism. Haraway suggests that added to this tripartite alignment we should further align (1) the patriarchal nuclear family with the first, commercial/early industrial stage; (2) the modern family “mediated (or enforced) by the welfare state and institutions like the family wage,” with a flowering of a-feminist heterosexual ideologies, include their radical versions represented in “Greenwich Village around World War I,” with the second, monopoly capital stage; and (3) “the ‘family’ of the homework economy with its oxymoronic structure of women-headed households and its explosion of feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion of gender itself” (p. 87) with the third, multinational stage.
The problem of the growing feminization of work is one Haraway sees for both developed and underdeveloped countries; she suggests that the general situation that black women have known for a century or more, vis-à-vis the unemployment of black men, now will spread to become the general model for both men and women in the West — if not the world.