Why, I’ve wondered for a good dozen years now, shouldn’t socialism be the world mode with, now and again, moments of capitalism arising (or even being encouraged) temporarily to combat local socialist breakdowns?
At any rate, in Haraway’s reading of science fiction writers, I feel more conviction. In her survey Haraway shows a (at least to me) comforting sensitivity to the importance of writing in marginal literatures and paraliteratures. She explains:
Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a- time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other… Writing is preeminently the technology of cyborgs [she continues a page later], etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animals and machines. These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of “Western” identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind… [And, still further on, she declares gloriously: ] cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many times a “Western” commentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by “Western” technology, by writing. (pp. 93–96)
It is shortly after this that we encounter Haraway’s reading of Helva’s story with which we began:
Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang explored the consciousness of a cyborg, hybrid of girl’s brain and complex machinery, formed after the birth of a severely handicapped child. Gender, sexuality, embodiment, stilclass="underline" all were reconstituted in the story. Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From the seventeenth century till now, machines could be animated — given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and mental capacities. Or organisms could be mechanized — reduced to body understood as resource of mind. These machine/organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. (p. 97)
This becomes the entrance point in her consideration of a range of other science fiction texts, most importantly Joanna Russ’s The Adventures of Alyx and The Female Man, most generously a work of my own, followed by discussions of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed and Vonda McIntyre’s Superluminal and its rich world of “protean transformation and connection.”
The conclusion of her conclusion is a meditation on monsters. “There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies,” (p. 99) Haraway writes. True. But I hope in the central work of this consideration I’ve suggested some of the things we may remain blind to in their friendship if we do not consider what may be missing from them as enemies. In the midst of this monstrous meditation, there is an oddly satisfactory challenge to the notion of the everyday — of “dailiness”—as women’s traditional preserve. And it is here that Haraway manifests — I almost want to say, at last — the bipolar meaning of “construct” I read into her text so long ago, to recomplicate that reading (if we choose to work at it) even further: “There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction” (p. 100, italics mine: my gift to Haraway, her gift to me). Cyborgs, she goes on to say, are not about rebirth, with its originary, Edenic presuppositions, but about regeneration — with its ever-present possibility of partiality, deformation, monstrosity.
Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: (1) the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; (2) taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti- science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all our parts. (p. 100)
Yes — if we’re willing to work at reading, to read at work. But cyborg imagery will not do the work, will not promote the necessary analytic vigilance, for us. And it is work that Haraway appeals to in her final cadences: “This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia… It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, spaces, stories.” (p. 101) In this power, in this building, in this destroying, is there pleasure? Haraway’s last sentence: “Though both are bound in a spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” (p. 101)
Doesn’t a preference sign, at some level, pleasure?
Here something is missing.
As I conclude this minimal bit of work — of interpretive vigilance, of hermeneutic violence, of pleasure, of aggression — my eye lifts from the text and again strays, glances about, snags a moment at a horizon, a boundary that does not so much contain a self, an identity, a unity, a center and origin which gazes out and defines that horizon as the horizon is defined by it; rather that horizon suggests a plurality of possible positions within it, positions which allow a number of events to transpire, move near, pass through, impinge on each other, take off from one another, some of which events are that an eye looks, a voice speaks, a hand writes. When I try to articulate the positions from which I write, as a male, as a black male, as a gay black male, as a gay black male whose work is the writing of para- literary fictions, of which this, as you read it, may be one — it seems only reasonable someone else might protest: “Who else would cite, would mark, would take on and torture so this particular text?”
The question, then, is: How has Haraway’s text survived my violence?
(I call that violence ‘aggressive,’ but is it oppositional? Blind, yes. Ignorant, probably. But how is that aggression positioned?)
In this consideration I have cut her text up, cut bits of it out, compressed, paraphrased, brought together dispersed bits, constrained and contorted her argument… to what ends?
Clearly, there is no survival here unless the reader turn to Haraway’s manifesto, to do her or his own work, which alone can restructure mine.
From a position, with its rigors as well as its accidentals, I read. I write. I work.
From another position, it would seem that something is missing…
Thus I pass a text — a simulation of an interpretation — from one position to another, from this borrowed position it would be so inadequate to call mine (alone) to one that it is too suspicious to call yours (alone), as it was passed on to me, as it will pass on from you.
Perhaps this is only a simulation of a passage.
By reading, do we halt it?
By reading, do we move it along? Do we move along it?
But, now, we’d best let Helva have back her screw and get on with her work.
Pace, and good luck, Ms. Haraway, with yours.