A Cyborg Manifesto By Donna Haraway From "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991),
pp.149-181. First published in Socialist
Review LXXX. Full text at: http://www.kitchenmedialab.org/download/cyborgmanifesto1.rtf AN IRONIC DREAM OF A
COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT This chapter is an
effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and
materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent
worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking
things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the
secular-religious, evangelical traditions of
Contemporary science
fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who
populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also
full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as
coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the
history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative
baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against
heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction.
Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream
that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a
cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84
billion item in 1984'sUS defence budget. I am making an argument for the
cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an
imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael
Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very
open field. By the late twentieth
century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and
fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The
cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed
image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres
structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions
of 'Western' science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominant
capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of
nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of
reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation
between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border
war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.
This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and
for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute
to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist
mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which
is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The
cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an
oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an
oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in
her unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear
culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters
in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different
logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival. The cyborg is a creature
in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal
symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness
through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher
unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense - a
'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating
dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from
all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the 'Western', humanist
sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror,
represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the
task of individual development and of history, the twin potent The cyborg is resolutely
committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional,
utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the
polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis
based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one
can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the
other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of
polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world.
Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its
father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the
fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished
whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model
of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would
not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of
returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert
the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name
the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They
are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural
feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main
trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring
of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But
illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.
Their fathers, after all, are inessential. I will return to the
science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this chapter, but now I want to
signal three crucial boundary breakdowns that make the following
political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis possible. By the late
twentieth century in
The second leaky
distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic
machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the
machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and
idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history,
according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving,
self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it.
They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that
masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid.
Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly
ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body,
self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that
used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly
lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert
The third distinction is
a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is
very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum
theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific
equivalent to Harlequin romances as a marker of radical change in American
white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject.
Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are
everywhere and they are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart
god, mocking the Father's ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a
surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by
atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power,
and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of
civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism.
Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much
beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV
sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or
hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of
sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals,
electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are
eminently portable, mobile -- a matter of immense human pain in |