A Cyborg Manifesto

"A Cyborg Manifesto" is an essay written by Donna Haraway and first published in 1985 in the Socialist Review under the title "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s." In it, the concept of the cyborg represents a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating "human" from "animal" and "human" from "machine." Haraway writes: "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."

Given its composition in the mid-1980s, the "Manifesto" also includes many references to the political context of the period, including the geopolitical tensions of the late Cold War, the anti-nuclear protests of the Livermore Action Group, the "Star Wars" missile defense initiative, and the rise of the new right in the United States.

Summary

thumb|Haraway, the author, in 2006

Haraway begins the "Manifesto" by explaining three boundary breakdowns since the 20th century that have allowed for her hybrid, cyborg myth: those between human and animal, animal-human and machine, and physical and non-physical. Evolution, she claims, has blurred the lines between human and animal; 20th-century machines have blurred the lines between natural and artificial; and microelectronics and the political invisibility of cyborgs have blurred the lines of physicality.

Haraway's piece is a novel approach to examining the culture-nature divide. She introduces the potential of a completely new ontology of hybridization of nature and culture through the cyborg, a combination of machine and organism. Haraway's use of the cyborg illustrates her conceptualizations of socialism and feminism in the examinations of dichotomies such as nature/culture, mind/body, and idealism/materialism. Haraway's cyborgs are a blending of imagination and material reality. The cyborg is a dualism, as opposed to a dichotomy; there is value perceived in the confusion of the borders of bounded categories. The need for the divide between culture and nature is no longer relevant, and the cyborg emerges from the blending of that boundary.

Issues with Western patriarchal tenets

Haraway highlights what she sees as the problematic use and justification of historical Western ideologies like patriarchy, colonialism, essentialism, and naturalism (among others). These traditions in turn allow for the problematic formations of taxonomies (and identifications of the Other) and what Haraway explains as "antagonistic dualisms" that order Western discourse. These dualisms, Haraway states, "have all been systematic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals... all [those] constituted as others." She highlights specific problematic dualisms of "self/other,[...] culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive,[...] right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man [among others]". She explains that these dualisms are in competition with one another, creating paradoxical relations of domination (especially between the One and the Other). However, high-tech culture provides a challenge to these antagonistic dualisms.

There is also the idea that cyborgs are beings that have been uncoupled from organic reproduction. Haraway also distinguishes the cyborg from other literary ideas that are lacking in their parentage such as Frankenstein's monster, because that parentage is no longer a relevant or desired connection. Haraway paints the cyborg as the illegitimate offspring of patriarchal capitalism; because that connection isn't sought or is irrelevant, the cyborg is not beholden to its capitalistic, patriarchal, and neoliberal origins. There are social and bodily realities that come about from the joint kinship with both organisms and machines that inform on the identities of cyborgs to be permanently partial identities, incorporating aspects of both. The struggle is to see from both perspectives at once, and can provide an archetype for resistance, as another of Haraway's premises is about the need for unity of people in the face of what she refers to as "world wide intensification of domination."

Cyborg theory

Haraway's cyborg theory rejects the notions of essentialism, proposing instead a chimeric, monstrous world of fusions between animal and machine. Cyborg theory relies on writing as "the technology of cyborgs," and asserts that "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." Instead, Haraway's cyborg calls for a non-essentialized, material-semiotic metaphor capable of uniting diffuse political coalitions along the lines of affinity rather than identity. Following Lacanian feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Haraway addresses the chasm between feminist discourses and the dominant language of Western patriarchy. As Haraway explains, "grammar is politics by other means," and effective politics require speaking in the language of domination. In 2006, a variorum edition of the Manifesto was published in The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments integrating variations from the various versions and returning references and some of the scholarly apparatus that had become separated from the text.

Updates and revisions

Although Haraway's metaphor of the cyborg has been labelled as a post-gender statement, Haraway has clarified her stance on post-genderism in some interviews. She acknowledges that her argument in the "Manifesto" seeks to challenge the necessity for categorization of gender, but does not correlate this argument to post-genderism. She clarifies this distinction because post-genderism is often associated with the discourse of the utopian concept of being beyond masculinity and femininity. Haraway notes that gender constructs are still prevalent and meaningful, but are troublesome and should therefore be eliminated as categories for identity. Despite this, Haraway also recognizes that new feminist scholars "embrace and use the cyborg of the manifesto to do what they want for their own purposes". In this essay, she explores how her new concept of the cyborg goddess, a female figure "capable of inflicting pain and pleasure simultaneously", can be used to make sense of how female representation is shifting towards a more multidimensional stance. Giresunlu builds from Haraway's cyborg because the cyborg goddess goes beyond "offering a way out from [the] duality" and instead provides how spirituality and technology work together to form a complex and more accurate representation of women. When Robert finds himself lost in the feminine space of the basement, an area of the house that was reserved for Louise's domestic duties of sewing and washing, he is forced to fight for his life and reclaim his masculinity. Although he is able to conquer some of his foes and regain his "manhood", the gender lines do not become established again because there is no one to share and implement the gendered power structure with. Robert's transformation presents "an existence in which acceptance and meaning are released from the limitations of patriarchal dualisms", which aligns with Haraway's cyborg. The essay has been described as "controversial" and "viral" in its circulation through multiple academic departments and disciplinary boundaries, contributing to the critical discourse on its claims.

This controversiality was matched by its omnipresence; Jackie Orr, Associate Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs Syracuse University, writes, "It is hard to be a feminist graduate student in the U.S. humanities or social sciences after 1985 and not be touched in some way by the Cyborg Manifesto." The rapid adoption of the article in academic circles also increased the pace of the critical conversation surrounding the work, and in 1990, Haraway felt that the essay had "acquired a surprise half life," which made it "impossible to rewrite" and necessitated revisiting the topic in her subsequent publications.

Many critiques of "A Cyborg Manifesto" focus on a basic level of reader comprehension and writing style, such as Orr's observation that "undergraduate students in a science and technology class find the Cyborg Manifesto curiously relevant but somewhat impenetrable to read." This is corroborated by Helen Merrick and Margret Grebowicz's observation that scientists who reviewed Primate Visions had similar issues, particularly as related to Haraway's use of irony. Judy Wajcman, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, suggests in TechnoFeminism that "the openness of her writing to a variety of readings is intentional," which "can sometimes make Haraway difficult to interpret;" however, it does not seem that Wajcman critiques Haraway's tone for its capability to encompass more possibilities, rather than limit them. Wajcman concludes her chapter "Send in the Cyborgs" on a critical note, claiming that "Certainly, Haraway is much stronger at providing evocative figurations of a new feminist subjectivity than she is at providing guidelines for a practical emancipatory politics."

Critiques of Haraway have also centered on the accessibility of the thematic topics she discusses in her writing, and according to third-wave feminist readings, her work "assumes a reader who is familiar with North American culture," and posits that "readers without the appropriate cultural capital are...likely to find it infuriatingly obscure and impenetrable."

As for the relationships between cyborg and religion, Robert A. Campbell argues that "in spite of Haraway's efforts to move beyond traditional Western dualisms and offer a new hope for women, and by extension of humanity and the world, what she in fact offers is a further legitimation for buying into the not so new American civil religion of high technology." He says that "in spite of what some may view as a radical critique of the present and a potentially frightening prescription for the future, the stark reality about Haraway's 'postmodern reality' is that there is no such thing."

Beyond its presence in academic context, "A Cyborg Manifesto" has also had popular traction including Wireds piece by Hari Kunzru and Mute, BuzzFeed,

as well as Vice. Retrospective articles consistently mark its anniversary.

In 2018, disability rights activist Jillian Weise, who identifies as a cyborg, argued that the "Cyborg Manifesto" erased disabled people and appropriated the aesthetic of disability.

The sonographic fetus as cyborg

Scholar Marilyn Maness Mehaffy writes that the "sonographic fetus is in many ways the ultimate cyborg in that it is 'created' in a space of virtuality that straddles the conventional boundary between an organic body and a digital text." Yet, it is this cyborg that presents a limit to Haraway's post-human theory. The sonographic fetus, as posited by scholar Heather Latimer, "is publicly envisioned as both independent of [its mother's] body and as independent of the sonographic equipment used to read this body. We know that fetal images are depictions, yet the sonogram invokes a documentary-like access to fetuses that makes it easy to ignore this, which in turn can limit the authority and agency of pregnant women." In positioning the fetus as independent, and consequently oppositional, to the pregnant mother, these reproductive technologies "reinscribe stable meanings to the human/machine dualism they supposedly disrupt." which would make Haraway's vision of a regenerative species, unrestricted by heteronormative conceptions of reproduction, unattainable in the sonographic fetus.

References

External links

Full text at The Anarchist Library
Full text with complete footnote references
Full text of original Socialist Review article
Archive of full text hosted by University of Warwick
Audio recording of the manifesto