Donna Haraway
"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”
From Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
E-Text:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
Secondary: http://www.popcultures.com/theorists/haraway.html
Major Reference:” Cyborgs, Trickster, and
Hermes ”
http://www.users.voicenet.com/~grassie/Fldr.Articles/Cyborgs.html
Outline



Main Argument and General Questions
1. Cyborg and Three sacred boundaries
challenged: AN IRONIC DREAM
2. The Cyborg myth: FRACTURED IDENTITIES






Marxist dialectical materialism and feminist object relation theory critiqued;
3. Informatics of Domination
4. THE 'HOMEWORK ECONOMY' OUTSIDE 'THE
HOME'
5. WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT
6. CYBORGS: A MYTH OF POLITICAL IDENTITY
Critique and Responses
Main Argument and General Questions



Cyborg: “A cyborg is a cybernetic
organism, a hybrid of machine and
organism, a creature of social reality as
well as a creature of fiction.”
Cyborg as a metaphor for feminist groups
defined by affinity but not identification.
Any examples? And possible problems?
How is her stance different from or similar
to that of Judith Butler?
Cyborg



(149/2269)
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.
argument for pleasure in the
confusion of boundaries and for
responsibility in their construction.
(150/2270)
Cyborg (1): definition



(151/2270) we are cyborgs. Ths 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.
The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender
world; it has no truck with bisexuality, preoedipal 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 . . .
The cyborg is resolutely committed to
partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It
is oppositional, utopian, and completely
Cyborg (1): definition



(151/2271)
-- against origins; e.g. the oedipal
project, the Garden of Eden
-- the illegitimate offspring of
militarism and patriarchal capitalism,
not to mention state socialism.
Cyborg (2): examples



Contemporary science fiction
Modern medicine --Cyborg 'sex,'
Cyborg replication,
modern war
Cyborg (3): ambiguous politics

(154/2275) “From one perspective, a
cyborg world is about the final
imposition of a grid of control on the
planet, . . . From another
perspective, a cyborg world might be
about lived social and bodily realities
in which people are not afraid of their
joint kinship with animals and
machines, not afraid of permanently
partial identities and contradictory
standpoints.”
Feminist Cyborg Myth --conclusion

Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of
the maze of dualisms in which we have
explained our bodies and our tools to
ourselves. This is a dream not of a common
language, but of a powerful infidel
heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a
feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear
into the circuits of the supersavers of the
new right. It means both building and
destroying machines, identities, categories,
relationships, space stories. Though both are
bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be
a cyborg than a goddess. (Haraway 1991b,
181/2299).
1. Three Boundaries Challenged


1) between human and animal
Biology and evolutionary theory
(e.g. the primate)
1. Three Boundaries Challenged




2) between animal-human (organism)
and machine --(152/2272-73)
“Our machines are disturbingly lively, and
we ourselves frighteningly inert. ”
-- “the reconceptions of machine and
organism as coded texts through which
we engage in the play of writing and
reading the world.”
Examples?
1. Three Boundaries Challenged





3) physical and non-physical
-- "pop physics books on the
consequences of quantum theory
and the indeterminacy principle
-- silicon chip – writing;
-- miniaturization  ‘clean and
light’ or mobility and fluidity
and spectacular-ization, too.
II. FRACTURED IDENTITIES
Group based on affinity but not unity 
 Challenge the category of ‘female’ p. 2275 76
 Critiques the attempts at taxonomy p. 2277
 Critique of Marxist Feminism p. 2278;
 The unity of women here rests on an
epistemology based on the ontological
structure of 'labour'.
 Critique of radical feminism 2279- the
totalization built into this tale of radical
feminism achieves its end - the unity of
women - by enforcing the experience of and
testimony to radical non-being.
 Taxonomy caricaturized 2281


The Limits of Identification


“The theoretical struggle against unity-throughdomination or unity -through-incorporation
ironically not only undermines the justification
for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism,
positivism, essentialism, scientism, and other
unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic
or natural standpoint."
"What kind of politics could embrace partial,
contradictory, permanently unclosed
constructions of personal and collective selves
and still be faithful, effective and, ironically,
socialist-feminist?" (157/2277)
Informatics of Domination –
fundamental changes in the structure of
the world


Critique and analysis of a new sets of
dualism which marks “transitions from the
comfortable old hierarchical dominations
to the scary new networks I have called
the informatics of domination ”
(161/2281-82)
Biology and communication science: ”In
relation to objects like biotic components,
one must not think in terms of essential
properties, but in terms of design,
boundary constraints, rates of flows,
systems logics, costs of lowering
constraints.” (biological organism 
biotic components p. 2282; 85)
Communications technologies and
biotechnologies


Blurring of the boundaries – p. 2284
between mind, body, etc.  “The
cyborg is a kind of disassembled and
reassembled, postmodern collective and
personal self. This is the self feminists
must code” (163/2284).
recrafting our bodies; the translation of
the world into a problem of coding
Communications technologies and
biotechnologies e.g.



e.g. 1) telephone technology, computer
design, weapons deployment, or data
base construction and maintenance;
2) biotechnologies: molecular genetics,
ecology, sociobiological evolutionary
theory, and immunobiology )
Everyday life -- the translations of labour
into robotics and word processing, sex
into genetic engineering and reproductive
technologies, and mind into artificial
intelligence and decision procedures
THE 'HOMEWORK ECONOMY'


Definition: a restructuring of work that
broadly has the characteristics formerly
ascribed to female jobs, jobs literally done
only by women. Work is being redefined as
both literally female and feminized, whether
performed by men or women. To be
feminized means to be made extremely
vulnerable (2287)
(many women are involved and affected.) 
p. 167/2287 the loss of the family (male) wage (if
they ever had access to this white privilege) and in
the character of their own jobs, which are
becoming capital-intensive; for example, office
work and nursing.
THE 'HOMEWORK ECONOMY‘ (2)
3 stages of capitalism //3 forms of families
(1) the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by the
dichotomy between public and private// the white
bourgeois ideology of separate spheres// AngloAmerican bourgeois feminism;
(2) the modern family mediated (or enforced) by the
welfare state and institutions like the family wage// afeminist heterosexual ideologies
(3) the 'family' of the homework economy // womenheaded households // its explosion of feminisms and
the paradoxical intensification and erosion of gender
itself.
WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED
CIRCUIT

'Networking' is both a feminist
practice and a multinational
corporate strategy -- weaving is for
oppositional cyborgs.
CYBORGS: A MYTH OF POLITICAL
IDENTITY



Cyborg Writing:
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. (2293);
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 animal and machine.
Harding’s Critique

In my view, Haraway's analysis is weakened
by its still excessive containment within
Marxist epistemological assumptions. This can
be seen in her not so hidden assumptions that
we can, indeed, tell 'one true story' about the
political economy; that in principle develop
mental psychologies can make no
contributions to our understandings of the
regularities and underlying causal tendencies
of historical institutions; that we begin to exist
as distinctive social persons only when we get
our first paycheck or, if we are women, when
we first begin adult forms of trading sexual
favors for social benefits (Harding 1986, 194).
Response: "Situated Knowledges: The
Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspective"


"our" problem -- how to have simultaneously an
account of radical historical contingency for all
knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a
critical practice for recognizing our own
"semiotic technologies" for making meanings,
and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful
accounts of a "real" world, one that can be
partially shared and friendly to earth-wide
projects of finite freedom, ad equate material
abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and
limited happiness. . .
. . . Immortality and omnipotence are not our
goals. But we could use some enforceable,
reliable accounts of things not reducible to
power moves and agnostic, high status games of
rhetoric or to scientistic, positivist, arrogance.
(Haraway 1991b, 187 - 188)
Response: "Situated Knowledges: The
Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspective"

Accounts of a 'real' world do not, then,
depend on a logic of 'discovery,' but on a
power-charged social relation of
'conversation.' The world neither speaks
itself nor disappears in favor of a master
decoder. The codes of the world are not
still waiting only to be read. The world is
not raw material for humanisation. . . The
world encountered in knowledge projects
is an active entity (Haraway 1991b, 198).