On Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto

Donna Haraway’s cyborg narrative attempts to unlock feminist discourse and recode technology that has fused with nature, yielding tools of domination and control. The cyborg concept acts as a catalyst that challenges feminism, socialism and materialism; in the process, it introduces new politics en route to understanding, deconstructing and overcoming manufactured, hegemonic relationships.

At first glance, one may consider a cyborg the simple physical marriage of biology and machine. However, Haraway introduces the cyborg as a physical and psychological construct, or part of our own social and bodily veracity (150). Haraway’s cyborgs are political creatures (150) with the ability to “determine” race, gender and class (161). They are the “illegitimate offspring of militarism, patriarchal capitalism, and state socialism,” and they “are unfaithful to their origins” (151). Cyborgs are persuasive biases, born of social construction and historical connotations (174).

Haraway’s definition of the cyborg supports the position that females are not “naturally” female – nor or they ever easily categorized, because gender generalizations cannot exist after technology’s marriage with (or pollution of) the natural state of femininity. Therefore, there is no clear or natural state of femininity. It could be said that today, all people are cyborgs (regardless of gender). We are all the products of “imagination and reality” (150) and cannot think about ourselves in strict, terms of male/female, black/white or rich/poor, because we are the products of biology and technology.

The concept of the cyborg provides us with the political means to challenge the proliferation and domination of gender, race, and class generalizations (175); it also attempts to redefine “world-wide social relations tied to science and technology” (161). The understanding of the metaphors used by science and technology and their impact on our “being” will help us understand, mitigate and eventually eliminate their complex systems of oppression. Therefore, cyborg myths can be useful tools in shifting metaphors and reclaiming control of our imaginations. These metaphors, according to Haraway (161), include:

Representation ... Simulation
Bourgeois novel, realism ... Science fiction, postmodernism
Organism ... Biotic Component
Depth, integrity ... Surface, boundary
Heat ... Noise
Biology as clinical practice ... Biology as inscription
Physiology ... Communications engineering
Small group ... Subsystem
Perfection ... Optimization
Eugenics ... Population Control
Decadence, Magic Mountain ... Obsolescence, Future Shock
Hygiene ... Stress Management
Microbiology, tuberculosis ... Immunology
Organic division of labour ... Ergonomics/cybernetics of labour
Functional specialization ... Modular construction
Reproduction ... Replication
Organic sex role specialization ... Optimal genetic strategies
Biological determinism ... Evolutionary inertia, constraints
Community ecology ... Ecosystem
Racial chain of being ... Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism
Scientific management in home/factory ... Global factory/Electronid cottage
Family/Market/Factory ... Women in the Integrated Circuit
Family wage ... Comparable worth
Public/Private ... Cyborg citizenship
Nature/Culture ... fields of difference
Co-operation ... Communications enhancement
Freud ... Lacan
Sex ... Genetic engineering
Labour ... Robotics
Mind ... Artificial Intelligence
Second World War ... Star Wars

Throughout history, we have seen how tragedies and threats can act as catalysts for unity and action against their perpetrating source. In this way, the Cyborg Manifesto eliminates the hurdles caused by disparate theoretical beliefs – hurdles that may stifle progress toward the elimination of oppression – by constructing compelling “battle cries” against manufactured assumptions of homogeny and essentialism. It is in this sense that the Cyborg Manifesto is faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism.

Works Cited:

Haraway, Donna. “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

Posted on November 14, 2004 07:03 AM | TrackBack