Rodrigo Paramo

HUSL 6317

A Cyborg Manifesto (1977)

Donna Haraway

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.

Donna Haraways A Cyborg Manifesto works towards an ironic blasphemy blasphemous in its relation to
contemporary understandings of feminism, socialism, and materialism, and ironic in its willingness to embrace
contradictory social values and beliefs. This ironic political strategy is constructed on the back of what Haraway
terms the cyborg. The end goal of such a framing is the imagination of a utopian world without gender the
necessary telos of any political project against traditionally oppressive Western structures. For Haraway, Western
culture has been engaged in a border war between the definitions of organism and machine. This border war is
the center of the political: what is necessary now is taking pleasure in the moments when those boundaries are
confused, while assuming responsibility for their original construction.

Although Haraways cyborg has no easy origin story, it is the inevitable end-goal of a Western politics that values
individuation and independence above all else only the cyborg is truly free. Three boundaries in United States
culture have broken down and opened up the space for Haraways analysis: animal/human, organism/machine, and
physical/non-physical. These divides have rendered certain things newly possible namely, a cyborg world with
two possible manifestations:
a. The final imposition of a grid of control on the planet
b. 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.
For Haraway, choosing between these again misses the point one must embrace both potentialities
simultaneously.

Feminism (and more broadly, politics) today faces a unique problem: in naming ones ideology, exclusion seems
inevitable; essential categories can no longer capture the diversity of individuals experiences, and identity groups
are quickly collapsing as they are revealed to be increasingly convoluted social constructs. These realizations have
seen coalitional movements shift from wholly identity-based politics to ones premised on affinity: related not by
blood but by choice. To demonstrate these new affinities, Haraway here highlights the feminisms of three
theorists:
1. Chela Sandovals oppositional consciousness
2. Katie Kings feminism
3. Catherine MacKinnons radical feminism

Harway from here engages in an expansive discussion of how contemporary politics have re-defined social
concepts: representation becomes simulation, eugenics becomes population control, reproduction becomes
replication, and white capitalist patriarchy becomes the informatics of domination. At the heart of this is the ways
that cyborg semiologies have transformed society, and how this has manifested itself in control strategies applied
across afore-mentioned boundaries. Human beings are now localized in newly technological systems that are no
longer subject to the biopolitics of history.

Recognizing this reveals a flaw in feminist discourses that have assumed certain discourses continue to govern
everyday life: mind/body, animal/human, public/private, men/women. These are all in flux and in fact highlight that
the cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self
feminists must code.
This network is not a literal technologically-determined society it is rather a referent to the social relations that
shape much of everyday life. New technology is, however, leading to the redefinition of work and the
transformation of capitalism into what Richard Gordon terms the homework economy. This is significant
especially in the context of the three stages of capitalism and their ideal familial structures. As work is feminized,
sexuality, class, reproduction and family intersect, and robotics push men out of work, contemporary politics
necessitates alliances of affinity in order to ensure basic survival.

Simultaneously, new technologies are both constructing a world of simulated realities that has eradicated public
life and re-defining the figure of the woman. Societys map thus invokes public spaces concurrently Home,
Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital, Church. These spaces become locations for domination
that require a new politics addressed to handle the rise of technology. Haraway concludes by recognizing the
necessary partial feminine viewpoint: politics must stop desiring a totality and instead reconceptualize what is
available into a radical new standpoint. She concludes with a feminist myth that builds on past authors. Writing is
central to politics, as signification is an access to power that has historically been denied to marginalized/peripheral
populations. Language is thus an important tool to the cyborg where writing is historically reproductive and
individuated, the cyborg and women of color can transform that as they historically have a liminal re-signification
that transforms tools of oppression into ones of liberation.

We find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems,
communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge
of machine and organism, of technical and organic.
Donna Haraway

The differential form of oppositional consciousness is both another mode of these oppositional ideologies and
at the same time a transcendence of them. Functioning on an altogether different register, differential
oppositional consciousness is what makes it possible to identify the previous modes as the politics of the Other-
in-opposition, what permits the practitioner to perceive their structural relatedness, and thus to tactically
utilize or move among them.
Chela Sandoval (183)

Key Terms:

Cyborg: a body that is a hybrid between a machine and an organism; created at the juncture of social reality and
social fiction. Omni-present in contemporary political discourses.

Homework Economy: a restructuring of work that broadly has the characteristics traditionally associated with
tasks done only by women.

Further Reading:

Anzalda, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Print.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Kunzru, Hari. "You Are Cyborg." Wired. Wired, 1 February 1997. Web. 3 February 2015

Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Print.

Sullivan, Shannon, "Intersections Between Pragmatist and Continental Feminism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).