A Cyborg Manifesto

'A Cyborg Manifesto' is an essay written by Donna Haraway and published in 1985 in the Socialist Review. In it, the concept of the cyborg is a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating 'human' from 'animal' and 'human' from 'machine'. She 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.' 'A Cyborg Manifesto' is an essay written by Donna Haraway and published in 1985 in the Socialist Review. In it, the concept of the cyborg is a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating 'human' from 'animal' and 'human' from 'machine'. She 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.' The 'Manifesto' criticizes traditional notions of feminism, particularly feminist focuses on identity politics, and encourages instead coalition through affinity. She uses the figure of the cyborg to urge feminists to move beyond the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics; the 'Manifesto' is considered one of the milestones in the development of feminist posthumanist theory. Haraway begins the 'Manifesto' by explaining three boundary breakdowns since the 20th century that have allowed for her hybrid, cyborg myth: the breakdown of boundaries between human and animal, animal-human and machine, and physical and non-physical. Evolution has blurred the lines between human and animal; 20th century machines have made ambiguous the lines between natural and artificial; and microelectronics and the political invisibility of cyborgs have confused the lines of physicality. Haraway highlights the problematic use and justification of Western traditions 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 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. 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's work 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. As she details in a chart of the paradigmatic shifts from modern to postmodern epistemology within the Manifesto, the unified human subject of identity has shifted to the hybridized posthuman of technoscience, from 'representation' to 'simulation', 'bourgeois novel' to 'science fiction', 'reproduction' to 'replication', and 'white capitalist patriarchy' to 'informatics of domination'. While Haraway's 'ironic dream of a common language' is inspired by Irigaray's argument for a discourse other than patriarchy, she rejects Irigaray's essentializing construction of woman-as-not-male to argue for a linguistic community of situated, partial knowledges in which no one is innocent. Haraway takes issue with some traditional feminists, reflected in statements describing how 'women more than men somehow sustain daily life, and so have a privileged epistemological (relating to the theory of knowledge) position potentially.' The views of traditional feminism operate under the totalizing assumptions that all men are one way, and women another, whereas 'a cyborg theory of wholes and parts,' does not desire to explain things in total theory. Haraway suggests that feminists should move beyond naturalism and essentialism, criticizing feminist tactics as 'identity politics' that victimize those excluded, and she proposes that it is better strategically to confuse identities. Her criticism mainly focuses on socialist and radical feminism. The former, she writes, achieves 'to expand the category of labour to what (some) women did' Socialist feminism does not naturalize but rather builds a unity that was non-existent before -namely the woman worker. On the other hand, radical feminism, according to Catherine MacKinnon, describes a world in which the woman only exists in opposition to the man. The concept of woman is socially constructed within the patriarchal structure of society and women only exist because men have made them exist. The woman as a self does not exist. Haraway criticizes both when writing that 'my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice' and 'MacKinnon's intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the 'essential' non-existence of women is not reassuring' (299). Haraway also indirectly critiques white feminism by highlighting the struggles of women of color: she suggests that a woman of color 'might be understood as a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical layerings of her 'biomythography.''