In Sight The Feminism and Series Editor: Nicholas Mirzoeff on, development and thinking-through of the Visual culture reader Second edition searthers, and general readers. The Nlneteenth-Centwry Visual Culture Reader Amelia Jones Wwlticwtura Art in A/merica ichplas Mirzoeff The Oblect Reader Edited by Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guirs he Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, second edition R
chapter 62 DONNA HARAWAY A CYBORG MANIFESTO Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge,,1991)149-82,243- An ironic dream of a common language for women in the to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps ludi olite t sph oldin ing ff on the construction of the consciousness, the rinat ssibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and live but the bo This is a struggle over life and death, Contemporary science fiction is full of ial reality is an optical illusion cyborgs, of couplings betwe gener stor ode colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C'l, command
A CYBORG MANIFESTO 589 controL-communication-intelligence, an s8 5 billion item in 1984,s us defence budget. I am cannot dream of returning to dust. Perha mapping our social and a The cyb offspring are ofie ism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socia exceedingly unfaithful to their origins, Their fathers, after all,ar ality, the two joined end of this cha lcs-+ alism: the tra fictional (political tific) ne border reproduction, and imagination of human and ity in their separation; indeed, many bran outside salvatien history. Nor does it mark time Biolog 1已 ganisms as objects of knowledge lelar tched in ideological struggle or professional disputes betwee ng monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narrative Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of i diflerent logic of repression, oedia/a borg is a t Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific culture for appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no sense-a"linaP"irony the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of of the "we alating dominations people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the"Western",humanist yth of original uni e uld be haunt the task of individual develo Thistory. cepts of labo m, only mock Ithor to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproducti eam, To think they were otherwi rm sense. This migh and nther distinctions that use oppositional, uto s resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves a technological polis based partly on a revo nships for of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and chical domination are at issu has been damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the eterosexual mate, through its completion a postmodernist strategies, lik he cyborg project as nature-a source of insight and promise of innocence is undermined, probably fatally of Eden; it is not made of mud and The transcendent authorization of interpretation is last, and with it the ontology grou
590 DONNA HARAWAY A CYBORG MANIFESTO 591 sness, that is, some cally med by the"text". who cyborgs will be is a radical From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non- Sofia, 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodil fraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is ives at once bee for litical dir turbed only by riting, power, and tecnology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization. recoupling like to imagine Ain, the livermore e tion Grs pe as a kind spew tools of nd committed to building a cut powt emy se n o th m ugs s ar the as pr menen of the igos rith the ts the chir in my town.(Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear oymh hense human Pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being Fractured identities The ubiquity and invis bility of cyborgs is p why these sunshine-belt machines are so It has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjecti ving in pickup tru oss Europe, blocked more contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and effectively by the witch-weavings of the displaced and so ender, race, and clas so very well, than by the militant labour of old ing female, itself a highly complex category constructed in cor number, pure spirit, C'l, cryptography, and "no more than the minuscule motivate enlistment in th he nimble fingers of"Oriental"women, the old fascination of little Ang with doll's houses e-and for Hmmm购址Ppm:,Nm oppositional strategi en a response to this kind of crisis b here has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition-affinity, not identity. body animal and ma emulations, and physical artefacts associated with "high technology"and seientific culture positional consciousness", born of the skills fo insisted on th my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist world-wit ns, constructs a kind of postmodern of otherness. difference, and domination has never been more ut a slightly perverse shift of perspective might ity. This postmodernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said about other
592 DONNA HARAWAY A CYBORG MANIFESTO 59 passible postmodernisms. Sandoval's oppositional consciousness is about contradictory locations erochronic calendar aphasizes the lack of any essenti on for identifying who utionary subjects might be us appropriation of means to hat ut with the loss of innocence in our origin, te Ga a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative minism look like? What kind of 1 i. contradict ted osed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effectiveand, ple, colour. This identity in history when t confront effectively the dominations of"race, " gender,"sexuality", and"class".I also do onl of the matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely available through the power m,写P ing socialist feminists, discovered(that is, were forced potent formulation for feminists out of the the author of a cosmos called history. As orientalism is deconstructed politically and that"women of colour etically ends sal ng has emphasized the limits of identification and the poetic mechanics and denatured the category "woman"and consciousness of the social lives of"we of identification built into reading"the poem", that generative core of cultural feminism. King riticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different"moments"or 时 of wage labour wh山boh由可 moves, Marxian socialism is rooted in an mize the womens moveme his(sic) product. an the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake minist history so that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting marginalized, usually by building an explicit tegory permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge of subjugation an ntology om official women's like wopen eminent. The politics of race and cultur achievement of King nd Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identificati ty-through-dominatie ept of labour. The unity of k th think cist-ferminisms have also their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable all"epistemologies"as Western in It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary standpoints, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding