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Title: A Cyborg Manifesto Author: Donna Haraway Date: 1991 Language: en Topics: cyborg, cybernetics, transhumanism, Anarcho-Transhuman, anarcho-transhumanism, socialism, feminism, transfeminism, anti-humanism, dialectics, anarcha-feminism, not-anarchist Source: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149â181. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html][www.stanford.edu]] [[https://web.archive.org/web/20120214194015/http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgMan
Circuit
This essay 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. Blasphemy has
always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better
stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical
traditions of United States politics, including the politics of
socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority
within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is
not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into
larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding
incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true.
Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy
and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within
socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is
the image of the 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. Social
reality is lived social relations, our most important political
construction, a world-changing fiction. The international womenâs
movements have constructed âwomenâs experienceâ, as well as uncovered or
discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction
and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the
construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of
oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and
lived experience that changes what counts as womenâs experience in the
late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the
boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical
illusion.
Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgsâcreatures simultaneously
animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.
Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism
and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a
power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg âsexâ
restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and
invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism).
Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern
production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that
makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a
cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence,
an $84 billion item in 1984âs US defence budget. I am making an argument
for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as
an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael
Foucaultâs biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a
very open field.
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all
chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in
short, we are cyborgs. This 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. In the traditions of âWesternâ science and
politicsâthe tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the
tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as
resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction
of the self from the reflections of the otherâthe relation between
organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war
have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.
This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries
and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to
contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist,
non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world
without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also
a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation
history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to
heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or
post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her unpublished
manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture,
Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in
cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different
logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival.[1]
The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with
bisexuality, pre-oedipal 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 in the Western sense â a âfinalâ irony since the cyborg is
also the awful apocalyptic telos of the âWestâsâ escalating dominations
of abstract individuation, an ultimate selfâuntied at last from all
dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the âWesternâ, humanist
sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror,
represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate,
the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths
inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary
Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts
of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot
of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted
in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature.[2] The cyborg skips
the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western
sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of
its teleology as Star Wars.
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 polls 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. Unlike the hopes of Frankensteinâs monster,
the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration
of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate,
through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. 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. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the
apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name
the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos.
They are wary of holism, but needy for connectionâthey seem to have a
natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party.
The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the
illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to
mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often
exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are
inessential.
I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this
chapter, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary breakdowns that
make the following political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis
possible. By the late twentieth century in United States scientific
culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached.
The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into
amusement parksâlanguage tool use, social behaviour, mental events,
nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal.
And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed,
many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of
human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not
irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted
recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and
culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries
have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge
and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace
re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life
and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian
creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.
Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in
scientific culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is
much room for radical political people to contest the meanings of the
breached boundary.[3] The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the
boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a
walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal
disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status
in this cycle of marriage exchange.
The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and
machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the
spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the
dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a
dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But
basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous.
They could not achieve manâs dream, only mock it. They were not man, an
author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist
reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we
are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly
ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body,
self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions
that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are
disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
Technological determination is only one ideological space opened up by
the reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts through which
we engage in the play of writing and reading the world.
[4]âTextualizationâ of everything in poststructuralist, postmodernist
theory has been damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its
utopian disregard for the lived relations of domination that ground the
âplayâ of arbitrary reading.[5] It is certainly true that postmodernist
strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (for
example, the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In
short, the certainty of what counts as natureâa source of insight and
promise of innocenceâis undermined, probably fatally. The transcendent
authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology
grounding âWesternâ epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or
faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract existence, like the
accounts of technological determinism destroying âmanâ by the âmachineâ
or âmeaningful political actionâ by the âtextâ. Who cyborgs will be is a
radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees
and artefacts have politics, so why shouldnât we (de Waal, 1982; Winner,
1980)?
The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between
physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on
the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a
kind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances[6] as a
marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it
wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are
quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they
are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking
the Fatherâs ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a surface
for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic
noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and
technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of
civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of
mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is
not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles.
Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with
the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best
machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they
are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum,
and these machines are eminently portable, mobileâa matter of immense
human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid,
being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.
The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these
sunshine-belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see
politically as materially. They are about consciousnessâor its
simulation.[7] They are floating signifiers moving in pickup trucks
across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch-weavings of the
displaced and so unnatural Greenham women, who read the cyborg webs of
power so very well, than by the militant labour of older masculinist
politics, whose natural constituency needs defence jobs. Ultimately the
âhardestâ science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, the
realm of pure number, pure spirit, C3I, cryptography, and the
preservation of potent secrets. The new machines are so clean and light.
Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific
revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society.
The diseases evoked by these clean machines are âno moreâ than the
minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, âno moreâ
than the experience of stress. The nimble fingers of âOrientalâ women,
the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with dollâs
houses, womenâs enforced attention to the small take on quite new
dimensions in this world. There might be a cyborg Alice taking account
of these new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg
women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail[8]
whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies.
So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and
dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one
part of needed political work. One of my premises is that most American
socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal
and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic
formulations, and physical artefacts associated with âhigh technologyâ
and scientific culture. From One-Dimensional-Man (Marcuse, 1964) to The
Death of Nature (Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by
progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and
recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance.
Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to
resist world-wide intensification of domination has never been more
acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable
us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and
pleasure in technologically mediated societies.
From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a
grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a
Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final
appropriation of womenâs bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia,
1984). 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. The political struggle
is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both
dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.
Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed
monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present
political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for
resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action
Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically
converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the
tools of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political
form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders,
perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the
state. Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity group in my town.
(Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one
chemical nuclear group for another, avidly.)[9]
It has become difficult to name oneâs feminism by a single adjectiveâor
even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness of
exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory,
partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social
and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the
basis for belief in âessentialâ unity. There is nothing about teeing
âfemaleâ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as
âbeingâ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in
contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices.
Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by
the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities
of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as âusâ in my
own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent
political myth called âusâ, and what could motivate enlistment in this
collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention
among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of
woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of womenâs dominations of each
other. For meâand for many who share a similar historical location in
white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North American,
mid-adult bodiesâthe sources of a crisis in political identity are
legion. The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has
been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches
for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition
of another response through coalitionâaffinity, not identity.[10]
Chela Sandoval (n.d., 1984), from a consideration of specific historical
moments in the formation of the new political voice called women of
colour, has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called
âoppositional consciousnessâ, born of the skills for reading webs of
power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of
race, sex, or class. âWomen of colorâ, a name contested at its origins
by those whom it would incorporate, as well as a historical
consciousness marking systematic breakdown of all the signs of Man in
âWesternâ traditions, constructs a kind of postmodernist identity out of
otherness, difference, and specificity. This postmodernist identity is
fully political, whatever might be said about other possible
postmodernisms. Sandovalâs oppositional consciousness is about
contradictory locations and heterochronic calendars, not about
relativisms and pluralisms.
Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying
who is a woman of colour. She notes that the definition of the group has
been by conscious appropriation of negation. For example, a Chicana or
US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black
person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of
negative identities, left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial
categories called âwomen and blacksâ, who claimed to make the important
revolutions. The category âwomanâ negated all non-white women; âblackâ
negated all non-black people, as well as all black women. But there was
also no âsheâ, no singularity, but a sea of differences among US women
who have affirmed their historical identity as US women of colour. This
identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot
affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but
only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political
kinship.[11] Unlike the âwomanâ of some streams of the white womenâs
movement in the United States, there is no naturalization of the matrix,
or at least this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely available through
the power of oppositional consciousness.
Sandovalâs argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for
feminists out of the world-wide development of anti-colonialist
discourse; that is to say, discourse dissolving the âWestâ and its
highest productâthe one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman; man,
that is, the author of a cosmos called history. As orientalism is
deconstructed politically and semiotically, the identities of the
occident destabilize, including those of feminists.[12] Sandoval argues
that âwomen of colourâ have a chance to build an effective unity that
does not replicate the imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects
of previous Marxisms and feminisms which had not faced the consequences
of the disorderly polyphony emerging from decolonization.
Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and the
political/ poetic mechanics of identification built into reading âthe
poemâ, that generative core of cultural feminism. King criticizes the
persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different
âmomentsâ or âconversationsâ in feminist practice to taxonomize the
womenâs movement to make oneâs own political tendencies appear to be the
telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so
that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types
persisting over time, especially those typical units called radical,
liberal, and socialist-feminism. Literally, all other feminisms are
either incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit
ontology and epistemology.[13] Taxonomies of feminism produce
epistemologies to police deviation from official womenâs experience. And
of course, âwomenâs cultureâ, like women of colour, is consciously
created by mechanisms inducing affinity. The rituals of poetry, music,
and certain forms of academic practice have been pre-eminent. The
politics of race and culture in the US womenâs movements are intimately
interwoven. The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how
to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of
appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification.
The theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-domination
or unity-through-incorporation ironically not only undermines the
justifications for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism,
essentialism, scientism, and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for
an organic or natural standpoint. I think that radical and
socialist/Marxist-feminisms have also undermined their/our own
epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in
imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all
âepistemologiesâ as Western political people have known them fail us in
the task to build effective affinities.
It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary
stand-points, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to
changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of
identification. The acid tools of postmodernist theory and the
constructive tools of ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects
might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves in the
interests of survival. We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means
to have a historically constituted body. But with the loss of innocence
in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our
politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naiveté of innocence. But
what would another political myth for socialist-feminism look like? What
kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently
unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be
faithful, effectiveâand, ironically, socialist-feminist?
I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need
for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of âraceâ,
âgenderâ, âsexualityâ, and âclassâ. I also do not know of any other time
when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible.
None of âusâ have any longer the symbolic or material capability of
dictating the shape of reality to any of âthemâ. Or at least âweâ cannot
claim innocence from practicing such dominations. White women, including
socialist feminists, discovered (that is, were forced kicking and
screaming to notice) the non-innocence of the category âwomanâ. That
consciousness changes the geography of all previous categories; it
denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein. Cyborg feminists
have to argue that âweâ do not want any more natural matrix of unity and
that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence
on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage.
But the constructed revolutionary subject must give
late-twentieth-century people pause as well. In the fraying of
identities and in the reflexive strategies for constructing them, the
possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the
day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history.
Both Marxist/socialist-feminisms and radical feminisms have
simultaneously naturalized and denatured the category âwomanâ and
conscious-ness of the social lives of âwomenâ. Perhaps a schematic
caricature can highlight both kinds of moves. Marxian socialism is
rooted in an analysis of wage labour which reveals class structure. The
consequence of the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the
worker is dissociated from his (sic) product. Abstraction and illusion
rule in knowledge, domination rules in practice. Labour is the
pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome
illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the
world. Labour is the humanizing activity that makes man; labour is an
ontological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the
knowledge of subjugation and alienation.
In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism advanced by allying itself
with the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. The main achievement of
both Marxist feminists and socialist feminists was to expand the
category of labour to accommodate what (some) women did, even when the
wage relation was subordinated to a more comprehensive view of labour
under capitalist patriarchy. In particular, womenâs labour in the
household and womenâs activity as mothers generally (that is,
reproduction in the socialist-feminist sense), entered theory on the
authority of analogy to the Marxian concept of labour. The unity of
women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological structure
of âlabourâ. Marxist/socialist-feminism does not ânaturalizeâ unity; it
is a possible achievement based on a possible standpoint rooted in
social relations. The essentializing move is in the ontological
structure of labour or of its analogue, womenâs activity.[14] The
inheritance of Marxian humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, is
the difficulty for me. The contribution from these formulations has been
the emphasis on the daily responsibility of real women to build unities,
rather than to naturalize them.
Catherine MacKinnonâs (1982, 1987) version of radical feminism is itself
a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies
of Western theories of identity grounding action.[15] It is factually
and politically wrong to assimilate all of the diverse âmomentsâ or
âconversationsâ in recent womenâs politics named radical feminism to
MacKinnonâs version. But the teleological logic of her theory shows how
an epistemology and ontologyâincluding their negationsâerase or police
difference. Only one of the effects of MacKinnonâs theory is the
rewriting of the history of the polymorphous field called radical
feminism. The major effect is the production of a theory of experience,
of womenâs identity, that is a kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary
standpoints. That is, the totalization built into this tale of radical
feminism achieves its endâthe unity of womenâby enforcing the experience
of and testimony to radical non-being. As for the Marxist/ socialist
feminist, consciousness is an achievement, not a natural fact. And
MacKinnonâs theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into
humanist revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical
reductionism.
MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a different
analytical strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure of
class, but at the structure of sex/gender and its generative
relationship, menâs constitution and appropriation of women sexually.
Ironically, MacKinnonâs âontologyâ constructs a non-subject, a
non-being. Anotherâs desire, not the selfâs labour, is the origin of
âwomanâ. She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that enforces
what can count as âwomenâsâ experienceâanything that names sexual
violation, indeed, sex itself as far as âwomenâ can be concerned.
Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness;
that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not.
Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism still has the
epistemological status of labour; that is to say, the point from which
an analysis able to contribute to changing the world must flow. But
sexual objectification, not alienation, is the consequence of the
structure of sex/gender. In the realm of knowledge, the result of sexual
objectification is illusion and abstraction. However, a woman is not
simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as
a subject, or even potential subject, since she owes her existence as a
woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted by anotherâs desire is
not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the
labourer from his product.
MacKinnonâs radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme;
it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any other
womenâs political speech and action. It is a totalization producing what
Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doingâfeministsâ
consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of menâs
desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of
identity can firmly ground womenâs unity. But in solving the problem of
the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist
purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of
experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their
unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made
visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, MacKinnonâs intentional
erasure of all difference through the device of the âessentialâ
non-existence of women is not reassuring.
In my taxonomy, which like any other taxonomy is a re-inscription of
history, radical feminism can accommodate all the activities of women
named by socialist feminists as forms of labour only if the activity can
somehow be sexualized. Reproduction had different tones of meanings for
the two tendencies, one rooted in labour, one in sex, both calling the
consequences of domination and ignorance of social and personal reality
âfalse consciousnessâ.
Beyond either the difficulties or the contributions in the argument of
any one author, neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view have
tended to embrace the status of a partial explanation; both were
regularly constituted as totalities. Western explanation has demanded as
much; how else could the âWesternâ author incorporate its others? Each
tried to annex other forms of domination by expanding its basic
categories through analogy, simple listing, or addition. Embarrassed
silence about race among white radical and socialist feminists was one
major, devastating political consequence. History and polyvocality
disappear into political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies.
There was no structural room for race (or for much else) in theory
claiming to reveal the construction of the category woman and social
group women as a unified or totalizable whole. The structure of my
caricature looks like this:
socialist feminism â structure of class // wage labour // alienation
labour, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race
radical feminism â structure of gender // sexual appropriation //
objectification
sex, by analogy labour, by extension reproduction, by addition race
In another context, the French theorist, Julia Kristeva, claimed women
appeared as a historical group after the Second World War, along with
groups like youth.[16] Her dates are doubtful; but we are now accustomed
to remembering that as objects of knowledge and as historical actors,
âraceâ did not always exist, âclassâ has a historical genesis, and
âhomosexualsâ are quite junior. It is no accident that the symbolic
system of the family of manâand so the essence of womanâbreaks up at the
same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are
unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex. âAdvanced capitalismâ
is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment. In the
âWesternâ sense, the end of man is at stake. It is no accident that
woman disintegrates into women in our time. Perhaps socialist feminists
were not substantially guilty of producing essentialist theory that
suppressed womenâs particularity and contradictory interests. I think we
have been, at least through unreflective participation in the logics,
languages, and practices of white humanism and through searching for a
single ground of domination to secure our revolutionary voice. Now we
have less excuse. But in the consciousness of our failures, we risk
lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of
making partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are
poles of world historical systems of domination. âEpistemologyâ is about
knowing the difference.
In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I would
like to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture indebted to
socialist and feminist principles of design. The frame for my sketch is
set by the extent and importance of rearrangements in world-wide social
relations tied to science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted
in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and
gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and
scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a
movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous,
information systemâfrom all work to all play, a deadly game.
Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be
expressed in the following chart of transitions from the comfortable old
hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the
informatics of domination:
This list suggests several interesting things.[17] First, the objects on
the right-hand side cannot be coded as ânaturalâ, a realization that
subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well. We cannot
go back ideologically or materially. Itâs not just that âgodâ is dead;
so is the âgoddessâ. Or both are revivified in the worlds charged with
microelectronic and biotechnological politics. 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. Sexual
reproduction is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs
and benefits as a function of the system environment. Ideologies of
sexual reproduction can no longer reasonably call on notions of sex and
sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms and
families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically
corporate executives reading Playboy and anti-porn radical feminists
will make strange bedfellows in jointly unmasking the irrationalism.
Likewise for race, ideologies about human diversity have to be
formulated in terms of frequencies of parameters, like blood groups or
intelligence scores. It is âirrationalâ to invoke concepts like
primitive and civilized. For liberals and radicals, the search for
integrated social systems gives way to a new practice called
âexperimental ethnographyâ in which an organic object dissipates in
attention to the play of writing. At the level of ideology, we see
translations of racism and colonialism into languages of development and
under-development, rates and constraints of modernization. Any objects
or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and
reassembly; no ânaturalâ architectures constrain system design. The
financial districts in all the worldâs cities, as well as the
export-processing and free-trade zones, proclaim this elementary fact of
âlate capitalismâ. The entire universe of objects that can be known
scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications
engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who
would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies.
One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary
conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundariesâand not on
the integrity of natural objects. âIntegrityâ or âsincerityâ of the
Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems. For
example, control strategies applied to womenâs capacities to give birth
to new human beings will be developed in the languages of population
control and maximization of goal achievement for individual
decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of
rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any
other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture
whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No
objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can
be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code,
can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Exchange
in this world transcends the universal translation effected by
capitalist markets that Marx analysed so well. The privileged pathology
affecting all kinds of components in this universe is
stressâcommunications breakdown (Hogness, 1983). The cyborg is not
subject to Foucaultâs biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much
more potent field of operations.
This kind of analysis of scientific and cultural objects of knowledge
which have appeared historically since the Second World War prepares us
to notice some important inadequacies in feminist analysis which has
proceeded as if the organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in
âthe Westâ since Aristotle still ruled. They have been cannibalized, or
as Zoe Sofia (Sofoulis) might put it, they have been âtechno-digestedâ.
The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and
machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women,
primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. The actual
situation of women is their integration/ exploitation into a world
system of production/reproduction and communication called the
informatics of domination. The home, workplace, market, public arena,
the body itselfâall can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite,
polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and
othersâconsequences that themselves are very different for different
people and which make potent oppositional international movements
difficult to imagine and essential for survival. One important route for
reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and
practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology,
including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our
imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled,
postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must
code.
Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools
recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social
relations for women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses
can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments,
of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also
be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is
permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical
systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies,
including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually
constitute each other.
Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are
constructed by a common moveâthe translation of the world into a problem
of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to
instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted
to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.
In communications sciences, the translation of the world into a problem
in coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic
(feedback-controlled) systems theories applied to telephone technology,
computer design, weapons deployment, or data base construction and
maintenance. In each case, solution to the key questions rests on a
theory of language and control; the key operation is determining the
rates, directions, and probabilities of flow of a quantity called
information. The world is subdivided by boundaries differentially
permeable to information. Information is just that kind of quantifiable
element (unit, basis of unity) which allows universal translation, and
so unhindered instrumental power (called effective communication). The
biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication. Any
system breakdown is a function of stress. The fundamentals of this
technology can be condensed into the metaphor C31, command-control
communication-intelligence, the militaryâs symbol for its operations
theory.
In modern biologies, the translation of the world into a problem in
coding can be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology,
sociobiological evolutionary theory, and immunobiology. The organism has
been translated into problems of genetic coding and read-out.
Biotechnology, a writing technology, informs research broadly.[18] In a
sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving
way to biotic components, i.e., special kinds of information-processing
devices. The analogous moves in ecology could be examined by probing the
history and utility of the concept of the ecosystem. Immunobiology and
associated medical practices are rich exemplars of the privilege of
coding and recognition systems as objects of knowledge, as constructions
of bodily reality for us. Biology here is a kind of cryptography.
Research is necessarily a kind of intelligence activity. Ironies abound.
A stressed system goes awry; its communication processes break down; it
fails to recognize the difference between self and other. Human babies
with baboon hearts evoke national ethical perplexityâfor animal rights
activists at least as much as for the guardians of human purity. In the
US gay men and intravenous drug users are the âprivilegedâ victims of an
awful immune system disease that marks (inscribes on the body) confusion
of boundaries and moral pollution (Treichler, 1987).
But these excursions into communications sciences and biology have been
at a rarefied level; there is a mundane, largely economic reality to
support my claim that these sciences and technologies indicate
fundamental transformations in the structure of the world for us.
Communications technologies depend on electronics. Modern states,
multinational corporations, military power, welfare state apparatuses,
satellite systems, political processes, fabrication of our imaginations,
labour-control systems, medical constructions of our bodies, commercial
pornography, the international division of labour, and religious
evangelism depend intimately upon electronics. Micro-electronics is the
technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals.
Microelectronics mediates 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 new biotechnologies concern more than human
reproduction. Biology as a powerful engineering science for redesigning
materials and processes has revolutionary implications for industry,
perhaps most obvious today in areas of fermentation, agriculture, and
energy. Communications sciences and biology are constructions of
natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between
machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on
very intimate terms. The âmultinationalâ material organization of the
production and reproduction of daily life and the symbolic organization
of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem
equally implicated. The boundary-maintaining images of base and
superstructure, public and private, or material and ideal never seemed
more feasible.
I have used Rachel Grossmanâs (1980) image of women in the integrated
circuit to name the situation of women in a world so intimately
restructured through the social relations of science and technology.[19]
I used the odd circumlocution, the social relations of science and
technology, to indicate that we are not dealing with a technological
determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured
relations among people. But the phrase should also indicate that science
and technology provide fresh sources of power, that we need fresh
sources of analysis and political action (Latour, 1984). Some of the
rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated
social relations can make socialist-feminism more relevant to effective
progressive politics.
The âNew Industrial Revolutionâ is producing a new world-wide working
class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities. The extreme mobility
of capital and the emerging international division of labour are
intertwined with the emergence of new collectivities, and the weakening
of familiar groupings. These developments are neither gender- nor
race-neutral. White men in advanced industrial societies have become
newly vulnerable to permanent job loss, and women are not disappearing
from the job rolls at the same rates as men. It is not simply that women
in Third World countries are the preferred labour force for the
science-based multinationals in the export-processing sectors,
particularly in electronics. The picture is more systematic and involves
reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption, and production. In the
prototypical Silicon Valley, many womenâs lives have been structured
around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate
realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare,
distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community,
a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as
they age. The ethnic and racial diversity of women in Silicon Valley
structures a microcosm of conflicting differences in culture, family,
religion, education, and language.
Richard Gordon has called this new situation the âhomework economyâ.[20]
Although he includes the phenomenon of literal homework emerging in
connection with electronics assembly, Gordon intends âhomework economyâ
to name 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; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve
labour force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to some
arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited
work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out
of place, and reducible to sex. Deskilling is an old strategy newly
applicable to formerly privileged workers. However, the homework economy
does not refer only to large-scale deskilling, nor does it deny that new
areas of high skill are emerging, even for women and men previously
excluded from skilled employment. Rather, the concept indicates that
factory, home, and market are integrated on a new scale and that the
places of women are crucialâand need to be analysed for differences
among women and for meanings for relations between men and women in
various situations.
The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure is
made possible by (not caused by) the new technologies. The success of
the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, menâs unionized jobs
is deaf to the power of the new communications technologies to integrate
and control labour despite extensive dispersion and decentralization.
The consequences of the new technologies are felt by women both in 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 new economic and technological arrangements are also related to the
collapsing welfare state and the ensuing intensification of demands on
women to sustain daily life for themselves as well as for men, children,
and old people. The feminization of povertyâgenerated by dismantling the
welfare state, by the homework economy where stable jobs become the
exception, and sustained by the expectation that womenâs wages will not
be matched by a male income for the support of childrenâhas become an
urgent focus. The causes of various women-headed households are a
function of race, class, or sexuality; but their increasing generality
is a ground for coalitions of women on many issues. That women regularly
sustain daily life partly as a function of their enforced status as
mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall
capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new. The particular
pressure, for example, on US black women, who have achieved an escape
from (barely) paid domestic service and who now hold clerical and
similar jobs in large numbers, has large implications for continued
enforced black poverty with employment. Teenage women in industrializing
areas of the Third World increasingly find themselves the sole or major
source of a cash wage for their families, while access to land is ever
more problematic. These developments must have major consequences in the
psychodynamics and politics of gender and race.
Within the framework of three major stages of capitalism (commercial/
early industrial, monopoly, multinational)âtied to nationalism,
imperialism, and multinationalism, and related to Jamesonâs three
dominant aesthetic periods of realism, modernism, and postmodernismâI
would argue that specific forms of families dialectically relate to
forms of capital and to its political and cultural concomitants.
Although lived problematically and unequally, ideal forms of these
families might be schematized as (1) the patriarchal nuclear family,
structured by the dichotomy between public and private and accompanied
by the white bourgeois ideology of separate spheres and
nineteenth-century Anglo-American bourgeois feminism; (2) the modern
family mediated (or enforced) by the welfare state and institutions like
the family wage, with a flowering of a-feminist heterosexual ideologies,
including their radical versions represented in Greenwich Village around
the First World War; and (3) the âfamilyâ of the homework economy with
its oxymoronic structure of women-headed households and its explosion of
feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion of gender
itself.
This is the context in which the projections for world-wide structural
unemployment stemming from the new technologies are part of the picture
of the homework economy. As robotics and related technologies put men
out of work in âdevelopedâ countries and exacerbate failure to generate
male jobs in Third World âdevelopmentâ, and as the automated office
becomes the rule even in labour-surplus countries, the feminization of
work intensifies. Black women in the United States have long known what
it looks like to face the structural underemployment (âfeminizationâ) of
black men, as well as their own highly vulnerable position in the wage
economy. It is no longer a secret that sexuality, reproduction, family,
and community life are interwoven with this economic structure in myriad
ways which have also differentiated the situations of white and black
women. Many more women and men will contend with similar situations,
which will make cross-gender and race alliances on issues of basic life
support (with or without jobs) necessary, not just mice.
The new technologies also have a profound effect on hunger and on food
production for subsistence world-wide. Rae Lessor Blumberg (1983)
estimates that women produce about 50 per cent of the worldâs
subsistence food.[21] Women are excluded generally from benefiting from
the increased high-tech commodification of food and energy crops, their
days are made more arduous because their responsibilities to provide
food do not diminish, and their reproductive situations are made more
complex. Green Revolution technologies interact with other high-tech
industrial production to alter gender divisions of labour and
differential gender migration patterns.
The new technologies seem deeply involved in the forms of
âprivatizationâ that Ros Petchesky (1981) has analysed, in which
militarization, right-wing family ideologies and policies, and
intensified definitions of corporate (and state) property as private
synergistically interact.[22] The new communications technologies are
fundamental to the eradication of âpublic lifeâ for everyone. This
facilitates the mushrooming of a permanent high-tech military
establishment at the cultural and economic expense of most people, but
especially of women. Technologies like video games and highly
miniaturized televisions seem crucial to production of modern forms of
âprivate lifeâ. The culture of video games is heavily orientated to
individual competition and extraterrestrial warfare. High-tech, gendered
imaginations are produced here, imaginations that can contemplate
destruction of the planet and a sci-fi escape from its consequences.
More than our imaginations is militarized; and the other realities of
electronic and nuclear warfare are inescapable. These are the
technologies that promise ultimate mobility and perfect exchangeâand
incidentally enable tourism, that perfect practice of mobility and
exchange, to emerge as one of the worldâs largest single industries.
The new technologies affect the social relations of both sexuality and
of reproduction, and not always in the same ways. The close ties of
sexuality and instrumentality, of views of the body as a kind of private
satisfaction- and utility-maximizing machine, are described nicely in
sociobiological origin stories that stress a genetic calculus and
explain the inevitable dialectic of domination of male and female gender
roles.[23] These sociobiological stories depend on a high-tech view of
the body as a biotic component or cybernetic communications system.
Among the many transformations of reproductive situations is the medical
one, where womenâs bodies have boundaries newly permeable to both
âvisualizationâ and âinterventionâ. Of course, who controls the
interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneutics is a major
feminist issue. The speculum served as an icon of womenâs claiming their
bodies in the 1970S; that handcraft tool is inadequate to express our
needed body politics in the negotiation of reality in the practices of
cyborg reproduction. Self-help is not enough. The technologies of
visualization recall the important cultural practice of handing with the
camera and the deeply predatory nature of a photographic
consciousness.[24] Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central actors
in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of personal and
social possibility.
Another critical aspect of the social relations of the new technologies
is the reformulation of expectations, culture, work, and reproduction
for the large scientific and technical work-force. A major social and
political danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social
structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but
especially people of colour, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy
of several varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled
by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to
surveillance and disappearance. An adequate socialist-feminist politics
should address women in the privileged occupational categories, and
particularly in the production of science and technology that constructs
scientific-technical discourses, processes, and objects.[25]
This issue is only one aspect of enquiry into the possibility of a
feminist science, but it is important. What kind of constitutive role in
the production of knowledge, imagination, and practice can new groups
doing science have? How can these groups be allied with progressive
social and political movements? What kind of political accountability
can be constructed to the women together across the scientific-technical
hierarchies separating us? Might there be ways of developing feminist
science/technology politics in alliance with and-military science
facility conversion action groups? Many scientific and technical workers
in Silicon Valley, the high-tech cowboys included, do not want to work
on military science.[26] Can these personal preferences and cultural
tendencies be welded into progressive politics among this professional
middle class in which women, including women of colour, are coming to be
fairly numerous?
Let me summarize the picture of womenâs historical locations in advanced
industrial societies, as these positions have been restructured partly
through the social relations of science and technology. If it was ever
possible ideologically to characterize womenâs lives by the distinction
of public and private domainsâsuggested by images of the division of
working-class life into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market
and home, and of gender existence into personal and political realmsâit
is now a totally misleading ideology, even to show how both terms of
these dichotomies construct each other in practice and in theory. I
prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces
and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body
and in the body politic. âNetworkingâ is both a feminist practice and a
multinational corporate strategyâweaving is for oppositional cyborgs.
So let me return to the earlier image of the informatics of domination
and trace one vision of womenâs âplaceâ in the integrated circuit,
touching only a few idealized social locations seen primarily from the
point of view of advanced capitalist societies: Home, Market, Paid Work
Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital, and Church. Each of these
idealized spaces is logically and practically implied in every other
locus, perhaps analogous to a holographic photograph. I want to suggest
the impact of the social relations mediated and enforced by the new
technologies in order to help formulate needed analysis and practical
work. However, there is no âplaceâ for women in these networks, only
geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to womenâs cyborg
identities. If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life,
we might learn new couplings, new coalitions. There is no way to read
the following list from a standpoint of âidentificationâ, of a unitary
self. The issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora.
Home: Women-headed households, serial monogamy, flight of men, old women
alone, technology of domestic work, paid homework, re-emergence of home
sweat-shops, home-based businesses and telecom-muting, electronic
cottage, urban homelessness, migration, module architecture, reinforced
(simulated) nuclear family, intense domestic violence.
Market: Womenâs continuing consumption work, newly targeted to buy the
profusion of new production from the new technologies (especially as the
competitive race among industrialized and industrializing nations to
avoid dangerous mass unemployment necessitates finding ever bigger new
markets for ever less clearly needed commodities); bimodal buying power,
coupled with advertising targeting of the numerous affluent groups and
neglect of the previous mass markets; growing importance of informal
markets in labour and commodities parallel to high-tech, affluent market
structures; surveillance systems through electronic funds transfer;
intensified market abstraction (commodification) of experience,
resulting in ineffective utopian or equivalent cynical theories of
community; extreme mobility (abstraction) of marketing/financing
systems; inter-penetration of sexual and labour markets; intensified
sexualization of abstracted and alienated consumption.
Paid Work Place: Continued intense sexual and racial division of labour,
but considerable growth of membership in privileged occupational
categories for many white women and people of colour; impact of new
technologies on womenâs work in clerical, service, manufacturing
(especially textiles), agriculture, electronics; international
restructuring of the working classes; development of new time
arrangements to facilitate the homework economy (flex time, part time,
over time, no time); homework and out work; increased pressures for
two-tiered wage structures; significant numbers of people in
cash-dependent populations world-wide with no experience or no further
hope of stable employment; most labour âmarginalâ or âfeminizedâ.
State: Continued erosion of the welfare state; decentralizations with
increased surveillance and control; citizenship by telematics;
imperialism and political power broadly in the form of information
rich/information poor differentiation; increased high-tech
militarization increasingly opposed by many social groups; reduction of
civil service jobs as a result of the growing capital intensification of
office work, with implications for occupational mobility for women of
colour; growing privatization of material and ideological life and
culture; close integration of privatization and militarization, the
high-tech forms of bourgeois capitalist personal and public life;
invisibility of different social groups to each other, linked to
psychological mechanisms of belief in abstract enemies.
School: Deepening coupling of high-tech capital needs and public
education at all levels, differentiated by race, class, and gender;
managerial classes involved in educational reform and refunding at the
cost of remaining progressive educational democratic structures for
children and teachers; education for mass ignorance and repression in
technocratic and militarized culture; growing and-science mystery cults
in dissenting and radical political movements; continued relative
scientific illiteracy among white women and people of colour; growing
industrial direction of education (especially higher education) by
science-based multinationals (particularly in electronics- and
biotechnology-dependent companies); highly educated, numerous elites in
a progressively bimodal society.
Clinic-hospital: Intensified machine-body relations; renegotiations of
public metaphors which channel personal experience of the body,
particularly in relation to reproduction, immune system functions, and
âstressâ phenomena; intensification of reproductive politics in response
to world historical implications of womenâs unrealized, potential
control of their relation to reproduction; emergence of new,
historically specific diseases; struggles over meanings and means of
health in environments pervaded by high technology products and
processes; continuing feminization of health work; intensified struggle
over state responsibility for health; continued ideological role of
popular health movements as a major form of American politics.
Church: Electronic fundamentalist âsuper-saverâ preachers solemnizing
the union of electronic capital and automated fetish gods; intensified
importance of churches in resisting the militarized state; central
struggle over womenâs meanings and authority in religion; continued
relevance of spirituality, intertwined with sex and health, in political
struggle.
The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a
massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with
common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable. Since
much of this picture interweaves with the social relations of science
and technology, the urgency of a socialist-feminist politics addressed
to science and technology is plain. There is much now being done, and
the grounds for political work are rich. For example, the efforts to
develop forms of collective struggle for women in paid work, like SEIUâs
District 925,27 should be a high priority for all of us. These efforts
are profoundly deaf to technical restructuring of labour processes and
reformations of working classes. These efforts also are providing
understanding of a more comprehensive kind of labour organization,
involving community, sexuality, and family issues never privileged in
the largely white male industrial unions.
The structural rearrangements related to the social relations of science
and technology evoke strong ambivalence. But it is not necessary to be
ultimately depressed by the implications of late twentieth-century
womenâs relation to all aspects of work, culture, production of
knowledge, sexuality, and reproduction. For excellent reasons, most
Marxisms see domination best and have trouble understanding what can
only look like false consciousness and peopleâs complicity in their own
domination in late capitalism. It is crucial to remember that what is
lost, perhaps especially from womenâs points of view, is often virulent
forms of oppression, nostalgically naturalized in the face of current
violation. Ambivalence towards the disrupted unities mediated by
high-tech culture requires not sorting consciousness into categories of
clear-sighted critique grounding a solid political epistemologyâ versus
âmanipulated false consciousnessâ, but subtle understanding of emerging
pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing
the rules of the game.
There are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new kinds of unity
across race, gender, and class, as these elementary units of
socialist-feminist analysis themselves suffer protean transformations.
Intensifications of hardship experienced world-wide in connection with
the social relations of science and technology are severe. But what
people are experiencing is not transparently clear, and we lack
sufficiently subtle connections for collectively building effective
theories of experience. Present effortsâMarxist, psychoanalytic,
feminist, anthropologicalâto clarify even âourâ experience are
rudimentary.
I am conscious of the odd perspective provided by my historical
positionâa PhD in biology for an Irish Catholic girl was made possible
by Sputnikâs impact on US national science-education policy. I have a
body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second World War arms race
and cold war as by the womenâs movements. There are more grounds for
hope in focusing on the contradictory effects of politics designed to
produce loyal American technocrats, which also produced large numbers of
dissidents, than in focusing on the present defeats.
The permanent partiality of feminist points of view has consequences for
our expectations of forms of political organization and participation.
We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a
common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of
perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist
one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to
resolve contradiction. Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our
fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of
Western logos. From the point of view of pleasure in these potent and
taboo fusions, made inevitable by the social relations of science and
technology, there might indeed be a feminist science.
I want to conclude with a myth about identity and boundaries which might
inform late twentieth-century political imaginations (Plate 1). I am
indebted in this story to writers like Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany,
John Varley, James Tiptree, Jr, Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, and
Vonda Mclntyre.[27] These are our story-tellers exploring what it means
to be embodied in high-tech worlds. They are theorists for cyborgs.
Exploring conceptions of bodily boundaries and social order, the
anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966, 1970) should be credited with helping
us to consciousness about how fundamental body imagery is to world view,
and so to political language. French feminists like Luce Irigaray and
Monique Wittig, for all their differences, know how to write the body;
how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of
embodiment, and especially for Wittig, from imagery of fragmentation and
reconstitution of bodies.[28] American radical feminists like Susan
Griffnn, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich have profoundly affected our
political imaginationsâand perhaps restricted too much what we allow as
a friendly body and political language.[29] They insist on the organic,
opposing it to the technological. But their symbolic systems and the
related positions of ecofeminism and feminist paganism, replete with
organicisms, can only be understood in Sandovalâs terms as oppositional
ideologies fitting the late twentieth century. They would simply
bewilder anyone not preoccupied with the machines and consciousness of
late capitalism. In that sense they are part of the cyborg world. But
there are also great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the
possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between
organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western
self. It is the simultaneity of breakdowns that cracks the matrices of
domination and opens geometric possibilities. What might be learned from
personal and political âtechnologicalâ pollution? I look briefly at two
overlapping groups of texts for their insight into the construction of a
potentially helpful cyborg myth: constructions of women of colour and
monstrous selves in feminist science fiction.
Earlier I suggested that âwomen of colourâ 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 âbiomythographyâ, Zami (Lorde, 1982; King, 1987a, 1987b). There are
material and cultural grids mapping this potential, Audre Lorde (1984)
captures the tone in the title of her Sister Outsider. In my political
myth, Sister Outsider is the offshore woman, whom US workers, female and
feminized, are supposed to regard as the enemy preventing their
solidarity, threatening their security. Onshore, inside the boundary of
the United States, Sister Outsider is a potential amidst the races and
ethnic identities of women manipulated for division, competition, and
exploitation in the same industries. âWomen of colourâ are the preferred
labour force for the science-based industries, the real women for whom
the world-wide sexual market, labour market, and politics of
reproduction kaleidoscope into daily life. Young Korean women hired in
the sex industry and in electronics assembly are recruited from high
schools, educated for the integrated circuit. Literacy, especially in
English, distinguishes the âcheapâ female labour so attractive to the
multinationals.
Contrary to orientalist stereotypes of the âoral primitiveâ, literacy is
a special mark of women of colour, acquired by US black women as well as
men through a history of risking death to learn and to teach reading and
writing. Writing has a special significance for all colonized groups.
Writing has been crucial to the Western myth of the distinction between
oral and written cultures, primitive and civilized mentalities, and more
recently to the erosion of that distinction in âpostmodernistâ theories
attacking the phallogocentrism of the West, with its worship of the
monotheistic, phallic, authoritative, and singular work, the unique and
perfect name.[30] Contests for the meanings of writing are a major form
of contemporary political struggle. Releasing the play of writing is
deadly serious. The poetry and stories of US women of colour are
repeatedly about writing, about access to the power to signify; but this
time that power must be neither phallic nor innocent. Cyborg writing
must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time
wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. 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.
The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and
displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. In
retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of
origin of Western culture. We have all been colonized by those origin
myths, with their longing for fulfilment in apocalypse. The
phallogocentric origin stories most crucial for feminist cyborgs are
built into the literal technologiesâtechnologies that write the world,
biotechnology and microelectronicsâthat have recently textualized our
bodies as code problems on the grid of C3I. Feminist cyborg stories have
the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command
and control.
Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade the struggles of
women of colour; and stories about language have a special power in the
rich contemporary writing by US women of colour. For example, retellings
of the story of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of the mestizo
âbastardâ race of the new world, master of languages, and mistress of
Cortes, carry special meaning for Chicana constructions of identity.
Cherrie Moraga (1983) in Loving in the War Years explores the themes of
identity when one never possessed the original language, never told the
original story, never resided in the harmony of legitimate
heterosexuality in the garden of culture, and so cannot base identity on
a myth or a fall from innocence and right to natural names, motherâs or
fatherâs.[31] Moragaâs writing, her superb literacy, is presented in her
poetry as the same kind of violation as Malincheâs mastery of the
conquerorâs languageâa violation, an illegitimate production, that
allows survival. Moragaâs language is not âwholeâ; it is
self-consciously spliced, a chimera of English and Spanish, both
conquerorâs languages. But it is this chimeric monster, without claim to
an original language before violation, that crafts the erode, competent,
potent identities of women of colour. Sister Outsider hints at the
possibility of world survival not because of her innocence, but because
of her ability to live on the boundaries, to write without the founding
myth of original wholeness, with its inescapable apocalypse of final
return to a deathly oneness that Man has imagined to be the innocent and
all-powerful Mother, freed at the End from another spiral of
appropriation by her son. Writing marks Moragaâs body, affirms it as the
body of a woman of colour, against the possibility of passing into the
unmarked category of the Anglo father or into the orientalist myth of
âoriginal illiteracyâ of a mother that never was. Malinche was mother
here, not Eve before eating the forbidden fruit. Writing affirms Sister
Outsider, not the Woman-before-the-Fall-into-Writing needed by the
phallogocentric Family of Man.
Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of
the late twentieth century. 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. These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so
problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to
generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes
of reproduction of âWesternâ identity, of nature and culture, of mirror
and eye, slave and master, body and mind. âWeâ did not originally choose
to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and epistemology
that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the wider
replications of âtextsâ.
From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to ground politics in
âourâ privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other
dominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of those
closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities. Feminisms and
Marxisms have run aground on Western epistemological imperatives to
construct a revolutionary subject from the perspective of a hierarchy of
oppressions and/or a latent position of moral superiority, innocence,
and greater closeness to nature. With no available original dream of a
common language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile
âmasculineâ separation, but written into the play of a text that has no
finally privileged reading or salvation history, to recognize âoneselfâ
as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics
in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of
identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins and
the importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of colour have
transformed her from the evil mother of masculinist fear into the
originally literate mother who teaches survival.
This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transformation.
Every, story that begins with original innocence and privileges the
return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation,
separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall
into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in
the bosom of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive
politicsârebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. In this plot
women are imagined either better or worse off, but all agree they have
less selfhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother,
less at stake in masculine autonomy. But there is another route to
having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass
through Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its imaginary. It
passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not
of Woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so
as to have a real life. These cyborgs are the people who refuse to
disappear on cue, no matter how many times a âwesternâ commentator
remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group
done in by âWesternâ technology, by writing.[32] These real-life cyborgs
(for example, the Southeast Asian village women workers in Japanese and
US electronics firms described by Aihwa Ong) are actively rewriting the
texts of their bodies and societies.[33] Survival is the stakes in this
play of readings.
To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western
traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of
domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animalsâin
short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror
the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other,
mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive,
reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/ made,
active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. The
self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the service of
the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by
the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the
self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to
be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of
apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without
clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too
many.
High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is
not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and
machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that
resolve into coding practices. In so far as we know ourselves in both
formal discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for
example, the homework economy in the integrated circuit), 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. The
replicant Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner stands as the
image of a cyborg cultureâs fear, love, and confusion.
One consequence is that our sense of connection to our tools is
heightened. The trance state experienced by many computer users has
become a staple of science-fiction film and cultural jokes. Perhaps
paraplegics and other severely handicapped people can (and sometimes do)
have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization with other
communication devices.[34] Anne McCaffreyâs pre-feminist The Ship Who
Sang (1969) explored the consciousness of a cyborg, hybrid of girlâs
brain and complex machinery, formed after the birth of a severely
handicapped child. Gender, sexuality, embodiment, skill: all were
reconstituted in the story. Why should our bodies end at the skin, or
include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From the seventeenth
century till now, machines could be animatedâgiven ghostly souls to make
them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and
mental capacities. Or organisms could be mechanizedâreduced to body
understood as resource of mind. These machine/ organism relationships
are obsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice,
machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly
selves. We donât need organic holism to give impermeable wholeness, the
total woman and her feminist variants (mutants?). Let me conclude this
point by a very partial reading of the logic of the cyborg monsters of
my second group of texts, feminist science fiction.
The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic
the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race,
individual entity, or body. Katie King clarifies how pleasure in reading
these fictions is not largely based on identification. Students facing
Joanna Russ for the first time, students who have learned to take
modernist writers like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf without flinching,
do not know what to make of The Adventures of Alyx or The Female Man,
where characters refuse the readerâs search for innocent wholeness while
granting the wish for heroic quests, exuberant eroticism, and serious
politics. The Female Man is the story of four versions of one genotype,
all of whom meet, but even taken together do not make a whole, resolve
the dilemmas of violent moral action, or remove the growing scandal of
gender. The feminist science fiction of Samuel R. Delany, especially
Tales of Neveyon, mocks stories of origin by redoing the neolithic
revolution, replaying the founding moves of Western civilization to
subvert their plausibility. James Tiptree, Jr, an author whose fiction
was regarded as particularly manly until her âtrueâ gender was revealed,
tells tales of reproduction based on non-mammalian technologies like
alternation of generations of male brood pouches and male nurturing.
John Varley constructs a supreme cyborg in his arch-feminist exploration
of Gaea, a mad goddess-planet-trickster-old woman-technological device
on whose surface an extraordinary array of post-cyborg symbioses are
spawned. Octavia Butler writes of an African sorceress pitting her
powers of transformation against the genetic manipulations of her rival
(Wild Seed), of time warps that bring a modern US black woman into
slavery where her actions in relation to her white master-ancestor
determine the possibility of her own birth (Kindred), and of the
illegitimate insights into identity and community of an adopted
cross-species child who came to know the enemy as self (Survivor). In
Dawn (1987), the first instalment of a series called Xenogenesis, Butler
tells the story of Lilith Iyapo, whose personal name recalls Adamâs
first and repudiated wife and whose family name marks her status as the
widow of the son of Nigerian immigrants to the US. A black woman and a
mother whose child is dead, Lilith mediates the transformation of
humanity through genetic exchange with extra-terrestrial
lovers/rescuers/destroyers/genetic engineers, who reform earthâs
habitats after the nuclear holocaust and coerce surviving humans into
intimate fusion with them. It is a novel that interrogates reproductive,
linguistic, and nuclear politics in a mythic field structured by late
twentieth-century race and gender.
Because it is particularly rich in boundary transgressions, Vonda
McIntyreâs Superluminal can close this truncated catalogue of promising
and dangerous monsters who help redefine the pleasures and politics of
embodiment and feminist writing. In a fiction where no character is
âsimplyâ human, human status is highly problematic. Orca, a genetically
altered diver, can speak with killer whales and survive deep ocean
conditions, but she longs to explore space as a pilot, necessitating
bionic implants jeopardizing her kinship with the divers and cetaceans.
Transformations are effected by virus vectors carrying a new
developmental code, by transplant surgery, by implants of
microelectronic devices, by analogue doubles, and other means. Lacnea
becomes a pilot by accepting a heart implant and a host of other
alterations allowing survival in transit at speeds exceeding that of
light. Radu Dracul survives a virus-caused plague in his outerworld
planet to find himself with a time sense that changes the boundaries of
spatial perception for the whole species. All the characters explore the
limits of language; the dream of communicating experience; and the
necessity of limitation, partiality, and intimacy even in this world of
protean transformation and connection. Superluminal stands also for the
defining contradictions of a cyborg world in another sense; it embodies
textually the intersection of feminist theory and colonial discourse in
the science fiction I have alluded to in this chapter. This is a
conjunction with a long history that many âFirst Worldâ feminists have
tried to repress, including myself in my readings of Superluminal before
being called to account by Zoe Sofoulis, whose different location in the
world systemâs informatics of domination made her acutely alert to the
imperialist moment of all science fiction cultures, including womenâs
science fiction. From an Australian feminist sensitivity, Sofoulis
remembered more readily McIntyreâs role as writer of the adventures of
Captain Kirk and Spock in TVâs Star Trek series than her rewriting the
romance in Superluminal.
Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western
imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the
limits of the centred polls of the Greek male human by their disruption
of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and
woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the confused human
material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural
and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseasesâall crucial
to establishing modern identity.[35] The evolutionary and behavioral
sciences of monkeys and apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late
twentieth-century industrial identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist
science fiction define quite different political possibilities and
limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman.
There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of
cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are
maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is
not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary
identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the
world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only
one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be
a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be
animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes,
an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do
not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are
they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be
given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in
mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place
could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that
this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs
might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of
sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after
all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth.
The ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as
experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image. Feminists
have recently claimed that women are given to dailiness, that women more
than men somehow sustain daily life, and so have a privileged
epistemological position potentially. There is a compelling aspect to
this claim, one that makes visible unvalued female activity and names it
as the ground of life. But the ground of life? What about all the
ignorance of women, all the exclusions and failures of knowledge and
skill? What about menâs access to daily competence, to knowing how to
build things, to take them apart, to play? What about other embodiments?
Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race,
gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There
is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate
experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There
is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one
way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics
of dominationâin order to act potently.
One last image organisms and organismic, holistic politics depend on
metaphors of rebirth and invariably call on the resources of
reproductive sex. I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with
regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most
birthing. For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss
of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function
with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical
productions at the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be
monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We
require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our
reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous
world without gender.
Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay:
first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake
that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and
second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and
technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of
technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing
the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in
communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and
technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a
matrix of complex dominations. 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.
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[21 The conjunction of the Green Revolutionâs social relations with
biotechnologies like plant genetic engineering makes the pressures on
land in the Third World increasingly intense. The U.S. Agency for
International Developmentâs estimates used at the 1984 World Food Day
are that in Africa women produce about 90 percent of rural food
supplies, about 60â80 percent in Asia, and provide 40 percent of
agricultural labor in the Near East and Latin America (New York Times
1984). Blumberg charges that world organizationsâ agricultural politics,
as well as those of multinationals and national governments in the Third
World, generally ignore fundamental issues in the sexual division of
labor. The present tragedy of famine in Africa might owe as much to male
supremacy as to capitalism, colonialism, and rain patterns. More
accurately, capitalism and racism are usually structurally male
dominant. See also Blumberg 1981; Hacker 1984; Hacker and Bovit 1981;
Busch and Lacy 1983; Wilfred 1982; Sachs 1983; International Fund for
Agricultural Development 1985; Bird 1984.
[1] See Zoe Sofoulis (n.d.).
[2] See Hilary Klein 1989.
[3] Useful references to left and/or feminist radical science movements
and theory and to biological/biotechnical issues include Bleier 1984,
1986; Harding 1986; Fausto-Sterling 1985; Gould 1981; Hubbard et al.
1979; Keller 1985; Lewontin et al. 1984. See also Radical Science
Journal (which became Science as Culture in 1987): 26 Freegrove Road,
London N7 9RQ; and Science for the People, 897 Main Street, Cambridge,
Massachusetts 02139.
[4] Starting points for left and/or feminist approaches to technology
and politics include Cowan 1983, 1986; Rothschild 1983; Traweek 1988;
Young and Levidow 1981, 1985; Weisenbaum 1976; Winner 1977, 1986;
Zimmerman 1983; Athanasiou 1987; Cohn 1987a, 1987b; Winograd and Flores
1986; Edwards 1985. Global Electronics Newsletter, 867 West Dana Street,
Street, San Francisco, California 94104; ISIS, Womenâs International
Information and Communication Service, P.O. Box 50 (Cornavin), 1211
Geneva 2, Switzerland; and Via Santa Maria DellâAnima 30, 00186 Rome,
Italy. Fundamental approaches to modern social studies of science that
do not continue the liberal mystification that all started with Thomas
Kuhn include Knorr-Cetina 1981; Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay 1983; Latour and
Woolgar 1979; Young 1979. The 1984 Directory of the Network for the
Ethnographic Study of Science, Technology, and Organization lists a wide
range of people and projects crucial to better radical analysis,
available from NESSTO, P.O. Box 11442, Stanford, California 94305.
[5] A provocative, comprehensive argument about the politics and
the-ories of âpostmodernismâ is made by Fredric Jameson (1984), who
argues that postmodernism is not an option, a style among others, but a
cultural dominant requiring radical reinvention of left politics from
within; there is no longer any place from without that gives meaning to
the comforting fiction of critical distance. Jameson also makes clear
why one cannot be for or against postmodernism, an essentially moralist
move. My position is that feminists (and others) need continuous
cultural reinvention, most modernist critique, and historical
materialism; only a cyborg would have a chance. The old dominations of
white capitalist patriarchy seem nostalgically innocent now: they
normalized heterogeneity, into man and woman, white and black, for
example. âAdvanced Capitalismâ and postmodernism release heterogeneity
without a norm, and we are flattened, without subjectivity, which
requires depth, even unfriendly and drowning depths. It is time to write
The Death of the Clinic. The clinicâs methods required bodies and works;
we have texts and surfaces. Our dominations donât work by medicalization
and normalization anymore; they work by networking, communications
redesign, stress management. Normalization gives way to automation,
utter redundancy. Michel Foucaultâs Birth of the Clinic (1963), History
of Sexuality (1976), and Discipline and Punish (1975) name a form of
power at its moment of implosion. The discourse of biopolitics gives way
to technobabble, the language of the spliced substantive; no noun is
left whole by the multinationals. These are their names, listed from one
issue of Science: Tech-Knowledge, Genentech, Allergen, Hybritech,
Compupro, Genen-cor, Syntex, Allelix, Agrigenetics Corp., Syntro, Codon,
Repligen, Micro/Angelo from Scion Corp., Percom Data, Inter Systems,
Cyborg Corp., Statcom Corp., Intertec. If we are imprisoned by language,
then escape from that prison-house requires language poets, a kind of
cultural restriction enzyme to cut the code; cyborg heteroglossia is one
form of radical cultural politics. For cyborg poetry see Perloff 1984;
Fraser 1984. For feminist modernist/postmodernist cyborg writing, see
HOW(ever), 971 Corbett Avenue, San Francisco, California 94131
[6] The U.S. equivalent of Mills and Boon.
[7] Baudrillard 1983 and Jameson 1984 (page 66) point out that Platoâs
definition of the simulacrum is the copy for which there is no original,
i.e., the world of advanced capitalism, of pure exchange. See Discourse
9 (Spring/Summer 1987) for a special issue on technology (cybernetics,
ecology, and the postmodern imagination).
[8] A practice at once both spiritual and political that linked guards
andarrested antinuclear demonstrators in the Alameda County Jail in
California in the early 1980s.
[9] For ethnographic accounts and political evaluations, see
Epstein1993; Sturgeon 1986. Without explicit irony, adopting the
spaceship earth/whole earth logo of the planet photographed from space,
set off by the slogan âLove Your Mother,â the May 1987 Mothers and
Others Day action at the nuclear weapons testing facility in Nevada
nonetheless took account of the tragic contradictions of views of the
earth. Demonstrators applied for official permits to be on the land from
officers of the Western Shoshone tribe, whose territory was invaded by
the U.S. government when it built the nuclear weapons test ground in the
1950s. Arrested for trespassing, the demonstrators argued that the
police and weapons facility personnel, without authorization from the
proper officials, were the trespassers. One affinity group at the
womenâs action called themselves the Surrogate Others; and in solidarity
with the creatures forced to tunnel in the same ground with the bomb,
they enacted a cyborgian emergence from the constructed body of a large,
nonheterosexual desert worm. I was a member of that affinity group.
[10] Powerful developments of coalition politics emerge from
âThirdWorldâ speakers, speaking from nowhere, the displaced center of
the universe, earth: âWe live on the third planet from the sunââSun Poem
by Jamaican writer Edward Kamau Braithwaite, review by Mackey 1984.
Contributors to Smith 1983 ironically subvert naturalized identities
precisely while constructing a place from which to speak called home.
See especially Reagon (in Smith 1983, 356â68); Trinh T. Minh-ha
1986â87a, b.
[11] See hooks 1981, 1984; Hull et al. 1982. Toni Cade Bambara (1981)
wrote an extraordinary novel in which the women of color theater group
the Seven Sisters explores a form of unity. See analysis by Butler-Evans
1987.
[12] On orientalism in feminist works and elsewhere, see Lowe 1986; Said
1978; Mohanty 1984; Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives
(1984).
[13] Katie King (1986, 1987a) has developed a theoretically sensitive
treatment of the workings of feminist taxonomies as genealogies of power
in feminist idealogy and polemic. King examines Jaggarâs (1983)
problematic example of taxonomizing feminisms to make a little machine
producing the desired final position. My caricature here of socialist
and radical feminism is also an example.
[14] The central role of object relations versions of psychoanalysis
andrelated strong universalizing moves in discussing reproduction,
caring work, and mothering in many approaches to epistemology underline
their authorsâ resistance to what I am calling postmodernism. For me,
both the universalizing moves and these versions of psychoanalysis make
analysis of âwomenâs place in the integrated circuitâ difficult and lead
to systematic difficulties in accounting for or even seeing major
aspects of the construction of gender and gendered social life. The
feminist standpoint argument has been developed by Flax 1983; Harding
1986; Harding and Hintikka 1983; Hartsock 1983a, 1983b; OâBrien 1981; H.
Rose 1983; Smith 1974, 1979. For rethinking theories of feminist
materialism and feminist standpoints in response to criticism, see
Harding 1986, 163â96; Hartsock 1987; and S. Rose 1986.
[15] I make an argumentative category error in âmodifyingâ MacKin-nonâs
positions with the qualifier âradical,â thereby generating my own
reductive critique of extremely hetergeneous writing, which does
explicitly use that label, by my taxonomically interested argument about
writing, which does not use the modifier and which brooks no limits and
thereby adds to the various dreams of a common, in the sense of
univocal, language for feminism. My category error was occasioned by an
assignment to write from a particular taxonomic position that itself has
a heterogeneous history, socialist-feminism, for Socialist Review,
published in SR as âThe Cyborg Manifesto.â A critique indebted to
MacKinnon, but without the reductionism and with an elegant feminist
account of Foucaultâs paradoxical conservatism on sexual violence
(rape), is de Lauretis 1985 (see also 1986, 1â19). A theoretically
elegant feminist social-historical examination of family violence, which
insists on womenâs, menâs, and childrenâs complex agency without losing
sight of the material structures of male domination, race, and class, is
Gordon 1988.
[16] See Kristeva 1984.
[17] This chart was published in 1985 in the âCyborg Manifesto.â My
previous efforts to understand biology as a cybernetic command-control
discourse and organisms as ânatural-technical objects of knowledgeâ were
Haraway 1979, 1983, 1984. A later version, with a shifted argument,
appears in Haraway 1989.
[18] For progressive analyses and action on the biotechnology
debates,see GeneWatch, a Bulletin of the Committee for Responsible
Genetics, 5 Doane St., 4^(th) Floor, Boston, Massachusetts 02109;
Genetic Screening Study Group (formerly the Sociobiology Study Group of
Science for the People), Cambridge, Massachusetts; Wright 1982, 1986;
Yoxen 1983.
[19] Starting references for âwomen in the integrated circuitâ: DâOno
-frio-Flores and Pfafflin 1982; Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Fuentes and
Ehrenreich 1983; Grossman 1980; Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983; A. Ong
1987; Science Policy Research Unit 1982.
[20] For the âhomework economy outside the homeâ and related argu-ments,
see Gordon 1983; Gordon and Kimball 1985; Stacey 1987; Reskin and
Hartmann 1986; Women and Poverty 1984; S. Rose 1986; Collins 1982; Burr
1982; Gregory and Nussbaum 1982; Piven and Coward 1982; Microelectronics
Group 1980; Stallard et al. 1983, which includes a useful organization
and resource list.
[21] The conjunction of the Green Revolution's social relations with
biotechnologies like plant genetic engineering makes the pressures on
land in the Third World increasingly intense. AID's estimates (New York
Times, 14 October 1984) used at the 1984 World Food Day are that in
Africa, women produce about 90 per cent of rural food supplies, about
60-80 per cent in Asia, and provide 40 per cent of agricultural labour
in the Near East and Latin America. Blumberg charges that world
organizations' agricultural politics, as well as those of multinationals
and national governments in the Third World, generally ignore
fundamental issues in the sexual division of labour. The present tragedy
of famine in Africa might owe as much to male supremacy as to
capitalism, colonialism, and rain patterns. More accurately, capitalism
and racism are usually structurally male dominant. See also Blumberg
(1981); Hacker (1984); Hacker and Bovit (1981); Busch and Lacy (1983);
Wilfred (1982); Sachs (1983); International Fund for Agricultural
Development (1985); Bird (1984).
[22] See also Enloe 1983a, 1983b.
[23] For a feminist version of this logic, see Hrdy 1981. For an
analysis of scientific womenâs storytelling practices, especially in
relation to sociobiology in evolutionary debates around child abuse and
infanticide, see Haraway 1989.
[24] For the moment of transition of hunting with guns to hunting with
cameras in the construction of popular meanings of nature for an
American urban immigrant public, see Haraway 1984â85, 1989; Nash 1979;
Sontag 1977; Preston 1984.
[25] For guidance for thinking about the political/cultural/racial
implications of the history of women doing science in the United States,
see Haas and Perucci 1984; Hacker 1981; Keller 1983; National Science
Foundation 1988; Rossiter 1982; Schiebinger 1987; Haraway 1989.
[26] See Markoff and Siegel 1983. High Technology Professionals for
Peace and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility are promising
organizations.
[27] See King 1984. An abbreviated list of feminist science fiction
underlying themes of this essay: Octavia Butler, Wild Seed, Mind of My
Mind, Kindred, Survivor; Suzy McKee Charnas, Motherlines; Samuel R.
Delany, the NevĂšrĂżon series; Anne McCaffery, The Ship Who Sang, Dino
saur Planet; Vonda McIntyre, Superluminal, Dreamsnake; Joanna Russ,
Adventures of Alix, The Female Man; James Tiptree Jr., Star Songs of an
Old Primate, Up the Walls of the World; John Varley, Titan, Wizard,
Demon.
[28] French feminisms contribute to cyborg heteroglossia: Burke 1981;
Irigaray 1977, 1979; Marks and de Courtivron 1980; Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 1981 (Autumn); Wittig 1973; Duchen 1986.
For English translation of some currents of Francophone feminism, see
Feminist Issues: A Journal of Feminist Social and Political Theory
(1980).
[29] But all these poets are very complex, not least in their treatment
ofthemes of lying and erotic, decentered collective and personal
identities: Griffin 1978; Lorde 1984; Rich 1978.
[30] See Derrida 1976 (especially part II); LĂ©vi-Strauss 1973
(especially âThe Writing Lessonâ); Gates 1985; Kahn and Neumaier 1985;
Ong 1982; Kramarae and Treichler 1985.
[31] The sharp relation of women of color to writing as theme and
pol-itics can be approached through the program for âThe Black Woman and
the Diaspora: Hidden Connections and Extended Acknowledgments,â An
International Literary Conference, Michigan State University, October
1985; Evans 1984; Christian 1985; Carby 1987; Fisher 1980; Frontiers
1980, 1983; Kingston 1976; Lerner 1973; Giddings 1985; Moraga and
AnzaldĂșa 1981; Morgan 1984. Anglophone European and Euro-American women
have also crafted special relations to their writing as a potent sign:
Gilbert and Gubar 1979; Russ 1983.
[32] The convention of ideologically taming militarized high technology
by publicizing its applications to speech and motion problems of the
disabled/differently abled takes on a special irony in monotheistic,
patriarchal, and frequently anti-Semitic culture when computer-generated
speech allows a boy with no voice to chant the Haftorah at his bar
mitzvah. See Sussman 1986. Making the always context-relative social
definitions of âablenessâ particularly clear, military high-tech has a
way of making human beings disabled by definition, a perverse aspect of
much automated battlefield and Star Wars research and development. See
Wilford 1986.
[33] See A. Ong 1987.
[34] James Clifford (1985, 1988) argues persuasively for recognition of
continuous reinvention, the stubborn nondisappearance of those âmarkedâ
by Western imperializing practices.
[35] See Du Bois 1982; Daston and Mark n.d.; Park and Daston 1981. The
noun monster shares its root with the verb to demonstrate.