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journalette's review
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
What does it mean to be a cyborg? According to Haraway, it is acknowledging that our first element is hybridity, that there are no fixed identities in this world we live in. A cyborg is a compound of organic and technological elements, blurring the frontiers between the organism and the machine. That means it is no longer approved to subordinate one to the other. Technology is not to be demonized or idolized but explored with cheerfulness. The other side of the coin is responsibility. While technophilic philosophies encourage us to be proactive with tech development, Haraway asks us to consider the consequences of such development for the world and its inhabitants. Feminism and theories of embodiment are influential on cyborg theory, meaning the cyborg subject is not an abstract reality but a localized one. Cyborg knowledge is not absolute or relative but perspective. Although humans can't stop thinking from a human point of view, we can stop thinking only for the benefit of humans. Therefore, the cyborg is a vehicle to draw alliances and symbiotic relations between species instead of hierarchical and dominative ones.
nb_leftist's review
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
I definitely did not understand it all. I get the feeling this will be like Armed Joy where I understand it and engage with it so much more on the second read through. The ideas and language are quite difficult to understand and to connect up, most likely because I am not as experienced or well-versed in the concepts she cites.
Anyways, here's my notes, I only really do the notes for the stuff I read digitally!
Anyways, here's my notes, I only really do the notes for the stuff I read digitally!
A Cyborg Manifesto – Donna Haraway
An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit
“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 Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.”
- Premise of the essay, trying to make the Cyborg a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource “suggesting some very fruitful couplings.”
- Earlier Lines: “A cyborg is 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 women’s movements have constructed ‘women’s experience’, as well as uncovered or discovered the 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.”
o It is needed to create, to construct consciousness of oppression, the working class, women, POC, etc. need to know they are oppressed—that it is a systemic issue—for progress to be made, for change to take place.
- “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.”
o We must better our lives, our bodies, with technology. Connecting our bodies with technology to solve these problems. We are cyborgs, just not in the way we would usually think about it.
- In the end, cyborgs are everywhere, everything we do is usually a coupling of animal and machine. Haraway is not getting to the point of Deleuze where everything is a machine, but it is getting close. It is talking about biology and mechanics. When we produce something, we are connecting a biological process, usually, with machines (e.g. when we build a table we are using tools, that production is a cyborg process).
“In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense – a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self—untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.”
- In the west, as capitalism continues, we become more and more alienated from everything we do. We become more and more reliant on different mechanical objects/tools. Eventually those mechanical objects/tools become reliant on other mechanical objects/tools, making us less and less biological.
- They have no origin, they just exist.
- Next lines: The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and the patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.”
o Interesting, like Marcuse talks about, technology is not inherently political, it can be used by either side. Although it may have been created for a specific purpose, it does not have to be used for that purpose. It can be repurposed for our understanding.
“The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed.”
- Cyborg is the transgression of the boundary between animal and machine. It is the attempt to continue the progress of abstraction of humanity. Not necessarily a bad thing in any way, but it, as a technological idea/concept, is being used as a way to push the boundary of comfort and make the population more comfortable with cyborgs, as processes, as identities, etc. Once again, not necessarily a bad thing, but it is definitely an abstraction of the human concept. Humans are no longer humans, they are animals. Humans are no longer biological, they are part mechanical too.
- Next lines: “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.”
o It is becoming clear that humanity is becoming more and more reliant on machinery. That us, as ourselves, are doing very little compared to the machinery we have “created.” Alienating ourselves both from our creations, and everything we do—since we do not do any of it, instead relying on machinery.
“The boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. … 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.”
- I think this is incredibly interesting. As we get more and more advanced in mechanics and technology, we slowly rely less and less on physical things. Writing is no longer done on a physical thing, it is communicated through all these technologies, without even a single one would render the entire writing unreadable. It is an alienation from even our physical experiences.
- Next lines: 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 consciousness—or its simulation.”
o This is where the consciousness comes in, the consciousness of our status as cyborgs. We are not aware of the sheer amount we rely on mechanics, how intertwined our mere existence is with mechanics and tools. Thus, animal and machine.
“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 int eh name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their join kinship with animals and machines, not afraid off permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”
- Next lines: “The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.”
- I love this idea of trying to see both sides and admitting to yourself that it is impossible to see every possibility. I also think this is somewhat reminiscent of accelerationism, or I guess the other way around. Embracing the coming and present abstraction to make people more conscious that it is happening.
- It also references Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which is quite interesting. Specifically referencing the multiple vision that Cyborg realities could encompass, that abstraction is important because it allows different understandings, challenging understandings that negate the current reality.
Fractured Identities
“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 ‘essential’ unity. There is nothing about teeing ‘female’ that naturally binds women.”
- There is no unity in just naming a category. Being conscious that you are part of this category, in some cases, can bring some unity with others of that category, but it really only creates unity when there is widespread consciousness. For example, it is easier to be united with another conscious person. It is easier to be in solidarity with someone who is conscious of their class (and the oppression therein) than with a person who acts against their class, who is not conscious.
“’Oppositional consciousness’, born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. … Sandoval’s oppositional consciousness is about contradictory locations and heterochronic calendars, not about relativisms and pluralisms.”
- The point is that it is an identifier of anyone who is not part of the unmarked category, anyone who is oppressed. It is purposely a consciousness of opposition, consciousness that you are in opposition.
- Next Lines: “Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of color. She notes that the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation.”
o It is an idea of getting rid of exclusive identities. Creating exclusive identities—although sometimes helpful—is another way of solidifying these structures that exist solely to oppress us. By creating this new identity of simple resistance, of opposition, we are able to create an inclusive category, one that exists just as a product of consciousness. This is similar to the idea of Queerness, anyone who does not fit into the “norm”.
- Next lines: “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.”
- “Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women’s experiences.”
o Just creating a new structure of oppression within our own movements.
“Cyborg feminists have to argue that ‘we’ 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.”
- We have to realize that everyone is complicit, nobody is just a victim. Even the victim can be complicit in their own oppression through internalization of oppressive ideas. Only seeing yourself as a victim, incapable of participating in oppression, makes us blind to the oppression and violence we propagate.
“If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, MacKinnon’s intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the ‘essential’ non-existence of women in not reassuring. … Radical feminism can accommodate all the activities of women named by socialist feminists as forms of labor only if the activity can somehow be sexualized. Reproduction had different tones of meanings for the two tendencies, one rooted in labor, one rooted in sex, both calling the consequences of domination and ignorance of social and personal reality ‘false consciousness’.”
- Both taxonomies inherently do not accommodate every form of oppression, which when strictly stuck to as a party line always end up in a reconstruction of the oppressive structures they are supposed to be resisting.
- “Neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view have tended to embrace the status of a partial explanation; both were regularly constituted as totalities.”
o If they were talked about and embraces as partial explanations, they would be useful, but if propagated as complete and total explanations they inherently exclude and silence a multiplicity of identities.
The Informatics of Domination
Informatics: the science of processing data for storage and retrieval; information science.
“We are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and ideological”.
- The methods of control and surveillance are changing. Things like representation are changing to simulation, etc. Things are getting more complicated and harder to pin down. Another example is the organic division of labor is now “ergonomics”, the “cybernetics of labor”, or the technology of labor.
- “The objects on the right [the new objects] cannot be coded as ‘natural’, a realization that subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well. We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess’.”
o Everything is technological, everything must be thought of as risk and benefit, everything must be scientific.
“At the level of ideology, we see translations of racism and colonialism into languages of development and under-development, rates and constraints of modernization.”
- Nothing is really changing, rather our understanding of our language/words and our actions are becoming more alienated from their actual meanings and the effects of them.
o Everyone knows its not natural, nobody is saying modernization is natural. In fact, by definition, modernization is not natural, but it is “just something that needs to happen for progress to take place”. Everything needs to be modernized, everything needs to be optimized/made more efficient.
- “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.”
o Everything is constantly changing, growing, and destroying itself to make things easier or more complicated. Thus, “exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analyzed so well.”
o Marx analyzed a very specific variety of exchange, specifically that of industrial capitalism without service workers and rampant automation. He also did not take in much of the fact that workers do not all experience the same oppression (as mentioned above). In this new system there is infinite constant change, there is obviously oppression but actually finding where it comes from is much more difficult that just reading Marx.
- “The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself—all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others—consequences that themselves are very different for different people and which make potent oppositional international movements difficult to imagine and essential for survival.”
o Everything is constantly at risk for being used by the informatics, nothing is sacred. It is incredibly hard to create a resistance that is offensive rather than defensive (and reactive) against these constant new oppressions.
“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.”
- Science is a tool. Technology is a tool. Both are not inherently political, but are used by power to enforce domination. Just like in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, Haraway describes how both are used to enforce meanings. That the dichotomy between so many different things is permeable, these constructs are constantly being changed, destroyed, rebuilt, enforced, etc.
- “The 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.”
o Interesting. It is trying to create a way where things are “different”, but, despite the difference, is still subject to the same control everything else is. Optimizing Power.
The ‘Homework Economy’ Outside ‘The Home’
“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 labor force, … subjected to some arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day.”
- This is the “homework economy” put forth by Richard Gordon. This just means that everyone is constantly doing work. They are vulnerable at all times, and their entire lives are now up to the control of their employer.
- “The concept indicates that factory, home, and market are integrated on a new scale and that the places of women are crucial—and need to be analyzed for differences among women and for meanings for relations between men and women in various situations.”
o Things are changing. Every part of everyone’s life is part of the labor process. Before it was part of the process as the only place where one can not do labor, but now it has become part of labor. Even at home, one is expected to work.
Women in The Integrated Circuit
“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.”
- As stated above, it is the growth of complete control. For the subjects, it is the growth of complete instability, complete vulnerability. Nothing is safe, it will be used in any possible way for increased optimization.
- Next line: “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 in plain.”
“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.”
- It is impossible to have a totality, and trying to create one (which is impossible) results in violence towards those who are not able to be included/categorized.
- Next lines: “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.”
Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity
“They are theorists for cyborgs. Exploring conceptions of bodily boundaries and social order.”
- Referring to a list she gave on authors who explore these topics, including Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, John Varley, James Tiptree, Jr, Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, Vonda McIntyre.
“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 crack the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities.”
- Trying to broaden our definition of the self can allow to look at things differently. She is suggesting that we try something out, something new, rather than fall back into our totalizing tendencies—which, as already described, are sources of imperialism and violence.
“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.”
- Cyborg politics are the direct challenge to “rationality”, in this case phallogocentric rationality. I think by pollution she means confusion, like polluting the meaning of this word, of all words. I really like this idea, it’s similar to some parts of accelerationism but in a way more sensible way. It is excited to embrace the new changes in a new way of resistance.
“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.”
- This hits on things similar to what Bonanno talks about in Anarchist Tension, the Western understanding/perspective of hierarchies and quantitative understanding is harmful. It also hits on things I have talked about when discussing intersectionality. Intersectionality is not an understanding of/a creation of a hierarchy of oppression—saying who is more or less oppressed than others—but rather an attempt to discuss that each person/group is differently oppressed than others. There is nuance to this, of course; white men are going to be less harshly oppressed than a Black woman, but creating a hierarchy does more harm than good as it is a totalizing hierarchy.
“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.”
- This honestly helps me understand a lot better what she means when she speaks of cyborgs. A cyborg is constantly assembled, disassembled, reassembled, etc. with no real origin point. This is what she means, they are creating their own story, they are rewriting themselves, reconstructing themselves.
“Certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals—in 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.”
- This is a massive quote but very interesting. Creating a “self” is automatically creating an other. This is close to the idea talked about in Evangelion, where there is an other, there is an unavoidable quality of objectification, that it automatically creates a divide. Schismogenesis. When you are the self, you are able to control everything, your perception is your entire world.
- Next Lines: “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.”
o This is interesting, it is the same question one asks with culture. Does the person create the culture or does the culture create the person. It’s really similar to Foucault’s ideas of creation and societal control.
- “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?”
“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.”
- I think this is interesting. I also get worried about an over-reliance on science. That is what we currently have and it is extremely quantitatively based—something that ends in an ignorance of qualitative understanding. I do like the erasure of boundaries between mechanism and human, but I get worried about doing this before capitalism is destroyed. Once again though, this will happen whether or not we are ready for it, capitalism has not stopped and will not stop because we aren’t comfortable with it. We have to be prepared to build a new politics which does not lay idly by in the politics of the past while the rest of the world rushes by us.
queerghstbuster's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.0