Donna Haraway
«A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century»
AN IRONIC
DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT
This chapter 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 women's movements have constructed 'women's
experience', 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 women's 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 cyborgs - creatures 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 'sex' 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 1984'sUS
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 Foucault's 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. Ths 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
'Western' science and politics--the 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 other - the 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.
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 - 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. An origin story in the
'Western', 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. 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
rela-tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and
hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of
Frankenstein's 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 eyborg 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 eyborgs 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 connection- they 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 parks--language 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.2 The
cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is
transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings,
cyborgs signal distrurbingly 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 man's 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 art)ficial, 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.3 'Textualization' 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 'play' of arbitrary reading.4 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 nature – a source of insight and
promise of innocence -- is undermined, probably fatally. The transcendent
authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding
'Western' epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness,
that is, some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological
determinism destroying 'man' by the 'machine' or 'meaningful political action'
by the 'text'. Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a
matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn't
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* 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 Father's 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, mobile -- a 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 consciousness - or its simulation.5 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
'hardest' 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 'no more' than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune
system, 'no more' than the experience of stress. The nimble fingers of
'Oriental' women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls
with doll's houses, women's 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* 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 formula-tions, and physical
artefacts associated with 'high technology' and scientific culture. From
One-DimensionalMan (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
women's 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 acutally 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, avidiy.)
FRACTURED IDENTITIES
It has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjective -- or 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 'essential'
unity. There is nothing about teeing 'female' that naturally binds women. There
is not even such a state as 'being' 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 historica experience of the contradictory social realities of
patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as 'us' in my own
rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth
called 'us', 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
women's dominations of each other. For me - and for many who share a similar
historical location in white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North
American, mid-adult bodies - the 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 coalition - affinity, not identity. political identity called
'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. 'Women of color', 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 'Western' traditions, constructs a kind of
postmodernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity. This
postmodernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said abut other
possible postmodernisms. Sandoval's 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 'women and blacks',
who claimed to make the important revolutions. The category 'woman' negated all
non-white women; 'black' negated all non-black people, as well as all black
women. But there was also no 'she', 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.8
Unlike the 'woman' of some streams of the white women's 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.
Sandoval's 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 'West' and its highest product - the 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.9 Sandoval
argues that 'women of colour' 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 'the poem', that
generative core of cultural feminism. King criticizes the persistent tendency
among contemporary feminists from different 'moments' or 'conversations' in
feminist practice to taxonomize the women's movement to make one's 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.10 Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to
police deviation from official women's experience. And of course, 'women's
culture', like women of colour, is consciously created 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 women's
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
'epistemologies' 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 naivete
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,
effective - and, 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 'race', 'gender',
'sexuality', and 'class'. I also do not know of any other time when the kind of
unity we might help build could have been possible. None of 'us' have any
longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape of reality to
any of'them'. Or at least 'we' 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
'woman'. That consciousness changes the geography of all previous categories;
it denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein. 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. 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 simul-taneously
naturalized and denatured the category 'woman' and conscious-ness of the social
lives of 'women'. 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, women's labour in the household and women's 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'labour'. Marxist/socialist-feminism does not 'natur-alize' 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, women's activity.11 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 MacKinnon's (198Z, 1987) version of radical feminism is itself a caricature
of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories
of identity grounding action.12 It is factually and politically wrong to
assimilate all of the diverse 'moments' or 'conversations' in recent women's
politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon's version. But the teleological
logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontology - including their
negations - erase or police difference. Only one of the effects of MacKinnon's
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
women's identity, that is a kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary
standpoints. That is, the totalization built into this tale of radical feminism
achieves its end - the unity of women - by 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 MacKinnon's 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 analyt-ical
strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure of class, but at the
structure of sex/gender and its generative relationship, men's constitu-tion
and appropriation of women sexually. Ironically, MacKinnon's 'ontology'
constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Another's desire, not the self's labour,
is the origin of 'woman'. She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that
enforces what can count as 'women's' experience - anything that names sexual
violation, indeed, sex itself as far as 'women' 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
epistemolo-gical status of labour; that is to say, the point from which an
analysis able to contribute to changing the world must flow. But sexual
object)fication, 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 another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the
violent separation of the labourer from his product.
MacKinnon's radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme; it does
not so much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any other women's
political speech and action. It is a totalization producing what Western
patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing - feminists' consciousness of the
non-existence of women, except as products of men's desire. I think MacKinnon
correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground women's
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, MacKinnon's
intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the 'essential'
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 'false consciousness'.
Beyond either the diff~culties 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
'Western' 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--structure of class // wage labour // alienation labour, by
analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race radical feminism -
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.
Her dates are doubtful; but we are now accustomed to remembering that as
objects of knowledge and as historical actors, 'race' did not always exist,
'class' has a historical genesis, and 'homosexuals' are quite junior. It is no
accident that the symbolic system of the family of man - and so the essence of
woman - breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people
on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex. 'Advanced
capitalism' is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment. In
the 'Western' 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 women's
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.
'Epistemology' is about knowing the difference.
THE INFORMATICS OF DOMINATION
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 system--from 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:
Representation Simulation
Bourgeois novel, realism Science fiction, postmodernism
Organism Biotic Component
Depth, integrity Surface, boundary
Heat Noise
Biology as clinical practice Biology as inscription
Physiology Communications engineering
Small group Subsystem
Perfection Optimization
Eugenics Population Control
Decadence, Magic Mountain Obsolescence, Future Shock
Hygiene Stress Management
Microbiology, tuberculosis Immunology, AIDS
Organic division of labour Ergonomics/cybernetics of labour
Functional specialization Modular construction
Reproduction Replication
Organic sex role specialization Optimal genetic strategies
Bioogical determinism Evolutionary inertia, constraints
Community ecology Ecosystem
Racial chain of being Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism
Scientific management in home/factory Global factory/Electronid cottage
Family/Market/Factory Women in the Integrated Circuit
Family wage Comparable worth
Public/Private Cyborg citizenship
Nature/Culture fields of difference
Co-operation Communicatins enhancemenet
Freud Lacan
Sex Genetic engineering
labour Robotics
Mind Artificial Intelligence
Second World War Star Wars
White Capitalist Patriarchy Informatics of Domination
This list suggests several interesting things.13 First, the objects on the
right-hand side 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 igod'is dead; so is the
'goddess'. 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 'irrational' to invoke concepts like primitive and civilized. For
liberals and radicals, the search for integrated social systems gives way to a
new practice called 'experimental ethnography' 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
'natural' architectures constrain system design. The financial districts in all
the world's cities, as well as the export-processing and free-trade zones,
proclaim this elementary fact of'late capitalism'. 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 boundaries-- and not on the integrity of
natural objects. 'Integrity' or 'sincerity' of the Western self gives way to
decision procedures and expert systems. For example, control strategies applied
to women's 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
stress - communications breakdown (Hogness, 1983). The cyborg is not subject to
Foucault's 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 'the West' since Aristotle
still ruled. They have been cannibalized, or as Zoe Sofia (Sofoulis) might put
it, they have been 'techno-digested'. 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 com-munication called the informatics of
domination. 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. 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 move - 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.
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-controlcommunication-intelligence, the
military's 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 prob-lems of
genetic coding and read-out. Biotechnology, a writing technology, informs
research broadly.14 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 perplexity-- for 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 'privileged' 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
transforma-tions 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
construc-tions 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 reproducdon. Biology as a powerful
engineering science for redesigning materials and processes has revolutionary
implications for industry, perhaps most obvious today in areas of fermentadon,
agriculture, and energy. Communicadons sciences and biology are construcdons 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 'multinational' 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 feeble.
I have used Rachel Grossman's (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.15 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 'HOMEWORK ECONOMY' OUTSIDE 'THE HOME'
The 'New Industrial Revolution' 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 collecdvities, 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, consumphon, and producdon. In the
prototypical Silicon Valley, many women's 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 'homework economy'.16 Although
he includes the phenomenon of literal homework emerging in connecdon with
electronics assembly, Gordon intends 'homework economy' 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 dme 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 crucial -
and 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, men's 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 poverty-- generated by dismantling the welfare state, by
the homework economy where stable jobs become the exception, and sustained by
the expectation that women's wages will not be matched by a male income for the
support of children-- has 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 funcdon 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
domeshc service and who now hold clerical and similar jobs in large numbers,
has large implicadons for condnued 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 problemadc. 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) --tied to nationalism, imperialism, and
multinationalism, and related to Jameson's three dominant aesthetic periods of
realism, modernism, and postmodernism --I 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
'family' 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 robodcs and related technologies put men out of work in
'developed' countries and exacerbate failure to generate male jobs in Third
World 'development', and as the automated of fice 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 ('feminization') 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 world's subsistence food.17 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 responsibilides 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'privatization' 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.18 The new communications
technologies are fundamental to the eradication of 'public life' 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
televi-sions seem crucial to production of modern forms of 'private life'. The
culture of video games is heavily orientated to individual compedtion 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 exchange-- and
incidentally enable tourism, that perfect practice of mobility and exchange, to
emerge as one of the world's 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.19 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 women's bodies have boundaries newly
permeable to both 'visualization' and 'intervention'. Of course, who controls
the interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneubcs is a major
feminist issue. The speculum served as an icon of women's 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 hundng with the camera and the deeply predatory nature of
a photographic consciousness.20 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.21
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 sciendfic and
technical workers in Silicon Valley, the high-tech cowboys included, do not
want to work on military science.22 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?
WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT
Let me summarize the picture of women's 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 women's lives by the disdnction of public and
private domains-- suggested 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 realms --it 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. 'Networking' is both a feminist practice
and a multinational corporate strategy -- weaving is for oppositional cyborgs
So let me return to the earlier image of the informatics of domination and
trace one vision of women's 'place' 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 'place' for women in these networks, only
geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women's 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'idendfication', 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: Women's 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 women's
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 'marginal' or 'feminized'.
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 privadzation 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 educa-tion 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 dissendng 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 'stress' phenomena;
intensification of reproductive politics in response to world historical
implications of women's 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 'super-saver' preachers solemnizing the union
of electronic capital and automated fetish gods; intensified importance of
churches in resisting the militarized state; central struggle over women's
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 tione, and the grounds for political work are rich. For
example, the efforts to develop forms of collecdve struggle for women in paid
work, like SEIU's District 925,* 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 uldmately
depressed by the implications of late twentieth-century women's 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 people's
complicity in their own domination in late capitalism. It is crucial to
remember that what is lost, perhaps especially from women's points of view, is
often virulent forms of oppression, nostalgically naturalized in the face of
current violation. Ambivalence towards the disrupted unides mediated by
high-tech culture requires not sorting consciousness into categories of
clear-sighted critique grounding a solid political epistemology'
*Service Employees International Union's office workers' organization in the
US.
versus
'manipulated false consciousness', 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 aufficiently subtle connections for
collectively building effective theories of experience. Present efforts -
Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological-- to clarify even 'our'
experience are rudimentary.
I am conscious of the odd perspecdve provided by my historical position - a PhD
in biology for an Irish Catholic girl was made possible by Sputnik's 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
women's 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 pardality 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.
CYBORGS: A
MYTH OF POLITICAL IDENTITY
I want to conclude with a myth about idendty 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 McIntyre.23 These are
our story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds.
They are theorists for cyborgs. Exploring concephons 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.24
American radical feminists like Susan Griffnn, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich
have profoundly affected our political imaginations - and perhaps restricted
too much what we allow as a friendly body and political language.25 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 Sandoval's 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 possibilides inherent in the
breakdown of clean disdnctions 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 'technological' 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 'women of colour' might be understood as a cyborg
idendty, a potent subjecdvity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities
and in the complex political-historical layerings of her 'biomythography', 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 prevendug 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. 'Women of colour' 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 'cheap' female labour so
attractive to the multinationals.
Contrary to orientalist stereotypes of the 'oral primidve', 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 wridng.
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 'postmodernist' theories attacking the phallogo-centrism
of the West, with its worship of the monotheistic, phallic, authoritative, and
singular work, the unique and perfect name.26 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 dme
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 phallogocentrie origin stories most crucial for
feminist cyborgs are built into the literal technologies - teehnologies that
write the world, biotechnology and microelectronics - that 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 stom~
of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of the mesdzo 'bastard' 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,
mother's or father's.27 Moraga's writing, her superb literacy, is presented in
her poetry as the same kind of violation as Malinche's mastery of the
conqueror's language -- a violation, an illegitimate production, that allows
survival. Moraga's language is not 'whole'; it is self-consciously spliced, a
chimera of English and Spanish, both conqueror's 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 Moraga's 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 'original
illiteracy' 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 'Western' idendty, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and
master, body and mind. 'We' 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 'texts'.
From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to ground politics in 'our'
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 'masculine' separation, but written into the play of a text that
has no finally privileged reading or salvation history, to recognize 'oneself'
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 politics --rebirth without flaw, perfection,
abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either better or worse off, but
all agree they have less selflhood, 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 imaginaw. 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 dmes a 'western' commentator remarks on the sad passing of another
primitive, another organic group done in by 'Western' technology, by writing.28
These real-life cyborgs (for example, the Southeast Asian village women workers
inJapanese and US electronics firms described by Aihwa Ong) are actively rewriting
the texts of their bodies and sociedes. Sumival 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, 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, totaVpartial, God/man. The
self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the semice 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 culture's 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.29 Anne McCaffrey's
pre-feminist The Ship Who Sang (1969) explored the consciousness of a cyborg,
hybrid of girl's 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 dll now, machines
could be animated - given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to
account for their orderly development and mental capacides. Or organisms could
be mechan-ized - reduced 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 don't need organic holism to give impermeable whole-ness,
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 endty,
or body. Katie King clarifies how pleasure in reading these fictions is not
largely based on idendfication. Students facingJoanna 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 reader's 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 undl
her 'true' 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 pithug her powers of transformation against the genetic manipulations
of her rival (Wild Seed), of dme 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 illegidmate insights
into idendty and community of an adopted cross-species child who came to know
the enem' 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 Adam's 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 earth's habitats after
the nuclear holocaust and coerce surviving humans into intimate fusion with
them. It is a novel that interrogates reproductive, linguishc, and nuclear
politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-century race and
gender.
Because it is particularly rich in boundary transgressions, Vonda McIn-tyre's
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 'simply' 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 indmacy 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 'First World' 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 system's informatics of domin-ation made her
acutely alert to the imperialist moment of all science fiction cultures,
including women's science fiction. From an Australian feminist sensitivity,
Sofoulis remembered more readily McIntyre's role as writer of the adventures of
Captain Kirk and Spock in TV's 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 diseases -- all crucial to establishing modern identity.30 The evolutionary
and behavioural 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 exten-sions. 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 epistemo-logical 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 men's 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 domination—in 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 skilful 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.
Source: Donna Haraway, «A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,» in: Socialist Review, 80,
1985, S. 65–108, reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149-181; (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html)
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