Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” is an ironic look at constructs, binaries, and ‘technologies’, with feminism, socialism, and materialism at the forefront. Carolyn Keen calls it a “socialist-feminist analysis of women’s situation in the advanced technological conditions of postmodern life in the First World” (Keen 1). The image of the cyborg (short for “cybernetic organism”), which takes pleasure in the confusion of boundaries, is at the centre of this political outlook as a hybrid being without a past in western narrative or teleology, outside the boundaries of dualistic binaries. According to Haraway’s Manifesto, it is “imperative to join together into groups of affinity, to challenge the informatics of domination” (Haraway 80) which are the old hierarchical dominations born out of racist, male dominated, capitalism. Haraway’s ironic myth is a call for “political unity to confront effectively the dominations of “race”, “gender”, “sexuality”, and “class”' (Haraway 75). Maintaining that cyborg theory is relevant in critical discourse necessitates an attempt at depicting what the cyborg represents and embodies, and places Haraway’s Manifesto in historical context. Haraway’s Manifesto accomplishes the task of turning the cyborg from an “icon of the Cold War power into a symbol of feminist liberation” (Kunzru 3). “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” is constantly creating links outside itself in order to examine and dissect the constructs, definitions, and ideas within the text, much like hypertext of the internet. The text itself mirrors the image of the cyborg body, living outside of constructions, while calling attention to facets within the constructs, and offering an alternative perspective. One intriguing link the Manifesto leads to is cyberfeminism. Cyberfeminism is a tool of resistance, a promise of new histories, an infiltration of the media stream with alternative images of the feminine, and therefore a means of dissecting gender. Cyberfeminist art is effective in its manner of influencing the media stream with images of the gendered cyborg. The relevance of cyborg theory is seen in its picture of the world as a collection of networks, and in the notion that the separation between people and machines is not a clear boundary. Cyberfeminists admonish that “an anti-science stance is unrealistic and ignores potential pleasure and the potential value of science fiction” (Keen 2).
The Western ‘informatics of domination’ relies on a belief in the unitary subject, and on dualisms between this ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in all its different forms. Cyborg imagery undermines this by polluting boundaries, and mixing and embodying its creations with simultaneous singularity and multiplicity. The cyborg does not adhere to the traditional humanist concepts of:
Individuality and individual wholeness, the heterosexual marriage-
nuclear family, transcendentalism and Biblical narrative, the great
chain of being (god/man/animal/etc.), fear of death, fear of
automatism, insistence upon consistency and completeness. It
evades the Freudian family drama, the Lacanian m/other, and
“natural” affiliation and unity. (Keen 2)
Binary oppositions play a leading role in domination and oppression. The cyborg embodies a perspective outside the poles of binaries in order to recognize the positive and negative aspects of social constructions. Haraway calls for the formation of affinity groups, with the goal of resistance, and the integration of resistance in response to worldwide intensification of domination. This would result in a slightly perverse shift of perspective in order to better contest meaning (Haraway 70). ‘Our’ world is intruded upon by constructs, and only when the boundaries of these ‘technologies’ are dissected, discarded, broken down, and blurred, can people unify as allies in affinity groups. The world is messier than the usual good/bad, nature/nurture, right/wrong, biology/society arguments, and the cyborg has replicated/generated out of this mess: “the cyborg is not afraid of joint kinship with animals and machines…of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (Haraway 68)
The cyborg image hails an introduction to posthuman identity. Katherine Hayles says in her book How We Became Post Human that “cyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions” (114). Hayles estimates approximately ten percent of the U.S. population, technically speaking, are cyborgs (Hayles 115). The techno-cultural world includes implanted technologies such as artificial hips, retinal implants, cosmetic surgery, hearing aids, online retrieval systems which are used as prosthetics for limited human memories, and vaccinations that program immune systems to recognize and kill viruses, which make it evident that embodied technologies are no longer images or ideas that can be relegated to science fiction. “The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (Haraway 66). The realities of modern life include a relationship between people and technology so intimate that it is no longer possible to tell where humans end and machines begin. For First World countries, the banal activity of:
Picking up a receiver, punching in numbers, ad responding either to an actual human voice or to a machine, is inherently cyborgian…the telephone and telecommunications are not only an interface, they are an extension of the personal body…I experience myself as disembodied, as mental rather than physical, as a projection. (Bostic 359)
The world’s first known cyborg was part animal, part machine, a white lab rat which had an implanted osmotic pump that injected controlled doses of chemicals to alter several of its physiological parameters. By the mid 1960’s, the US Air Force was attempting to realize a scientific military daydream by spending billions of dollars funding projects to build “exoskeletons, master-slave robot arms, biofeedback devices, and expert systems” (Kunzru 7). But it wasn’t only the military that was enthralled with the possibilities of the cyborg. Western Medical literature was also enamored with the possibility of making better humans by augmenting them with artificial devices. Norbert Wiener, who lead the field in cybernetic research, and his book Cybernetics, of Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (1948), influenced both science and medicine with regards to cyborg research. By the 1970’s the image and idea of the cyborg was becoming mainstream, with TV shows such as The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Bionic Woman. Haraway herself is a self proclaimed cyborg. The profound impact of “Manifesto for Cyborgs” is largely due to its timing. The manifesto was first published in 1985. The idea of the cyborg was a trend in literature and film at the time, and was becoming a major player in popular culture, with movies such as Terminator, Blade Runner, and the birth of cyberpunk literature. People were becoming more intimate with technology; intellectuals had computers on their desktops. Haraway says: “Human beings in the ‘90s show[ed] a surprising willingness to understand themselves as creatures networked together” (Kunzru 4).
Haraway’s desire to address humans in terms of context and location, make the cyborg a political body. Dissent within Western feminism illustrates how gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in “essential” unity:
There is nothing about being “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
historical experience of the contradictory social realities of
patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. (Haraway 72)
Haraway views the recent history of fragmentation in western feminism as a result of searches for a new essential unity. There is need for recognition of another response through “coalition-affinity, not identity” (Haraway 73). “Cyborg feminists have to argue that “we” do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole” (Haraway 75). Feminists must be aware of the relations between science and technology, as they are rearranging categories of race, sex and class. According to Sadie Plant, a forerunner in cyberfeminist theory, cyberfeminism is an alliance between women, machinery, and new technology, and there is a long-standing relationship between information technology and women’s liberation (Cutler 187).
Discussing Haraway’s feminism leads to the search for and research of multi-media. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language, the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that claims to translates all meaning perfectly--universality. All technologically based societies are subject to an incessant flickering from the image stream with mediums such as television, film, comics, magazines, music, fashion, art, and advertising. The imaginary (science fiction) and the ‘real’ blur into each other. Within this media stream there is a cultural system that traffics in fetishized images of the female body, as well as anonymous feminine labour or “homework” (Haraway 85). Sadie Plant makes the assertion:
Women have served his media and interfaces, muses, and
messengers, currencies and screens, interactions, operators, decoders, secretaries…they have been man’s go-betweens, the in-betweens, taking his messages, bearing his children, and passing on his genetic code” (Cutler 187)
Eva Sedgwick, a theorist in the field of queer theory, asserts a similar opinion with regards to sexuality in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985):
[Between Men] attempted to demonstrate the immanence of men’s same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to male-female bonds in nineteenth-century English literature…[The book] focused on the oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by being routed through triangular desire involving a woman. (Sedgwick 15).
Cyberfeminism can be seen as a resistor: a device used to control current in an electric circuit by providing resistance, and as a metaphor for differential embodiment. Irreverent sheborgs (gendered cyborgs) can offer examples of liberation by creating awareness around the potential for new technologies which are open ended, ambiguous, and blur borders. One method that cyberfeminists utilize to disrupt the flow of the image-stream is conceptual art that provides opportunities for feminists to influence the formation of new gender configurations. In conjunction with technology, it is possible to construct identity, sexuality, and gender. Cyberfeminists “revel in polymorphous perversity” (Kunzru 4). The outspoken nature of Cyberfeminism manifests in the increased presence of women in areas of technology. “Women everywhere are rewriting the cultural codes” (Cutler 189).
The cyborg myth is also historically situated within modern, postmodern, and most recently posthuman conceptual art. “The feminist cyborg is a monster, it is abject. And that is the point” (Scott 370). Adhering to this sentiment, Orlan, a performance artist/cyborg who uses her own body to make "carnal art", exemplifies this positioning. By means of plastic surgery she is transforming her face, but her aim is not to attain a commonly held standard of beauty. By working so radically with her own body, Orlan elicits critical discourse about the status of the body and gender construction in society. This ‘body’ of work is entitled “The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan”, and since May 1990 she has undergone a series of plastic surgical operations to transform herself into a new being, modeled on Venus, Diana, Europa, Psyche and Mona Lisa. Orlan does not wish to achieve a final 'plastic' result, but rather seeks to modify the body, and engage in public debate, Drawing attention to the man-made (or "ready-made) construct of beauty. After her third surgery in 1990, she donned a Bride of Frankenstein wig for a portrait. The image draws attention to the notion that female beauty is constructed by men, for the pleasure of men (http://orlan.net/).
Haraway suggests that cyborgs have no origin story, or no place in a western narrative or teleology, but this does not mean that their stories cannot be told. The stories of a post gender world can be read back through time and show how the cyborg can play with the patriarchal assumptions of sexuality, as well as gender. Cyberfeminist art subverts the stereotyped female characters found in comics, animation and film, with a goal to create interference within culture, social politics, and history (Cutler 80). An example of cyberfeminist art that engages in discourse with this idea is Nina Levitt’s installation Gravity. Gravity suggests possible displacements that figure in the cyborg model, and shows images that have been erased, and then made visible through old and new technologies.
In its original conception, Gravity is displayed in the following fashion, with small variations depending on the space provided by galleries. The installation is composed of three video projections entitled Spin, Nostalgia, and Wave. The projections are installed as distinct stations in a darkened room. Two audio systems consisting of a looped sonar echo and the aria Ebben n’andro lontana are played. Spin is projected as a 22 inch x 26 inch image, and is a sequence of women divers spinning in slow motion over a sparkling blue swimming pool, taken from footage of the 1996 Olympic games, and is projected onto a white surface on the floor. Nostalgia is a 7 foot x 8 foot wall-projected video loop, comprised of two slow motion sequences: a long shot of a crowd of women dancing, and a close-up of a couple dancing cheek to cheek. The sample is taken from the movie The Killing of Sister George by Robert Aldrich, which is an erroneous depiction of homosexual desire, not unlike a lot of early depictions of lesbian culture. Wave is an 11 inch x 13 inch video projection loop of ‘the First Woman in Space’, Valentina Terechkova, waving and smiling for the camera. It is projected onto an opaque Plexiglas screen suspended from the ceiling. The flickering black and white image can be viewed from both sides. (www.ccca.ca)
Nina Levitt’s Gravity recounts an alternate history in which women’s investments in a technological future are celebrated and made visible again rather than erased. It creates a new history. The astronaut, Valentina Tershkova is a displaced historical figure that is made visible by way of the installation. Ideas of contemporary sexbots and socially constructed feminine images are brought to mind and contrasted with the image of the woman astronaut. The beginnings of space flight and also the formative contribution of woman to that dream are shown.
I
In Spin the mechanically slowed down images suggest the overlap between women and technology, and “evoke the utopian desire to be free of physical and social constraints as well as earthbound identity” (Cutler 196).
The sequence at the lesbian bar in Nostalgia pulls a positive memory out of a sad and negative depiction of lesbian culture. The sampling of found footage in this installation calls up the infancy of technology and gender construction to the present day, and casts it in a modern context. This context contrasts its patriarchal origins. The image of the space suited body, the lesbian body, and the orbiting bodies raise questions and connections between cyborg, gender, history, and sexist, homophobic, stereotypes:
All of the women in Gravity –the smiling astrochick, the dancing lesbians, and the soaring divers – enjoy a certain distance from origins, from history, and from terrestrial constraints. They delight in an altered perspective where the gravity of space and historical time cannot encumber their movements, gestures and identities. (Cutler 197)
While they enjoy a relative distance from the oppression of societal ‘gravity’, they are networked together by means of the technology that they have created; that creates them.
Almost no one today calls themselves a cyberneticist. Donna Haraway has moved on to the study of what she calls ‘companion species’, or dogs. It is possible that some cybernetic projects were victims of fleeting scientific trends. Another possibility is that the mechanisms of control and communication in machines are significantly different from those in animals, and neither is very like control and communication in society. According to Hari Kunzru cybernetics, “which was based on an inspired generalization, fell victim to its inability to deal with details” (8). Adoption of the ironic “cyborg would make an unlikely hero for radicals, for high-tech research is typically financed by corporate interests, often with grants from the Defense Department” (McLemee 1). The cyborg age is everywhere there is a car, a phone or a VCR. Having said this, an entire group of humans, those without technological resources, are automatically excluded from this reality. Contemporary theorist Joseba Gabilondo suggests that the cyborg is representative of the hegemonic subject position that its ideology privileges. In
the economically privileged First World, she writes:
The production of ‘Man’ has given way to the production and simulation of cyborgs. Cyborg subjectivity stretches as far as capitalist individual’ access to the cyberspatial interface of the apparatus continuum constituted by phones, modems, PC’s, cable TV, cell phones, faxes, etc., of late capitalism. (Bostic 357-8)
Yet Haraway’s ironic myth is found in the Norton anthology of theory and criticism, and is still considered relevant today in academic discourse. It is a praxis from which perspective can be shifted. Cyberfeminism and Cyberfeminist art are exclusive due to their necessity for access and comprehension to and of technology. Haraway’s manifesto is written from a western, and techno cultural perspective, and therefore the language of the text is irrelevant to those not privy to technology. Yet, Cyberfeminists’ infiltration of the image-stream with the gendered cyborg body is a resistor to the continuous gendering of techno culture in the everyday life of technological societies. Cyberfeminism art is a tool for deconstructing the dominations of race, gender, sexuality, and class. The ability of the cyborg to blur boundaries and dismantle constructions is a metaphor that can aid in more objectively dealing with a colonized and socially constructed world. The sheborg is a model for the fissure of technologies (constructs) and gender differences:
If women (and men) aren’t natural but are constructed, like a cyborg, then, given the right tools, we can all be reconstructed. Everything is up for grabs…basic assumptions suddenly come into question, such as whether it’s natural to have a society based on violence and the domination of one group by another. Maybe humans are biologically destined to fight wars and trash the environment. Maybe we’re not. (Kunzru 4)
We are living in a world of connections. Haraway denies that there is such a thing as abstract. Everything is tangled together in a web of science, politics, and the personal. "Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us", and it matters which connections get made and unmade (Kunzru 6). The cyborg is a fitting metaphor for those who live in a techno culture, where conservative attitudes about constructs such as "gender", "race", "sexuality", and "class" need to be challenged.
Works Cited
Bostic, Adam. I. “Automata: Seeing Cyborg through the Eyes of Popular Culture, Computer-Generated Imagery, and Contemporary Theory”. Leonardo, Vol. 31, No. 5 Sixth Annual New York Digital Salon. (1998). 357-361. UVIC Libraries
Gateway. November 28 2007.
Cutler, Randy Lee. “Warning: Sheborgs/Cyberfems Rupture Image-Stream!” The
Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture. Ed. Bruce Greenville. Vancouver:
Vancouver Art Gallery/Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002. 65-107.
Gravity. Installation by Nina Levitt. Toronto: distributed by v/tape. 1997.
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture. Ed. Bruce Greenville. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery/Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002. 65-107.
Keen, Carolyn. Carolyn Keen on Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto”. Essay for ENGL 571.
Kunzru, Hari. “You Are Cyborg”. Wired News. Issue 5.02. Wired Digital Inc., Feb 1997. November 26, 2007.
McLemee, Scott. “The Soul of a New Machine”. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Issue dated January 31, 2003. November 25, 2007.
Old Boys Network. A Coalition with Cornelia Sollfrank as contact. 1997. October 2007.
Orlan. Nov 30 2007.
Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. Los Angeles: Universtiy of California Press, 1990. 15.
Scott, Anne. “Trafficking in Monstrosity: Conceptualizations of ‘nature’ within feminist cyborg discourses”. Feminist Theory. London: Sage Publications, 2001. 367-78. November 26, 2007.
