A Cyborg Manifesto
"The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation".
"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" was a groundbreaking essay written by Donna Haraway in 1986. The essay explores the concept of the cyborg and it's ramifications for the future, and effectively inaugurating the academic study of cyborgs. The manifesto uses gender as its central example in explaining the power of the cyborg. Haraway attacks the "goddess feminism" movement ("an American attempt to reject things technological and return women to nature"[1]) and instead offers the model of the cybernetic woman: that of machine and human, a co-created techno-social assemblage with the capability of transcending the polarizing binary notions of gender. Technologies such as sex-change operations and virtual avatars undermine the traditional symbols by which we use to determine gender, thus destabilizing the binary by which we traditionally understand gender.
In the essay Haraway makes a table of how different concepts will shift in our cyborg future:
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/Electronic 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
Haraway's Definition of Cyborg
Haraway defines the cyborg in four different ways in her essay. "The first is as a "cybernetic organism." The second is as "a hybrid of machine and organism." The third is as "a creature of lived social reality", and the fourth is as a "creature of fiction." "[2]
Cyborg Borders
Haraway points out that "the border of the cyborg is an optical illusion", and that "the struggle to define and control the cyborg amounts to a border war". Ironically enough, she adds, this war is fought a terrain that is largely an "optical illusion": the space between science fiction and today's fact. Anyone who believes cyborgs are things of the future is mistaken. Modern medicine is full of cyborgs already, as is modern reproduction, manufacturing and modern warfare. In short, "we are cyborgs", whether we know it or not, if only because it is the cyborg which "is our ontology, it gives us our politics".[3]
Related Reading
References
- ↑ [Background Information on Haraway and her Manifesto. Background Information on Haraway and her Manifesto - Notes for a Cyborg Manifesto]
- ↑ Definition of a Cyborg - Notes for a Cyborg Manifesto
- ↑ The border of the cyborg is an optical illusion. Notes on a Cyborg Manifesto.
