Longer Views (23 page)

As they sit safely on the other side of the boundary between type fonts, as they hang over the border marked by our initial Roman numeral, squeezed and set off in the upper margin of our text along with the poor and prior epigraph they read with such distress, let us consider the above italics to be a bad dream—something which we would all, as would Helva, sheer away from rather than consecrate by personal discussion.

The unpleasantness will, certainly, return to trouble. (The boundary is clearly not all that secure.) But for now let us turn to Donna Har-away's “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” to read, to work, to rework.

In a slow, careful, and even ponderous perusal of this 34-page text (41 with Acknowledgments and References), which first appeared in
The Socialist Review
for Summer 1985, a perusal where the labor was all in an attempt to negotiate a fixed and unitary signified (while all the interpretative work was allowed to drift lazily within the confines set out by a strongly fixed and socially commonplace ideological authority), it was fairly easy for me to read Haraway's manifesto more or less as follows:

In an introductory movement (“An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit,” the title a play on a book of poems by Adrienne Rich), itself introduced by an alignment of “faithfulness,” “irony,” and “blasphemy,” the metaphor of the cyborg was worked upon: the cyborg (the cybernetic organism of Norbert Weiner, transformed by numerous science fiction stories into any combination of organic—usually neurological—and mechanical or electronic material) was
discussed as “reality,” “fiction,” and “lived experience,” as suggesting the bisexual reproductiveness of ferns and invertebrates, as well as that eighty-four-billion-dollar item in the U.S. defense budget, C
³
-I (control- command-communication-intelligence). The cyborg suggests science and politics, “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” Perhaps even more important is what the cyborg avoids: it avoids “the seductions of organic wholeness” and “skips the step of original unity”; as well it escapes the polar structure of “public and private.” “The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the Oedipal project. The cyborg does not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust (p. 67), i.e., it is not subject to Freud's “death wish.” For Haraway, the cyborg partakes of the delirium of the bodilessness of the miniature and post-modern silicon chip, “a surface for writing.” The hardest sciences, she notes, are the places where the boundaries have become most confused. “The new machines are so clean and light” (p. 71)—and deadly. The cyborg suggests a double myth, one that courts “the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet,” but, in opposition to that, courts as well the “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.” (p. 72)

With this account of Haraway's introductory move, I suspect at least some of her delirious striving “for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” is a response to a “social reality” that several science fiction writers have addressed with various amounts of insight—sundry works by both Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Joanna Russ come to mind. Only as a society becomes more and more infrastructurally stable does it permit greater and greater superstructural freedom—of expression, of action, of belief. Conversely, as soon as the society is truly menaced at the in-frastructural level, then precisely those freedoms are the first to go.

The freedoms that we, in the West, are taught to think of as the foundation on which our society is built are actually—in historical terms—of recent vintage. They are very much on the surface of our culture—which is why so frequently they seem so easily threatened in less stable societies.

We must point out, then, that the two versions of Haraway's cyborg myth do not function at the same social level: “the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet” is very likely to be an infrastructural grid, which alone
allows
the superstructural freedom of (some) people to explore “their joint kinship with animals and machines” in a fearless, Utopian union. What seems to be missing, at least from Haraway's introductory move, is any sense of the darker, even tragic side of this situation—a side we enter with the graffito from Joanna Russ's science fiction novel,
We Who Are About to
. . . : “Money doesn't matter/When control is somewhere else!” Not only does
money
not matter in such a situation, neither does language or sexual freedom. To change things at the infrastructural level—to establish a
different
structure for the deployment of wealth, say—is a lot harder than the simple re-deployment of different people into the
existing
wealth structure. And in our society, the second process just cited is a self-repairing mechanism by which the existing oppressive wealth structure heals any infrastructural damages done to it.

Perhaps, I remark in passing, a little more faith in a more traditionally socialist approach (and a little less Baudrillardian
exstase
) might turn Haraway's criticism to the larger lived realities of the vast majority of peoples in the U.S.—female and male, white, black, and Hispanic—whom the existing wealth structure wholly excludes from exploring any such Utopian kinships or boundary confusions with any joy at all.

Yet, that reservation comes to me as easily as her account, so that I was not particularly troubled by it in my progress through her text.

And here, at the end of this account of her introduction, I can think of no better place to give that introduction's opening:

This essay is an effort to built an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful . . . Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously . . . Blasphemy protects us from the moral majority within . . . 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. (
Socialist Review
, Summer 1985, p. 65. All quotes are from this article unless otherwise specified.)

And a page later she writes:

This essay 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 post-modernist, 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, (pp. 66-67)

A world without end is, of course, a world without science—is, indeed,
the
“pre-scientific” Salvationist model: for the great, scientific tragedy is the realization that everything runs down eventually, every fire burns out—the individual, the society, the species; the world, the sun, the universe. But Haraway locates her myth
as
myth. As such, it functions more
as a literary irony—thus, as with my first reservation, I am not much troubled by it.

A premise of this essay is that “the need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But—” Haraway proposes (and herein lies the energy and importance of her work)—”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.” (p. 71)

As much as she approves of “oppositional consciousness,” what Haraway is proposing here is a kind of oppositional judo, a slight skewing of concepts, practices, programs, that may accomplish the same ends. Well, in a world where energy is such a threatened commodity, the suggested economy alone of her proposal privileges it in our attention.

In the section of her manifesto, “Fractured Identities,” Haraway looks to the plurality of women's movements.

While the fragmentation and dissension among the various women's movements has its painful aspect, Haraway tries not so much to unify them as to unpack from the various theoretical positions an encouraging polyvocality.

She looks approvingly at Chela Sandoval's “women of color,” with its insistent lack of capitalization as well as its “oppositional consciousness,” which opens up, and finally deconstructs (i.e., makes radically undecidable) any hard-edged definition of what a woman of color is, save by the accrued negations of having been heretofore denied a place to speak from.

A similar approval is given to Katie King's more theoretical enterprise. King “emphasizes the limits of identification and the political/ poetic mechanics of identification built into reading ‘the poem,' that generative core of cultural feminism . . .” while opposing “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 tendency appears to be the
telos
of the whole.”

Thus, “[t]he 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.”

When, after another brief theoretical foray, Haraway turns to look at Catherine MacKinnon, from the first sentence of Haraway's consideration her sympathy becomes highly strained. (“Catherine MacKinnon's version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action.”) By the end, if any sympathy was there to start, it has vanished:

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, (p. 78)

This section of Haraway's manifesto concludes with an appeal to the strength of “partial explanations”; thus she further reinforces her support for those feminisms that do not claim to explain everything. Here, Haraway invokes the explanatory excitement of Julia Kristeva's notion that “women appeared as a historical group after World War II, along with groups like youth.” Haraway goes on: “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.” Haraway could have extended this historical revisionism to include that literature does not begin till shortly after World War I (Terry Eagleton,
Literary Theory, an Introduction
) and that racism and anti-Semitism are products of 1886 (Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
).

My reservation here, in terms of Haraway's critique of MacKinnon (which Haraway uses as the springboard for this terminal exhortation for a polyvocal feminism), is that in an attempt to maintain a theoretical level, she skirts the real danger of MacKinnon's position. MacKinnon is after all a lawyer, and her enterprise is primarily a legislative one—the institution of laws against pornography and sexually explicit material that presumably degrade women. MacKinnon bases her whole program on the theoretical assumption that fantasies about actions and the actions themselves have a simple, direct, and uncritically causal relation—that, indeed, we should not consider any differences at all between them—a theoretical position that must certainly find itself hostile to, just for example, the whole complex fantasy element that motivates, controls, and that indeed represents the ends of Haraway's manifest cyborg enterprise.

This is certainly a more troubling reservation than my initial one about infrastructural and superstructural levels, because this blindness
to what strikes me as a basic hostility in the two positions seems either suicidal—or profoundly manipulative. And, frankly, if it's the latter, I am not sure who or what is being manipulated nor to what end. I am still willing, however, to read an irony here.

This second section concludes:

Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. “Epistemology” is about knowing the difference, (p. 79)

The third section of the manifesto is “The Informatics of Domination.” It chronicles, by means of two comparable lists, a shift in sensibility that may, indeed, represent the sort of developmental discontinuity Foucault locates at the end of French classicism in
Les Mots et les choses
, when the science of wealth, natural philosophy, and general grammar transformed into political economy, biology, and linguistics.

What sort of change is really involved, Haraway asks, when questions of “Representation” give way to practices of “Simulation,” when the “Bourgeois novel” and “realism” are replaced by “science fiction” and “post-modernism,” when the notion of “organism” is driven out by that of “biotic component,” or when questions of “depth and integrity” become considerations of “surface and boundary”?