In Sight The Feminism and Series Editor: Nicholas Mirzoeff on, development and thinking-through of the Visual culture reader Second edition searthers, and general readers. The Nlneteenth-Centwry Visual Culture Reader Amelia Jones Wwlticwtura Art in A/merica ichplas Mirzoeff The Oblect Reader Edited by Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guirs he Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, second edition R
chapter 62 DONNA HARAWAY A CYBORG MANIFESTO Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge,,1991)149-82,243- An ironic dream of a common language for women in the to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps ludi olite t sph oldin ing ff on the construction of the consciousness, the rinat ssibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and live but the bo This is a struggle over life and death, Contemporary science fiction is full of ial reality is an optical illusion cyborgs, of couplings betwe gener stor ode colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C'l, command
A CYBORG MANIFESTO 589 controL-communication-intelligence, an s8 5 billion item in 1984,s us defence budget. I am cannot dream of returning to dust. Perha mapping our social and a The cyb offspring are ofie ism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socia exceedingly unfaithful to their origins, Their fathers, after all,ar ality, the two joined end of this cha lcs-+ alism: the tra fictional (political tific) ne border reproduction, and imagination of human and ity in their separation; indeed, many bran outside salvatien history. Nor does it mark time Biolog 1已 ganisms as objects of knowledge lelar tched in ideological struggle or professional disputes betwee ng monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narrative Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of i diflerent logic of repression, oedia/a borg is a t Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific culture for appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no sense-a"linaP"irony the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of of the "we alating dominations people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the"Western",humanist yth of original uni e uld be haunt the task of individual develo Thistory. cepts of labo m, only mock Ithor to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproducti eam, To think they were otherwi rm sense. This migh and nther distinctions that use oppositional, uto s resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves a technological polis based partly on a revo nships for of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and chical domination are at issu has been damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the eterosexual mate, through its completion a postmodernist strategies, lik he cyborg project as nature-a source of insight and promise of innocence is undermined, probably fatally of Eden; it is not made of mud and The transcendent authorization of interpretation is last, and with it the ontology grou
590 DONNA HARAWAY A CYBORG MANIFESTO 591 sness, that is, some cally med by the"text". who cyborgs will be is a radical From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non- Sofia, 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodil fraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is ives at once bee for litical dir turbed only by riting, power, and tecnology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization. recoupling like to imagine Ain, the livermore e tion Grs pe as a kind spew tools of nd committed to building a cut powt emy se n o th m ugs s ar the as pr menen of the igos rith the ts the chir in my town.(Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear oymh hense human Pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being Fractured identities The ubiquity and invis bility of cyborgs is p why these sunshine-belt machines are so It has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjecti ving in pickup tru oss Europe, blocked more contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and effectively by the witch-weavings of the displaced and so ender, race, and clas so very well, than by the militant labour of old ing female, itself a highly complex category constructed in cor number, pure spirit, C'l, cryptography, and "no more than the minuscule motivate enlistment in th he nimble fingers of"Oriental"women, the old fascination of little Ang with doll's houses e-and for Hmmm购址Ppm:,Nm oppositional strategi en a response to this kind of crisis b here has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition-affinity, not identity. body animal and ma emulations, and physical artefacts associated with "high technology"and seientific culture positional consciousness", born of the skills fo insisted on th my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist world-wit ns, constructs a kind of postmodern of otherness. difference, and domination has never been more ut a slightly perverse shift of perspective might ity. This postmodernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said about other
592 DONNA HARAWAY A CYBORG MANIFESTO 59 passible postmodernisms. Sandoval's oppositional consciousness is about contradictory locations erochronic calendar aphasizes the lack of any essenti on for identifying who utionary subjects might be us appropriation of means to hat ut with the loss of innocence in our origin, te Ga a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative minism look like? What kind of 1 i. contradict ted osed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effectiveand, ple, colour. This identity in history when t confront effectively the dominations of"race, " gender,"sexuality", and"class".I also do onl of the matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely available through the power m,写P ing socialist feminists, discovered(that is, were forced potent formulation for feminists out of the the author of a cosmos called history. As orientalism is deconstructed politically and that"women of colour etically ends sal ng has emphasized the limits of identification and the poetic mechanics and denatured the category "woman"and consciousness of the social lives of"we of identification built into reading"the poem", that generative core of cultural feminism. King riticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different"moments"or 时 of wage labour wh山boh由可 moves, Marxian socialism is rooted in an mize the womens moveme his(sic) product. an the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake minist history so that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting marginalized, usually by building an explicit tegory permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge of subjugation an ntology om official women's like wopen eminent. The politics of race and cultur achievement of King nd Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identificati ty-through-dominatie ept of labour. The unity of k th think cist-ferminisms have also their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable all"epistemologies"as Western in It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary standpoints, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding
594 DONNA HARAWAY A CYBORG MANIFESTO 59 or me are poles of world historical systems of domination. "Epistemology"is about knowing m甲如 of the history of the polymorphous field called radical feminism. The major effo The informatics of domination stemological and political positi sketch a pictu achievement, not a natural ied to science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental cbanges of the dilficulties built int subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism onary Ity and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a moveme cety to a polym hich like any other taxon forms old hierarchical dominations if the sexualized. Reproduction had different tones of m油 bourgeois novel, realism fiction, postmodernism mm加 epth, integrity Irface, boundary er forms of dom on by expanding its basic categories through analogy, simpl sting,or addition. Embarrassed silence about race among w Biology as clinical practice cal and socialist feminists engineering 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 Decadence, Magic Mountain lescence, Future Shock ocialist feminism--structure of class // wage labour//alienation microbiology, tuberculosis metics of labour radical feministm-structure of gender // sexual appropriation//objectification sex,by analogy labour, by extension reproduction, by addition race peared as a historic constraints group alter the Second Worid War, along with groups like youth. Her dates are doubtful;but cts of knowledge and as historical actors, ecial chain of bei sm, United Nations humanism exist,"class"has a historical genesis, and"homosexuals"are quite nior. It is no accident that integrated stake. It is no accident that woman disinterment. In the"Western"sense, the end of man is ature/Culture elds of difference communications enhancement articularity and contradictory interests. I think we have netic engineering a single ground of domination to se Practices of white humanism and through searching lapsing into boundless diff giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection. Some differences are playful Informatics of domination
596 DONNA HARAWAY This list arena,the body itself-all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous fhcuit to imagine and people and whlch make potent oppositional international movemen ways, with large consequences for women and others--consequences that themselves an no on nd bo rains. Sexual gm, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costa isassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code ke organisms and families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically irporate executives reading Playboy and anti-porm radical feminists will make strange bedfellows gies about human din have social interactions const them, but they should also be viewed as instrumen henries of parameters, like blood groups or intelligence oncepts like primitive and civilized, For liberals and radicals, the search for integrated social -the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a abmitted oding tary fact of "late capitalism" zones, proclaim be know ons engineering(for the manage One should expect control strateg ed not on the integrity of natural objects. "Integrity"or and interfaces Information is just that kind of quantifiable element(unit, basis of unity) which allows universal ontrol strategies applied to wotmen's capacities to give birth to new human beings will be d effective communication). The biggest veloped in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for divi freedom. Human beings, like any other component control-co ized in of by molecular go gle be interfaced with m时 into problems of genetic coding and read-out a jects of knowledge, giving wa al kinds of information- ts in this probing the is not subject to Foucaults biopolitics; the cyborg simulates non ( Hogness, 1983). The cyborg it, a much and utility of the conce th potent held em. Immunobiology and associated medical practic of analysis of scientific and cultural objects of knowledge which have appeared in"the Wert"since Aristotle suil ruled. They have been cannibalized, or as zoe ofia So ethi or the guardians of buman purity In the US gay men and i boundaries and awful immune system disease that marks(inscribes is thela exploitation into a world system of production/reproducti mmunication called the informatics of darnination. The hom ne, largely eoonomic reality to support my claim that these science and technologies indicate fundamental transformations in the structure of the world for
598 DONNA HARAWAY A CYBORG MANIFESTO 599 Communications onies, Modem states, multinational corporations, world. But there are also great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities labour, and religious evangelism depend intimatel origin electronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without litical "technological polluti cyborg myt processing,s arlier I "women of colour"might be understood implications for industry. perhaps most cal ogs of her"biomythography", Zami( orde, 1982; King, 1987a, 1987b) ations sciences and biology are constructions onatutation, agriculture, and grids mapping this potential, Audre Lorde(1984) e tone in the title of her Sister Outsider. In my political myth, Sister Outsider is the offshor ted States, Sister Outsider is a potential amidst the races and ethnic identities of womer of situation of women in a and technology. I used the od restructured through the social relations of cd circuit. Literacy, especially in English with a technological determinism, but wi tinguishes the"cheap"female labour so attractive to the multination sle. But the phrase shou sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make socialist-feminism more oW地Wmm所 oral and written cultures, primitive and civilized mentalities, and more recently to the crosion Cyborgs: a myth of political identity r the meanings of writi want to conclude with a myth about identity and boundaries which might wentti political imaginations, I am indebted in this story to writers like joanna the basis of seizing The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace f embodiment, and especially for Wittig, from imagery of fr gy, and politics from imagery in apocalypse. The phallogocentric origin stories 1 augmentation and reconstitution that have recently textualize our bodies as code problems Griffin, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich have pro- sand perhaps restricted too much what we allow have the task of recoding communication and gies fitting the late twentieth century. They would simply bewilder anyone not positional For example, retellings of the story of the ind machines and consciousness of late capitalism. In that sense ing for Chicana constructions of ident
600 DONNA HARAWAY A CYBORG MANIFESTO 601 plores the themes of identity when one never possessed the original language, eaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake in masculine inary. It esented in her poetry as the same kind of violation as Mallnche' cal life. These cyborgs are the peopl writing. These real.I t identities of women of colo the texts world survival not because of her innocence, but because of her ability to of their bodies and so urvival is the stakes in this all freed at the End from another spiral of appropriation by self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, total/ partial, God/man. The self is the Or efore eating the forbidden fruit. Writing affirms Sister Outsider, not the Woman-before-the who is not do her. the other is the one who Fall-into- Writing needed by the phallogocentric Family of Man holds the future, who knows that by the experience of domination, wi of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twenth oute is2m地; ng ways. It is not clear who makes language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of "western both formal discourse (for exam actice(for example, the homework dentin of mirror and We that stems, oommunications devices like others. There nes the reproducti fundamental our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic. of those closer nces to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than perspective of a hier A cyborg box able original hout end (or until the world ends); it tak W, ity. Intense pleasure in skill be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment astard race teaches ab female ermbodime falinche. Women of power of purity, transformed her from the evil mother of masculinist fear be female embodiment seened to mean skill in othering and its metaphoric extensions. Only ould we take inter be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the nent. t nder might rot be g o,a identiy afte l, even if t ha rofound are ruled by a reproductive polities--rebirth without flaw women are imagined either better agree they have less approached by exploiting the
A CYBORG MANIFESTO 603 given sustain daily life, and so have a privi. and politics, and theory and methods oourses contributed to rg manifesto. Particular debts bere elling aspect to this daim, one the a global vengeance p一间m, boundaries, their construction and deconstruction, There is a myth system waiting to become gg ng at science and technology and challeng and thinand discussion and editor phors of rebirth cyborgs irthing. For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth ock ernandez-Kelly, and Judith Gregory. Finally, I want to aneucated, potent. We have all been injureorlude the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous reconstitution Frecgrowe 02139 ut certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the socAl Feality, probably alwa est Dana St, technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in parti Santa maria nnection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and echnology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a mat beral mystification that it all started with Thomas Kuhn, include: Knorr-Cetina of pkp时b时osm: of a feminist speaking in tongues strike fear into the circuits of the super-savers of the new right. It means bot 4 A provocative, comprehensive argument about the politics and theories of "postmodernism?"is made by estroying machines, identities, catego lationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess akes dear My position Notes The us equivalent of Mills and Boon. odernism release heterogeneity 和出 Alameda County al in california po t)dm arrested anti-nuclear demonstrators hs. It we have funded by an Academic Senate Faculty Research Grant from the University of California, The borg manifesto Punish(1975)name a form of power at its moment of implosion. The dis Scholar and the Feminist X: The Question of Tech Barnard April Consciousness board of ucsc have had an en borg Corp., Statcom Corp those I ate may Dt recognize their ideas. In particular, members of graduate and undergraduate feminist theory, science, of cultural restriction enzyme to at the oode, cyborg heteroglossia is one form of radical cultural
