Donna Haraway’s text “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” was written in 1985, but it reads as if it were written yesterday. A cyborg is a hybrid of living organism and machine. The cyborg is a person whose body has been supplemented by artificial components. The term is an acronym derived from “cybernetic organism.” Most of us are already cyborgs: glasses, artificial teeth, artificial limbs, chips implanted to open doors or make payments. And all the metaphorical meanings of cyborg: we are merged with technologies; we sleep with our smartphones next to us at night. Haraway uses the phrase “the informatics of domination” to describe the hyper-modernist worldview that translates the entire world into a problem of software coding. Human bodies (especially female bodies) get coded or inscribed.
With biotechnology, bodies get manipulated by information processing. Haraway gives the term cyborg a positive utopian meaning as a figure of resistance against capitalist mainstream cybernetic systems. The cyborg in the sense of transformation is not searching for an identity but rather for affinities with kindred actors. She is intimately entangled with advanced technologies. Haraway points to feminist SF writing. She proposes that feminist theory take a new direction away from “identity politics” or the “essentialist” position that gender or being female is biologically based and clearly demarcated from the non-female. Not only SF, but also post-biological medical science “is full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine.”
In biology, the organism is no longer the primary object of knowledge, having given way to biotic components as information-processing devices. In the cybernetics model, the centrality of information is what allows for universal translation among all idioms.
The goal of the conversion-of-everything-into-information matrix is to eliminate in advance resistance to the rhetorical powers of governance. If informatic code is the prevailing parlance, then there are no more interpretations of discourses, and no more differentiating viewpoints. In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Donna Haraway writes about power and control in post-modernism. In her two-column tabular listing of historical pairings called “The Informatics of Domination,” Haraway enumerates many features of the transition from modern to post-modern “epistemologies,” indicative of the paradigm shift brought about by the advances of science and technology, and the hegemony of information.
The modernist-postmodernist pairs include: the passage from representation to simulation in aesthetics; the passing from the realist novel to science fiction in literature; the movement from organism to bionics and techno-implants in the life sciences; the turn from reproduction to replication of “offspring”; the crossing from dual public-and-private spheres to cyber-cultural citizenship in the topology of social space; the change from work to automation/robotics in the accomplishing of economic tasks; and the progression from mind to Artificial Intelligence in the answer to the question “what is thinking?”
For Haraway, there is a paradigm shift from the “comfortable old hierarchical dominations” of modernity to the “scary new networks” of postmodernism where power is exercised via science fictions, technoscience narratives, simulations, communications and genetic engineering, cybernetic systems logics, cyborg citizenship, and “women in the integrated circuit.” Anticipating hyper-modernism, Haraway implies already in the 1980s that domination was becoming primarily implemented via informatic and bio-technological codes. She writes of the “translation of the world into a problem of coding.” “Microelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra – that is, of copies without originals.”
In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Haraway is talking about the cyborg in the specific scientific-historical-cultural context of Norbert Wiener’s first-order cybernetics; NASA’s “technologically-enhanced astronaut” project of the early 1960s; the neuroscience research of Clynes and Kline (who coined the term cyborg); the “self-regulating man-machine system;” the conceptualization of a “common science” of biology and informatics; the formulation of the material-semiotic object of inquiry; humans as information processing devices; and the techno-cultural and techno-scientific thread issuing from this constellation of developments.
Donna J. Haraway, author of the milestone 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” has emphasized the importance of using the term “cyborg” specifically for techno-scientific entities that became possible in the historical conjuncture around 1960. “Pushing the reality of the cyborg harder” with situated knowledge means examining its entanglement in a definite matrix of cybernetic communications theories, ideas about humans as information processing devices, Cold War militarization, and behavioral and psycho-pharmacological research.
Haraway cites the late twentieth century feminist science fiction writers Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, John Varley, James Tiptree, Jr., Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, Vonda McIntyre, Suzy McKee Charnas, and Anne McCaffery as weavers of narratives about what happens to identities and boundaries in an advanced technological society. These authors are “theorists for cyborgs.” Organic and cybernetic are no longer separated in their stories of embodiment. In the breakdown of the border between flesh and machine, the hegemonic structure of the “Western self” is threatened.
Haraway’s focus is on (1) writerly stories about women of color and (2) feminist science fiction stories about “monstrous selves” who are no longer our enemies. Cyborg science fiction authors subvert the “origin myths” of Western culture by questioning naturalized identities and “recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control.”
Haraway’s figure of “Sister Outsider” (taken from the title of the essay collection Sister Outsider by poet Audre Lorde) is the caricatured image of women of color outside the United States spread by fear-mongering demagogic politicians inside the United States. Third-world women are claimed to be threats to the survival of first-world women. “Sister Outsider” writes for self-affirmation on the borders and “without the founding myth of original wholeness.”
Writing is technology. Feminist science fiction writes as itself a cyborg technology. It fights “illegitimately” for language and against the alleged “perfect communication” of the universal digital code of the first-order cybernetics of “phallogocentrism” (the privileging of the masculine). Humans are by now biotic systems and communications devices. They are coded. Code is fluid, reversible, and always changeable. Code undermines the distinctions of mind and body, and programmer and programmed. Haraway cites the female android Rachael of Blade Runner as emblematic of the blurring of the human/technology dualism. In Anne McCaffrey’s novel The Ship Who Sang (1969), the birth of a disabled child is resolved by the technological hybridization of a brain and a machine.
Feminist science fiction is about “cyborg monsters.” The genre consistently brings into question the fixed binary oppositions of male and female, human corporeality and technology, and individual and systemic assemblage. Monsters have always played a major role in the Western imagination as defining the limits of acceptable community.
Like the Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece, the hermaphrodites of early modern France, and primates in the evolutionary and behavioral sciences, cyborg monsters in feminist SF continue this lineage.
In her novel Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, James Tiptree, Jr. narrates a tale of three male astronauts who are propelled three hundred years into the future by an anomalous solar flare to arrive in a world where men are extinct and highly competent women have developed great theoretical and practical knowledge. In his Gaea trilogy, John Varley writes of a giant living torus in orbit around Saturn, ruled by a controlling intelligence whom Haraway describes as a “mad goddess-planet-trickster-old woman-technological device.” Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred is a time-travel story of an African American woman transported back to pre-Civil War America, plunged into a situation of slavery.
The protagonist’s actions with respect to her new master will paradoxically preserve or eliminate the conditions for her own birth in her original late twentieth century time-period. In Superluminal, Vonda McIntyre writes of space pilots who, to withstand the pressure of acceleration to faster-than-light speed, must undergo an operation to have their heart replaced by a mechanical pump. To help humanity colonize inhabitable planets in distant star systems, the astronauts must metamorphose from the human condition to the status of cyborg. Posthuman transfigurations are also enacted by means of genetic re-coding and the implanting of nano-electronic devices.
Justine Larbalestier investigates The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, a “genre where the negotiations that produce and shape heterosexual subjectivities are explicitly realized.” Joanna Russ writes: “The strangest and most fascinating oddities in science fiction occur not in the stories that try to abolish differences in gender roles but in those which attempt to reverse the roles themselves.” Larbalestier discusses David H. Keller’s 1929 story “The Feminine Metamorphosis” and Edmund Cooper’s 1972 novel Who Needs
Men? In Keller’s short story, thousands of women take over the world in a conspiracy. In Cooper’s symptomatic sexist tale, a male protagonist establishes heterosexual economic exchange for an entire culture by sealing the heroine’s acquiescent allegiance through a symbolic penetrating kiss that is overwhelming and nearly orgasmic. The foundational kiss is the prerequisite to a new system of sexual and gender circulation. It marks the turning point from matriarchy to patriarchy and reinstates both sexes to the status of so-called “real men” and “real women.”
Haraway writes: “Science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations.”577 Technological skills are a dimension of embodiment. One can take pleasure in becoming technically competent. Humans need to take responsibility for their machines. The task of the feminist cyborg is to actively challenge the informatics of domination.