| Some quotations from “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”: Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of U.S. politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the Moral Majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. (Haraway 190)
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. (194)
The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies. (204)
The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of a perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction. Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos. From the point of view of pleasure in these potent and taboo fusions, made inevitable by the social relations of science and technology, there might indeed be a feminist science. (215)
We have all been injured profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender. (223)
Although both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. (223) Questions for Consideration - How do you envision the cyborg’s blasphemous role? Is Haraway’s manifesto blasphemous? Why or why not?
- Haraway states that her manifesto aims to “build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” (190). Is she successful?
- How does embodiment inform Haraway’s manifesto? Is the body important to the cyborg? “Gender, sexuality, embodiment, skill: All were reconstituted in the story. Why should our bodies end at the skin or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” (220)
- What form does Haraway’s feminism take? What is the role of consciousness that she mentions throughout her manifesto? What might she mean by a “feminist science”?
- How does Haraway’s cyborg compare to other pomo/feminist figurations, like Braidotti’s nomad; Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo; de Certeau’s user of tactics; ...
- Haraway makes the distinction between “natural identification” and “conscious coalition” (197-8) in attempting to clarify her feminism; what is a “woman” to Haraway? How does she construct her “matrix of unity” (if at all)?
- Is the cyborg a simulacrum?
- What is the “homework economy” and how is it related to technology and “formal discourse”
- What is the cyborg’s “place” in relation to “the personal body and . . . the body politic” (212)?
- How should the cyborg use writing? stories? myths?
Some Links about Haraway |