Chapter 24 Donna Haraway A CYBORG MANIFESTO EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION THIS REALLY A MANIFESTO? For whom? Whatever the answer, it's an amazing ‘blasphemous’ call for a profound change of conscious everyone ~ maybe most of ing and working in high-tech Donna Haraway's manifesto sits dead-centre within cultural studies ion of an often maligned and feared contempo ‘on women’s rel ‘The essay prefiguring and supplementing queer theory, concept ‘as well as shadowing the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari’s experimental prescriptions for contemporary thought and livin, In particular, Haraway targets: 1 ature fetishism which finds value in what is natural, where nature is interpreted as the opposite of artifice and technolo \; but once you have read and taken inthis essay, you won't think the same way about things again. A CYBORG MANIFESTO 315 Further reading: Bukatman 1993; Deleuze and Guattari 1977 and 1988; Fox-Keller 1984; Haraway 2003; Hayles 1999; Penley 1997; Robertson et al. 1996, an effort to build an ironic political myth futhful to feminism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is fa ‘reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has akways seemed to things very serioush: I know no better stance to ad lio, evangelical tations of United States feminism. Blasphemy protects one from ral majority within, reed for community, Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectical, about the tension of holding i necessary and true, Irony is abou and serious play. Iti also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to sce more honoured within socialst-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the ima propt ay y ny lasphems, ag ‘A borg is a bernetic organism, 2 hybrid of machine and organism, a ‘reature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social experience that changes wha count at women's experience inthe ate trentth entry Th 2 struggle oer ean death, but the boundary boven scent fon nd oc realty an opted ilson Contemporary sence ftom is fll of cyborgs — eeturessimulaneoy sna uci, hppa ors mt nce Meer cine i ao fl of bors, of couplings between orgism an machine, ‘each conceived as coded devices, in an es we hheterosexism). Cyborg replica production scems like a dreamc C c c sad 316 DONNA WARAWAY ant policy — the win of cit ule dion apts the wan of rae uation ofthe appepttion of tates rence for the productions Foe ee ition of tprerhton of thes fom the rele of the ction benscen ens ae machine has ben «border wat. The ote ade whe bre the trons of production, erin, tl “pet rear in he consion fBourdaies Fare nthe contruction 1c ao an et conta 0 eacee ce and theory in 2 postmodernist, non-natural mode semi Sudan of ageing «world without gd, which pape Miekowt poet bt ape ako wor ih aaoet itaoahatory Nor docs mak ve onan oedipal elena, at cate eninge of gener i an orl bite op OF post 4 “os ako the al apocalyptic els of the “West? cane Sera ee ation an lima eluted oat rom Sh depetency a mani space. An origin so Speman the myth of original unity the alc mother fom whom all humans Tinton the ein Diss and terror, represented by separate, the task of individual ins inscribed most powerfully for has argued that both Marxism ‘nd of individuation and gender ‘of excalating domination of womar/nature step of orginal unity, of identification with nature in the = (illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars. “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partly irony, intimacy and perversity ld completely without innocence. No longer structured lis based ‘A CYBORG MANIFESTO 317 ‘but without the vanguard part: The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful “Their fathers, afterall, are inessentil not turned into amusement parks ~ language, tool parks ~ language, ‘events, nothing really convincingly setles the separation of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be culture for argu ings of human ai radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary. The ‘borg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between h id animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a walling off of people from ig beings, cyborg signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling, Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange ‘The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (o Pre-qbernetic machines could be haunted; there was alway ghost in the machine, This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and ‘idealism that was setled by a dialectical progeny, called sprit or according were not sel:moving, sel. design They could not. ‘dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinst reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now 10 sure, Late twentieth machines have made thoroughly ambiguou space opened up by the coded texts through318 DONNA HARAWAY primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty of what counts as jon is subset of the second: the boundary between physical very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences tnt bands or hand-aed video cameras now arene. Our best machines ae tad of rca thy areal igi wd den bum they are octhing buts Glearomagnetic wanes, a ection of specrum, an hese machines fe einen poruble table ~s mac of meter buram pin in Dero snd Sinppore Feople ace nowicre near 20 Bud, beng both marl and apa Corp te cher, qitenenee : "The ubigty and tty of bors ls prey why thee sunshine bt machines ares Sealy. They at at hard fo ee pty a matrlly They ae st cons sno, Te fing een mig chap tracks across Europe Blocked more elev bythe witch-wenings 0 the loplaced and so unnatural Geenkam women, who Fed the oborg webs of power so very well than by the mitant tour fer marin policy, howe of an antigen in “The nimble fingers Victorian girls with quite new dimensi of these new dimensions ith is about transgressed boundaries, pot which progressive people might explor A cyBoRG MANIFESTO 319 needed political work. One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism {and materialism inthe social practices, symbolic formulations, and physical artefacts ‘sociated with ‘high technology” and scientific cukure, From One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1964) t0 The Death of Notre developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technice and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance. Another cof my premises is that the need for unity of sification of domination has never been more unimaginable from than double vision town. (Affinity: related nuclear group for anoth Fractured idk adjective ~ oF even to become difficult to name one’s feminism by a single in every circumstance upon the ng i acute. Ident320 DONNA HARAWAY ble fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse forthe ddominations of each other. For me — and for many who share oes the definition of the group jon of negation. For example, a Chicana of US black wor to speak as a woman or as a black person the important revolutions. The category ‘woman’ negated all non-white women; “black? nega historical identity as US women of colour. This identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship. Unlike the ‘woman’ Katie King has emphas mechanics of identifstion bui A cyaoRG maniresto 321 ‘ontological discourse about in dissolving Western sees in are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have th the Toss322 DONNA HARAWAY constructed revolutionary subject must give Iatewentith-century people pause the fagog of Mente dln the relive stretegin fr coercing possibility opens up for weaving something other naturalized and denatured the category ‘wor lives of women’. Perhaps a schematic caricature ca she sporopiing lenaty grounding the verte moment or coment in retent womens peli Feminism to MacKinon's veson. Bat the clog loi of her cory shows A cysorc MANIFESTO 323, still as the which an ana Bi song the jc far ei iran dactine ef experince, If ndpoints thet unimendl eae of tifrence made al era of of th eset” ntvetenc of women not in scription of history, the activities of women named by socialist the activity can somehow be sex the two tendencies, on es of domination and Femi of labour Reproduction had different tones of in labour, one in sex, both324 DONNA WARAWAY socialist feminism ~ structure of clas // wage labour // alienation labour, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race In another context, the French theorist, Julia Kristen, as a historical group after the Second World War, In this attempt at an epistemological and politcal position, 1 woul sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture indeb principles of design. The frame for my sketch is set of rearrangement in word socil ration ded to we326 OONNA HARAWAY radicals, the search for integrated social systems gives way toa new practice called imental gineering (lor the manager we who would resist). Both are cyborg semiolo ‘capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed population control and maximization of goal achievement bars wo eect to Foueuls biol; the chor simulates poles, a much more potent eld of “snd of ans of ete and clr objet of knowlege which have appeatedhstrily since the Second Work War prepare ws to notice some important inadequacies in feminist analyse which has proceeded body, animal and human, organism and machine, pt culture, men and women, primitive a disassembled and reassembled, postmodern coll the self feminists must code, A CYBORG MANIFESTO 327 logis are the crucial tools recrafting new social relations for women the military's symbol for its operations theory In mover biologis, the translation of the work into a problem in coding can be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology, sociabiological evolation, and immunobilogy. The organism has been transated ito problems ut. Biotechnology, nology, informs research broadly objects of knowledge,a. 328 DONNA HARAWAY ‘Modern states, multinational corporations, military power, welfare state apparatuses, lite systems, rocesses, fabrication of our imagina ictions of our bodies, commercial p tional division of labour, and religious evangelism depend the technical basis of simulacra ‘without originals. Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artifical intelligence and decision procedures. The new biotechnologes concern more than human reproduction. Biology as a power ‘materials and processes has revolutionary i ‘mind, body, and tool are on very ‘organization of the production and rep organization of the production and reproduction of cul tagination seem ‘equally implicated. The boundary-maintaning images of base and superstructure, public and private, or material and ideal never scemed inore feeble. te sil reo of sos ad technol I tel the ol cee he seat rcaons of ns and iol ene tt me oes ag wih tchmbgial dawrmiem, bt tis hn mtn dng ae Srucurel rons among pop Be te prs shld obese se tel technology prove eh mes of fey tate need ema ot sss an plc acon Some ofthe Ferngeents rote hited cl rons ca ake ‘lout te cae pope alte The ‘homework economy’ outside ‘the home’ ‘The ‘New Industrial Revol is producing 3 new worldwide workin vulnerable to_ pei the job rolls at A CYBORG MANIFESTO 329330. DONNA HaRAWAY Within the framework of three major stages of capitalism commercial or and the paradoxical intensification in which the projections for world ‘new technologies ae part ofthe picture ofthe homework economy: AS and related technologies put men out of work in ‘developed’ countries and exacerbate failure to generate male jobs in Third World ‘development’ and as the automated office becomes the rule even in Iabour-surplus countries, the feminization of work that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community life economic structure in myriad ways which have also situations, which will make cross-gender and eross-race alliances on issues life support (with or without jobs) necessary, not just nice. The new technologies also have a profound eflect on hunger and on food production for subsistence worldwide. Rae Lessor Blumberg estimates that women produce about 50 per cent of the work's subsistence food. Women are excluded ‘generally from benefiting from the i and energy crops, their days are made more arduous because their responsibilities to provide food do not diminish, and their reproductive sare made more complex. Green Revolution technologies interact with ‘A CYBORG MANIFESTO 331 inescapable. These are the technologies that fect exchange ~ and incidentally enable tourism, ind exchange, to emerge as one of the work's of both sexuality and of i Our imaginations of personal social relations of the new technologies isthe culture, work, and reproduction for the large scientific workforce. A major social and politcal dinger isthe formation of social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ly people of colour, confined to a homework ect sgories, and particularly in the production of cts scientifi-technical discourses, processes,‘A CYBORG MANIFESTO 333 yummmarize the picture of women’s historical locations in advanced actared party through334 DONNA WaRAWAY ‘being done, and the grounds for political work are rich. For example, the efforts to develop forms of collective struggle for women in paid work should be a high priority forall of us. These efforts are profoundly tied to technical restructuring ‘of labour processes and reformations lasses. These efforts also are not necessary to be ultimately n’s relation to all and reproduction, and have trouble ‘oppression, nostalgically naturalized in the face of current violation. A towards the disrupted tities mediated by high-tech culture requires not sorting ‘consciousness into categories of ‘clear-sighted critique grounding a soll political epistemology’ versus ‘manipulated false consciousnest', but subtle understanding ‘of emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game. severe. But what people are experiencing is not sulicenly sub connections for collectively bulling effective theories of experience Present efforts ~ Maras, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological - to clarify even ‘our experience ate rudimentary. 1 am conscious of the od perspective provided by my historical position — a PAD in biology for an Irish Catholic girl was made possible by Sputnik's impact on US national science-educaton policy have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second:-World-War arms race and Cold War as by the women’s ‘movements. There are more grounds for hope in focusing on the contradictory ‘fects of politics designed to. produce produced large nu PART SIX Sexuality and gender