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Materializing a Cyborgs Manifesto

Jackie Orr

utopia

Once upon a time Donna Haraway wrote a manifesto for cyborgs. Inside
the essay are pieces of timea science fiction time of fantastic transmutations, an archival time of Cold War biologics and informatic cyberobjects,
a spiraling time of pagan turns and returnings, a political time of retooling
the very terms of feminist struggles. Outside the essay are wild oldnew
timesthe mythic physics of Star Wars, popular cultures of punk and aerobics, low intensities of U.S. military force in the central Americas, mass
movements for Christian morality and against nuclear war. It is an essay
about boundary crossing that insistently crosses the boundaries of whats
inside and whats out, of critique and dream. It is an edge-walking essay
generated by a cyborg on the edge of time, writing (with a computer, for
the first time) in the cut between here and elsewhere, between now and
other times. There is a kind of fantastic hope that runs through a manifesto.
Theres some kind of without warrant insistence that the fantasy of an elsewhere
is not escapism (2006, 152).1
Fantastic hope was not, to be sure, the currency of the time. And yet
the 1985 cyborg manifesto circulates with a kind of viral ambition as if the
elsewhere it tries to materialize is a fantastic contagion moving through
ready transmission routes. Its networks of circulation cross into and out of
scholarly inter/disciplines, practices from art to computing to progressive
activism to nursing to shape-shifting, and intellectual politics far beyond
the feminist and socialist readership it addresses with a relentless, intimate
demand to rethink. One of the fragments of time with which Haraway
WSQ: Womens Studies Quarterly 40: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2012) 2012 by Jackie Orr. All rights
reserved.

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builds the cyborg manifesto is the time of utopia. What time is that? Is utopia a viral temporality? Does it transverse via historically specific movements? Does fantastic hope require fantastic time? What time is it now,
in utopia?
I didnt set out to write a manifesto; or to write what turned out to be
a heavily poetic and almost dream-state piece in places (1990, 18). Socialist
Review asked me to write to address what had happened to socialist feminism
in the Reagan era... . Like the fact that it had disappeared... . Although it
hardly ever existed as a living social movement in the United States ... it had
been a kind of compelling vision, a kind of consensual hallucination (1994,
243). Dreaming in front of the computer screen, toward a compelling hallucination, Haraway conjures the potent utopian figure of the cyborg as
an imaginative resource for feminists facing a night dream of post-industrial
society, the scary new networks of coded hieroglyphics that now produce
so much more than just the secret ontology of Marxs commodity fetish
(1991, 150, 154, 161). In an irreverent reverb with its ironic predecessor,
The Communist Manifesto, the cyborg manifesto materializes a futurepresent time when fundamental transformations in the structure of the world
(1991,165) can be metnot by a revolutionary subject/collectivity of
laborbut by an implosive subject/object/network of fleshly informatics
that is as immersed in political possibility as in the blood Marx sees dripping from every pore of the new figure called capital. The time of utopia
is a fictive-factual warp inside the night dream of an informatics of domination. The time of utopia is the covert now of which science fiction is the
superb animator, through the imaginary grammars of a fabulated future
tense.
Its the fall of 2011. After catastrophic spring flooding throughout
North America, 312 tornadoes in the southcentral United States in a
seventy-two-hour period in April, a historically unprecedented summer
drought in Texas, and a tropical hurricane in late August that devastates
infrastructures in the state of Vermont and floods downtown Paterson,
New Jersey, with fourteen feet of water, a candidate for U.S. president
publicly states that climate change is undocumented science. Its a joke to
believe that we choose our nightmares (1997a, n.p.). Arnold Schwarzenegger,
cyborg, outlives three filmic incarnations as the Terminator before presiding for two terms as governor of California, leaving office just as the state
enters financial free fall and severe cutbacks in state expenditures include a

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20 percent reduction in public funding for the University of California system. The History of Consciousness Program at the University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz where Donna Haraway taught for thirty years is at risk of
disappearing under pressures for consolidated curriculum and academic
programs capable of generating independent profit streams. Undergraduate students in a science and technology class find the cyborg manifesto
curiously relevant but somewhat impenetrable to read. Subatomic experience becomes a thinkable category as nanoscience mobilizes to deliver new
techniques for the reprogramming of matter at nano scales. Proliferating
drone technology automates political assassinations in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan with minimal risk of casualties for the attackers and
maximal terror for those on the ground. In Cairo, Tunis, Hama, London,
Manama, Manchester, Sanaa, Homs, Amman, Madison, Wall Street, and
hundreds of occupied U.S. cities, digital media helps resisters, revolutionaries, and dissidents create new forms and tempos of political movement
while permitting unprecedented control of public communication during
crises for governments willing and able to exercise it.
Or. In other words. Its here again, utopia. How will we inhabit it this
time?
touch

Potent fusions, joint kinship, tight couplings, avid affinities, the manifesto
offers an analytic imaginary saturated with geographies of contact and
connection across multiple scales. The cyborg is an imploded object of
non-optional entanglements and architectured intimacy. The manifesto is
an essay in six parts that dont together compose a whole, that articulate
(that form a joint, are jointed) around fractured identities and destabilized
feminist political economies and epistemologies. The careful joint work
of Chela Sandovals oppositional consciousness touches close to the conceptual assemblage Haraway wants to make out of cyborg (dis)identifications
(1991, 15556).
To what are you accountable if you try to take what you have
inherited seriously? If you take love seriously, then what? You cant be
accountable to everything, so you try to figure out how to think of the
world through connections and encounters that re-do you. (2006, 145)

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Hands, tentacles, digits, prosthetic and replicate limbs abound in Haraways workall images that can articulate to the practice of crafting, in a
deeply artifactual sense of a making or remaking through handed labor.
But the hand, here, is not of course a natural tool. And the digital is, of
course, inextricably handed. Here, implosion, too, is an intimate craft,
an incarnate design strategy, and its force materializes repeatedly as both
object and method in Haraways analytics. Informatics, biotechnologies,
microelectronics are design practices reconfiguring labor, bodies, capital,
experience, impoverishment, nature, consciousness, race, matter, theory,
value, species, gender, violence, language. Redesigning worlds. In such
reworldings, implosion is a form of connectioninvoluntary perhaps,
sometimes forced, never fully determining. Haraways implosive conceptual vocabularies of natureculture, technoscience, whitecapitalistpatriarchy
meet the imploded technobabble of Genentech, Syntex, Allergen, Compupro,
Repligen, Hybritech, Codon (1991, 245n4). The splice can cut both ways. At
stake are complex restructurings of proximity and distance for knowledge
workers, molecular processes, systematic sufferings, biocapitalist data
streams, and the affinities we craft between them, or fail to.
I think almost any serious knowledge project is a thinking technology insofar as it re-does its participants. It reaches into you and you
arent the same afterwards. (2006, 154)
It is hard to be a feminist graduate student in the U.S. humanities or
social sciences after 1985 and not be touched in some way by the cyborg
manifesto. In my extracurricular reading group of four white women living on the West Coast in the early 1990s, we reread the text together and
rewrite our selves in relation. D. rethinks her anorexia beyond the micropowers of disciplinings and punishments, through the partial agency of
an incested girl-machine playing furiously with the on/off switch of her
own desire. K., embedded in the ethnographics of a refugee processing
zone in the Philippines, thinking just below a U.S. naval base and the sex
workers of Olongapo, just above the Westinghouse nuclear power plant
and the Bataan Free Export Zone, wonders if the cyborg is protected by
international copyright law. Whether cyborgs manufactured in Taiwan use
similar materials as those in Germany. Do they speak the same language?
When they die, is there toxic waste?

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String figure games are practices of scholarship, relaying, thinking


with, becoming with in material-semiotic makings. Like SF, cats cradle
is a game of relaying patterns, of one hand, or pair of hands, or mouths
and feet or other sorts of tentacular things, holding still to receive
something from another and then relaying by adding something new, by
proposing another knot, another web. (2011, 15)
It is not a clear intellectual or political task, twenty-six years out, to
write in patterned relay with a cyborg manifesto, a knotted text that Haraway felt was already collectively authored through multiple webs of relation and intellectual debt (1991, 24445n1). It is not certain what kinds
of touch are possible now, or necessary, walking too often with seemingly
empty hands down the institutionalized corridors of neoliberalizing postknowledge projects. Haraway has moved in the past decades from the
cyborg to its close kin, companion species, as an animating figuration for
storytelling today. And you? My companion. My intimate coauthor. What
forms of moving touch, what techno-arti-facts of proximity and distance,
are collectively authoring you?
the despised place

The Manifesto argued that you can, even must, inhabit the despised place.
The despised place then was the cyborg, which is not true now (2006, 156).
Monsters can and do change shape. Despising can rediscern its target.
Bare life becomes a viral meme in critical theory, inviting a related if less
enfleshed theoretical method. Haraway risks the repetitions of a sacramental Catholicism to deliver an embodied ethical-political-affective demand,
gesturing toward a different, decidedly immanent, order of response. The
despised place then was the cyborg, which is not true now. What is true now?
How to name the despised place of our own critical theories (the cyborg
in 1985 wasnt loathed in popular cultures or dominant political imaginaries, but in certain locally powerful formations of feminist critique). Haraway suggests, perhaps slyly, that maybe what is despised now is that old
lady with her dog, as she takes her distance from becoming animal with
Deleuze and Guattari (2006, 156). Maybe, today, to dive a little deeper
into the wreck, it is feminism itself (and what today is that?) that holds
in an ambivalent and somewhat unspeakable turna despised place for a
strange number of us. Is it possibly true now that following the cyborg may

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be less about analyzing the ongoing implosive, prosthetic, transmutational


relationality between information and organism and more about seriously
pursuing what might implode, extend, transmute our politics by inhabiting the place our politics despise?
mattering

Vibrant matter. Viral matters. Culture matters. New materialisms. Speculative realisms. The new vitalism. Materialist ontologies. Haraways work
anticipates and contributes to contemporary turns toward reengaging
the material in its heterogeneous agencies, its performative vitalities.
The shifting matters of biology, nature, body are the manifestos historical
matrix for rethinking materiality as worlding operation, for learning how
to pull the sticky threads where the technical, the commercial, the mythical, the
political, the organic are imploded (2005, 110). Built partially on a decade
of research tracking the postWorld War II transformation of biologys
key matters into militarized command-communication-control and information systems (1994, 243), Haraways worldly cyborg in 1985 stages a
feminist historical materialist re-visioning of how social relations of science and technology complexly matter within a networked series of local/
global transformations that the essay maps with extraordinary intellectual
ambition and acuity.
But imaginary matters and their animate link to language practices are
also at the heart of the manifestos desire. We are losing effective social imaginaries, and it matters in concrete, specific ways (1995, 519). The irreducibly
enmeshed material-semiotics of worlding for Haraway returns over and
over to genre-bending, generative imaginaries of SF (speculative fabulation, science fantasy), at the same time marking the historical specificities
of a biologic recoded by cybernetic communications theory. Cyborgs were
always simultaneously relentlessly real and inescapably fabulated (2011, 6).
Experimenting with styles of thought that detour around the Oedipal foreclosures of psychoanalysis while still engaging the material semiotics of
an unfamilial, not-particularly-human unconscious, social imaginaries of
queer incorporations and multidimensional kinships struggle, against loss,
to materialize through writing. The text is always fleshly and regularly not
human, not done, not man (2006, 137). Scientific realism becomes visible,
in part, as a storytelling practice. Stories are thick, physical entities (1997a,
125). Language plays seriously in the relays of material reworlding. I think

Materializing a Cyborgs Manifesto279

that looking at our academic work as a kind of performance art is not a bad
idea (1995, 520).
As rumors circulate of the exhaustion of a so-called linguistic turn, the
dead ends of discourse and a politics of the poststructural, a cyborgs manifesto responds with the perverse, tentacular, fantastic force of a textualhistorical, material-semiotic practice of crafting wor(l)ds. Weird agencies
proliferate. Wild curiosities find more time. If the turn in critical theory
today toward the material is also a re-turnThe move toward reanimating matter ... is a very old move within European traditions. It is also a move
made in many other cultural traditions (1994, 244)then making alliance
and affinity with the spiraling, situated poesis of theory-making itself is a
sustained invitation that the manifesto relays. As it finds ways, in worldly
relations, to continue mattering.
Jackie Orr teaches and writes in the fields of cultural politics, contemporary and feminist theory, and the critical study of technoscience. She is the author of Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Duke University Press, 2006). For the past two
decades, she has experimented with forms of performance sociology and multimedia
collage as alternative sites for the production of public memory, insurgent knowledge,
and political transformation. She is an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse
University.

Note

1. All passages in italics are quoted from texts by Donna Haraway, listed in the
Works Cited.
Works Cited

Haraway, Donna. 1990. Interview by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross.


Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway. Social Text 25(6):823.
. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. First published 1985.
. 1994. Interview by Avery Gordon. Possible Worlds: An Interview with
Donna Haraway. In Body Politics: Disease, Desire, and the Family, ed. Michael
Ryan and Avery Gordon. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
. 1995. Nature, Politics, and Possibilities: A Debate and Discussion with
David Harvey and Donna Haraway. Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space 13:50727.

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. 1997a. enlightenment@science_wars.com: A Personal Reflection on


Love and War. Social Text 50:12329.
. 1997b. Public talk at Codys Bookstore, Berkeley, CA, February 6.
. 2000. Interview by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. How Like a Leaf. New
York: Routledge.
. 2005. Interview by Joseph Schneider. Conversations with Donna
Haraway. In Donna Haraway: Live Theory, by Joseph Schneider. New York:
Continuum.
. 2006. Interview by Nicholas Gane. When We Have Never Been
Human, What Is to Be Done? Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory,
Culture and Society 23(78):13558.
. 2011. SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So
Far. Acceptance speech for Pilgrim Award, July 7. http://people.ucsc.
edu/~haraway/PilgrimAward.html.

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