Manifestly - Haraway - (INTRODUCTION)

INTRODUCTION
cary Wolfe
In the thirty-plus years I’ve been reading critical and cultural

theory, I don’t think there’s ever been a phenomenon like “The
Cyborg Manifesto.” I remember distinctly the first time I read
it (in the form of a dog-eared Xerox copy, as was the custom
among graduate students in those days). I’ve met lots of people
over the years who had the same experience with the mani-
festo—less like remembering where you were on 9/11 than re-
calling the first time you listened to a record that really blew you
away. On intellectual grounds, I was drawn to the text in part be-
cause as an undergraduate I had already become interested in
systems theory (or what was then often called “cybernetics”),
Copyright © 2016. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
thanks in no small part to the work of Gregory Bateson in Steps

to an Ecology of Mind. (Only later—much later—would I dis-
cover the happy coincidence that both Bateson and Haraway
had taught and made their homes in Santa Cruz, California, in
the thick of what would become the History of Consciousness
Board and, later, Department.) I was prepared, then (at least in
part), for the interdisciplinary intellectual sweep of the mani-
festo and its mash-up of science, technoculture, science fic-
tion, philosophy, socialist-feminist politics, and theory. But
what I wasn’t prepared for—and I don’t think many people
were—was its stylistic and rhetorical bravado, what I’d even call
Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=4392065.
Created from uoregon on 2020-08-26 00:52:28.
its swagger (being deliberately heretical here, precisely in the
spirit of the manifesto itself). Who else launches an essay with
observations such as “Cyborg ‘sex’ restores some of the lovely
replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice or-
ganic prophylactics against heterosexism)” and ends it with the
declaration “Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I’d
rather be a cyborg than a goddess”?
It wasn’t just that the manifesto made clear to me, in theo-
retical terms, something I would try to articulate later in
my own work: that rethinking the so-called “question of the
animal” was really a subset of a much broader challenge that
would come to be called posthumanism (a term Haraway chafes
against, for reasons we discuss in these pages). That much is
announced barely three pages into the text, where we find the
famous passage on the “three crucial boundary breakdowns”
(between human and animal, organism and machine, and the
physical and the nonphysical) that provides the point of entry

for the manifesto to do its work. No, for me, and I’ll wager for
most readers, it was the unprecedented writerly whirlwind of
the text that made it unforgettable—its swervings and foldings,
the mix of tones, voices, and conjurings, winking at the reader
here only to do some serious cage rattling on the very next page.
A term that comes up a lot (both in our conversation here and in
Haraway’s own characterization of the text) is irony, but irony
doesn’t begin to capture the amazing range of tones, personae,
and voices that Haraway is able to inhabit in these pages.
Introduction
viii
The rhetorical performance is so stunning that it’s easy to
forget just how encyclopedic the text is, and how generous, too.
How much do you first have to know to even contemplate a piece
of writing such as this? And where else—in an era of academic
stardom that was already well under way at the time—do we find
a more generous citational practice (something Haraway takes
very seriously, as readers of our conversation will discover)?
Try making a list of just the proper names mentioned in the text.
For these reasons (and more, of course), “The Cyborg Mani-
festo” was a profoundly liberating experience for many read-
ers—not liberating as in “freedom to do whatever you like,” but
liberating in the sense of modeling for us a new and unprece-
dented range of expression and experimentation for serious ac-
ademic writing. Given its headlong pace and its weave of affec-
tive registers and discursive textures, it sometimes felt more
like reading a novel or experimental fiction than reading an ac-
ademic essay. I think many readers left their first encounter with
the manifesto thinking to themselves, “Wow, you can really
write this way?!” Well, yes and no. You can if you’re Donna Har-
away.
But “The Cyborg Manifesto” is also very much a product of
its moment, and this is as it should be, since cyborgs (as she
reminds us many times in the text) have no truck with time -
lessness or immortality. Reading it again today, it’s a sort of time
capsule or cultural brain smear from the era of Star Wars (both
the Hollywood film franchise and the Reagan-era missile
Introduction
ix
defense system) blasphemously reinterpreted by a committed
socialist-feminist who is ready to do something about it, is look-
ing for help from you and me, and will use any and every tool in
the shed to make a good start on the job. Almost twenty years
later, Haraway had decided that the appropriate and necessary
tools had changed, in part because of a very long and very seri-
ous involvement with dogs and dog training that first brought us
together as friends (and brought us together as two people who
felt that they could, partly on those grounds, understand and
admire the late Vicki Hearne in ways that few officially function-
ing academics could). As she writes in “The Companion Species
Manifesto,” “I have come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the
much bigger, queer family of companion species.”
Of course, the bio and the techno have always been com-
pletely intertwined in Haraway’s work, early and late; they are
wound up in that “spiral dance” that ends Manifesto I. But “The
Companion Species Manifesto” reaches—and even yearns—to-

ward that other pole of the bio/techno problematic, the flesh
(keeping in mind, as she reminds us early in Manifesto II, that
“these figures are hardly polar opposites”). While it’s true, as
Haraway writes in Manifesto II, that “neither a cyborg nor a
companion animal pleases the pure of heart who long for better
protected species boundaries and sterilization of category de-
viants,” there’s a need for flesh and earth here that gives the sec-
ond manifesto a different feel. It’s not just that these are revealed
to be the site of a more densely woven complexity—ontologi-
Introduction
x
cally, ethically, and politically—than the circuit, the chip, or the
algorithm. It’s also that this is less a story about technoscience
(though it’s obviously that, too) than a story of “biopower and
biosociality,” of how “history matters in naturecultures,” in-
cluding Haraway’s own history (see “Notes of a Sports Writer’s
Daughter”), and including the history of this complicated crea-
ture called “The Australian Shepherd,” and how those two end
up in their own kind of “spiral dance,” one that is less about cy-
borgs and goddesses than about bitches, messmates, and what
Haraway (doing a number on Foucault) calls “the birth of the
kennel.”
To delve into the complexities—historical, genetic, and oth-
erwise—of the AKC-recognized “purebred” dog is to enter fully
biopolitical territory, because, as we now know, race is ab-
solutely central to the work of biopolitics, and it’s impossible to
talk about race without talking about species. In light of all the
biopolitical literature devoted to the Holocaust and the Nazi

camps, the word purebred takes on a rather more ominous cast
by the time the second manifesto appears. That text reminds
us of something we ought not need reminding of: that Donna
Haraway is one of the most important thinkers in the history of
what is now officially called “biopolitical thought” (a geneal-
ogy that can often seem, with its procession of white, male, Eu-
ropean continental philosophers, a little too purebred for its
own good—though I am happy to see Roberto Esposito, a fellow
Posthumanities author, giving Haraway her due). Does any
Introduction
xi
major thinker of biopolitics (and I include Michel Foucault
in that ascription) bring to the table anything like the range of
disciplinary expertise and nimbleness across literatures, dis-
courses, and political communities that we find in Haraway’s
writing? I don’t think so. No doubt “The Companion Species
Manifesto” (and Haraway’s book When Species Meet, which
grew out of it) makes a unique and remarkably timely contribu-
tion to biopolitical thought. But it also reminds us of something
I was keen to underscore in these pages: that in essays such as
“The Biological Enterprise: Sex, Mind, and Profit from Human
Engineering to Sociobiology” (published in 1979), Haraway was
“doing biopolitics” long before it became codified as a field.
Finally, to return to the title of this collection, readers will
find late in our conversation the amplification of an often-
overlooked element in Haraway’s writing, one that will have a
salutary effect, I hope, on what is often called “the return of re-
ligion” in contemporary theory and philosophy. After all, a pri-

mary sense of the word manifest, according to the Oxford En-
glish Dictionary, is “to make something evident to the eye or to
the understanding . . . especially of supernatural beings,” as in
the example offered from The Gospel of Ramakrishna: “I see that
God is walking in every human form and manifesting Himself
alike through the sage and the sinner.” As we discuss in some
detail in our exchange, the powerful trope of “the word made
flesh” does important work in Haraway’s writing—not just con-
ceptually, but ethically, politically, indeed biopolitically—and it
Introduction
xii
provides an important counterlogic for her to a certain binding,
hegemonic matrix of secularism, Protestantism, capitalism,
and the state form in the history of the modern United States.
As she reveals, her attraction to this trope is born, in no small
part, of the fact of being raised Catholic. But her own tran-
substantiation of it is due to the fact of being raised not just
Catholic but a Catholic woman who comes of age and is edu-
cated in the era of Sputnik and the Space Race. To return full cir-
cle to the opening of “The Cyborg Manifesto,” then, Haraway’s
use of “the word made flesh” is “blasphemy,” perhaps, but all
the more serious and all the more faithful because of it. After all,
as she reminds us in the very letter of her work, “blasphemy is
not apostasy.”
Introduction
xiii
This page intentionally left blank
THE MANIFESTOS
This page intentionally left blank

Manifestly - Haraway - (INTRODUCTION)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Manifestly - Haraway - (INTRODUCTION)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

INTRODUCTION

In the thirty-plus years I’ve been reading critical and cultural

thanks in no small part to the work of Gregory Bateson in Steps

physical and the nonphysical) that provides the point of entry

Companion Species Manifesto” reaches—and even yearns—to-

biopolitical literature devoted to the Holocaust and the Nazi

ligion” in contemporary theory and philosophy. After all, a pri-

You might also like