Feminism in the Late 20th Century

Chapter 4 A bionic man manifesto Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late 20th Century* DONNA HARAWAY Hi grade of mind Program, University of California, at Santa Cruz 1. AN IRONIC DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT This chapter is an effort to build an ironic semi govwhite-tailed sea eagle workforcetal figment faithful to womens lib, amicableism, and materialism. Perhaps more(prenominal) faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and assignment. Blasphemy has always commandmed to require taking things truly seriously.I have a go at it no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelistic imposts of united States politics, including the politics of mixerist-feminism. Blasphemy protects geniusness from the moral majority within, epoch unbosom insisting on the take in for comm union. Blas- phemy is non apostasy. Irony is active contradictions that do non resolve into larger wholes, p lane dialectic each(prenominal)y, or so the accent of holding incompatible things together because two(prenominal) or all argon infallible and rightful(a). Irony is ab break hu- mor and serious play.It is also a rhetorical strategy and a policy-making method, unrivaled I would worry to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the bionic man. A bionic charr is a cybernetic existence, a hybrid of instrument and organism, a creature of social strongity as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social sex acts, our most(prenominal) important political construction, a public-ever-changing fiction. The international womens movements rich person constructed womens let, as well as uncovered or detect this crucial bodied ob- ject.This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political winning. inflammation rests on the construction of the soul, the imaginative ap- prehe nsion, of oppression, and so of possibility. The bionic cleaning lady is a issue of fiction and lived experience that changes what studys as womens experience in the changeer(a) 20th century. This is a struggle over life and death, further the margin in the midst of science fiction and social reality is an optical conjuring trick. ripe science fiction is full of cyborgscreatures simultaneously animal and machine, who popu recently worlds ambiguously indwelling and crafted.Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings amid organism and machine, all(prenominal) conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a former that was non generated in the register of sexuality. Cyborg sex restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such straight-laced * Originally published as Manifesto for cyborgs science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review, no. 80 (1985) 65108. Reprinted with permission of the author. 117 J. Weiss et al. eds. ), The International vade mecum of Virtual Learning Environments, 117158. o C 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands. total prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncou- pled from native reproduction. Modern production clear the appearance _or_ semblances like a vision of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightm be of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command- control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984s US defence budget.I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our so- cial and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucaults biopolitics is a flaccid pre-monition of cyborg politics, a very open field. By the late 20th century, our quantify, a romanceic time, we atomic number 18 all chimeras, theorized, and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism in short, we argon cyborgs. Thi s cyborg is our ontology it perpetrates us our politics.The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined cen- ters structuring either possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of western sandwich science and politicsthe tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism the tradition of progress the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture the tradition of reproduction of the egotism from the reflections of the different the apprisal between organism and machine has been a border war.The stakes in the border war feel been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contri providede to socialist- libber culture and supposition in a post-modernist, non graphicist mode and in the utopian tradi- tion of imagining a world withou t sexual practice, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation level. Nor does it mark time on an oral symbiotic utopia or post- oedipal apocalypse.As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her unpublished disseminated sclerosis on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and atomic culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most brilliant monsters in cyborg worlds ar incarnate in non-oedipal narratives with a disparate logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival. The cyborg is a creature in a post- sexual practice world it has no truck with bisexu- ality, preoedipal symbiosis, unalienated sweat, or other seductions to organic wholeness finished a final appropriation of all the powers of the part into a higher wiz.In a sense, the cyborg has no pipeline story in the Western sensea final irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptictelosof the Wests escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the Western, hu- manist sense depends on the romance of authorized sensation, fullness, bliss, and terror, re applyed by the phallic mother from whom all military personnel must separate, the designate of individual development and of accounting, the twin potent fabrications scratch most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism.Hilary Klein (1989) has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their imaginations of labor and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original 118 unity out of which difference must be acquired and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is an illegitimate promise that efficiency maneuver to sub version of its teleology as star wars. The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, iro ny, intimacy, and per- versity.It is oppositional, utopian, and in all without innocence. No longer social systemd by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technologicalpolisbased partly on a diversity of social dealing in theoikos, the household. Nature and culture be reworked the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical dom- ination, are at issue in the cyborg world. contradictory the hopes of Frankensteins monster, the cyborg does non expect its father to save it by dint of a restoration of the garden that is, through the fabrication of a straightaway mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a urban center and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden it is not make of mud and cann ot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to get a line the Enemy.Cyborgs are not reverent they do not remember the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for communitythey seem to have a cancel go through for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to keep state socialism. simply illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, afterwards all, are inessential. I want to signal three crucial terminal top dog breakd sustains that make the following politicalfictional (political-scientific) analysis possible.By the late 20th cen- tury in united States scientific culture, the enclosure between adult male and ani- mal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of singularity have been pol- luted if not turned into amusement parkslanguage, tool use, social behavior, mental thus farts, slide fastener really convincingly settles the disengagement of gracious and animal. And umpteen people no longer feel the need for such a separation indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of confederacy of human and other living creatures.Movements for animal rights are not incoherent de- nials of human uniqueness they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary possible action over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern or- ganisms as objects of kip downledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a rickety trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional dis- putes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.Biological-determinist ideology is merely one position opened up in scien- tific culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is much 119 room for stand political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary. 1 The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary be- tween human and animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and plea- surably tight coupling. Bestiality has a newfangled status in this cycle of marriage exchange.The secondly leaky bill is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Precybernetic machines could be haunted in that location was always the spectre of the nicety in the machine. This dualism bodily structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was colonized by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. just now when basically machines were not self- moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve mans dream, w holly mock it. They were not man, an author himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream.To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late 20th-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 impose to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. Technological determination is only one ideological space opened up by the reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and construe the world. Textualization of everything in post-structuralist, post-modernist theory has been damned by bolshies and socialist-feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived relations of domination that priming coat the play of arbitrary rendering. 3 It is certainly true that post-modernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (for example, the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organ- ism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature a source of incursion and promise of innocenceis under exploit, probably fatally.The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology substructure Western epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technologi- cal determinism destroying man by the machine or substantive political action by the text. Who cyborgs will be is a radical question the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artifacts have politics, so why shouldnt we? (de Waal, 1982 Winner, 1980).The third distinction is a subset of the second The boundary between physical and nonphysical is very imprecise for us. toss off physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a large -hearted of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances as a marker of radical change in American white good faith They get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices They are everywhere and they are invisible.Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, jeering the Fathers ubiquity and spirituality. The 120 silicon chip is a surface for writing it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be some power depressed is not so much beau- tiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles.Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sun shine they are all light and clean because they are nothing but sig- nals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobilea matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine- smasher machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness or its simulation. 4 They are floating signifiers moving in pickup trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch- weavings of the displaced and so unnatural Greenham women, who read the cyborg webs of power so very well, than by the militant labor of older mas- culinist politics, whose natural constituency needs defence jobs.Ultimately the hardest science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure spirit, C3I, cryptography, an d the preservation of potent secrets. The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. The diseases evoked by these clean machines are no more than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, no more than the experience of stress.The nimble fin- gers of Oriental women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with dolls houses, womens en laboured attention to the smooth take on quite new dimensions in this world. There efficacy be a cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions. Ironically, it cogency be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral leaping in Santa Rita jail5 whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies. So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might looking for for as one pa rt of needed political work.One of my premises is that most American so- cialists and feminists see latelyened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, typic formula- tions, and physical artifacts associated with high technology and scientific culture. FromOne-Dimensional Man(Marcuse, 1964) toThe dying of Nature (Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives have in- sisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imag- ined organic body to integrate our resistance.Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of 121 domination has neer been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of per- spective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies. From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the p lanet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropri- ation of womens bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984).From other perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their vocalize kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and conflicting stand- points. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than branched vision or many-headed monsters.Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most f iercely embody and spew out the tools of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that in reality manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state.Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity assembly in my town. (Affinity Related not by alliance but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity. )6 2. FRACTURED IDENTITIES It has become difficult to name ones feminism by a single adjectiveor raze to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gen- der, race, and variety cannot provide the basis for belief in essential unity.There is nothing about being female that by nature binds women. There is not even such a state as being female, itself a highly complex cate gory constructed in oppose sexual scientific discussions and other social prac- tices. Gender, race, or class-consciousness is an deed forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as us in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called us, and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity?Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of womens dominations of each other. For meand for many who grant a similar historical location in white, professional middle-class, female, 122 radical, northward American, mid-adult bodiesthe sources of a crisis in political individuality are legion. The recent history for much of the US left and US femi- nism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and se arches for a new essential unity.But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalitionaffinity, not individualism. 7 Chela Sandoval (n. d. , 1984), from a consideration of particularised historical mo- ments in the formation of the new political voice called women of color, has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called oppositional conscious- ness, born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. Women of color, a name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorporate, as well as a historical consciousness marking magisterial breakdown of all the signs of Man in Western traditions, constructs a kind of post-modernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity. This post-modernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said abut other possible post-modernisms. Sandovals oppositional consciousness is about contradictory locations a nd heterochronic calendars, not about relativisms and pluralisms.Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential measurement for identifying who is a woman of color. She notes that the definition of a group has been by conscious appropriation of negation. For example, a Chicana or US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities, left out of even the inside oppressed authorial categories called women and blacks, who claimed to make the important revolutions.The category woman negated all non-white women black negated all non-black people, as well as all black women. But there was also no she, no singularity, but a sea of differences among US women who have affirmed their historical identity as US women of color. 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 consc ious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship. Unlike the woman of some streams of the white womens movement in the United States, there is no naturalization of the matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is unequivocally available through the power of oppositional consciousness. Sandovals argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feminists out of the worldwide development of anti-colonialist discourse that is to say, discourse dissolution the West and its highest productthe one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman man, that is, the author of a cosmos called history.As orientalism is deconstructed politically and semiotically, the identities of the occident destabilize, including those of feminists. 9 Sandoval argues that women of colour have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate the imperializing, totalizing rotatory subjects of previous Marxisms and feminisms which had not faced the consequences of the secret polyphony emerging f rom decolonization. 123 Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and the politi- cal/poetic mechanism of identification built into reading the poem, that generative core of heathen feminism.King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different moments or conversations in feminist practice to taxonomize the womens movement to make ones own political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so that it appears to be an ideological strug- gle among coherent types persisting over time, especially those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialist-feminist. Literally, all other feminisms are either incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit ontol- ogy and epistemology. 0 Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official womens experience. And of course, womens culture, like women of color, is consciously created by mechanisms inducin g affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certain forms of academic practice have been pre-eminent. The politics of race and culture in the US womens movements are intimately interwoven. The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification.The theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-domination or unity-throughincorporation ironically not only undermines the justifications for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scientism, and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or natural stand- point. I think that radical and socialist/Marxist-feminisms have also under- mined their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all epistemologies as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to build effective affinities.It is important to note that the effort to construct rotatory point of views, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process display the limits of identification. The acid tools of post-modernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dis work out West- ern selves in the interests of survival. We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body. But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either.Our politics lose the self-indulgence of guilt with the naivet ? e of innocence. But what would an- other political myth for socialist-feminism look like? What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and bodied selves and still be faithful, effectiveand, ironically, socialist-feminist? I do not know of any other time in history when there was great need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of race, gender, sexuality, and class. I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might swear out build could have been possible.None of us have 124 any longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape of reality to any of them. Or at least we cannot claim innocence from practicing such dominations. White women, including socialist-feminists, discovered the non-innocence of the category woman. That consciousness changes the geography of all previous categories it denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein. Cyborg feminists have to argue that we do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for nsight, has done enough damage. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give late 20th-century people pause as well. In the fraying of identities and in the reflexive pronoun strategies for constructing them, the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the solar day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history. Both Marxist/socialist-feminisms and radical feminisms have simultane- ously naturalized and denatured the category woman and consciousness of the social lives of women. Perhaps a schematic caricature can high spot both kinds of moves.Marxian-socialism is rooted in an analysis of wage labor which reveals class structure. The consequence of the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the worker is dissociated from his sic product. Ab- straction and illusion rule in knowledge, domination rules in practice. Labor is the pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world. Labor is the humanizing action at law that makes man labor is an o ntological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge of seduction and alienation.In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism is advanced by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. The main achievement of both Marxist- feminists and socialist-feminists was to expand the category of labor to ac- commodate what (some) women did, even when the wage relation was subor- dinated to a more comprehensive view of labor under capitalistic patriarchy. In particular, womens labor in the household and womens activity as mothers generally (that is, reproduction in the socialist-feminist sense), entered theory on the trust of analogy to the Marxian concept of labor.The unity of women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological structure of labor. Marxist/socialist-feminism does not naturalize unity it is a pos- sible achievement based on a possible standpoint rooted in social relations. The essentializing move is in the ontological structu re of labor or of its ana- logue, womens activity. 11 The inheritance of Marxian-humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me. The contribution from these formulations has been the emphasis on the daily responsibility of real women o build unities, rather than to naturalize them. Catherine MacKinnons (1982, 1987) version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action. 12 It is factually and politically wrong to 125 assimilate all of the versatile moments or conversations in recent womens politics named radical feminism to MacKinnons version. But the teleological logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontologyincluding their negationserase or police difference.Only one of the effects of MacKinnons theory is the rewriting of the history of the polymorphous field called radical feminism. The major effect is the production of a theory of experien ce, of womens identity, that is a kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary standpoints. That is, the totalization built into this tale of radical feminism achieves its endthe unity of womenby enforcing the experience of and testimony to radical non-being. As for the Marxist/socialist-feminist, consciousness is an achievement, not a natural fact.And MacKinnons theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into humanist revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism. MacKinnon argues that feminism inescapably adopted a different analyti- cal strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure of class, but at the structure of sex/gender and its generative relationship, mens constitution and appropriation of women sexually. Ironically, MacKinnons ontology constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Anothers desire, not the selfs labor, is the origin of woman.She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that enforces what can count as womens experienceanything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as women can be concerned. Fem- inist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not. Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism still has the epistemolog- ical status of labor that is to say, the point from which an analysis able to contribute to changing the world must flow. But sexual objectification, not alienation, is the consequence of the structure of sex/ gender.In the realm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and abstraction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted by anothers desire is not the very(prenominal) thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the laborer from his product. MacKinnons radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the business office of any other womens political speech and action.It is a totalization producing what West- ern patriarchy itself never succeeded in doingfeminists consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of mens desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground womens unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If my complaint about social- ist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended expunction of polyvocal, unassimil- able, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, 126