Donna Haraway:“A Cyborg Manifesto”(1985): An Outline

1^st: The idea that we are all cyborgs, that we have, through mutations in media, technology and social organization, all become cyborgs, is developed and offered as “an ironic political myth” urgent because of the power of other myths. This ironic faith, her blasphemy, is “the image of the cyborg” (149) This myth is developed at the boundary between s/f and social reality—where they fade into each other, there the distinction between the two appears as an “optical illusion”.(149) “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.”(151)

2^nd: The programmatic rejection of the heroic human myths of Origin and End (150-151; *177) Haraway offers a general schema of the heroic masculine narrative: it passes through “original innocence, individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other.” (177) In this plot “women” have “less selfhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy”

3^rd: The breakdown of three distinctions (151-155)

human / animal: “movements for animal rights …are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture.”(152)

human-animal / machine: “Late twentieth century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed…”

non-physical / physical: “our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals,…”(153)

4^th: The breakdown of these distinctions has made traditional conceptions of identity untenable: e.g. woman cannot be named, generalized, totalized around a particular set of features—because she is fractured by differences (Western/non-Western; White/ colored; rich/ poor; lesbian/ straight/bi-sexual/transexual; ...) that cannot be wished away à Solution: feminists should give up the dream of purity, naivite, innocence and origin-ality.

5^th: The informatics of domination have developed to the point that a whole new set of social practices are appropriate (list: 161-162): we could see this system as part of a dystopic regime of control; but it also can be seen as liberating and utopian: if the self is a cyborg, it/I can practice a new kind of politics (163): “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.”
Cybernetics as a system of control through coding: “Communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move—the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.”(164)

6^th: Work gets restructured as “home work” where all the places of the society get changed (170-173)à these many social developments mean that feminists should give up the metaphysical grounding of their politics in female identities like mothering.

7^th: The cyborg myths can take us beyond the dualisms that have explained what is human and non-human in the Western tradition: 177, 181.