The Cyborg: Sweet Sixteen (and Never Been Cloned)

María Fernández

Vol 1 #20, Summer 2001

In an era in which nearly everything, from small seeds to large computer networks, entails practical or metaphorical organic and machinic fusions, the ‘cyborg’ – that product of early Cold War cybernetic theory, détourned by Haraway a generation later – has lost its political clout. Haraway’s cyborg, ‘not of woman born’, the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, was modelled upon the meztisaje (racial mixing) of Mexican Americans. Given that she wrote her central thesis at a particular historical moment and primarily for women, Haraway’s cyborg was an inconstant figure able to incorporate spiral dancers, electronics factory workers, poets and engineers – a figure that allied diverse oppositional strategies, from writing to biotechnology. Given this radical theoretical openness, what did the Cyborg Manifesto (CM) really manage to achieve?

1. CM was an early recognition of the fundamental and irreversible changes brought about by digital technologies. Predating Dolly, the Visible Man, the Visible Woman and the (purported) completion of the Human Genome Project, Haraway discerned both society’s transformation into a ‘polymorphous information system’ and ‘the translation of the world into a problem of coding’, as phenomena with specific resonance for women worldwide. In the 1980s, Haraway was one of a handful of cultural critics to write about the double-edged possibilities of biotechnology, which has become a major focus of cultural work today. Her prediction – that control strategies applied to women to give birth to new human beings would be developed using the language ‘of goal achievement for individual decision-makers’ – had, by the 1990s, been all too fully borne out.

2. CM urged feminists to embrace new technologies as tools for feminist ends. This was a pressing antidote to the pernicious notion, popular at the time, that women belonged exclusively to ‘nature’. The manifesto proposed that feminists definitely could and should use the master’s tools to destroy (or at least disrupt) the master’s house.

3. CM contributed to the growth of a pan-global labour consciousness, acknowledging the key role of women as workers in the global economy. It also inspired the development of ‘cyberfeminism’ in various parts of the world. But, in contrast to Haraway’s feminist, socialist and antiracist politics, cyberfeminism eschewed definitions, political affiliations (including feminism) and even goals. The political effectiveness of such an undirected movement is still to be determined. Issues of race and racism, primary in Haraway’s formulation of the cyborg, have been avoided in cyberfeminism. This silence could prove as destructive here as it was to second wave US feminism. One can only hope that cyberfeminism is still open to transformations.

4. CM proposed feminist associations based on affinities rather than identity. Haraway wrote the manifesto in response to the endless fragmentation of the US second wave feminist movement along lines of ethnic, racial and sexual identity. The manifesto called for the crossing of boundaries and for a reorganisation of women on the basis of political kinship. Cyberfeminists followed Haraway’s lead to associate on the basis of affinities; but, at present and with some exceptions, these affinities tend to be career-orientated rather than political.

5. CM reinforced and popularised earlier utopian feminist imaginings of a world rendered gender-free by technology. Effectively, what this really meant was that those who could afford medical services and technology would be able to ‘re-generate’ themselves at will. For a small segment of the world’s population, this has indeed been liberating and empowering; previously ‘monstrous’ prostheses became beautiful.

If the original radicality of Haraway’s cyborg lay in its illegitimacy, the ubiquity of digital, ex-military, and genetic technologies suggest that the cyborg is now a recognised legal citizen, much more a creature of social reality than of fiction. The utilisation of the cyborg as an image of edgy radicalism was, and still is, the territory of electronics and the fashion industry. Yet, because cyberfeminism emphasises the cyber element of the formulation at the expense of the feminism, the most radical politics of the manifesto have largely been ignored.