Cyborgs and Human Nature

An examination of Donna Haraway's essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" reveals some interesting ideas about technology, feminism, and the future. Unfortunately it is riddled with incomplete arguments and elitist prose. Full text can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

Haraway fails to make any real connection between a physical cyborg, that is, a sentient cross of organic and inorganic matter, and this mythical marxist-feminist theory that she claims will revolutionize feminism and ultimately lead to some utopian ideal. Haraway rapturously describes the way in which cyborg technology blurs the lines between what most would consider "naturally" human and a new form of humanity of limitless possibilities.

These are some fragments of Haraway's essay that I find particularly fascinating, and powerful in regards to her ideas about the factual and actual cyborg.

"By the late twentieth century in the United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks -- language tool use, social behavior, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal."

"The second leaky distinction if between animal-human (organism) and machine. Late twentieth-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 apply to organism and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert."

And finally:

"The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us."

Now it isn't necessary to agree with everything Haraway says here, especially about the boundaries between man and animal, to realize that human technology has brought us to the point where thing are getting a little strange out there. And in here. To me this is some of Haraway's best work. Her descriptions of how the physical cyborgs blur the lines of reality and how they could very well force of redefining of the concept of humanity are very convincing.

Unfortunately she then goes of into the meat of her argument: that the physical cyborg has become a mythical and political cyborg. That women of color, of mixed race, marginalized, oppressed, fragmented and splintered are mythical cyborgs capable of fusing their fractured identities in a whole greater than the sum of its parts and in which a "cyborg identity" is incredibly politically powerful. Now I don't have a problem with this concept. It's fascinating and, I think, very much a possibility. Except Haraway has prefaced this argument with an entirely unrelated, or unconvincingly related, argument about the physical cyborg; that is the combination of organic and inorganic matter into a sentient whole. Now the overarching metaphor is clear: a mixing of unlike or disparate elements into a new whole, but to me she weakens her very powerful argument about the new coalition style feminism in which women (and men) of all races, ethnicity, languages, and classes might network themselves together in order in enact political change, by dangling the distraction of, well a Terminator, in front of the reader. Not only is it a distraction, but it can be read as potentially insulting as well.

For instance:

"Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade the struggles of women of colour; and stories about language have a special power in the rich contemporary writing by US women of colour. For example, retelling of the story of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of the mestizo 'bastard' race of the new world, master of languages, and mistress of Cortes, carry special meaning for Chicana constructions of identity. Cherrie Moraga (1983) in Loving the War Years explores the themes identity when one never possessed the original language, never told the original story, never resided in the harmony of legitimate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, and so cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right to natural names, mother's or father's. Moraga's writing, her superb literacy, is presented in her poetry as the same kind of violation as Malinche's mastery of the conqueror's language -- a violation, an illegitimate production, that allows survival. Moraga's language in not 'whole'; it is self-consciously spliced, a chimera of English and Spanish, both conqueror's languages. But it is this chimeric monster, without claim to an original language before violation, that crafts the erode, competent, potent identities of women of colour."

Fancy language aside, what she saying is that this poet took two languages, English and Spanish, two languages belonging to cultures that raped, pillaged, and murdered her gender and her entire race and fused them into a potent weapon enabling her to speak out and making her a political force. Here she is a mythic cyborg as Haraway has conceived it. But to compare someone who has appropriated and twisted the language of oppression into the language of empowerment (a mythic cyborg) to a guy with an artificial heart (a physical cyborg) is to insult the mythical cyborg and confuse the issue for the reader.

Another aspect of Haraway's work that I find unconvincing is her idea that cyborgism will lead to an utopia. Her argument for this is convoluted, but as I understand it, is basically that because cyborg blur the boundaries between life and non-life, human and animal, and eventually between man and woman that at some point all categories will become obsolete. Dualism will fracture in a myriad of options, categories, fusions, and alternatives that constantly flux and change. Haraway sees this as an opportunity. She must have a much higher opinion of human nature than me, since what I see are more opportunities for discrimination, marginalization, and hierarchical structuring of society.

The science fiction story The Pretended by Darryl Smith, though primarily concerned with the construction of racial identity, has a vision of the cyborg that is useful to examine in juxtaposition with Haraway's essay. Here cyborgs most certainly are the bastard children of mankind; they are a "recreation" of the black race that had been wiped out by the dominant white culture. Rather than being some sort of "potent fusion" as Haraway would have it, they are instead of race of slaves, carefully programmed and controlled. I think the main point that Haraway missed is that cyborgs, by their very nature, are constructs, built by someone else. Therefore it is inevitable that the people constructing them have an agenda for doing so. And since it is neither cheap, nor easy, to build a cyborg (within our own time or the foreseeable future) there is little likelihood of cyborgs being free beings with the ability to be a potent political force. Rather, it is far more likely that they will simply be one more tool wielded by those entrenched in power (who, after all, have access to the best toys) as simply one more tool in their arsenal of hegemony.