Cyborg Manifesto

A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway is an endeavor to theoretically and politically coalesce feminism, socialism, and materialism. To understand cyborg anthropology, let us situate its import first. "A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (Haraway 5). This means that social reality imbricates superstructure, and that our most basic political construction is a normative fiction. Liberation of oppressed categories rests on the construction of the consciousness, the representation of oppression, and so of remedy. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as feminine and natural experience in the twentieth-first century. This is strife to render the boundary between science fiction and social reality porous and permeable. The cyborg is a representation of both imagination and materialism. When combined together, history can be truly transformed.
Cyborgs are not devoted, because they do not identify the cosmos, neither do they believe in Creation. They are conducive to holism, yet resilient to connection. "The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential" (9-10). A cyborg is induced by two teloi: pleasure and responsibility-;- the pleasure to connect to other living creatures, and responsibility that might ensue from it. Cyborg philosophy rests its foundation on the biological and evolutionary breakthroughs that humankind has attained so far. These turning points have remarkably narrowed and changed boundaries between homo sapiens and other genera, and between homo sapiens and machine. "Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse" (10). The disparity between natural and artificial, mind and body, are made extensively malleable. "Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert" (10). Hegemony, writing, and nowadays technology is becoming characteristics of Western civilization. The true´-or-"hardest" science is of numbers, spirit, and cryptography. A cyborg world is about dismantling common relations between animals and machines, in which identities are shaken. "Gender, race,´-or-class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism" (16). Haraway suggests a cyborg feminism that foregoes the recurrent promise of unity, social, and political construction. "Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage" (21). Haraway accuses both Marxist feminisms and radical feminists of distorting the category woman in the collective consciousness of women . In her viewpoint, essential changes must be brought about on the level of class, race, and gender. These categories are the exclusive creation of industrial capitalism, and since they still subsist, in the here and now, the aim is moving towards a polymorphous information system,´-or-what she calls "the informatics of domination" (28). This means a quintessential transition from old hierarchical dualisms to sophisticated networks of informatics of domination. "It’s not just that “god” is dead-;- so is the “goddess.”´-or-both are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics" (30). Novel technologies and biotechnologies will recreate our bodies. This will bestow upon women new understanding and more complex social relations. The translation of the world into a problem of coding will embody human search for a common language. "The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C3 I, command-control- communication-intelligence, the military’s symbol for its operations theory" (34). Molecular genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolution, and immunobiology are the characteristics of modern cyborg philosophy. In other words, organisms are no longer objects of knowledge, but biotic components endowed with advanced information-processing implements. "Modern states, multinational corporations, military power, welfare state apparatuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabrication of our imaginations, labor-control systems, medical constructions of our bodies, commercial pornography, the international division of labor, and religious evangelism depend intimately on electronics. Microelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra—that is, of copies without originals" (35-36).
We are living under a new industrial revolution that s shaping a new global working class, genders, and ethnicities. It appears hence that the feminist search for utopian language-;- an optimal identification of experience, is a biased and unfair one.
Cyborg writing should be about our ability to survive, principally on the ground of our own exceptionality as a species. Mythical motifs, mainly the Fall from Heaven, are to be pretermitted. "Writing is preeminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics are the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism" (57). Cyborg culture and writing defies traditional dualisms in efficacious ways. It is not important the first-cause-relation between humans and machines. The human mind and artificial intelligence are compared through only coding practices. It has created the unprecedented opportunity of a world without gender. Cyborg imagery represents a place in which dualistic shackles can be supplanted. "It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess" (68).

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