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The Cyborg Manifesto: An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in…
The Cyborg Manifesto: An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit
1. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while on insisting on the need for community.
Not an apostasy
2. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all necessary and true.
About humor and serious play; a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one that should be honored with socialist-feminism
3. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction
4. International women's movements have constructed "women's experience" as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object
A fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind.
This is a struggle over life and death, but the social boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion
5. Contemporary science is full of cyborgs as well as modern medicine.
Couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that were not generated in the history of sexuality
Contemporary science fiction creatures simultaneously animal and machine
6. Cyborg "sex" restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates
.
Uncoupled from organic reproduction
7. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.
Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics
8. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers constructing any possibility of historical transformation.
Cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics
9. In the traditions of "Western" science and politics--the tradition of racist, male dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture;
Stakes in border war have been for production, reproduction and imagination territories.
10. This argument is an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a post-modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end
An argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.
11. The most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-Oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival
12. The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-Oedipal symbioses, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.
Cyborg considered an awful apocalyptic telos of the wests escalating dominations of abstract individualization, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space
Cyborg has no origin story, "final" irony."
13. An origin story in the "Western" humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism.
Both Marxism and psychoanalysis in their concepts of labor and of individuals and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of women/nature
Cyborg skips the step of original unity of identification with nature in the Western sense
<Hillary Clein, 1989>
14. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household
Nature and culture are re-worked; the one who longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation
15. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through restoration of the garden--that is, through the fabrication of the heterosexual male, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos.
The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of organic family without Oedipal project
16. The cyborg would not recognize the garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.
17. The main trouble with cyborgs is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism
They are wary of holism, but needy for connection-natural feel for united front without Vanguard party.
18. The last beach heads 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
Many people no longer feel the need for such separation; many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures
Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture.
Boundary between human and animal is breached
19. Biology and evolutionary theory over the past two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science.
Teaching modern Christian creationism should be taught as a form of child abuse
20. There is much room for radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary
the cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal transgressed.
Far from signaling a wailing off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signals disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling.
Beastiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage
<Bleier 1984, 1986; Harding 1986; Fausto-Sterling 1985; Gould 1981; Kellard 1985; Lewontin 1984>
21. Precybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the specter of the ghost in the machine
This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectic progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste.
But basically, machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous
22. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream
To think they were otherwise paranoid
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 organisms and machines
23. Technological determination is the only one ideological space opened up by the reconceptions of machines and organism as coded texts through which we engage with the play of writing and reading the world
Starting points for left and/or feminist approaches to technology and politics include:
Cowan 1983, 1986; Rothschild 1983; Traweek 1988; Young and Levidow 1981, 1985; Weisenbaum 1976; Winner 1977, 1986; Zimmerman 1983; Athanasiou 1987; Cohn 1987a, 1987b; Winograd and Flores 1986; Edwards 1985
Fundamental approaches to modern social studies of science that do not continue the liberal mystification that all started with Thomas Kuhn include:
Knorr-Cetina 1981; Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay 1983; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Young 1979
The 1984 Directory of the Network for the Ethnographic Study of Science, Technology, and Organization lists a wide range of people and projects crucial to better radical analysis,
24. "Textualization" of everything in post-structuralist, post-modernist theory has been damned by Marxist and socialist feminists for it utopian disregard for the lived relations of dominations that ground the "play" of arbitrary writing and reading
In short, the certainty of what counts as nature--a source of insight and promise of innocence--is undermined, probably by fatally
The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost and with it, the ontology grounding "Western" epistemology
A provacative, comprehensive argument about the politics and theories of "post-modernism" is made by Fredric Jameson (1984), who argues that post-modernism is not an option, a style among others, but a cultural dominant requiring radical reinvention of left politics from within; there is no longer any place from without that gives meaning to the comforting fiction of critical distance
The discourse of biopolitics gives way to technobabble, the language of spliced substantive; no noun is left whole by multinations
Jameson also makes clear why one cannot be for or against post-modernism, an essentially moralist move
Feminists and others need continuous cultural reinvention, most modernist critique and historical materialism; only a cyborg would have a chance
Old dominations of while capitalism patriarchy seem nostalgically innocent now: they normalized heterogeneity without a norm and we are flattened without subjectivity, which requires death, even unfriendly and drowning ones
The clinics methods required bodies work both ways; we have texts and surfaces
Our dominations don't work by medicalization and normalization anymore; they work by networking communication redesign and stress management
Normalization gives way to automation, utter redundancy
Michael Foucault's BIRTH OF THE CLINIC (1963), HISTORY OF SEXUALITY (1976), DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH (1975) name a form of power at the moment of implosion
25. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological determinism destroying "man" by the "machine" or "meaningful 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 shouldn't we?
26. The boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us
Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the interdeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances as a marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong but they are on the right subject
<The US equivalent to Mills and Boon>
Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible
The silicon chip is a surface for miting; it is etched into a molecular scales distributed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores
Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father's ubiquity and spirituality
28. Writing, power and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniturization has changed our experience of mechanism
Miniturization has turned out to be about power--small is not so much beautiful as preeminently dangerous as in cruise missiles
29. Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable mobile--a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore
People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material or opaque
Cyborgs are ether, quintessence
30. The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs are precisely why these sunshine belts are so deadly
They are about consciousness--or its simulation
<Baudrillard 1983 and Jameson (1984) point out that Plato's definition of the simulacrum is the copy for which there is no original, i.e. the world of advanced capitalism of pure exchange.>
DISCOURSE 9 (Spring Summer 1987)
They are floating signifiers moving in pick up trucks before Europe, blocked more effectively by the with wearings of the displaced and so unnatural women of the antinuclear Greenham Women's Peace Corps, who read the cyborg webs of power so very well, than by the militant labor of older masculinist, politics whose natural constituency needs defense jobs.
31. Ultimately the "hardest" science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure spirit, C3I, cryptography and the preservation of potent secrets
Engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society
New machines are so clean and light
32. Diseases invoked on these by clean machines are "no more" than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, "no more" than the experience of stress
33. There might be a cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions
Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies
A practice at once spiritual and political that linked guards and arrested anti-nuclear demonstrators in the Almeda Jail in California in the 1980's
34. Cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities, which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work
35. One of the premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices symbolic formulations and physical artifacts associated with high technology and scientific culture
Analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance
The need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of domination has never been more acute
A slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies
36. From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war
<Sofia, 1984>
37. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints
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 worst illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters
38. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling