When I first read Donna Haraway's A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, I was alienated on several fronts, not the least being my relative naivete, couple with a white skin and male genitalia. What could I glean from a text that seemed to be a call-to-arms against everything my body represented/embodied, and 15 years too late to boot? History had assured us that the essay was a relic: a memento of an era in academia before the balkanization of the humanities in the early 1990's in response to the vein of identity politics in which this work seemed a seminal work, despite the inherent critique of such divisions in Haraway's text. Reading the piece now, in the nowness of ubiquitous, parallel computing, bio-data targeted marketing, and liquid sexuality, Haraway's polemic seems not only frightfully relevant and astute, but, dare I say it, inspiring. She calls for renewed alliances, between feminisms, races and sexualities in the face of technologized social life that would reduce difference to numerical data. Already, in 1985, she sees the fertile linkages between animal and machine, the erasure of boundaries separating public and private, the destabilization of gender and sexual "identities" that have always been fictions, bestowed on others from above so we could feel a part of some community. Instead of holing ourselves into our individual departments, (also the internecine turf wars that wage within disciplines-the endemic ones I consistently see in Media Studies being between those allied to social science, history or theory)-we must look out across the campus, to the so-called "hard" sciences that are building the infrastructures that we do and will inhabit, as well as groups that have been partitioned (the various so-called area studies of ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality; as well as art history, communication, sociology, philosophy, engineering, biology) and forge affinities with those that are not only working toward the same kind of revolutionary politics that we envision, but also the opening of spaces that foster dialogue with and through the same machines that many would disavow or ignore. The question is not an either/or-bodies or technology, male or female, public or private, straight or gay, fiction or reality-but nor is it a flaccid fusion of the two-it's the problem of thinking the "both/and" and producing/experimenting within polyvalent fields where miscommunication and contradiction are frequent and fertile, not dead-ends or failures. The anxieties of originality can be overcome by cross-fertilizations, collective intelligence and modular thinking.
Some quotes:
"Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction." (8)
"Sexual reproduction is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment" (21).
"Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between man and machine, each concieved as coding devices, in an intimacy and with a power that ws not generated in the history of sexuality" (8).
-notion of affinity-"(Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity)" (13).
"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" (14).
"Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism" (34).
