Haraway_CyborgManifesto.html Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminismin the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: TheReinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.AN IRONIC DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithfulto feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemyis faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy hasalways seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no betterstance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditionsof United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism.Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insistingon the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictionsthat do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tensionof holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessaryand true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetoricalstrategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured withinsocialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is theimage of the cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism,a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social realityis lived social relations, our most important political construction, aworld-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collectiveobject. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, politicalkind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginativeapprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matterof fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experiencein the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, butthe boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneouslyanimal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. 150 Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organismand machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with apower that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restoressome of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (suchnice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication isuncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dreamof cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorismseem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence,an $84 billion item in 1984'sUS defence budget. I am making an argumentfor the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and asan imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. MichaelFoucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a veryopen field. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras,theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we arecyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborgis a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joinedcentres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In thetraditions of 'Western' science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominantcapitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriationof nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproductionof the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organismand machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have beenthe territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapteris an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibilityin their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feministculture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopiantradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a worldwithout genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnationis outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar,attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbioticutopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her unpublishedmanuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein,the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worldsare embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression,which we need to understand for our survival. The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck withbisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductionsto organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers ofthe parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin storyin the Western sense - a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awfulapocalyptic telos of the 151'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimateself untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin storyin the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity,fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whomall humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history,the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysisand Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis,in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, dependon the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced andenlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborgskips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Westernsense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion ofits teleology as star wars. The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, andperversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg definesa technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations inthe oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can nolonger be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other.The rela-tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarityand hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike thehopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father tosave it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabricationof a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a cityand cosmos. The eyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organicfamily, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognizethe Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returningto dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if eyborgs can subvert the apocalypseof returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy.Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are waryof holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel forunited front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main troublewith cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring ofmilitarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. Butillegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.Their fathers, after all, are inessential. I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this chapter,but now I want to signal three crucial boundary breakdowns that make thefollowing political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis possible.By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundarybetween human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads ofuniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks--languagetool 152use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settlesthe separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the needfor such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirmthe pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movementsfor animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they area clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breachof nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last twocenturies have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledgeand reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etchedin ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and socialscience. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism shouldbe fought as a form of child abuse. Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientificculture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is much roomfor radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary.2The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human andanimal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people fromother living beings, cyborgs signal distrurbingly and pleasurably tightcoupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange. The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine.Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre ofthe ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialismand idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit orhistory, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving,self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mockit. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of thatmasculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid.Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughlyambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body,self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions thatused to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively,and we ourselves frighteningly inert. Technological determination is only one ideological space opened up bythe reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts through which weengage in the play of writing and reading the world.3 'Textualization' ofeverything in poststructuralist, postmodernist theory has been damned byMarxists and socialist feminists for its utopian disregard for the livedrelations of domination that ground the 'play' of arbitrary reading.4 Itis certainly true that postmodernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvertmyriad organic wholes (for example, the poem, the primitive culture, thebiological organism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature --a 153source of insight and promise of innocence -- is undermined, probablyfatally. The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, and withit the ontology grounding 'Western' epistemology. But the alternative isnot 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 aradical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzeesand artefacts have politics, so why shouldn't we (de Waal, 1982; Winner,1980)? The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary betweenphysical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books onthe consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are akind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances* as a markerof radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong,but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentiallymicroelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modernmachinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father's ubiquity andspirituality. The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched inmolecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interferencefor nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Westernstories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed ourexperience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power;small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruisemissiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970swith the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Ourbest machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean becausethey are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum,and these machines are eminently portable, mobile -- a matter of immensehuman pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, beingboth material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence. The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-beltmachines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially.They are about consciousness - or its simulation.5 They are floating signIfiersmoving in pickup trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch-weavingsof the displaced and so unnatural Greenham women, who read the cyborg websof power so very well, than by the militant labour of older masculinistpolitics, whose natural constituency needs defence jobs. Ultimately the'hardest' science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, therealm of pure number, pure spirit, C3I, cryptography, and the preservationof potent secrets. The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineersare sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution*The US equivalent of Mills & Boon. 154associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. The diseasesevoked by these clean machines are 'no more' than the minuscule coding changesof an antigen in the immune system, 'no more' than the experience of stress.The nimble fingers of 'Oriental' women, the old fascination of little Anglo-SaxonVictorian girls with doll's houses, women's enforced attention to the smalltake on quite new dimensions in this world. There might be a cyborg Alicetaking account of these new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the unnaturalcyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail*whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies. So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, anddangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one partof needed political work. One of my premises is that most American socialistsand feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine,idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formula-tions,and physical artefacts associated with 'high technology' and scientificculture. From One-DimensionalMan (Marcuse, 1964) to The Death of Nature(Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives haveinsisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imaginedorganic body to integrate our resistance. Another of my premises is thatthe need for unity of people trying to resist world-wide intensificationof domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift ofperspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as forother forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies. From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition ofa grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied ina Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriationof women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From anotherperspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realitiesin which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines,not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once becauseeach reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the othervantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double visionor many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate;in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potentmyths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the LivermoreAction Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically convertingthe laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools* A practice at once both spiritual and political that linked guardsand arrested anti-nuclear demonstrators in the Alameda County jail in Californiain the early 1985. 155Of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political formthat acutally manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts,Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. FissionImpossible is the name of the affinity group in my town.(Affinity: relatednot by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group foranother, avidiy.)6 FRACTURED IDENTITIES It has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjective-- or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousnessof exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial,and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historicalconstitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for beliefin 'essential' unity. There is nothing about teeing 'female' that naturallybinds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself ahighly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discoursesand other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievementforced on us by the terrible historica experience of the contradictory socialrealities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as'us' in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such apotent political myth called 'us', and what could motivate enlistment inthis collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mentionamong women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of womanelusive, an excuse for the matrix of women's dominations of each other.For me - and for many who share a similar historical location in white,professional middle-class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies- the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent historyfor much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kindof crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. Butthere has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition- affinity, not identity.7 Chela Sandoval (n.d., 1984), from a consideration of specific historicalmoments in the formation of the new political voice called women of colour,has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called 'oppositionalconsciousness', born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refusedstable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. 'Womenof color', a name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorporate,as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic breakdown of allthe signs of Man in 'Western' traditions, constructs a kind of postmodernistidentity out of otherness, difference, and specificity. This postmodernistidentity is fully political, whatever might be said abut other possiblepostmodernisms. Sandoval's oppositional consciousness is about contradic- 156tory locations and heterochronic calendars, not about relativisms andpluralisms. Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifyingwho is a woman of colour. She notes that the definition of the group hasbeen by conscious appropriation of negation. For example, a Chicana or USblack woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person oras a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities,left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial categories called 'womenand blacks', who claimed to make the important revolutions. The category'woman' negated all non-white women; 'black' negated all non-black people,as well as all black women. But there was also no 'she', no singularity,but a sea of differences among US women who have affirmed their historicalidentity as US women of colour. This identity marks out a self-consciouslyconstructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis ofnatural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, ofaffinity, of political kinship.8 Unlike the 'woman' of some streams of thewhite women's movement in the United States, there is no naturalizationof the matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely availablethrough the power of oppositional consciousness. Sandoval's argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feministsout of the world-wide development of anti-colonialist discourse; that isto say, discourse dissolving the 'West' and its highest product - the onewho is not animal, barbarian, or woman; man, that is, the author of a cosmoscalled history. As orientalism is deconstructed politically and semiotically,the identities of the occident destabilize, including those of feminists.9Sandoval argues that 'women of colour' have a chance to build an effectiveunity that does not replicate the imperializing, totalizing revolutionarysubjects of previous Marxisms and feminisms which had not faced the consequencesof the disorderly polyphony emerging from decolonization. Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and the political/poetic mechanics of identification built into reading 'the poem', that generativecore of cultural feminism. King criticizes the persistent tendency amongcontemporary feminists from different 'moments' or 'conversations' in feministpractice to taxonomize the women's movement to make one's own politicaltendencies appear to be the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend toremake feminist history so that it appears to be an ideological struggleamong coherent types persisting over time, especially those typical unitscalled radical, liberal, and socialist-feminism. Literally, all other feminismsare either incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicitontology and epistemology.10 Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologiesto police deviation from official women's experience. And of course, 'women'sculture', like women of colour, is consciously created by 157mechanisms inducing affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certainforms of academic practice have been pre-eminent. The politics of race andculture in the US women's movements are intimately interwoven. The commonachievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/politicalunity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorpora-tion, and taxonomicidentification. The theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-dominationor unity-through-incorporation ironically not only undermines the justifica-tionsfor patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scient-ism,and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint.I think that radical and socialist/Marxist-feminisms have also underminedtheir/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuablestep in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all 'epistemologies'as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to buildeffective affinities. It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary stand-points,epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world,has been part of the process showing the limits of identification. The acidtools of postmodernist theory and the constructive tools of ontologicaldiscourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies indissolving Western selves in the interests of survival. We are excruciatinglyconscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body. Butwith the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from theGarden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naiveteof innocence. But what would another political myth for socialist-feminismlook like? What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanentlyunclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful,effective - and, ironically, socialist-feminist? I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater needfor political unity to confront effectively the dominations of 'race', 'gender','sexuality', and 'class'. I also do not know of any other time when thekind of unity we might help build could have been possible. None of 'us'have any longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shapeof reality to any of'them'. Or at least 'we' cannot claim innocence frompracticing such dominations. White women, including socialist feminists,discovered (that is, were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the non-innocenceof the category 'woman'. That consciousness changes the geography of allprevious categories; it denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein.Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural matrixof unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollaryinsistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enoughdamage. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give late-twentieth- 158century people pause as well. In the fraying of identities and in thereflexive strategies for constructing them, the possibility opens up forweaving something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse thatso prophetically ends salvation history. Both Marxist/socialist-feminisms and radical feminisms have simul-taneouslynaturalized and denatured the category 'woman' and conscious-ness of thesocial lives of 'women'. Perhaps a schematic caricature can highlight bothkinds of moves. Marxian socialism is rooted in an analysis of wage labourwhich reveals class structure. The consequence of the wage relationshipis systematic alienation, as the worker is dissociated from his (sic) product.Abstraction and illusion rule in knowledge, domination rules in practice.Labour is the pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist toovercome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changingthe world. Labour is the humanizing activity that makes man; labour is anontological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledgeof subjugation and alienation. In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism advanced by allying itselfwith the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. The main achievement of bothMarxist feminists and socialist feminists was to expand the category oflabour to accommodate what (some) women did, even when the wage relationwas subordinated to a more comprehensive view of labour under capitalistpatriarchy. In particular, women's labour in the household and women's activityas mothers generally (that is, reproduction in the socialist-feminist sense),entered theory on the authority of analogy to the Marxian concept of labour.The unity of women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontologicalstructure of'labour'. Marxist/socialist-feminism does not 'natur-alize'unity; it is a possible achievement based on a possible standpoint rootedin social relations. The essentializing move is in the ontological structureof labour or of its analogue, women's activity.11 The inheritance of Marxianhumanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me.The contribution from these formulations has been the emphasis on the dailyresponsibility of real women to build unities, rather than to naturalizethem. Catherine MacKinnon's (198Z, 1987) version of radical feminism is itselfa caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendenciesof Western theories of identity grounding action.12 It is factually andpolitically wrong to assimilate all of the diverse 'moments' or 'conversations'in recent women's politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon's version.But the teleological logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontology- including their negations - erase or police difference. Only one of theeffects of MacKinnon's theory is the rewriting of the history of the polymorphousfield called radical feminism. The major effect is the production of a theory 159of experience, of women's identity, that is a kind of apocalypse forall revolutionary standpoints. That is, the totalization built into thistale of radical feminism achieves its end - the unity of women - by enforcingthe experience of and testimony to radical non-being. As for the Marxist/socialist feminist, consciousness is an achievement, not a natural fact.And MacKinnon's theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into humanistrevolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism. MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a different analyt-icalstrategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure of class, butat the structure of sex/gender and its generative relationship, men's constitu-tionand appropriation of women sexually. Ironically, MacKinnon's 'ontology'constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Another's desire, not the self'slabour, is the origin of 'woman'. She therefore develops a theory of consciousnessthat enforces what can count as 'women's' experience - anything that namessexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as 'women' can be concerned.Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; thatis, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not. Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism still has the epistemolo-gicalstatus of labour; that is to say, the point from which an analysis ableto contribute to changing the world must flow. But sexual object)fication,not alienation, is the consequence of the structure of sex/gender. In therealm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion andabstraction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product,but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject,since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constitutedby another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violentseparation of the labourer from his product. MacKinnon's radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme;it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any otherwomen's political speech and action. It is a totalization producing whatWestern patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing - feminists' consciousnessof the non-existence of women, except as products of men's desire. I thinkMacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmlyground women's unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions ofany Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops aneven more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxianstandpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radicaldifference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, MacKinnon'sintentional erasure of all difference through the device of the 'essential'non-existence of women is not reassuring. In my taxonomy, which like any other taxonomy is a re-inscription ofhistory, radical feminism can accommodate all the activities of women namedby socialist feminists as forms of labour only if the activity can somehowbe sexualized. Reproduction had different tones of meanings for the twotendencies, one rooted in labour, one in sex, both calling the consequencesof domination and ignorance of social and personal reality 'false consciousness'. Beyond either the diff~culties or the contributions in the argument ofany one author, neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view havetended to embrace the status of a partial explanation; both were regularlyconstituted as totalities. Western explanation has demanded as much; howelse could the 'Western' author incorporate its others? Each tried to annexother forms of domination by expanding its basic categories through analogy,simple listing, or addition. Embarrassed silence about race among whiteradical and socialist feminists was one major, devastating political consequence.History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try toestablish genealogies. There was no structural room for race (or for muchelse) in theory claiming to reveal the construction of the category womanand social group women as a unified or totalizable whole. The structureof my caricature looks like this: socialist feminism--structure of class // wage labour // alienation labour, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race radical feminism - structure of gender // sexual appropriation // objectification sex, by analogy labour, by extension reproduction, by addition race In another context, the French theorist, Julia Kristeva, claimed womenappeared as a historical group after the Second World War, along with groupslike youth. Her dates are doubtful; but we are now accustomed to rememberingthat as objects of knowledge and as historical actors, 'race' did not alwaysexist, 'class' has a historical genesis, and 'homosexuals' are quite junior.It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man - and sothe essence of woman - breaks up at the same moment that networks of connectionamong people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex.'Advanced capitalism' is inadequate to convey the structure of this historicalmoment. In the 'Western' sense, the end of man is at stake. It is no accidentthat woman disintegrates into women in our time. Perhaps socialist feministswere not substantially guilty of producing essentialist theory that suppressedwomen's particularity and contradictory interests. I think we have been,at least through unreflective participation in the logics, languages, andpractices of white humanism and through searching for a single ground ofdomination to secure our revolutionary voice. Now we have less excuse. Butin the consciousness of our failures, we 161risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusingtask of making partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; someare poles of world historical systems of domination. 'Epistemology' is aboutknowing the difference. THE INFORMATICS OF DOMINATION In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I wouldlike to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture indebted to socialistand feminist principles of design. The frame for my sketch is set by theextent and importance of rearrangements in world-wide social relations tiedto science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims aboutfundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emergingsystem of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that createdby industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic,industrial society to a polymorphous, information system--from all workto all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and ideological, thedichotomies may be expressed in the following chart of transitions fromthe comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks Ihave called the informatics of domination:RepresentationSimulationBourgeois novel, realismScience fiction, postmodernismOrganismBiotic ComponentDepth, integritySurface, boundaryHeatNoiseBiology as clinical practiceBiology as inscriptionPhysiologyCommunications engineeringSmall groupSubsystemPerfectionOptimizationEugenicsPopulation ControlDecadence, Magic MountainObsolescence, Future ShockHygieneStress ManagementMicrobiology, tuberculosisImmunology, AIDSOrganic division of labourErgonomics/cybernetics of labourFunctional specializationModular constructionReproductionReplicationOrganic sex role specializationOptimal genetic strategiesBioogical determinismEvolutionary inertia, constraintsCommunity ecologyEcosystemRacial chain of beingNeo-imperialism, United Nations humanismScientific management in home/factoryGlobal factory/Electronid cottageFamily/Market/FactoryWomen in the Integrated CircuitFamily wageComparable worthPublic/PrivateCyborg citizenshipNature/Culturefields of differenceCo-operationCommunicatins enhancemenetFreudLacanSexGenetic engineeringlabourRoboticsMindArtificial IntelligenceSecond World WarStar WarsWhite Capitalist PatriarchyInformatics of Domination162This list suggests several interesting things.13 First, the objects onthe right-hand side cannot be coded as 'natural', a realization that subvertsnaturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well. We cannot go back ideologicallyor materially. It's not just that igod'is dead; so is the 'goddess'. Orboth are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnologicalpolitics. In relation to objects like biotic components, one must not thinkin terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints,rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints. Sexual reproductionis one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefitsas a function of the system environment. Ideologies of sexual reproductioncan no longer reasonably call on notions of sex and sex role as organicaspects in natural objects like organisms and families. Such reasoning willbe unmasked as irrational, and ironically corporate executives reading Playboyand anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointlyunmasking the irrationalism. Likewise for race, ideologies about human diversity have to be formulatedin terms of frequencies of parameters, like blood groups or intelligencescores. It is 'irrational' to invoke concepts like primitive and civilized.For liberals and radicals, the search for integrated social systems givesway to a new practice called 'experimental ethnography' in which an organicobject dissipates in attention to the play of writing. At the level of ideology,we see translations of racism and colonialism into languages of developmentand under-development, rates and constraints of modernization. Any objectsor persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly;no 'natural' architectures constrain system design. The financial districtsin all the world's cities, as well as the export-processing and free-tradezones, proclaim this elementary fact of'late capitalism'. The entire universeof objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problemsin 163communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text(for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies. One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditionsand interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries-- and not on the integrityof natural objects. 'Integrity' or 'sincerity' of the Western self givesway to decision procedures and expert systems. For example, control strategiesapplied to women's capacities to give birth to new human beings will bedeveloped in the languages of population control and maximization of goalachievement for individual decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulatedin terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings,like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecturewhose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects,spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfacedwith any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructedfor processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcendsthe universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analysedso well. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in thisuniverse is stress - communications breakdown (Hogness, 1983). The cyborgis not subject to Foucault's biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics,a much more potent field of operations. This kind of analysis of scientific and cultural objects of knowledgewhich have appeared historically since the Second World War prepares usto notice some important inadequacies in feminist analysis which has proceededas if the organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in 'the West'since Aristotle still ruled. They have been cannibalized, or as Zoe Sofia(Sofoulis) might put it, they have been 'techno-digested'. The dichotomiesbetween mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public andprivate, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized areall in question ideologically. The actual situation of women is their integration/exploitation into a world system of production/reproduction and com-municationcalled the informatics of domination. The home, workplace, market, publicarena, the body itself- all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite,polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others - consequencesthat themselves are very different for different people and which make potentoppositional international movements difficult to imagine and essentialfor survival. One important route for reconstructing socialist-feministpolitics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relationsof science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meaningsstructuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled,postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists mustcode. 164Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial toolsrecrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relationsfor women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partiallyunderstood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid socialinteractions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instrumentsfor enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth,instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historicalanatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, mythand tool mutually constitute each other. Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructedby a common move - the translation of the world into a problem of coding,a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental controldisappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly,investment, and exchange. In communications sciences, the translation of the world into a problemin coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic (feedback-controlled)systems theories applied to telephone technology, computer design, weaponsdeployment, or data base construction and maintenance. In each case, solutionto the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the keyoperation is determining the rates, directions, and probabilities of flowof a quantity called information. The world is subdivided by boundariesdifferentially permeable to information. Information is just that kind ofquantifiable element (unit, basis of unity) which allows universal translation,and so unhindered instrumental power (called effective communication). Thebiggest threat to such power is interruption of communication. Any systembreakdown is a function of stress. The fundamentals of this technology canbe condensed into the metaphor C31, command-controlcommunication-intelligence,the military's symbol for its operations theory. In modern biologies, the translation of the world into a problem in codingcan be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolutionarytheory, and immunobiology. The organism has been translated into prob-lemsof genetic coding and read-out. Biotechnology, a writing technology, informsresearch broadly.14 In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objectsof knowledge, giving way to biotic components, i.e., special kinds of information-processingdevices. The analogous moves in ecology could be examined by probing thehistory and utility of the concept of the ecosystem. Immunobiology and associatedmedical practices are rich exemplars of the privilege of coding and recognitionsystems as objects of knowledge, as constructions of bodily reality forus. Biology here is a kind of cryptography. Research is necessarily a kindof intelligence activity. Ironies abound. A stressed system goes awry; itscommunication processes break down; it fails to recognize the differencebetween self and other. Human babies with 165baboon hearts evoke national ethical perplexity-- for animal rights activistsat least as much as for the guardians of human purity. In the US gay menand intravenous drug users are the 'privileged' victims of an awful immunesystem disease that marks (inscribes on the body) confusion of boundariesand moral pollution (Treichler, 1987). But these excursions into communications sciences and biology have beenat a rarefied level; there is a mundane, largely economic reality to supportmy claim that these sciences and technologies indicate fundamental transforma-tionsin the structure of the world for us. Communications technologies dependon electronics. Modern states, multinational corporations, military power,welfare state apparatuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabricationof our imaginations, labour-control systems, medical construc-tions of ourbodies, commercial pornography, the international division of labour, andreligious evangelism depend intimately upon electronics. Micro-electronicsis the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals. Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics andword processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies,and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures. The new biotechnologiesconcern more than human reproducdon. Biology as a powerful engineering sciencefor redesigning materials and processes has revolutionary implications forindustry, perhaps most obvious today in areas of fermentadon, agriculture,and energy. Communicadons sciences and biology are construcdons of natural-technicalobjects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organismis thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms.The 'multinational' material organization of the production and reproductionof daily life and the symbolic organization of the production and reproductionof culture and imagination seem equally implicated. The boundary-maintainingimages of base and superstructure, public and private, or material and idealnever seemed more feeble. I have used Rachel Grossman's (1980) image of women in the integratedcircuit to name the situation of women in a world so intimately restructuredthrough the social relations of science and technology.15 I used the oddcircumlocution, 'the social relations of science and technology', to indicatethat we are not dealing with a technological determinism, but with a historicalsystem depending upon structured relations among people. But the phraseshould also indicate that science and technology provide fresh sources ofpower, that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action (Latour,1984). Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitatedsocial relations can make socialist-feminism more relevant to effectiveprogressive politics. 166THE 'HOMEWORK ECONOMY' OUTSIDE 'THE HOME' The 'New Industrial Revolution' is producing a new world-wide workingclass, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities. The extreme mobilityof capital and the emerging international division of labour are intertwinedwith the emergence of new collecdvities, and the weakening of familiar groupings.These developments are neither gender- nor race-neutral. White men in advancedindustrial societies have become newly vulnerable to permanent job loss,and women are not disappearing from the job rolls at the same rates as men.It is not simply that women in Third World countries are the preferred labourforce for the science-based multinationals in the export-processing sectors,particularly in electronics. The picture is more systematic and involvesreproduction, sexuality, culture, consumphon, and producdon. In the prototypicalSilicon Valley, many women's lives have been structured around employmentin electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serialheterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare, distance from extended kinor most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of lonelinessand extreme economic vulnerability as they age. The ethnic and racial diversityof women in Silicon Valley structures a microcosm of conflicting differencesin culture, family, religion, education, and language. Richard Gordon has called this new situation the 'homework economy'.16Although he includes the phenomenon of literal homework emerging in connecdonwith electronics assembly, Gordon intends 'homework economy' to name a restructuringof work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to femalejobs, jobs literally done only by women. Work is being redefined as bothliterally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To befeminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled,reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers thanas servers; subjected to dme arrangements on and off the paid job that makea mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borderson being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. Deskilling is an oldstrategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers. However, the homeworkeconomy does not refer only to large-scale deskilling, nor does it denythat new areas of high skill are emerging, even for women and men previouslyexcluded from skilled employment. Rather, the concept indicates that factory,home, and market are integrated on a new scale and that the places of womenare crucial - and need to be analysed for differences among women and formeanings for relations between men and women in various situations. The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure ismade possible by (not caused by) the new technologies. The success of theattack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men's unionized jobs is deafto 167the power of the new communications technologies to integrate and controllabour despite extensive dispersion and decentralization. The consequencesof the new technologies are felt by women both in the loss of the family(male) wage (if they ever had access to this white privilege) and in thecharacter of their own jobs, which are becoming capital-intensive; for example,office work and nursing. The new economic and technological arrangements are also related to thecollapsing welfare state and the ensuing intensification of demands on womento sustain daily life for themselves as well as for men, children, and oldpeople. The feminization of poverty-- generated by dismantling the welfarestate, by the homework economy where stable jobs become the exception, andsustained by the expectation that women's wages will not be matched by amale income for the support of children-- has become an urgent focus. Thecauses of various women-headed households are a function of race, class,or sexuality; but their increasing generality is a ground for coalitionsof women on many issues. That women regularly sustain daily life partlyas a funcdon of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kindof integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economyis new. The particular pressure, for example, on US black women, who haveachieved an escape from (barely) paid domeshc service and who now hold clericaland similar jobs in large numbers, has large implicadons for condnued enforcedblack poverty with employment. Teenage women in industrializing areas ofthe Third World increasingly find themselves the sole or major source ofa cash wage for their families, while access to land is ever more problemadc.These developments must have major consequences in the psychodynamics andpolitics of gender and race. Within the framework of three major stages of capitalism (commercial/early industrial, monopoly, multinational) --tied to nationalism, imperialism,and multinationalism, and related to Jameson's three dominant aestheticperiods of realism, modernism, and postmodernism --I would argue that specificforms of families dialectically relate to forms of capital and to its politicaland cultural concomitants. Although lived problematically and unequally,ideal forms of these families might be schematized as (1) the patriarchalnuclear family, structured by the dichotomy between public and private andaccompanied by the white bourgeois ideology of separate spheres and nineteenth-centuryAnglo-American bourgeois feminism; (2) the modern family mediated (or enforced)by the welfare state and institutions like the family wage, with a floweringof a-feminist heterosexual ideologies, including their radical versionsrepresented in Greenwich Village around the First World War; and (3) the'family' of the homework economy with its oxymoronic structure of women-headedhouseholds and its explosion of feminisms and the paradoxical intensificationand erosion of gender itself. 168This is the context in which the projections for world-wide structuralunemployment stemming from the new technologies are part of the pictureof the homework economy. As robodcs and related technologies put men outof work in 'developed' countries and exacerbate failure to generate malejobs in Third World 'development', and as the automated of fice becomesthe rule even in labour-surplus countries, the feminization of work intensifies.Black women in the United States have long known what it looks like to facethe structural underemployment ('feminization') of black men, as well astheir own highly vulnerable position in the wage economy. It is no longera secret that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community life are interwovenwith this economic structure in myriad ways which have also differentiatedthe situations of white and black women. Many more women and men will contendwith similar situations, which will make cross-gender and race allianceson issues of basic life support (with or without jobs) necessary, not justmice.The new technologies also have a profound effect on hunger and on foodproduction for subsistence world-wide. Rae Lessor Blumberg (1983) estimatesthat women produce about 50 per cent of the world's subsistence food.17Women are excluded generally from benefiting from the increased high-techcommodification of food and energy crops, their days are made more arduousbecause their responsibilides to provide food do not diminish, and theirreproductive situations are made more complex. Green Revolution technologiesinteract with other high-tech industrial production to alter gender divisionsof labour and differential gender migration patterns. The new technologies seem deeply involved in the forms of'privatization'that Ros Petchesky (1981) has analysed, in which militarization, right-wingfamily ideologies and policies, and intensified definitions of corporate(and state) property as private synergistically interact.18 The new communicationstechnologies are fundamental to the eradication of 'public life' for everyone.This facilitates the mushrooming of a permanent high-tech military establishmentat the cultural and economic expense of most people, but especially of women.Technologies like video games and highly miniaturized televi-sions seemcrucial to production of modern forms of 'private life'. The culture ofvideo games is heavily orientated to individual compedtion and extraterrestrialwarfare. High-tech, gendered imaginations are produced here, imaginationsthat can contemplate destruction of the planet and a sci-fi escape fromits consequences. More than our imaginations is militarized; and the otherrealities of electronic and nuclear warfare are inescapable. These are thetechnologies that promise ultimate mobility and perfect exchange-- and incidentallyenable tourism, that perfect practice of mobility and exchange, to emergeas one of the world's largest single industries. The new technologies affect the social relations of both sexuality andof 169reproduction, and not always in the same ways. The close ties of sexualityand instrumentality, of views of the body as a kind of private satisfaction-and utility-maximizing machine, are described nicely in sociobiologicalorigin stories that stress a genetic calculus and explain the inevitabledialectic of domination of male and female gender roles.19 These sociobiologicalstories depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component orcybernetic communications system. Among the many transformations of reproductivesituations is the medical one, where women's bodies have boundaries newlypermeable to both 'visualization' and 'intervention'. Of course, who controlsthe interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneubcs is a majorfeminist issue. The speculum served as an icon of women's claiming theirbodies in the 1970S; that handcraft tool is inadequate to express our neededbody politics in the negotiation of reality in the practices of cyborg reproduction.Self-help is not enough. The technologies of visualization recall the importantcultural practice of hundng with the camera and the deeply predatory natureof a photographic consciousness.20 Sex, sexuality, and reproduction arecentral actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations ofpersonal and social possibility. Another critical aspect of the social relations of the new technologiesis the reformulation of expectations, culture, work, and reproduction forthe large scientific and technical work-force. A major social and politicaldanger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with themasses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of colour,confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and generalredundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatusesranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance. An adequatesocialist-feminist politics should address women in the privileged occupationalcategories, and particularly in the production of science and technologythat constructs scientific-technical discourses, processes, and objects.21 This issue is only one aspect of enquiry into the possibility of a feministscience, but it is important. What kind of constitutive role in the productionof knowledge, imagination, and practice can new groups doing science have?How can these groups be allied with progressive social and political movements?What kind of political accountability can be constructed to the women togetheracross the scientific-technical hierarchies separating us? Might there beways of developing feminist science/technology politics in alliance withand-military science facility conversion action groups? Many sciendfic andtechnical workers in Silicon Valley, the high-tech cowboys included, donot want to work on military science.22 Can these personal preferences andcultural tendencies be welded into progressive politics among this professionalmiddle class in which women, including women of colour, are coming to befairly numerous? 170WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT Let me summarize the picture of women's historical locations in advancedindustrial societies, as these positions have been restructured partly throughthe social relations of science and technology. If it was ever possibleideologically to characterize women's lives by the disdnction of publicand private domains-- suggested by images of the division of working-classlife into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market and home, andof gender existence into personal and political realms --it is now a totallymisleading ideology, even to show how both terms of these dichotomies constructeach other in practice and in theory. I prefer a network ideological image,suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability ofboundaries in the personal body and in the body politic. 'Networking' isboth a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy -- weavingis for oppositional cyborgs. So let me return to the earlier image of the informatics of dominationand trace one vision of women's 'place' in the integrated circuit, touchingonly a few idealized social locations seen primarily from the point of viewof advanced capitalist societies: Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State,School, Clinic-Hospital, and Church. Each of these idealized spaces is logicallyand practically implied in every other locus, perhaps analogous to a holographicphotograph. I want to suggest the impact of the social relations mediatedand enforced by the new technologies in order to help formulate needed analysisand practical work. However, there is no 'place' for women in these networks,only geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women's cyborgidentities. If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life,we might learn new couplings, new coalitions. There is no way to read thefollowing list from a standpoint of'idendfication', of a unitary self. Theissue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora. Home: Women-headed households, serial monogamy, flight of men, old womenalone, technology of domestic work, paid homework, re-emergence of homesweat-shops, home-based businesses and telecom-muting, electronic cottage,urban homelessness, migration, module architecture, reinforced (simulated)nuclear family, intense domestic violence. Market: Women's continuing consumption work, newly targeted to buy theprofusion of new production from the new technologies (especially as thecompetitive race among industrialized and industrializing nations to avoiddangerous mass unemployment necessitates finding ever bigger new marketsfor ever less clearly needed commodities); bimodal buying power, coupledwith advertising targeting of the numerous affluent groups and neglect ofthe previous mass markets; growing importance of 171informal markets in labour and commodities parallel to high-tech, affluentmarket structures; surveillance systems through electronic funds transfer;intensified market abstraction (commodification) of experience, resultingin ineffective utopian or equivalent cynical theories of community; extrememobility (abstraction) of marketing/financing systems; inter-penetrationof sexual and labour markets; intensified sexualization of abstracted andalienated consumption. Paid Work Place: Continued intense sexual and racial division of labour,but considerable growth of membership in privileged occupational categoriesfor many white women and people of colour; impact of new technologies onwomen's work in clerical, service, manufacturing (especially textiles),agriculture, electronics; international restructuring of the working classes;development of new time arrangements to facilitate the homework economy(flex time, part time, over time, no time); homework and out work; increasedpressures for two-tiered wage structures; significant numbers of peoplein cash-dependent populations world-wide with no experience or no furtherhope of stable employment; most labour 'marginal' or 'feminized'. State: Continued erosion of the welfare state; decentralizations withincreased surveillance and control; citizenship by telematics; imperialismand political power broadly in the form of information rich/informationpoor differentiation; increased high-tech militarization increasingly opposedby many social groups; reduction of civil service jobs as a result of thegrowing capital intensification of office work, with implications for occupationalmobility for women of colour; growing privadzation of material and ideologicallife and culture; close integration of privatization and militarization,the high-tech forms of bourgeois capitalist personal and public life; invisibilityof different social groups to each other, linked to psychological mechanismsof belief in abstract enemies. School: Deepening coupling of high-tech capital needs and public educa-tionat all levels, differentiated by race, class, and gender; managerial classesinvolved in educational reform and refunding at the cost of remaining progressive educational democratic structures for childrenand teachers; education for mass ignorance and repression in technocraticand militarized culture; growing and-science mystery cults in dissendngand radical political movements; continued relative scientific illiteracyamong white women and people of colour; growing industrial direction ofeducation (especially higher education) by science-based multinationals(particularly in electronics- and biotechnology-dependent companies); highlyeducated, numerous elites in a progressively bimodal society. Clinic-hospital: Intensified machine-body relations; renegotiations of 172public metaphors which channel personal experience of the body, particularlyin relation to reproduction, immune system functions, and 'stress' phenomena;intensification of reproductive politics in response to world historicalimplications of women's unrealized, potential control of their relationto reproduction; emergence of new, historically specific diseases; strugglesover meanings and means of health in environments pervaded by high technologyproducts and processes; continuing feminization of health work; intensifiedstruggle over state responsibility for health; continued ideological roleof popular health movements as a major form of American politics. Church: Electronic fundamentalist 'super-saver' preachers solemnizingthe union of electronic capital and automated fetish gods; intensified importanceof churches in resisting the militarized state; central struggle over women'smeanings and authority in religion; continued relevance of spirituality,intertwined with sex and health, in political struggle. The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massiveintensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failureof subsistence networks for the most vulnerable. Since much of this pictureinterweaves with the social relations of science and technology, the urgencyof a socialist-feminist politics addressed to science and technology isplain. There is much now being tione, and the grounds for political workare rich. For example, the efforts to develop forms of collecdve strugglefor women in paid work, like SEIU's District 925,* should be a high priorityfor all of us. These efforts are profoundly deaf to technical restructuringof labour processes and reformations of working classes. These efforts alsoare providing understanding of a more comprehensive kind of labour organization,involving community, sexuality, and family issues never privileged in thelargely white male industrial unions. The structural rearrangements related to the social relations of scienceand technology evoke strong ambivalence. But it is not necessary to be uldmatelydepressed by the implications of late twentieth-century women's relationto all aspects of work, culture, production of knowledge, sexuality, andreproduction. For excellent reasons, most Marxisms see domination best andhave trouble understanding what can only look like false consciousness andpeople's complicity in their own domination in late capitalism. It is crucialto remember that what is lost, perhaps especially from women's points ofview, is often virulent forms of oppression, nostalgically naturalized inthe face of current violation. Ambivalence towards the disrupted unidesmediated by high-tech culture requires not sorting consciousness into categoriesof clear-sighted critique grounding a solid political epistemology' *Service Employees International Union's office workers' organizationin the US. 173versus 'manipulated false consciousness', but subtle understanding ofemerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changingthe rules of the game. There are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new kinds of unityacross race, gender, and class, as these elementary units of socialist-feministanalysis themselves suffer protean transformations. Intensifications ofhardship experienced world-wide in connection with the social relationsof science and technology are severe. But what people are experiencing isnot transparently clear, and we lack aufficiently subtle connections forcollectively building effective theories of experience. Present efforts- Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological-- to clarify even 'our'experience are rudimentary. I am conscious of the odd perspecdve provided by my historical position- a PhD in biology for an Irish Catholic girl was made possible by Sputnik'simpact on US national science-education policy. I have a body and mind asmuch constructed by the post-Second World War arms race and cold war asby the women's movements. There are more grounds for hope in focusing onthe contradictory effects of politics designed to produce loyal Americantechnocrats, which also produced large numbers of dissidents, than in focusingon the present defeats. The permanent pardality of feminist points of view has consequences forour expectations of forms of political organization and participation. Wedo not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a commonlanguage, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithfulnaming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense,dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction. Perhaps,ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines hownot to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos. From the point of view ofpleasure in these potent and taboo fusions, made inevitable by the socialrelations of science and technology, there might indeed be a feminist science. CYBORGS: A MYTH OF POLITICAL IDENTITY I want to conclude with a myth about idendty and boundaries which mightinform late twentieth-century political imaginations (Plate 1). I am indebtedin this story to writers like Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, John Varley,James Tiptree, Jr, Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, and Vonda McIntyre.23These are our story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-techworlds. They are theorists for cyborgs. Exploring concephons of bodily boundariesand social order, the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966, 1970) should becredited with helping us to consciousness about how fundamental body imageryis to world view, and so to political language. French feminists like Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, for all theirdifferences, know how to write the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology,and politics from imagery of embodiment, and especially for Wittig, fromimagery of fragmentation and reconstitution of bodies.24 American radical feminists like Susan Griffnn, Audre Lorde, and AdrienneRich have profoundly affected our political imaginations - and perhaps restrictedtoo much what we allow as a friendly body and political language.25 Theyinsist on the organic, opposing it to the technological. But their symbolicsystems and the related positions of ecofeminism and feminist paganism,replete with organicisms, can only be understood in Sandoval's terms asoppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century. They would simplybewilder anyone not preoccupied with the machines and consciousness of latecapitalism. In that sense they are part of the cyborg world. But there arealso great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilidesinherent in the breakdown of clean disdnctions between organism and machineand similar distinctions structuring the Western self. It is the simultaneityof breakdowns that cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometricpossibilities. What might be learned from personal and political 'technological'pollution? I look briefly at two overlapping groups of texts for their insightinto the construction of a potentially helpful cyborg myth: constructionsof women of colour and monstrous selves in feminist science fiction. Earlier I suggested that 'women of colour' might be understood as a cyborgidendty, a potent subjecdvity synthesized from fusions of outsider identitiesand in the complex political-historical layerings of her 'biomythography',Zami (Lorde, 1982; King, 1987a, 1987b). There are material and culturalgrids mapping this potential, Audre Lorde (1984) captures the tone in thetitle of her Sister Outsider. In my political myth, Sister Outsider is theoffshore woman, whom US workers, female and feminized, are supposed to regardas the enemy prevendug their solidarity, threatening their security. Onshore,inside the boundary of the United States, Sister Outsider is a potentialamidst the races and ethnic identities of women manipulated for division,competition, and exploitation in the same industries. 'Women of colour'are the preferred labour force for the science-based industries, the realwomen for whom the world-wide sexual market, labour market, and politicsof reproduction kaleidoscope into daily life. Young Korean women hired inthe sex industry and in electronics assembly are recruited from high schools,educated for the integrated circuit. Literacy, especially in English, distinguishesthe 'cheap' female labour so attractive to the multinationals. Contrary to orientalist stereotypes of the 'oral primidve', literacyis a special mark of women of colour, acquired by US black women as wellas 175men through a history of risking death to learn and to teach readingand wridng. Writing has a special significance for all colonized groups.Writing has been crucial to the Western myth of the distinction betweenoral and written cultures, primitive and civilized mentalities, and morerecently to the erosion of that distinction in 'postmodernist' theoriesattacking the phallogo-centrism of the West, with its worship of the monotheistic,phallic, authoritative, and singular work, the unique and perfect name.26Contests for the meanings of writing are a major form of contemporary politicalstruggle. Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious. The poetry andstories of US women of colour are repeatedly about writing, about accessto the power to signify; but this dme that power must be neither phallicnor innocent. Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imaginationof a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, beforeMan. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of originalinnocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world thatmarked them as other. The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse anddisplace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. In retellingorigin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin of Westernculture. We have all been colonized by those origin myths, with their longingfor fulfilment in apocalypse. The phallogocentrie origin stories most crucialfor feminist cyborgs are built into the literal technologies - teehnologiesthat write the world, biotechnology and microelectronics - that have recentlytextualized our bodies as code problems on the grid of C3I. Feminist cyborgstories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvertcommand and control. Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade the struggles ofwomen of colour; and stories about language have a special power in therich contemporary writing by US women of colour. For example, retellingsof the stom~ of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of the mesdzo 'bastard'race of the new world, master of languages, and mistress of Cortes, carryspecial meaning for Chicana constructions of identity. Cherrie Moraga (1983)in Loving in the War Years explores the themes of identity when one neverpossessed the original language, never told the original story, never residedin the harmony of legitimate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, andso cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right tonatural names, mother's or father's.27 Moraga's writing, her superb literacy,is presented in her poetry as the same kind of violation as Malinche's masteryof the conqueror's language -- a violation, an illegitimate production,that allows survival. Moraga's language is not 'whole'; it is self-consciouslyspliced, a chimera of English and Spanish, both conqueror's languages. Butit is this chimeric monster, without claim to an original language before 176violation, that crafts the erode, competent, potent identities of womenof colour. Sister Outsider hints at the possibility of world survival notbecause of her innocence, but because of her ability to live on the boundaries,to write without the founding myth of original wholeness, with its inescapableapocalypse of final return to a deathly oneness that Man has imagined tobe the innocent and all-powerful Mother, freed at the End from another spiralof appropriation by her son. Writing marks Moraga's body, affirms it asthe body of a woman of colour, against the possibility of passing into theunmarked category of the Anglo father or into the orientalist myth of 'originalilliteracy' of a mother that never was. Malinche was mother here, not Evebefore eating the forbidden fruit. Writing affirms Sister Outsider, notthe Woman-before-the-Fall-into-Writing needed by the phallogocentric Familyof Man. Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces ofthe late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for languageand the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code thattranslates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicingin the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the couplingswhich make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire,the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting thestructure and modes of reproduction of 'Western' idendty, of nature andculture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind. 'We' did notoriginally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics andepistemology that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the widerreplications of 'texts'. From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to ground politicsin 'our' privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all otherdominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of those closerto nature, we can see powerful possibilities. Feminisms and Marxisms haverun aground on Western epistemological imperatives to construct a revolutionarysubject from the perspective of a hierarchy of oppressions and/or a latentposition of moral superiority, innocence, and greater closeness to nature.With no available original dream of a common language or original symbiosispromising protection from hostile 'masculine' separation, but written intothe play of a text that has no finally privileged reading or salvation history,to recognize 'oneself' as fully implicated in the world, frees us of theneed to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering.Stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the marginsand the importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of colour have transformedher from the evil mother of 177masculinist fear into the originally literate mother who teaches survival. This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transformation.Every, story that begins with original innocence and privileges the returnto wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation,the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation;that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. Theseplots are ruled by a reproductive politics --rebirth without flaw, perfection,abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either better or worse off,but all agree they have less selflhood, weaker individuation, more fusionto the oral, to Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy. But there isanother route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route thatdoes not pass through Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its imaginaw.It passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, notof Woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization soas to have a real life. These cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappearon cue, no matter how many dmes a 'western' commentator remarks on the sadpassing of another primitive, another organic group done in by 'Western'technology, by writing.28 These real-life cyborgs (for example, the SoutheastAsian village women workers inJapanese and US electronics firms describedby Aihwa Ong) are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and sociedes.Sumival is the stakes in this play of readings. To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions;they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination ofwomen, people of colour, nature, workers, animals - in short, dominationof all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief amongthese troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female,civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, totaVpartial, God/man.The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the semice ofthe other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that bythe experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of theself. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to beOne is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypsewith the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary,frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too many. High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It isnot clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine.It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve intocoding practices. In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse(for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homeworkeconomy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids,mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, com-178munications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontologicalseparation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technicaland organic. The replicant Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runnerstands as the image of a cyborg culture's fear, love, and confusion. One consequence is that our sense of connection to our tools is heightened.The trance state experienced by many computer users has become a stapleof science-fiction film and cultural jokes. Perhaps paraplegics and otherseverely handicapped people can (and sometimes do) have the most intenseexperiences of complex hybridization with other communication devices.29Anne McCaffrey's pre-feminist The Ship Who Sang (1969) explored the consciousnessof a cyborg, hybrid of girl's brain and complex machinery, formed afterthe birth of a severely handicapped child. Gender, sexuality, embodiment,skill: all were reconstituted in the story. Why should our bodies end atthe skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From theseventeenth century dll now, machines could be animated - given ghostlysouls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly developmentand mental capacides. Or organisms could be mechan-ized - reduced to bodyunderstood as resource of mind. These machine/ organism relationships areobsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice, machinescan be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. We don'tneed organic holism to give impermeable whole-ness, the total woman andher feminist variants (mutants?). Let me conclude this point by a very partialreading of the logic of the cyborg monsters of my second group of texts,feminist science fiction. The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematicthe statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individualendty, or body. Katie King clarifies how pleasure in reading these fictionsis not largely based on idendfication. Students facingJoanna Russ for thefirst time, students who have learned to take modernist writers like JamesJoyce or Virginia Woolf without flinching, do not know what to make of TheAdventures of Alyx or The Female Man, where characters refuse the reader'ssearch for innocent wholeness while granting the wish for heroic quests,exuberant eroticism, and serious politics. The Female Man is the story offour versions of one genotype, all of whom meet, but even taken togetherdo not make a whole, resolve the dilemmas of violent moral action, or removethe growing scandal of gender. The feminist science fiction of Samuel R.Delany, especially Tales of Neveyon, mocks stories of origin by redoingthe neolithic revolution, replaying the founding moves of Western civilizationto subvert their plausibility. James Tiptree, Jr, an author whose fictionwas regarded as particularly manly undl her 'true' gender was revealed,tells tales of reproduction based on non-mammalian technologies like alternationof generations of male brood pouches and male nurturing. John Varley 179constructs a supreme cyborg in his arch-feminist exploration of Gaea,a mad goddess-planet-trickster-old woman-technological device on whose surfacean extraordinary array of post-cyborg symbioses are spawned. Octavia Butlerwrites of an African sorceress pithug her powers of transformation againstthe genetic manipulations of her rival (Wild Seed), of dme warps that bringa modern US black woman into slavery where her actions in relation to herwhite master-ancestor determine the possibility of her own birth (Kindred),and of the illegidmate insights into idendty and community of an adoptedcross-species child who came to know the enem' as self (Survivor). In Dawn(1987), the first instalment of a series called Xenogenesis, Butler tellsthe story of Lilith Iyapo, whose personal name recalls Adam's first andrepudiated wife and whose family name marks her status as the widow of theson of Nigerian immigrants to the US. A black woman and a mother whose childis dead, Lilith mediates the transformation of humanity through geneticexchange with extra-terrestrial lovers/rescuers/destroyers/genetic engineers,who reform earth's habitats after the nuclear holocaust and coerce survivinghumans into intimate fusion with them. It is a novel that interrogates reproductive,linguishc, and nuclear politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-centuryrace and gender. Because it is particularly rich in boundary transgressions, Vonda McIn-tyre'sSuperluminal can close this truncated catalogue of promising and dangerousmonsters who help redefine the pleasures and politics of embodiment andfeminist writing. In a fiction where no character is 'simply' human, humanstatus is highly problematic. Orca, a genetically altered diver, can speakwith killer whales and survive deep ocean conditions, but she longs to explorespace as a pilot, necessitating bionic implants jeopardizing her kinshipwith the divers and cetaceans. Transformations are effected by virus vectorscarrying a new developmental code, by transplant surgery, by implants ofmicroelectronic devices, by analogue doubles, and other means. Lacnea becomesa pilot by accepting a heart implant and a host of other alterations allowingsurvival in transit at speeds exceeding that of light. Radu Dracul survivesa virus-caused plague in his outerworld planet to find himself with a timesense that changes the boundaries of spatial perception for the whole species.All the characters explore the limits of language; the dream of communicatingexperience; and the necessity of limitation, partiality, and indmacy evenin this world of protean transformation and connection. Superluminal standsalso for the defining contradictions of a cyborg world in another sense;it embodies textually the intersection of feminist theory and colonial discoursein the science fiction I have alluded to in this chapter. This is a conjunctionwith a long history that many 'First World' feminists have tried to repress,including myself in my readings of Superluminal before being called to accountby Zoe Sofoulis, 180whose different location in the world system's informatics of domin-ationmade her acutely alert to the imperialist moment of all science fictioncultures, including women's science fiction. From an Australian feministsensitivity, Sofoulis remembered more readily McIntyre's role as writerof the adventures of Captain Kirk and Spock in TV's Star Trek series thanher rewriting the romance in Superluminal. Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations.The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of thecentred polls of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage andboundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman. Unseparatedtwins and hermaphrodites were the confused human material in early modernFrance who grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical andlegal, portents and diseases -- all crucial to establishing modern identity.30The evolutionary and behavioural sciences of monkeys and apes have markedthe multiple boundaries of late twentieth-century industrial identities.Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different politicalpossibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Manand Woman. There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgsas other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of powerand identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; itwas not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generateantagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes ironyfor granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasurein skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment.The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. Themachine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsiblefor machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible forboundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodimentseemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed tomean skill in mothering and its metaphoric exten-sions. Only by being outof place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excusesthat this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgsmight consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sexand sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, evenif it has profound historical breadth and depth. The ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity,as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image. Feministshave recently claimed that women are given to dailiness, that women morethan men somehow sustain daily life, and so have a privileged epistemo-logicalposition potentially. There is a compelling aspect to this claim, one thatmakes visible unvalued female activity and names it as the ground of life. 181But the ground of life? What about all the ignorance of women, all theexclusions and failures of knowledge and skill? What about men's accessto daily competence, to knowing how to build things, to take them apart,to play? What about other embodiments? Cyborg gender is a local possibilitytaking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theoryof wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory,but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction anddeconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political languageto ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging theinformatics of domination-- in order to act potently. One last image organisms and organismic, holistic politics depend onmetaphors of rebirth and invariably call on the resources of reproductivesex. I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration andare suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing. For salamanders,regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowthof structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility oftwinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury.The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all beeninjured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilitiesfor our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrousworld without gender. Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay:first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistakethat misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second,taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technologymeans refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology,and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundariesof daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication withall of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possiblemeans of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations.Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which wehave explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream notof a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is animagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuitsof the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroyingmachines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though bothare bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. |
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