WAC 204: Theories of Corporeality Lauren van Arsdall Week 10- Cyborg Bodies A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science,

Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s Donna Harraway Thank you for assigning this text! I have been meaning to read it for a while now. Her discussions of chimeras (and monsters on page 99) line up with a new area in research interests, I just added Harraway to my reading list for the graduate research mentorship that will take place this summer. Most of my research concentrates on the representation of the body in surrealist poetry, but more recently, visions of the monstrous and the beautiful in collage books by Max Ernst and Paul Eluard, which portray chimeras, hybrid animal-women and animal-men.

In reading A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, I was constantly thinking of the defining characteristics of the manifesto as a genre and a fixed form. The declarative tone and the substantial claims x is y that appear throughout the piece resonate with the Communist Manifesto (1848) and later artistic manifestoes from the early twentieth-century. For the latter, I am referring to manifestoes written by avant-gardes, the Futurists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists. Manifesto derives from the Latin word, manifestum, meaning to make clear, to announce, even to unveil a program or call for change. Manifestoes are really about creating a shockwave. All manifestoes contain a double gesture: they seek to announce a new era, a new way of thinking, while at the same time they attempt to think through the positioning of the newness. How do the historical conditions of the manifesto genre set up the thought experiment Harraway executes in this piece? First, her use of the manifesto to address social feminism pays homage to Marxist philosophy. Social feminism grew out of the Marxist belief that when class oppression would end, gender oppression would end too, yet it goes beyond that belief to claim that liberation is only possible by working to end the economic sources of womens oppression. Another possible historical condition of the manifesto genre at play in this piece is post-modern irony and self-reflexivity. Over the last ten years, internet companies and informatics providers have started writing business manifestoes stating their philosophy to consumers. To the extent Harraway acknowledges that she wants to use serious play to touch at larger contradictions that exist in radical feminism (namely, woman cannot be subsumed into a totalizing category), one could also argue that she chose to use the manifesto form used by information companies to demonstrate the pervasive influence of technology on all aspects of life, including binary conceptions of woman. Irony is about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honored within socialist feminism. (66). Harraway rejects formulaic discourse (liberating!) such as Oedipal/Electral complexes, Marxist, feminist, anthropological, a bold move, but one that literary critics alike should consider. What a fascinating, dare I say avant-garde critic she is. We do not need a totality (dream of a common language, of perfectly

WAC 204: Theories of Corporeality Lauren van Arsdall

naming of experience, which is a totalizing and imperialist one). In that sense dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction. (92). Bruno Latour recently published a book entitled We Have Never Been Modern, which also draws attention to the necessity of hybridization in contemporary society to talk about the way we live, think, view the world, know and interact (our ontology and epistemology). He talks about a new conception of knowledge in which objects of study and discourses about them are not seen as separate objects but as hybrids made and unmade by the public interaction of people, things and concepts. Latours argument has connections with Harraways concept of the cyborg myth being about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities (71) that would then lead to new perspectives. Another example is when she says, a cybord would might (thought experiment, clearly!) be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. (72). Affinity (choice as well as position, orientation, likemindedness but not blood) over identity (Latours we are modern, they are primitive another binary) provides more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. Her oppositions between an industrial, organic society and an information society were a little too de-historicized (80), yet I also understand that she is juxtaposing major paradigm shifts and that she views technology as the major cause for these changes. This type of diagram makes sense considering that she likes to use metaphor to explore a concept; eg, cyborgs to talk about social and radical feminism within the backdrop of technology. Katie Kings feminist techno-science is a form of New Historicism. I definitely buy her argument that Technologies write the world, and in turn, they textualize our bodies and their interaction with the world. Why are dualisms so troubling? I understood Harraways maxim, One is two few, two are too many to mean that unity and dualism are both forms of domination. We live in a world that is more characterized by polymorphism and multiplicity.