— New York City
October ’83—December ’87
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Reading at Work
and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority:
A Reading of Donna Haraway’s
“Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”
“Thank you. Would you like to see my work?” Helva asked, politely. She instinctively sheered away from personal discussion . . .
“Work?” asked the lady.
“I am currently reproducing the Last Supper on the head of a screw.”
—Anne McCaffrey, The Ship Who Sang
Isn’t there something—could it really be missing from the text above—urging us to read this passage from Anne McCaffrey’s series of science fiction tales about the young cyborg Helva as irony? Pin down (or up) that irony, and we admit at the same time: Our laughter only checks a more violent urge to dash the screw from Helva’s metal grip, to declare: “Fool, fool! Blind metal fool! For all your microscopic vision, that is no work at all!”
Work? we go on, to ourselves, stalled between laughter and rage in the uncertainty between responses that is irony’s sign. “Work!” we do not quite ejaculate into a silence that, for all we know, is as likely formed of Helva’s ignorance (she does not suspect the vanity of her labor) as by her terror (even at age twelve she must know what her audience—at least the male fraction—might do or say) as by her indifference (she is not human; she is only something we—the males among us—make: though, in this case, she has been written by a woman). The silence, now, is Helva’s: she is doing something—work—that is, maddeningly, not responding to us. A few (of us) may even notice what we have left out—that what is missing is our own terror at work on an historical indifference we can hardly bear and, therefore, will not bare. . . because it flies in the face of all (or only: male/heterosexual) desire. (Metaphorically identifiable with any other kind? by extension of any sort of logic or psychology?) “This is work?” we go on. “Oh, no! If that is what you think—” we silently inveigh—“there is something decidedly missing. “As we perceive the futility of Helva’s task, our anger turns on her precisely as we would use it to unlock her silence, her ignorance, her error—this victim of an impoverished notion of production:
Angels on a pin?
Apostles on a screw?
We want to snatch its emblem—drawn and patterned so incisively by a woman—violently from her! Certainly writer McCaffrey intended something like this. . . from us. (“I bet she laves it,” grunts my grosser brother, with a snicker. “I believe this was her intention, ” declares my more refined, with a smile.) We want to commit some violence against this deflated notion of work that will leave Helva’s claw empty, will leave her lights and lenses and paint brush fixed or blinking or probing about in some brutal absence, an illuminated space from which an object has just vanished, a space that is saturated with meaning precisely because something is no longer there. (Art? Labor? What confusion of boundaries between presence and absence is written in that violent, violated, void locus whose legibility we would unlock—to read into it our own words, our own meanings—even as it fades to pure blankness, even as we watch, under the combined mechanical/human gaze—hers, ours—still, somewhere, backed by human brain?) Among the more articulate of us, this turn of the lock, this rape of the screw—this violence motivated wholly by a conflict of interpretation—goes on in silence even as we admit that the fictive creators of this metal and glass and nervous creature (whose genitals have already been removed, like a phrase snipped from the body of the text by the closure of parentheses) are our brothers. They exist only in the empty margin writer McCaffrey has assigned them, yet their operations stall us—the men, that is—on some confused level between experience and myth, before a contradictory gap in the logic or poetics of bodies or machines. For the moment we do not know which . . .
r />
As of yet we cannot name it.
Something is still missing.
Still, in excess of the silence, of the absence, of the incompleteness, don’t we all understand (whether that “we” is the pathologically “socialized” few who sympathize with, or the morally “civilized” many who abominate) this rape fantasy by which we have just indulged in an ugly and overextended metaphor of desires we would rather not admit that we, some of us, have or admit that we, all of us, have seen rampant throughout “civilized” (read: patriarchal) society: despite whatever religious image has been incised on it by Helva’s vice-like virginal grip, certainly one screw less in this collection of metal and glass and wire that is cyborg Helva (extended or, better, constituted by her technology as much as writer McCaffrey, writing in 1959, was extended or, better, constituted by typewriter, printing, etc.), in which the organic—reduced to pure subject, pure ego, pure nerve (or over-wrought nerves)—is wholly hidden behind some hard and inanimate shell, couldn’t be a theft, an appropriation, a rape—could not possibly create an absence in any way missed or mourned in the face of any understanding of work, or art, or desire, or rage. . .
Well, as long as it remains only a fantasy . . . but what we all know now is that where all these ellipses, pauses, gaps hide, veil, cover, and even violently destroy the possibility of completion to the thoughts either side of them, obliterate the work that might have gone on within them, there is something wrong. For such elisions are the visible and resonant marks of an error we can all at last read: it is precisely in these moments of silence that fantasy returns to trouble—that is, to present us with the possibility of its realized fact that must, certainly, be based upon it, that must be construed, if not constructed, by it.
There, certainly, we can find—definitely—something troubling, something missing.
I
As they sit safely on the other side of the boundary between type fonts, as they hang over the border marked by our initial Roman numeral, squeezed and set off in the upper margin of our text along with the poor and prior epigraph they read with such distress, let us consider the above italics to be a bad dream—something which we would all, as would Helva, sheer away from rather than consecrate by personal discussion.
The unpleasantness will, certainly, return to trouble. (The boundary is clearly not all that secure.) But for now let us turn to Donna Har-away’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” to read, to work, to rework.
In a slow, careful, and even ponderous perusal of this 34-page text (41 with Acknowledgments and References), which first appeared in The Socialist Review for Summer 1985, a perusal where the labor was all in an attempt to negotiate a fixed and unitary signified (while all the interpretative work was allowed to drift lazily within the confines set out by a strongly fixed and socially commonplace ideological authority), it was fairly easy for me to read Haraway’s manifesto more or less as follows:
In an introductory movement (“An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit,” the title a play on a book of poems by Adrienne Rich), itself introduced by an alignment of “faithfulness,” “irony,” and “blasphemy,” the metaphor of the cyborg was worked upon: the cyborg (the cybernetic organism of Norbert Weiner, transformed by numerous science fiction stories into any combination of organic—usually neurological—and mechanical or electronic material) was discussed as “reality,” “fiction,” and “lived experience,” as suggesting the bisexual reproductiveness of ferns and invertebrates, as well as that eighty-four-billion-dollar item in the U.S. defense budget, C3-I (control- command-communication-intelligence). The cyborg suggests science and politics, “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” Perhaps even more important is what the cyborg avoids: it avoids “the seductions of organic wholeness” and “skips the step of original unity”; as well it escapes the polar structure of “public and private.” “The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the Oedipal project. The cyborg does not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust (p. 67), i.e., it is not subject to Freud’s “death wish.” For Haraway, the cyborg partakes of the delirium of the bodilessness of the miniature and post-modern silicon chip, “a surface for writing.” The hardest sciences, she notes, are the places where the boundaries have become most confused. “The new machines are so clean and light” (p. 71)—and deadly. The cyborg suggests a double myth, one that courts “the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet,” but, in opposition to that, courts as well the “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.” (p. 72)
With this account of Haraway’s introductory move, I suspect at least some of her delirious striving “for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” is a response to a “social reality” that several science fiction writers have addressed with various amounts of insight—sundry works by both Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Joanna Russ come to mind. Only as a society becomes more and more infrastructurally stable does it permit greater and greater superstructural freedom—of expression, of action, of belief. Conversely, as soon as the society is truly menaced at the in-frastructural level, then precisely those freedoms are the first to go.
The freedoms that we, in the West, are taught to think of as the foundation on which our society is built are actually—in historical terms—of recent vintage. They are very much on the surface of our culture—which is why so frequently they seem so easily threatened in less stable societies.
We must point out, then, that the two versions of Haraway’s cyborg myth do not function at the same social level: “the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet” is very likely to be an infrastructural grid, which alone allows the superstructural freedom of (some) people to explore “their joint kinship with animals and machines” in a fearless, Utopian union. What seems to be missing, at least from Haraway’s introductory move, is any sense of the darker, even tragic side of this situation—a side we enter with the graffito from Joanna Russ’s science fiction novel, We Who Are About to. . . : “Money doesn’t matter/When control is somewhere else!” Not only does money not matter in such a situation, neither does language or sexual freedom. To change things at the infrastructural level—to establish a different structure for the deployment of wealth, say—is a lot harder than the simple re-deployment of different people into the existing wealth structure. And in our society, the second process just cited is a self-repairing mechanism by which the existing oppressive wealth structure heals any infrastructural damages done to it.
Perhaps, I remark in passing, a little more faith in a more traditionally socialist approach (and a little less Baudrillardian exstase) might turn Haraway’s criticism to the larger lived realities of the vast majority of peoples in the U.S.—female and male, white, black, and Hispanic—whom the existing wealth structure wholly excludes from exploring any such Utopian kinships or boundary confusions with any joy at all.
Yet, that reservation comes to me as easily as her account, so that I was not particularly troubled by it in my progress through her text.
And here, at the end of this account of her introduction, I can think of no better place to give that introduction’s opening:
This essay is an effort to built an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful . . . Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously . . . Blasphemy protects us from the moral majority within . . . Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. (Socialist Review, Summer 1985, p. 65. All quotes are from this article unless otherwise specified.)
And a page later she writes:
This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of b
oundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a post-modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the Utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history, (pp. 66-67)
A world without end is, of course, a world without science—is, indeed, the “pre-scientific” Salvationist model: for the great, scientific tragedy is the realization that everything runs down eventually, every fire burns out—the individual, the society, the species; the world, the sun, the universe. But Haraway locates her myth as myth. As such, it functions more as a literary irony—thus, as with my first reservation, I am not much troubled by it.
A premise of this essay is that “the need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But—” Haraway proposes (and herein lies the energy and importance of her work)—”a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically-mediated societies.” (p. 71)
As much as she approves of “oppositional consciousness,” what Haraway is proposing here is a kind of oppositional judo, a slight skewing of concepts, practices, programs, that may accomplish the same ends. Well, in a world where energy is such a threatened commodity, the suggested economy alone of her proposal privileges it in our attention.
In the section of her manifesto, “Fractured Identities,” Haraway looks to the plurality of women’s movements.
While the fragmentation and dissension among the various women’s movements has its painful aspect, Haraway tries not so much to unify them as to unpack from the various theoretical positions an encouraging polyvocality.