Haraway begins the "Manifesto" by explaining three boundary breakdowns since the 20th century that have allowed for her hybrid, cyborg myth: those between human and animal, animal-human and machine, and physical and non-physical. Evolution, she claims, has blurred the lines between human and animal; 20th-century machines have blurred the lines between natural and artificial; and microelectronics and the political invisibility of cyborgs have blurred the lines of physicality.[1]
Haraway’s piece is a novel approach to examining the culture-nature divide. She introduces the potential of a completely new ontology of hybridization of nature and culture through the cyborg, a combination of machine and organism. Haraway’s use of the cyborg illustrates her conceptualizations of socialism and feminism in the examinations of dichotomies such as nature/culture, mind/body, and idealism/materialism. Haraway’s cyborgs are a blending of imagination and material reality. The cyborg is a dualism, as opposed to a dichotomy; there is value perceived in the confusion of the borders of bounded categories. The need for the divide between culture and nature is no longer relevant, and the cyborg emerges from the blending of that boundary.
Issues with Western patriarchal tenets
Haraway highlights what she sees as the problematic use and justification of historical Western ideologies like patriarchy, colonialism, essentialism, and naturalism (among others). These traditions in turn allow for the problematic formations of taxonomies (and identifications of the Other) and what Haraway explains as "antagonistic dualisms" that order Western discourse. These dualisms, Haraway states, "have all been systematic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals... all [those] constituted as others." She highlights specific problematic dualisms of self/other, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man (among others). She explains that these dualisms are in competition with one another, creating paradoxical relations of domination (especially between the One and the Other). However, high-tech culture provides a challenge to these antagonistic dualisms.
There is also the idea that cyborgs are beings that have been uncoupled from organic reproduction. Haraway also distinguishes the cyborg from other literary ideas that are lacking in their parentage such as Frankenstein's monster, because that parentage is no longer a relevant or desired connection. Haraway paints the cyborg as the illegitimate offspring of patriarchal capitalism; because that connection isn’t sought or is irrelevant, the cyborg is not beholden to its capitalistic, patriarchal, and neoliberal origins. There are social and bodily realities that come about from the joint kinship with both organisms and machines that inform on the identities of cyborgs to be permanently partial identities, incorporating aspects of both. The struggle is to see from both perspectives at once, and can provide an archetype for resistance, as another of Haraway’s premises is about the need for unity of people in the face of what she refers to as “world wide intensification of domination.”
Cyborg theory
Haraway's cyborg theory rejects the notions of essentialism, proposing instead a chimeric, monstrous world of fusions between animal and machine. Cyborg theory relies on writing as "the technology of cyborgs," and asserts that "cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism." Instead, Haraway's cyborg calls for a non-essentialized, material-semiotic metaphor capable of uniting diffuse political coalitions along the lines of affinity rather than identity. Following Lacanian feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Haraway's work addresses the chasm between feminist discourses and the dominant language of Western patriarchy. As Haraway explains, "grammar is politics by other means," and effective politics require speaking in the language of domination.[1] Still, as Haraway states, "Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control." These stories are "communications devices" which "can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies," dualisms which engender the illusion of perfect coded communication. Haraway mentions Octavia Butler, John Varley, and Vonda McIntyre as authors/artists whose work constitute a feminist science fiction of cyborg stories.
As she details in a chart of the paradigmatic shifts from modern to postmodern epistemology within the Manifesto, the unified human subject of identity has shifted to the hybridized posthuman of technoscience, from "representation" to "simulation", "bourgeois novel" to "science fiction", "reproduction" to "replication", and "white capitalist patriarchy" to "informatics of domination".[1] While Haraway's "ironic dream of a common language" is inspired by Irigaray's argument for a discourse other than patriarchy, she rejects Irigaray's essentializing construction of woman-as-not-male to argue for a linguistic community of situated, partial knowledges in which no one is innocent.
In her discussion of cyborg theory, Haraway describes two possible worlds resulting from embracing cyborg identity. The first future, which aligns with the view point taken by socialist and radical feminism, is that the breaking down of the boundary between the organism and technology will represent the final conquering of the oppressed body. The second future, which Haraway offers as an alternative in her critique of binary thinking, allows for kinship between boundaries and acceptance of fluid and contradictory identities. These futures function within her argument for cyborg theory in that she sees the acknowledgment of both possibilities as necessary for understanding intersecting forces of oppression and preparing for how technological advancement will change the ways that political forces as well as identity and kinship will function in the future.[1]
Criticism of traditional feminism
Haraway takes issue with some traditional feminists, reflected in statements describing how "women more than men somehow sustain daily life, and so have a privileged epistemological (relating to the theory of knowledge) position potentially." The views of traditional feminism operate under the totalizing assumptions that all men are one way, and women another, whereas "a cyborg theory of wholes and parts," does not desire to explain things in total theory. Haraway suggests that feminists should move beyond naturalism and essentialism, criticizing feminist tactics as "identity politics" that victimize those excluded, and she proposes that it is better strategically to confuse identities. Her criticism mainly focuses on socialist and radical feminism. The former, she writes, achieves "to expand the category of labour to what (some) women did". Socialist feminism does not naturalize but rather builds a unity that was non-existent before - namely the woman worker. On the other hand, radical feminism, according to Catharine MacKinnon, describes a world in which the woman only exists in opposition to the man. The concept of woman is socially constructed within the patriarchal structure of society and women only exist because men have made them exist. The woman as a self does not exist. Haraway criticizes both when writing that "my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice" and "MacKinnon's intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the 'essential' non-existence of women is not reassuring" (299).[1]
Haraway also indirectly critiques white feminism by highlighting the struggles of women of color: she suggests that a woman of color "might be understood as a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical layerings of her 'biomythography.'"[1]
To counteract the essentializing and anachronistic rhetoric of spiritual ecofeminists, who were fighting patriarchy with modernist constructions of female-as-nature and earth mothers, Haraway employs the cyborg to refigure feminism into cybernetic code.
Call to action
Haraway calls for a revision of the concept of gender, moving away from Western patriarchal essentialism and toward "the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender," stating that "Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth."[1]
Haraway also calls for a reconstruction of identity, no longer dictated by naturalism and taxonomy but instead by affinity, wherein individuals can construct their own groups by choice. In this way, groups may construct a "post-modernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity" as a way to counter Western traditions of exclusive identification.
