Feminism in the Late 20th Century

Chapter 4 A bionic man pronunciamento Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late twentieth Century* DONNA HARAWAY History of Consciousness Program, University of California, at Santa Cruz 1. AN IRONIC fancy OF A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT This chapter is an effort to build an ironic governmental allegory faithful to feminism, companionableism, and materialism. possibly frequently faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent fear and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously.I know no better stance to contain from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States political sympathies, including the politics of cordialist-feminism. Blasphemy protects single from the moral studyity within, while cool off insisting on the need for comm agreement. Blas- phemy is non apostasy. Irony is ab tabu contradictions that do not resolve into big wholes, even dialectic anyy, about the tension of h wiz sequence(a)ing incompatible things together because both(prenominal) or all be necessary and straightforward. Irony is about hu- mor and serious play.It is besides a rhetorical strategy and a governmental method, one I would analogous to see more than honoured within affectionateist-feminism. At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the orbit of the bionic woman. A bionic man is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a marionette of social reality as fountainhead as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social traffic, our to the highest degree important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international womens movements have constructed womens sire, as surface as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective ob- ject.This experience is a fiction and particular of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the mind, the imaginative ap- prehension, of op pression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a look of fiction and lived experience that switchs what counts as womens experience in the late 20th century. This is a fight down over life and death, but the boundary mingled with science fiction and social reality is an visual illusion. Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgscreatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously inwrought and crafted. late medication is also full of cyborgs, of couplings among organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a world-beater that was not generated in the history of versedity. Cyborg sex restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice * sooner published as Manifesto for cyborgs science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review, no. 80 (1985) 65108. Reprinted with permission of the generator. 117 J. Weiss et al. eds. ), The International Handbook of Vir tual Learning Environments, 117158. o C 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands. organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncou- pled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that gifts the nightmargon of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern fight is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command- checker-communication-intelligence, an $84 trillion item in 1984s US defence budget.I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our so- cial and bodily reality and as an imaginative vision suggesting some very oval-fruited couplings. Michael Foucaults biopolitics is a flaccid pre-monition of cyborg politics, a very open field. By the late 20th century, our time, a mythic time, we be all chimeras, theorized, and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism in short, we ar cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology it deceases us our politics.The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and ma terial reality, the two joined cen- ters structuring whatsoever possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of westward science and politicsthe tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism the tradition of near the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the early(a) the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pastime in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to summate to socialist-feminist culture and opening in a post-modernist, non indwellingist mode and in the utopian tradi- tion of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is away(p) salvation hi story. Nor does it mark time on an oral symbiotic utopia or post- oedipal apocalypse.As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and atomic culture, Lacklein, the most wonderful and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds ar 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 with bisexu- ality, preoedipal symbiosis, unalienated restriction, or other seductions to organic wholeness by dint of a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sensea final irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptictelosof the Wests escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the Western, hu- manist sense depends on the myth of orig inal unity, fullness, bliss, and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humanes must separate, the task of exclusive development and of history, the twin blind drunk myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism.Hilary Klein (1989) has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labor and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original 118 unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the spirit of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is an illegitimate promise that might lead to corruption of its teleology as star wars. The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and per- versity.It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No chronic buildingd by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technologicalpolisbased partl y on a revolution of social relations in theoikos, the house live on. nature and culture atomic number 18 reworked the one can no overnight be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical dom- ination, ar at issue in the cyborg world.Unlike the hopes of Frankensteins monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a reappearance of the garden that is, through the fabrication of a hetero cozy mate, through its completion in a destroyed whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden it is not do of mud and cannot dream of go to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy.Cyborgs are not reverent they do no t remember the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connectionthey seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate take of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. provided illegitimate offspring are often super unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are in crucial. I want to signal three crucial boundary breakdowns that make the following politicalfictional (political-scientific) analysis possible.By the late 20th cen- tury in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and ani- mal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been pol- luted if not turned into amusement parkslanguage, tool use, social behavior, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the time interval of human and animal. And many tidy sum no longer feel the need for such a separation indeed, man y branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures.Movements for animal rights are not irrational de- nials of human uniqueness they are a clear-sighted intuition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. biota and evolutionary scheme over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern or- ganisms as objects of friendship and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological manage or professional dis- putes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scien- tific culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is much 119 room for revolutionary political batch to contest the meanings of the breached boundary. 1 The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary be- tween human and ani mal is transgressed. farthest from signaling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and plea- surably tight coupling. zooerasty has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange.The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Precybernetic machines could be haunted there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and high-mindedness that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. moreover basically machines were not self- moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve mans dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream.To turn over they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late 20th-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, header and be, self-developin g and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. Technological design is only one ideological space opened up by the reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world. Textualization of everything in post-structuralist, post-modernist theory has been damned by Marxists and socialist-feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived relations of domination that ground the play of arbitrary reading. 3 It is accreditedly true that post-modernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (for example, the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organ- ism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature a source of insight and promise of innocenceis undermined, probably fatally.The transcendent authorization of indication is lost, and with it the ontology groun ding Western epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some strain of abstract existence, like the accounts of technologi- cal determinism destroying man by the machine or meaningful political action by the text. Who cyborgs lead be is a radical question the answers are a matter of survival. both(prenominal) chimpanzees and artifacts have politics, so why shouldnt we? (de Waal, 1982 Winner, 1980).The third distinction is a subset of the second The boundary between physical and immaterial is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances as a marker of radical change in American face cloth heterosexuality They get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices They are everywhere and they are in subgross.Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Fathers ubiquity and spirituality. The 120 silicon chip is a surface for writing it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power small is not so much beau- tiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles.Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized motion-picture show cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sunshine they are all light and denude because they are nothing but sig- nals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobilea matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessen ce.The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine- belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about sureness or its simulation. 4 They are floating signifiers moving in pickup trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch- twines of the displaced and so unnatural Greenham women, who read the cyborg webs of power so very well, than by the militant labor of older mas- culinist politics, whose natural constituency needs defence jobs.Ultimately the hardest science is about the demesne of sterling(prenominal) boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure spirit, C3I, cryptography, and the preservation of potent secrets. The new machines are so pretty and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. The diseases evoked by these clean machines are no more than the minuscule coding changes of an antige n in the immune system, no more than the experience of stress.The nimble fin- gers of Oriental women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with dolls houses, womens enforced attention to the small take on quite new dimensions in this world. There might be a cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail5 whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies. So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work.One of my premises is that most American so- cialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formula- tions, and physical artifacts associated with high technology and scientific culture. FromOne-Dimensional Man(Marc use, 1964) toThe Death of Nature (Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives have in- sisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imag- ined organic body to integrate our resistance.Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of 121 domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of per- spective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically arbitrate societies. From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse hired in the name of defence, about the final appropri- ation of womens bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984).From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship w ith animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory stand- points. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other reward point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters.Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to guess LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely represent and spew out the tools of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state.Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity aggroup in my town. (Affinity relate d to not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity. )6 2. FRACTURED IDENTITIES It has become difficult to name ones feminism by a single proceduralor even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness of exclusion through assignment is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gen- der, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in essential unity.There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as being female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social prac- tices. Gender, race, or class-consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as us in my own rhetoric? Which identities are avai lable to ground such a potent political myth called us, and what could motivate term of enlistment in this collectivity?Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of womens dominations of each other. For meand for many who share a confusable historical location in white, professional middle-class, female, 122 radical, North American, mid-adult bodiesthe sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the US left and US femi- nism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity.But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalitionaffinity, not identity. 7 Chela Sandoval (n. d. , 1984), from a consideration of item historical mo- ments in the formation of the new political voice called women of color, has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called oppositional conscious- ness, born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. Women of color, a name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorporate, as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic breakdown of all the signs of Man in Western traditions, constructs a kind of post-modernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity. This post-modernist identity is fully political, whatever might be tell abut other possible post-modernisms. Sandovals oppositional consciousness is about contradictory locations and heterochronic calendars, not about relativisms and pluralisms.Sandoval emphasizes the leave out of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of color. She measures that the definition of a group has been by conscious appropriation of negation. For example, a Chicana or US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a bl ack person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities, left out of even the privileged oppress authorial categories called women and 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 historical identity as US women of color. This identity attach out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship. Unlike the woman of some streams of the white womens movement in the United States, there is no naturalization of the matrix, or at to the lowest degree this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely available through the power of oppositional consciousness. Sandovals argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feminists out of the worldwide development of anti-colonialist discourse that is to say, discourse dissolving the West and its highest productthe one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman man, that is, the author of a cosmos called history.As orientalism is deconstructed politically and semiotically, the identities of the occident destabilize, including those of feminists. 9 Sandoval argues that women of vividness have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate the imperializing, totalizing new subjects of old Marxisms and feminisms which had not faced the consequences of the disorderly polyphony emerging from decolonization. 123 Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and the politi- cal/poetic mechanics of identification construct into reading the poem, that generative core of cultural feminism.King criticizes the persistent tendency among modern-day feminists from different moments or conversations in feminist practice to taxonomize the womens movement to make ones own political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so that it appears to be an ideological strug- gle among coherent types persisting over time, especially those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialist-feminist. Literally, all other feminisms are both incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit ontol- ogy and epistemology. 0 Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to natural law deviation from official womens experience. And of course, womens culture, like women of color, is consciously created by mechanisms inducing affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certain forms of academic practice have been pre-eminent. The politics of race and culture in the US womens movements are intimately interwoven. The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of approp riation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification.The theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-domination or unity-throughincorporation ironically not only undermines the justifications for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scientism, and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or natural stand- point. I think that radical and socialist/Marxist-feminisms have also under- mined their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially blue-chip step 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 build effective affinities.It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary standpoints, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process display the limits of identification. The acid tools of post-modernist theory and the constructive tools of ontol ogical discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving West- ern selves in the interests of survival. We are excruciatingly conscious of what it mode to have a historically constituted body. But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either.Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naivet ? e of innocence. But what would an- other political myth for socialist-feminism look like? What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and inactive be faithful, effectiveand, ironically, socialist-feminist? I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of race, gender, sexuality, and class. I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible.None of us have 124 any longer the symbolic or mate rial capability of dictating the shape of reality to any of them. Or at least(prenominal) we cannot claim innocence from practicing such dominations. White women, including socialist-feminists, discovered the non-innocence of the category woman. That consciousness changes the geography of all previous categories it denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein. Cyborg feminists have to argue that we do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for nsight, has done enough damage. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give late 20th-century people pause as well. In the fraying of identities and in the reflexive strategies for constructing them, the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history. Both Marxist/socialist-feminisms and radical feminisms have simultane- ously naturalized and denatured the category woman and consciousness of the social lives of women. Perhaps a schematic caricature can highlight both kinds of moves.Marxian-socialism is rooted in an analysis of pursue labor which reveals class structure. The consequence of the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the worker is dissociated from his sic product. Ab- straction and illusion eclipse in knowledge, domination rules in practice. Labor is the pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to flood out illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world. Labor is the humanizing activity that makes man labor is an ontological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge of subjugation and alienation.In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism is advanced by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. The main achievement of both Marxist- feminists and socialist-feminists was to expand the category of labor to ac- commodate what (some) women did, even when the wage relation was subor- dinated to a more comprehensive view of labor under capitalist patriarchy. In particular, womens labor in the household and womens activity as mothers generally (that is, reproduction in the socialist-feminist sense), entered theory on the authority of analogy to the Marxian concept of labor.The unity of women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological structure of labor. Marxist/socialist-feminism does not naturalize unity it is a pos- sible achievement based on a possible standpoint rooted in social relations. The essentializing move is in the ontological structure of labor or of its ana- logue, womens activity. 11 The inheritance of Marxian-humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me. The contribution from these formulations has been the tenseness on the daily responsibility of real women o build unities, rather than to naturalize them. Catherine MacKi nnons (1982, 1987) version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action. 12 It is factually and politically wrong to 125 assimilate all of the diverse moments or conversations in recent womens politics named radical feminism to MacKinnons version. But the teleological logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontologyincluding their negationserase or constabulary difference.Only one of the effects of MacKinnons theory is the rewriting of the history of the polymorphous field called radical feminism. The major effect is the production of a theory of experience, of womens identity, that is a kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary standpoints. That is, the totalization built into this tale of radical feminism achieves its endthe unity of womenby enforcing the experience of and testimony to radical non-being. As for the Marxist/socialist-feminist, consciousness is an achi evement, not a natural fact.And MacKinnons theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into humanist revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism. MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a different analyti- cal strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure of class, but at the structure of sex/gender and its generative relationship, mens constitution and appropriation of women sexually. Ironically, MacKinnons ontology constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Anothers desire, not the selfs labor, is the origin of woman.She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that enforces what can count as womens experienceanything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as women can be concerned. Fem- inist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not. Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism still has the epistemolog- ical status of labor that is to say, the point from which an analysis able to head to changing the world must flow. But sexual objectification, not alienation, is the consequence of the structure of sex/ gender.In the realm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and abstraction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even capability subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted by anothers desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the laborer from his product. MacKinnons radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any other womens political speech and action.It is a totalization producing what West- ern patriarchy itself never succeeded in doingfeminists consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of mens desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground womens unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If my complaint about social- ist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimil- able, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, 126