1985 ACyborgManifestoScienceTechnolo
- (Haraway, 1985) ⇒ Donna Haraway. (1985). “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century.” In: The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments. ISBN:978-1-4020-3803-7
Subject Headings: Posthumanist, Cyborg, Identity Politics, Advanced Industrial Society, Feminist Standpoint.
Notes
Cited By
2022
- (Wikipedia, 2022) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto Retrieved:2022-9-11.
- "A Cyborg Manifesto" is an essay written by Donna Haraway and published in 1985 in the Socialist Review (US). In it, the concept of the cyborg is a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating "human" from "animal" and "human" from "machine.” She writes: "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 made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”
The "Manifesto" criticizes traditional notions of feminism, particularly feminist focuses on identity politics, and encourages instead coalition through affinity. She uses the figure of the cyborg to urge feminists to move beyond the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics; the "Manifesto" is considered one of the milestones in the development of feminist posthumanist theory.
- "A Cyborg Manifesto" is an essay written by Donna Haraway and published in 1985 in the Socialist Review (US). In it, the concept of the cyborg is a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating "human" from "animal" and "human" from "machine.” She writes: "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 made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”
2022
- (Wikipedia, 2022) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway#A Cyborg Manifesto Retrieved:2022-9-11.
- In 1985, Haraway published the essay "Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s" in Socialist Review. Although most of Haraway's earlier work was focused on emphasizing the masculine bias in scientific culture, she has also contributed greatly to the feminist narratives of the twentieth century. For Haraway, the Manifesto offered a response to the rising conservatism during the 1980s in the United States at a critical juncture at which feminists, to have any real-world significance, had to acknowledge their situatedness within what she terms the "informatics of domination."[1] Women were no longer on the outside along a hierarchy of privileged binaries but rather deeply imbued, exploited by and complicit within networked hegemony, and had to form their politics as such. According to Haraway's "Manifesto," "there is nothing about being female that naturally binds women together into a unified category. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices".[1] As stated, "In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Donna Haraway introduces the figure of the cyborg, an “impure” creature who scrambles orderly divisions between the natural and artificial/technical, and the human and the non-human/animal". A cyborg does not require a stable, essentialist identity, argues Haraway, and feminists should consider creating coalitions based on "affinity" instead of identity. To ground her argument, Haraway analyzes the phrase "women of color", suggesting it as one possible example of affinity politics. Using a term coined by theorist Chela Sandoval, Haraway writes that "oppositional consciousness" is comparable with a cyborg politics, because rather than identity it stresses how affinity comes as a result of "otherness, difference, and specificity".[1] Haraway's cyborg is a set of ideals of a genderless, race-less, more collective, and peaceful civilization with the caveat of being utterly connected to the machine. Her new versions of beings reject Western humanist conceptions of personhood and promote a disembodied world of information and the withering of subjectivity. The collective consciousness of the beings and their limitless access to information provides the tools with which to create a world of immense socio-political change through altruism and affinity, not biological unity. In her essay, Haraway challenges the liberal human subject and its lack of concern for collective desires which leaves the possibility for wide corruption and inequality in the world. Furthermore, the cyborg's importance lies in its coalition of consciousness, not in the physical body that carries the information/consciousness. A world of beings with a type of shared knowledge could create a powerful political force toward positive change. Cyborgs can see "from both perspectives at once."[1] In addition, Haraway writes that the cyborg has an imbued nature toward the collective good. Haraway explains that her "Manifesto" is "an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism."[1] She adds that "Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves."[1] Haraway is serious about finding future ways towards equality and ending dominating behavior; however, the cyborg itself is not as serious of an endeavor for her as the idea of it is. Haraway creates an analogy using current technologies and information to imagine a world with a collective coalition that has the capabilities to create grand socio-political change. Haraway's "Manifesto" is a thought experiment, defining what people think is most important about being and what the future holds for increased artificial intelligence. Gender, Work, & Organization's author Agnes Prasad's piece Cyborg Writing as a Political Act: Reading Donna Haraway in Organization Studies elaborates on how Haraway's writing contributes to the greater feminist community.
"This essay, almost immediately, became a watershed text for feminist theory and for, what was at the time, the inchoate field of feminist science studies. Interweaving ideas that were playful and imaginative with an incisive critique of the totalizing essentialism that was the ironic hallmark of the myriad strands of the second-wave feminist movement — encompassing, but not limited to, Marxist, psychoanalytic and radical feminist approaches — Haraway conscientiously articulates the politics of a monstrous creature of the post-gender world: the cyborg.” [2]
- In 1985, Haraway published the essay "Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s" in Socialist Review. Although most of Haraway's earlier work was focused on emphasizing the masculine bias in scientific culture, she has also contributed greatly to the feminist narratives of the twentieth century. For Haraway, the Manifesto offered a response to the rising conservatism during the 1980s in the United States at a critical juncture at which feminists, to have any real-world significance, had to acknowledge their situatedness within what she terms the "informatics of domination."[1] Women were no longer on the outside along a hierarchy of privileged binaries but rather deeply imbued, exploited by and complicit within networked hegemony, and had to form their politics as such. According to Haraway's "Manifesto," "there is nothing about being female that naturally binds women together into a unified category. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices".[1] As stated, "In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Donna Haraway introduces the figure of the cyborg, an “impure” creature who scrambles orderly divisions between the natural and artificial/technical, and the human and the non-human/animal". A cyborg does not require a stable, essentialist identity, argues Haraway, and feminists should consider creating coalitions based on "affinity" instead of identity. To ground her argument, Haraway analyzes the phrase "women of color", suggesting it as one possible example of affinity politics. Using a term coined by theorist Chela Sandoval, Haraway writes that "oppositional consciousness" is comparable with a cyborg politics, because rather than identity it stresses how affinity comes as a result of "otherness, difference, and specificity".[1] Haraway's cyborg is a set of ideals of a genderless, race-less, more collective, and peaceful civilization with the caveat of being utterly connected to the machine. Her new versions of beings reject Western humanist conceptions of personhood and promote a disembodied world of information and the withering of subjectivity. The collective consciousness of the beings and their limitless access to information provides the tools with which to create a world of immense socio-political change through altruism and affinity, not biological unity. In her essay, Haraway challenges the liberal human subject and its lack of concern for collective desires which leaves the possibility for wide corruption and inequality in the world. Furthermore, the cyborg's importance lies in its coalition of consciousness, not in the physical body that carries the information/consciousness. A world of beings with a type of shared knowledge could create a powerful political force toward positive change. Cyborgs can see "from both perspectives at once."[1] In addition, Haraway writes that the cyborg has an imbued nature toward the collective good. Haraway explains that her "Manifesto" is "an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism."[1] She adds that "Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves."[1] Haraway is serious about finding future ways towards equality and ending dominating behavior; however, the cyborg itself is not as serious of an endeavor for her as the idea of it is. Haraway creates an analogy using current technologies and information to imagine a world with a collective coalition that has the capabilities to create grand socio-political change. Haraway's "Manifesto" is a thought experiment, defining what people think is most important about being and what the future holds for increased artificial intelligence. Gender, Work, & Organization's author Agnes Prasad's piece Cyborg Writing as a Political Act: Reading Donna Haraway in Organization Studies elaborates on how Haraway's writing contributes to the greater feminist community.
Quotes
Abstract
This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist-feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. 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. Irony is about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image 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 reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women’s movements have constructed “women’s experience”, as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late 20th century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.
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References
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| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1985 ACyborgManifestoScienceTechnolo | Donna Haraway | A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century | 1985 |
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Haraway, Donna (1990). "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century". Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge. pp. 149–181. ISBN 978-0415903875.
- ↑ Prasad, Ajnesh. “Cyborg Writing as a Political Act: Reading Donna Haraway in Organization Studies.” Gender, Work & Organization, vol. 23, no. 4, 2016, pp. 431–446., doi:10.1111/gwao.12128.