Reading Donna Haraway

Western philosophy has leaned on a set of paired opposites for a long time. Mind and body, nature and culture, human and animal, male and female. In each pair one side rules the other, and the ruling side tends to describe itself as the natural or original one. Haraway’s cyborg is a figure built to make those pairs fail. It is organism and machine at once, born and manufactured, so you cannot say which half is the real one. If the distinction cannot be drawn in the cyborg, she suggests, perhaps it was never as solid in us as we assumed.

There is a problem underneath this that the essay does not solve. If the self is assembled, a question follows about who does the assembling. Haraway knew the cyborg came out of militarism and corporate capitalism, and she hoped it would be unfaithful to its makers. But a being with no essence has nothing inside it that guarantees resistance. It can be rebuilt by whoever controls the parts. She names this danger herself, calling it the “informatics of domination”, and then gives most of her energy to the hopeful reading. Forty years later the worry looks like the stronger half of the argument.

She calls the essay ironic, holding incompatible things together because each seems necessary. That is honest about how contradictory the situation is, but it makes the text hard to argue with, since any claim can be withdrawn as a provocation.

The closing line says she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. I think that is the right preference, because the goddess stands for a purity that was never available. Choosing the cyborg, though, settles only what we are. It leaves open who gets to design us, and that is the question the essay hands to its readers.