Philosophy 101 Unit 1

Donna Haraway, a philosopher and biologist, is a socialist feminist with unique viewpoints concerning several societal problems.  Cyborgs, however, were her focus in her Cyborg Manifesto.  Enjoying “blasphemy” and employing irony as a political and rhetorical method, she attempts to create a new political idea that is faithful to both feminism and materialism; she decides to use a cyborg as her metaphor.  She defines a cyborg in four ways:

1) “Cybernetic organism”

Cybernetics is defined as the study of communication and automatic control systems in both machines and living things.  A cybernetic organism, therefore, must be one that functions through a communication and control network.

2) “Hybrid of machine and organism”

Her “hybrid of machine and organism” contains organic and inorganic materials.  This provides some problems for the conventional definition of biological life - the cyborg parts would not increase in size, do not consume energy in the sam way, require no homeostasis, and do not respond to stimuli.  Defining life in unequivocal terms is still challenging for any scientist, and the argument could easily be made that as long as the system still exhibits all requirements as a whole, the cyborg is still alive.

3) “Creature of lived social reality”

The cyborg is a creature of the present, and It exists now.

4) “Creature of fiction”

The cyborg is a creature of the future, and will continue to advance.

These four definitions, for Haraway, exist simultaneously; they are codeterminate.  Philosophically, Haraway sees no difference between “fiction” and “lived social reality” because they constantly define and refine one another.  Feminists, she says, use the idea of “women’s experience” as both political fiction and crucial fact.  The cyborg, then, changes the methods for acquisition of experience and the definition thereof.  Her conception of a cyborg differs from that of other socialists and feminists in that she does not buy into the dualism - mind / body, organic / inorganic, idealism / materialism - that they see.  She regards their perception of dualism as entirely meritless.

Perception of cyborgs, Haraway says, is largely a “border war” - people might believe that cyborgs are confined to science-fiction, but she cites modern manufacturing and medicine as fields in which cyborgs are employed and created.  The cyborg, she says “gives us our politics” - we are already cyborgs according to her view.  Military history is important to this idea, as she regards transformation into a cyborg as a sort of termination of our attempts to increasingly dominate our environments.  Our combination of organics and inorganics places humans in the middle of the scale, between the absolute organic nature of animals and the mechanical, inorganic essence of a machine.  These, too, are borders.  The return to nature, she says, is impossible - pollution and medical experimentation cause ethical problems that pull us too far from that extreme.  Baboon heart transplants, for example, pose ethical dilemmas for animal rights activists as much they do for human purists.  The second boundary, that between humans and machines, is approached through our refinement of autonomy.  Haraway states that modern machines “make ambiguous the difference between the natural and the artificial” - “our machines,” she says, “are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.  She cites the universal presence of microprocessors in modern technology as an example of how “small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous.”  The cruise missile and microchip are two different examples of technology that plague us; the former represents technology’s destructive potential, and the second implies a sort of “invisible illness” - we constantly consume and interact with technology despite our unawareness that much of it exists.  These “border crossings” are significant for socialism and feminism in that they are essential to convince modern socialist feminists that negotiating in a technological world is an undertaking worth improving upon.  The poorest women - those who would benefit from her socialist ideas most - are those who suffer the greatest from scientific progress.  Home-workers are underpaid, sweatshop workers are exploited, and medical trial guinea pigs undergo potentially harmful tests.

To attempt to summarize: Haraway wants socialist feminists to actively engage technological economies.  The political struggle is not a complete adoption or an outright rejection of technology and its culture, but the capacity to understand both extremities.  Each position, she says, “reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.”  The cyborg, to Haraway, is a monstrous and illegitimate myth of feminism.

Okay, this was part one.  I might have been a little redundant at times, but this text is monstrously dense.  Perhaps I’ll do part two later.