Philosophy 101 Unit 1

Donna Haraway describes the idea of a cyborg in her manifesto. She actually sets out to describe “an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism,” so it’s not entirely clear when she describes the cyborg whether she means the myth or her idea of what a cyborg should be. Haraway describes the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,” created through non-organic means and thus not needing to bother with sexual pleasures, or rather distractions. The cyborg “does not revere” and thus has no religious delusions. Cyborgs are sunshine, “ether,” invisible. Haraway presents this idea of “Informatics of Domination,” which are modern concepts of tomorrow’s cyborg world, replacing the “Old Hierarchal Dominations” of the White Patriarchal Society and religion. Some of it seems arbitrary or just rewording, where “noise” replaces “heat,” “subsystem” replaces “small group,” “optimization” replaces “perfection,” “comparable worth” replaces “family wage.” Some of it, though, makes sense, depicting a scary, emotionless future if it comes true: “science fiction, postmodernism” replaces “bourgeois novel,” “biotic component” replaces “organism,” “Star Wars” replaces “Second World War,” “cyborg citizenship” replaces “public/private,” “communications enhancement” replaces “cooperation,” “robotics” replaces “labor,” the list goes on. Haraway encourages throughout her paper that feminists should strive to become like cyborgs, which would thereby eliminate the endless dualistic struggle plaguing the past centuries.

This idea of the cyborg, however, of eliminating awareness of gender, doesn’t seem like the way to solve the heated interactions between men and women. By replacing sexual reproduction with “replication,” and “organic sex role specialization” with “optimal genetic strategies” seems not to blend humanity with machine, but rather to throw away all humanity for only the machine. Since we can’t be machines, this replacement only results in a poor attempt to imitate a being completely and utterly different from us, both in makeup and cognitive capacity, which translates to the destruction of ourselves. Haraway discusses a few ideologies in the beginning of her manifesto, among them biological determinism and technological determinism. Biological Determinism rejects monotheistic thought that man lords above the animals and the earth, celebrating the blend between humans and animals, given that we are really not so different. Technological Determinism accepts the blend between humans and machines, revealing how blurred the lines have become between man and machine: “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert.” This very quote describes how inherently bad Technological Determinism is for humanity, and how they function as an inverted relationship: when one gains strength, the other loses it. Should we all alter ourselves to emulate the qualities of a cyborg, we would lose touch with our humanity.