Rereading A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway)
The themes of the moment for me are hybridity and (in)coherence.
In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway takes the idea of the “cyborg” as a motivating metaphor.
Cyborgs are important for Haraway because they are hybrids that blend across the apparently strict boundary between “machine” and “organism”.
Haraway invites us to consider and embrace a politics and sense of identity that is likewise willing to transcend or resist established binaries related to race, gender and so on:
What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective – and, ironically, socialist-feminist.
Haraway’s discussion is rich and multifaceted — political, philosophical, and critical. But what I want to focus on today is the emotional dimension of Haraway’s work.
At the outset of the piece, Haraway describes the essay as “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries”. Later, she explains that:
…a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints
These terms like “pleasure” and “fear” are emotional words. They are feelings and ways of experiencing the world.
It is natural to bring up these emotional words, because it can feel profoundly uncomfortable to exist on the boundary of identities, or in a state of apparent contradiction or incoherence (at least in the eyes of the world).
I know that others experience this far more profoundly than I do, as someone who fits within many expected boxes.
But this is also a kind of discomfort that I can relate to in parts of my life, as I struggle on the boundaries of different academic/intellectual/creative/personal perspectives which often feel mutually inconsistent, or at least difficult to reconcile.
Plenty of the intellectual world places a high value on internal consistency. Isn’t that what it means to be a “good”, thoughtful, intellectual thinker? To be someone who works out all the inconsistencies, makes sense of things, and acts accordingly? I think of the Socratic interlocutors with their unexamined beliefs, made better by careful inducements to reason more deeply and carefully. I think of Descartes and his will to doubt all things that can possibly be doubted. Philosophy education teaches that (intellectual) inconsistency is a state to be avoided and resolved in the process of learning and self-improvement.
Much of academic disciplinarity, still, shares the sensibility that there is one true way of seeing (and it is ours).
But so, returning to Haraway, part of the idea is to recalibrate the emotional experience of “hybridity” and “contradiction”. The point is not just to tolerate or even accept these states as inevitable-but-undersirable (and ideally transitory) states of a complex world that often resists reason and reconciliation.
Instead, Haraway invites us to go even further; how might it feel to embrace and celebrate these states of apparent contradiction, hybridity, and both-ness1 as worthy and permanent states of being? How might it feel to stand happily in hybridity, with full acceptance and sense of arrival and integrity?
Of course, sometimes integration and reconciliation can also be worthy goals. Sometimes, sensibilities that seem in conflict are, in fact, not in conflict at all if looked at from the right angle. But the point is that integration need not be a precondition for arrival and celebration.
Anyway, thanks for reading and, as always, let me know if you have thoughts on any of this.