Haraway’s Theory of History in the Cyborg Manifesto
Donna Haraway’s approach to media history is characterised by both a rejection of technological determinism and a sensitivity to the ideological impacts that media have. Though still utterly anthropocentric, this approach doesn’t merely put humans at the centre of history but also begins to undermine the conception of an easily taxonomised and identified humanity. Human history for Haraway isn’t a rigid procession of cause determining effect, but a process of becoming that depends upon human history’s conception of itself, via the medium of myth.
The Cyborg Manifesto strikes a nuanced balance between the discourses of constructivism and determinism by integrating this unresolved contemporary question of agency and identity into a revolutionary body. This question, of whether we control our machines or if these media determine (the possibilities of) our behaviour, is far from clear-cut and so rather than playing partisan Haraway is more intrigued by the question itself. Though the reader may lean towards one position or the other, it is the ongoing debate of agency (both relative and absolute) that forms the quintessential characteristic of the human at the culmination of history which concerns her — the fact that our historical assumptions are disrupted as to where the line can be drawn delineating the human from nature and the external world.
She speaks of a cyborg world being “about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory stand-points”, referring to issues of gender, sexuality, race and class among others. However the principle identity crisis inherent to the cyborg, which then calls into question these other identities, is the human/technology division. When the once-sacred line between ‘me’ and the prosthetic is so heavily blurred, she argues that other questions of identity needn’t be resolved so cleanly and simply either. Where the modern existential crisis is one of choice (and by extension freedom, assuming agency), the postmodern crisis is one of identity (having questioned the former assumption) — the cyborg embraces this latter crisis in order to overcome it.
Qua manifesto this work is a statement of political intent more than it is a piece of archaeology or philosophy, though it contains both of these elements. The cyborg that is being manifested here is less a new kind of being, as surely the very first time a human thought to wield an object as instrument (phenomenologically griffbereit: ready-to-hand) can be seen as the dawn of cyborg prosthesis, than it is a new kind of discourse.
This new cyborg discourse serves two main purposes. Firstly, it attempts at formalising some of the cultural implications of the accelerated and animated prosthesis that has characterised the late twentieth century, taking a McLuhan-influenced approach in seeing all technologies and media; whether intimately attached to a person, veritably invisible or monolithic and alien; as “extensions” of the body and ultimately prosthetic. Secondly, it challenges other discourses that characterise the cultures that have so far produced these technologies, discourses that are predominantly capitalist and patriarchal. This second purpose crucially assumes another very McLuhanist perspective, that the medium and meaning are tightly entangled — but where McLuhan asserts the causal primacy of the medium over the message, Haraway aims for a more balanced position:
Technologies and scientific discourses[…] should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, […they] mutually constitute each other.
The central issue of contention, perhaps, is not that media enforce meanings, but which meanings we might want to be enforced. Logic languages are both technologies and discourses in this exact sense, and one might rightly regard questioning the enforced meaning of, for example, predicate calculus as problematic, or at least deeply difficult. The hard task is drawing a line somewhere, and it must be drawn somewhere in the middle. The instrumental social power in discourse is something of which Haraway is explicitly cognisant, advocating a feminist science in order to affect a more equitable influence over the culture of technologies.
Returning to the above quote, we can begin to see the cyborg as the myth that Haraway hopes to use to invigorate a new discourse (a feminist science), rather than the cyborg being the new discourse itself. This is especially interesting, as it seems as though Haraway sees this piece as creating mythology rather than directly influencing the discourses she is concerned with — and this suggests that Haraway’s history is a history of discourses rather than a McLuhanistic history of media.
A Foucauldian framework of discourses competing for dominance and power (or “subjugat[ing] knowledges”) comes the closest to Haraway’s intended exposition of history, claiming the feminist critique as being a contender in the “struggle for language”. This constitutes not a cyclical or teleological theory, nor does it insinuate a direction of progress excepting the progression of time through entropy. She states: “We cannot go back ideologically or materially,” indicating a cognisance of a linear, irreversible history, but she sees the struggle between ideologies for dominance as ultimately too chaotic to attribute the kind of determinism required of a teleology.
Like McLuhan she attributes a strong enabling power to technology, ultimately proposing that the cyborg perspective is made possible by only what media history is to hand. However too strong a comparison to McLuhan would be misleading — the cyborg follows from the history of technology but is not utterly defined by it. She emphasises this point by illustrating that the history of technology is so far mired in “militarism and patriarchal capitalism”, to which the cyborg identity resulting from it is “exceedingly unfaithful”. A hard determinism must on the contrary demand comprehensive faithfulness to its causes from its effects.
Although by extension not teleological, the fundamental materialism of the cyborg perspective (not to mention feminist-socialism) is crucial to her work and, qua post-Marxist critique, her manifesto describes a new discourse that is of its time — placed within an historical context, motivated by the past and looking towards the future. In a manner similar to Marx’s view of communism as an inevitable consequence of capitalism, Haraway’s cyborg is a consequence of the hyper-technological world that it now regards and seeks to change.
Haraway’s cyborg can be read as a “spectre” haunting a postmodernity that is being undermined and supplanted, a revolution brought about by the products of that age. However this cybernetic spectre must, within a materialist framework, retain a sense of its own agency or at least, to coin Weber and later Debord’s phrase, the sense of being a “creative historical force”. The revolutionary project is at odds with hard determinism, not least because the ruling bodies’ sense of agency over non-ruling and marginalised bodies is precisely what is to be challenged. This emphasis on relative agency prohibits the relinquishing of absolute agency to technological and other hard determinisms, else there can be no revolutionary project at all.
This spectre, this myth, is that which occupies the space between a materially concrete and immovable history and the point at which our actions, and therefore the future, may yet be malleable. Qua myth, the cyborg is being proposed as the history upon which to base our future discourses, a perception of history that is as subjective as any other but just as influential in its consequence. It is our perception of history that governs our actions and culture more than any ontic facticity of history — and our perceptions can be altered by myth and ideology in contrast to a strict exchange of cause and effect. This is perhaps the theoretical crux of Haraway’s disavowal of technological determinism and teleology — myth can embrace ambiguity, introduce unpredictability and create a space from which radical change can grow.
Hence the central thesis of this manifesto — to undermine questions of human/machine, male/female, black/white or heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual/asexual/autosexual/et cetera not by attempting to resolve them but by acknowledging the increasingly apparent reality of the fluid, almost singular multiplicity of identity.
The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us[…] we are they.
To a view that treats the question of agency as a dualism, her rejection of determinism places her in the camp of the constructivists. Yet her treatments and integrations of Marxist and McLuhanist discourses suggest that neither she nor her view of history fits neatly into either.
Haraway’s cyborg; first as discourse, then as manifesto, finally as myth; denotes her efforts to rewrite history from a new perspective, thereby creating a new future. Though necessarily posited in such a way as to incline a sense of motivation and responsibility for this new future, it does not directly follow that this new myth can be taken objectively as a totally free human expression — the myth of the cyborg is, after all, a consequence or effect of the technologies that make us cyborgs.
