The Extensions of Ourselves: WE ARE CYBORG;
Embracing Our Past, Celebrating Our Future
OF CYBORG AND CYBERFEMINISM
In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway concentrates on biological networks. She takes a critical look at the way biotechnology is constructing our bodies. She tackles the masculine bias in scientific culture and sees herself as a troubled "witness" of the ethical whitewater of genetic engineering. Haraway precisely scrutinizes and records -- it appears to me that she is unable to be quiet about what she sees. She has become a heroine to a generation of women who are beginning to call themselves cyberfeminists. "'Cyberfeminism,' says Sadie Plant, director of the Centre for Research into Cybernetic Culture at Warwick University in England, 'is an alliance between women, machinery, and new technology. There's a long-standing relationship between information technology and women's liberation (Kunzru 1997, http://wwww.wired.com/wired/ 5.02/features/ffharaway.html).'" As Haraway pointed out in "Manifesto," gender, race and class consciousness are "achievements" forced upon us by terrible experiences of oppressive social realities such as capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Indeed, the time has arrived to "shake off the demon." The "New Industrial Revolution" is producing a new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities, at a rate that is difficult to follow and to understand. Again, acting as the prophetess in 1983, Haraway delineated these exact problems in her "The Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, or A Socialist Feminist Manifesto for Cyborgs." The title expresses the depth of this article on defining our identity:
"It has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjective -- or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Our consciousness of hierarchical exclusion in naming practices has become much more acute; and the multiple, non-reducible sources of insight and practice have become more unmistakable. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their radical social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in essential unity. We have learned that unities are difficult historical achievements fraught with inevitable exclusionary practices. Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, ironic (Haraway, "The Ironic Dream. . ." 1983, http://www.rochester.edu/College/FS/Publications/HarawayCyborg.html)."
This research seemed to reveal one thing, however, that even Haraway herself could not have foreseen. Perhaps this is an indicator of the eons of the search for female identity, the thirst for defining one's self in terms of ability, of mental prowess, of meaningful activity -- anything but being defined by "acceptable" feminized terms. In the few years of the life of the Internet, where cyborg theory has come into full swing, who could have predicted the GIANT LEAP that hundreds, even thousands, would make into the ether? If this is a giant mental mirage, then we've just come out of the electronic desert, waving our integrated circuits as banners! Most importantly, this has not been an isolated, American, WHITE happening. This has been world-wide. This has grabbed the indigenous communities by their roots, confirming once and for all that there is nothing "primitive" in ANY area of planet earth -- we are all equally capable of comprehending the mighty and possibly terrifying force of such an extension of "ourselves." Appropriately, it appears that Western Civilization's antithesis, their enemy, their "misunderstood others" are the very ones who are able to understand the sifting complex sands of electronic technologies. In huge WAVES, they are coming online with old and new, complex and simple, historical and future-grasping concepts. The day of liberation for "the vulnerable" is at hand. Cyborg technology has provided the medium. The harbingers of patriarchal thought should be, and probably are, shaking in their electronic boots. I am positive that the mostly-male dominators of the creation of computer-technologies never entertained the possibility that this communications "medium" would provide the "message" to the worker-bee economy, so long-oppressed by patriarchal thought.