Many Happy Returns! :: Sheryl N. Hamilton

It’s hard to believe that it has been twenty years since Donna Haraway first published, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” (the Cyborg Manifesto_). Reworked once, reprinted dozens of times, and cited immeasurably often, it rightly takes its place in the pantheon of great essays. The Cyborg Manifesto stands beside Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and of course Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto as a work whose invocation has become a signifier in its own right, while the content fades in memory and perhaps significance.

In that essay, Haraway has the distinction of having mobilised one of the most prolific, powerful, and purloined metaphors of technoculture : the cyborg. While the term cyborg itself, was coined by Manfred Clynes in the 1960s to describe the adaptation of humans to life in space (see Clynes and Kline 1995), it was the Cyborg Manifesto that introduced the unruly hybrid to social theory. Haraway defined the cyborg as a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (1985: 65). She offered the cyborg as a political fiction for mapping the boundary effacement between humans and animals and humans and machines. Ironic, unruly, and illegitimate, the cyborg revelled in the pleasures of promiscuous couplings with technology, sought a politics of affinity, and incited women to embrace a relationship with technology.

Scott Bukatman recognises that “Donna Haraway has extensively rethought the emergence of the cyborg in the mid-twentieth century, and the very term has become nearly synonymous with her formulations” (1993: 321). Many other scholars concur (Hicks, 2002; Flanagan and Booth, 2002; Gray, et al., 1985; Gray 2001; Davis-Floyd and Dumit, 1998; Wolmark, 1999). The metaphor has eclipsed the original essay in circulation, if not complexity. Virtually any body-machine encounter can be, and has been, labelled cyborgian. As Heather Hicks notes, “[t]hose of us who think and write about contemporary literature and culture may at times begin to feel that we have reached ‘cyborg’ saturation” (2002: 86). She goes on however, to advocate (although not demonstrate), the cyborg’s continued relevance. “[H]owever faddish the regular recycling of this trope may begin to appear, its staying power suggests its usefulness as an intellectual rallying point for all of us who find contemporary cultural transformations too astonishing and dramatic to warrant anything less than the special effect that is the cyborg metaphor” (ibid.). Yet, staying power alone does not prove usefulness. Particularly on this, her twentieth anniversary, I suggest that we shouldn’t easily forget that both the cyborg and her parent manifesto were “born” in the mid-1980s.

A feminist call to techno-arms, targeted at the jacuzzi Marxists reading the Socialist Review, focused on rethinking socialist feminist practice and interrogating practices like the homework economy, the essay is very much of its place. It is also an inevitable creature of its time; after all, it was pre-WWW, pre- the widespread adoption of PCs, pre-Dolly, pre-the Human Genome Project, pre- the Gulf War : It is fair to ask, indeed we need to ask, two questions: Does anyone care about the cyborg anymore? Should we?

In 1997, I published an article exploring what I then called the “not-so-surprising half-life of the Cyborg Manifesto,” the body of thought since 1985 (feminist and otherwise) that has taken up the cyborg (Hamilton, 1997). I suggested we could see several trends. First, the Cyborg Manifesto served as a theoretical and historical limit point; second, it was casually evoked as a ‘pro-technology’ feminist position; third, that induced as a conflation of representation and practice; fourth, that a science fictional aesthetic dominated that writing; and finally, that the cyborg had become a powerful construct in the analysis of bodies and technologies within feminist theory and research. Within the feminist literature I suggested three streams were evident where the cyborg was read as: a metaphor to theorise bodies and technologies, as a fantastic construct to examine representations, and as a literal being in order to consider gendered technological practices.

Since that time, it is clear that people still care about the cyborg. The intellectual activity I discerned in the cyborg’s first decade continues, as do many of the trends I identified. The cyborg as trope continues to decorate analyses about everything from Prozac to genetically modified foodstuffs, to brain-machine interfacing, to moral theory, to citizenship, to artificial insemination. We continue to see within technocultural writing the “add-cyborg-and-stir” recipe for immediate hipness (eg. Schmidt and Moore, 1998); body artists Orlan and Stelarc continue (amazingly) to generate intellectual attention as apparently the only two incarnations of literal cyborgs (Zylinska, 2002); and the Matrix, the Borg in Star Trek, and AI have replaced Robocop, The Lawnmower Man, and the Terminator series as the darlings of filmic cyborgia.

This proliferation of “cyborgology” as Gray et al. (1995) would call it may answer the question : does anyone still care? Clearly they do. It does not, however, answer the question of whether or not we should. This ongoing intellectual activity tends to accept the cyborg at face value, with the effect, surely unintended by Haraway, that the cyborg has become iconic, archetypical, and hence frozen in time, static. Can the cyborg continue to offer cyber- and other feminists, as well as others interested, technoculture, political, intellectual or creative resources? I briefly explore three sites where we can see the ongoing pertinence and perspicacity of the cyborg: biotechnology, posthumanism, and the Cyborg Manifesto itself.

Kathleen Woodward (1994) correctly suggests that too much attention in technocultural writing has been spent on communications technology, at the expense of biotechnology. She recognises the Cyborg Manifesto as a key source in rectifying this while noting that Haraway had to virtually “smuggle” biotechnology in (155). Treatments of the cyborg have been overly focused on “hard” technology, at the expense of “soft” technology, reluctant to take up the science element of technoscience. Cultural criticism and theory have been slow to take up biotechnology at all, and slower still to look to the cyborg as a helpful figure in its interrogation. Biotechnological science offers material instantiations of the boundary trouble between humans and animals, between human and machine. Transnational bioscience industries are producing hybrid beings that are far more troubling and interesting than Orlan ever was or could be. Disturbingly, however, the panic around the assault on the singular status of the human being in the order of things as a result of developments in biotechnology is obscuring issues of gender difference. W.J.T. Mitchell (2003), for example, examines what he calls biocybernetic reproduction, exploring the tensions between nature and culture, between genetic originals and copies, and takes up a series of cyborg films, all the while completely ignoring or side-stepping the gender implications of biocybernetic reproduction. And he’s not alone. What better work for the cyborg than to help us to examine the gender implications and politics within biotechnological practices that are materialising “these potent and taboo fusions” (Haraway, 1985: 90).

A second cultural site where the cyborg is implicit and yet unrecognised is in popular and intellectual explorations of posthumans and posthumanism. From N. Katherine Hayles’ classic, How We Became Post Human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999) to the wildest claims of the Extropians (a transhumanist fringe group where science and technology are advocated as a means to transcend human biological limits), there has been an explosion of interest in things posthuman. Without getting into debates about hyphens, slashes, and so on, work on the posthuman seems to fall into two broader streams: a more popular one which Eugene Thacker (2003) labels as “extropianism” and a more reflective and cautious exploration which he (borrowing from Jill Didur) calls “critical posthumanism.” Unlike many other posthuman scholars, Thacker does actually recognise Haraway as a foremother of critical posthumanism, but he does not explore why the posthuman as trope need replace the cyborg. My exploration of critical posthumanism suggests that this lack of reflection is rampant. Elaine L. Graham (2002) is perhaps the exception; she devotes an entire chapter in Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (2002) to distinguishing hers from a more cyborgian approach. She argues that in Haraway’s maintenance of an opposition between human and divine, the cyborg is unduly limited. However, even after a chapter devoted to that argument, I wasn’t fully convinced that the cyborg as a broader cultural figure was necessarily doomed by the alleged, latent Roman Catholicism of its author.

I suggest that the cyborg has more to say to the critical posthumanists. Bart Simon, editor of a 2003 special issue of Cultural Critique on posthuman futures asks: “How does one disentangle the critical potential of hybrid subjectivity from the corporate technoscientific practice of producing hybrids so well suited to the needs of global capitalism?” (4). Was this not the very raison d‘être of the cyborg?

Finally, the third site where I suggest we can explore the ongoing relevance of the cyborg is in the original Cyborg Manifesto. Let’s revel in claims like, “the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence” (Haraway, 1985: 67). As feminists, let’s consider the argument that “we require regeneration not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender” (ibid. 100). Or the claim that “cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (ibid. 100-101). Why don’t we take up the challenge: “my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (ibid. 71).

“What might be learned from personal and political ‘technological’ pollution?” (ibid. 93) remains a potent question. I am a cyberfeminist who teaches graduate courses in gender and technology. I had stopped assigning the Cyborg Manifesto as a reading because of what I perceived to be its datedness (aesthetically at least and perhaps intellectually and politically), the students’ cynicism with all things cyber-, and my own frustration with how the cyborg has come to mean everything and hence nothing in current technoculture. This year, approaching the 20th anniversary, I put it back on the course outline of my doctoral seminar. The students ranged from a young woman just entering her Master’s degree to a grandmother pursuing her doctorate. Surprisingly to me, none had read the essay before. Almost as surprising to me, the students loved it. Each had a completely different interpretation of what was important and predictably, they were frustrated and provoked by it. Most importantly, though, they found it relevant to their own lives with technology. The most poignant moment came when one woman told us that it was upon reading this essay that she could feel proud of the steel rods in her spine, placed there when she was a girl to straighten her spine. She felt empowered to be cyborg and suggested, tears in her eyes, that had she been able to read and understand the essay as a young girl, her adolescence would have been much easier. My cynicism with the cyborg was humbled. Obviously I still have things to learn from the cyborg.

It’s the 20th anniversary of a feminist figure that continues to have a lot to say to our current experience, as women (and men), with technoscience. Why not treat yourself? Go back and reread the Cyborg Manifesto.

Happy birthday Cyborg! I wish you many happy returns.

Works Cited

Bukatman, Scott (1993), Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-modern Fiction (Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Clynes, Manfred E. and Nathan S. Kline (1995), “Cyborgs and Space” in The Cyborg Handbook (Chris Hables Gray, et al., eds.), New York and London: Routledge, pp. 29-33.

Davis-Floyd, Robbie and Joseph Dumit, eds. (1998), Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots, New York: Routledge.

Booth, Austin and Mary Flanagan (2002), “Introduction” in Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture (Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, eds.), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 1-24.

Graham, Elaine L. (2002), Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Gray, Chris Hables et al., eds. (1995), The Cyborg Handbook, New York: Routledge.

Gray, Chris Hables (2001), Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age, New York: Routledge.

Hamilton, Sheryl N. (1998), “The Cyborg 11 Years Later: The Not-So-Amazing Half-Life of the Cyborg Manifesto” in Convergence: The Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 3(2): 104-120.

Haraway, Donna J. (1985), “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” in The Socialist Review 80: 65-106.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Hicks, Heather (2002), “Striking cyborgs: Reworking the ‘Human’ in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It“ in Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture (Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, eds.), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 85-106.

Schmidt, Matthew and Lisa Jean Moore (1998), “Constructing a ‘Good Catch,’ Picking a Winner: The Development of Technosemen and the Deconstruction of the Monolithic Male” in Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots (Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit, eds.), New York: Routledge, pp. 21-21-39.

Simon, Bart (2003), “Introduction: Toward a Critique of Posthuman Futures” in Cultural Critique 53:1-9.

Thacker, Eugene (2003), “Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman” in Cultural Critique 53: 72-97.

Wolmark, Jenny, ed. (1999), Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Woodward, Kathleen (1994), “From Virtual Cyborgs to Biological Time Boms: Technocriticism and the Material Body” in Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology (Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckrey, eds.), Seattle: Bay Press, pp. 47-64.

Zylinska, Joanna, ed. (2002), The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, London: Continuum.

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