EBSCOhost

Title: Technological sensibilities and the cyberpolitics of gender: Donna Haraway's postmodern feminism. By: van Loon,
Joost, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences, 13511610, Jun96, Vol. 9, Issue 2
Database: Academic Search Elite

Technological sensibilities and the cyberpolitics of gender: Donna Haraway's postmodern feminism

Contents

Introduction(n1)

Concern 1:
epistemology and
embodiment

Concern 2:
Cyberpolitical
strategies

Concern 3:
representation and
sensibility

Conclusion:
towards a cyborg-
ethics

Notes

ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss the far reaching implications of Donna Haraway's cyborg
feminism for social and cultural theory. I argue that it allows us to re-think the collapse of
modernity not so much as the death of the social and the death of the subject, but us the eclipse
of 'Modern Man' as the 'natural' anchorage of views flora nowhere. Highlighting the inevitable
particularism of embodiment, her notion of the cyborg marks the possibility of differential politics
which combine critique with agonistique. Such an alliance could serve as particularly effective
way of working through the challenge of postmodernity without either surrendering to 'anything
goes' liberal pluralism or the romantic desperation of nihilistic fatalism.

Introduction(n1)

Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication,
against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of
phallogocentrism. That is why Cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in
the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine

… 'We' did not originally choose to become

Cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and epistemology that imagines the reproduction
of individuals before the wider replications of 'texts' (Haraway, 1990, p. 218).

Considering modern (risk) society (Beck, 1992) today, it is quite clear that the promises of the
Enlightenment have been far from fulfilled. Ecological disasters lurk beneath every excavation of
a (recent) past; worldwide poverty shows sharp increases whilst the few who are very rich have
exponentially multiplied their fortunes; raging (civil) wars have claimed tens of millions of lives

EBSCOhost

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Emika/P...20and%20the%20cyberpolitics%20of%20gender.htm (1 of 11) [2007-10-07 04:10:05]

Language

EBSCOhost

References

and made millions more refugees, violently displaced from their habitat, aggressively pursued
by violent and sexual tortures. Colonialism, the Gulag, Auschwitz are just three symbolic

markers, not simply of the failures of modernity, but--above all--of the devastating consequences of its greatest
successes: capitalism, emancipatory radical political thought, technology and scientific rationality. Lyotard (1988,pp.
116-117) is right to state that there is nothing less ethical than reason that tries to rationalize, let alone justify, such
atrocities. They do not serve a historically, morally or politically necessary purpose (for example to allow progress to
'overcome' its own failures). They only mark the ethical imperative to bear witness, to work-through the gravity of the
violence unleashed by modernity. No rationalization or apology can compensate for the suffering at the expense of
which modernization takes place.

However, there is no need to focus exclusively on these 'big' issues. Over the years, for example, many feminists
have exposed the 'coincidence' of various intricate mechanisms of male domination with the multiplicity of discourses
of 'modern thought', regarding gendered divisions of labour, sexuality, reproduction, socialization, violence, ideology,
law, consumption, leisure and the whole dispositif (apparatus) of domesticity itself.(

) By paying close attention to

the mechanisms by which this 'coincidence' is realized, feminists have thus exposed how modern thought, with all its
universalistic pretensions, links up to very particular sets of relationships, which are marked by the extension of public
forms of domination into the smallest details of intimacy.

It has often been argued that the postmodernist and feminist critiques of modernity are incompatible, because the
former refuse to commit themselves to any political or ethical responsibility, whilst for the latter, a concern with the
gendered and sexual modes of domination (patriarchy) constitutes an ethical and political limit that cannot be
transversed (Fraser and Nicholson, 1990, p. 5). Such homogenizing, meta-theoretical simplifications must be taken
with great suspicion however (McClure, 1992; Singer, 1992). Postmodernism and feminism are far from paradigmatic
'bodies' of thought. Their loci are so disparate and diffuse that any clinical discussion on a paradigmatic level becomes
completely redundant (Morris, 1988). What provides a better anchorage of critical theorization is the 'particularity' of a
social setting in which specific forms of 'knowledge' are constructed as problematic.

Allow me therefore to avoid taxonomizing the broad arenas of feminism and postmodernism and the attempts to map
out the (im)possibilities of their convergence.(

) As a point of departure, I would merely like to state that there is no

way back; that is, there is no point in returning to some notion of 'essence', be it that of 'sex' or 'gender', as a
foundation for critical theory and politics. Butler (1990) has convincingly argued that such essentialisms rely on an
idea of 'nature' as a founding principle in which the very investment of male desire is being forgotten. Jordanova's
(1989) excellent exposition of the sexual visions of modern science should be taken as a warning to all those wishing
to continue the Enlightenment Project without taking the heterosexual matrix of its discourses into account. As we
inevitably approach the end of modernity, we have become more and more 'exposed' by the technologies of gender
(De Lauretis, 1989b) and the technologies of sex (Foucault, 1978).

However, whilst such technologies have to be taken into account as formative of the very 'nature' of gender, sex and
human being, this does not inevitably mean that the gendered and sexed modalities of being human can therefore be
changed at will. The power set into work by discursive constructions, materializes reality-effects and engenders
particular possibilities for anchoring identities which are thus simultaneously limits of transgression. In fact, notions of
gender, sex, and human being are saturated with discourses, whose very multiplicity might even actively-pursue
contradictions as the groundless grounding of 'new identities'. For example, Janice Winship's (1987) analysis of
Options shows that whereas since the early 1970s, women's magazines do not so much rely on stating the 'essence'
of 'being female', Options reconstructs woman-hood on the basis of 'technologies of choice'; it offers its women-
readers assistance to construct their own identities. In other words, it is not enough to provide a critique of
essentialism by referring to the discursive constructions and technologies of identification, since these discourse-
technology ensembles have very material effects indeed.

Feminists theorists such as for example Judith Butler (1990), Diane Fuss (1990), Luce Irigaray (1985,1993) and
Teresa de Lauretis (1989a, 1989b) have, partly for this reason and each in their own way, developed feminist
accounts of what could be called 'the postmodern' beyond the empty constructivism of anti-essentialist critique.
Although these feminists share with other critiques a 'project of creating alternative ways of seeing conceptualizing
and representing difference', their work occupies a specific critical location in its 'emphasis on the female subject and
all of its component aspects' (subjugation-subjecthood, resistance-agency-subjectivity) (De Lauretis, 1990, pp. 12-14).
In order to posit a feminist critique of the technologies and discourses of gender and sex, we have to engage in a

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Emika/P...20and%20the%20cyberpolitics%20of%20gender.htm (2 of 11) [2007-10-07 04:10:05]

EBSCOhost

reworking towards a differential objectification of female desire. That is, rather than confronting the dualistic structures
of the heterosexual-gender matrix with the counter-positions that it sets up, feminist critique has to conjure with the
technologies of sex, gender and human being to disclose a desire that is not entrapped in those heterosexist
structures. Not destruction but deconstruction alters the conditions of representability of the social subject (De
Lauretis, 1990, p. 15).

In this article, I aim to discuss some possibilities of the disclosure of such a desire. The particular problematic I seek to
deconstruct is that of the relationship between 'technology' and 'sexuality' in the face of the apocalypse under whose
shadow we currently live. My specific concern is with the sexualized 'essence' of this relationship which is based on a
difference that--in the words of Judith Butler--matters (Haraway, 1992). In the following sections, I discuss three
concerns that I argue are central to most of Donna Haraway's writings: (

) the connection between epistemology and

embodiment; (

) the strategic appropriation of technology for emancipatory politics; (

) the articulation of desire as a

location of ethics (difference) beyond the politics of representation.

Concern 1: epistemology and embodiment

Haraway's major work Primate Visions (1989) offers a thorough and ongoing critique of modern science as operating
upon the principle of 'disembodied vision'. The modern scientist always claims the 'view from nowhere' as an
epistemological point of privilege because such a detachment is associated with objectivity and neutrality. Scientific
disciplines such as primatology, ethnology, biology and anthropology have developed their corpus on the basis of
narratives departing from what she calls 'the persistence of vision' (1989,pp. 1-15). However, far from dismissing such
sciences as 'unscientific', she argues that the historical, discursive, narrative ethos of modern science grants it a
formidable material force that continuously writes away its own aesthetic and ethical groundings (which would fall
under the category of 'prejudices'). Feminist critique, she argues, has to expose these prejudices by exploiting the
contested narrative forms of scientific discourse (Haraway, 1989, p.377).

Modern science employs technologies to render the world visible. It is therefore no coincidence that modern science
became the dominant épistémé to order the worlds of words and things (Foucault, 1970) in the advent of a sweeping
ethos and aesthetics that has been named the 'Enlightenment'. To enlighten, to make lighter, however, is not only to
render something more visible towards a full transparency (Aufklärung), but also to make it more bearable, ultimately
to its full annihilation (Aufhebung). In other words, in its logical extreme, the ultimate aim for modern science is to
collapse Being into Nothingness. At that extreme limit, where the thing is annulled by the techno-logic of knowing, the
origin of 'mankind' becomes one with its destiny (telos). This is the state of full emancipation, where everything
becomes identical as One because there is no longer any difference. In other words, modern science is particularly
apocalyptic as its prophecies are always attuned to the end-of-history (Haraway, 1989, p. 369).

Because at its logical extreme modern science makes itself redundant, its existence cannot be understood on the
basis of the same logic as it professes. The practices of modern science provide the deferral of the apocalypse which
is a forgetting of its own groundless ground and apocalyptic teleology. As Lyotard (1979) following Nietzsche made
clear: there is nothing scientific about the foundation of science. Science can only legitimate itself on the basis of
narratives that rest beyond it. As we move towards the end of modernity, technologies no longer need to be based on
any foundation of legitimacy (master-narrative) other than that of what performativity: the technocratic principle of de-
legitimation in the name of rationality, effectivity and efficiency. Performativity is nothing but the operational logic of
producing more truth, rationality, effects, and efficiency without due consideration of either the perspective from which
this is to emerge or the objective it is made to serve.

In an essay called Situated Knowledges, Haraway (1988) pursues this point to its ultimate conclusion. Scientific
objectivity is a 'god trick' played upon the world to mask the prejudice, the political privilege of seeing without being
seen, naming without being named, objectifying without being objectified. Primatology, for example, is a science which
objectifies simian bodies, with technologies of visualization on the basis of which narratives are being told. But more
often than not, these narratives themselves already incorporate categorical imperatives which themselves are outside
of it. The basic form of the categorical imperative of modern science is the binary classification: for example male-
female, aggressive-demure, dominant-subordinate, life-death, sex-gender, nature-culture etc. (Haraway, 1989, p. 10).
Objectivity, the product of vision, is thus constructed as a universal 'given' that comes before the technologies of
science.

For Haraway, such classifications are deeply political. They engender the world in terms of fixed divisions which

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Emika/P...20and%20the%20cyberpolitics%20of%20gender.htm (3 of 11) [2007-10-07 04:10:05]

EBSCOhost

themselves are taken for granted, that is, not held accountable. Gender, however, is more than a matter of divide and
conquest. Gender is itself an enacted embodiment (also see Butler, 1990). Engendering is a form of induction, or
realization. Feminism engenders the world critically, in order to resist becoming an apology for that which exists
(Haraway, 1989, p. 5). The difference of feminism vis-à-vis scientific classification is thus not simply a matter of
rejection; it calls forth a desire for alternative visions, that is, a critical epistemology allied with a feminist political
critique.

Responding to the double challenge to counter the scientific rationality of omnipresent vision and developing a critical
epistemology, Haraway proposes a perspective that differentiates from the impossible: the claim to objectivity. Based
on a feminist critique of modem science, she argues that instead of universal vision (the view from nowhere) we
should develop an ontological account based on the partiality of perspective. Such partial knowledge is inevitably
bound to the embodiment of vision. In other words, far from refuting the persistence of vision, Haraway intensifies the
visual metaphor in relation to the technologies which have set it into work (Haraway, 1988, pp. 581-82). By reclaiming
the visual as a technological embodiment, she offers "a feminist writing of the body

… to reclaim that sense to find our

way through all the visualising tricks and powers of modern sciences and technologies that have transformed the
objectivity debates" (Haraway, 1988, p. 582). Hence, in contrast to the transcendental 'sexual visions' of the modern
scientist, embodied techno-visuality is marked by finite desire: "only partial perspective promises objective
desire" (Haraway, 1988, 583).(

)

The notion of promise is crucial here. Haraway does not displace the responsibility of accountability to the
performativity of the visual machine; that is, partial perspective does not--out of itself--guarantee objectivity, or a better
vision. Instead, it highlights the seminal importance of embodiment as a location of ethics and politics, in all practices
of rendering a better account of the world in the form of situated knowledge. In other words, far from claiming an
ontological foundation for epistemology, Haraway maintains the unresolvable dialectic between ontology and
epistemology, being and thinking. Knowledge is political; engendering is an embodied performativity.

The power/knowledge nexus thus situates epistemology in the socio-cultural matrix of late modern society. The sexual
visions of modern science produce a particular claim to objectivity, the form of which is often displayed as that of the
female body rendered visible for the scrutiny of the Gaze of the male scientist (Martin, 1987, 1990). The underlying
heterosexual structure of this scientific Gaze can for example be traced in the metaphorical appropriation of particular
sexualized technologies of vision such as unveiling, discovering and penetrating (Jordanova, 1989, p. 87). The claim
of modern science to objectivity is one of disembodiment. It represses the particularity of embodied heterosexual
masculinity whose desire regulates its vision and the heterosexist-gender matrix through which these visions are
narrated (Jordanova, 1989, pp. 93-4). The denial of a heterosexist cultural matrix as regulating the scientific gaze and
narratives, subsequently inscribes itself onto female bodies in the form of a sexualized violence, which is not
exclusively metaphorical but very performative indeed (forceps, episiotomy, caesarean section).(

) The repression

of a clearly heterosexually constructed cultural matrix organized around the centrality of male (phallic) desire is a
denial and sustained enactment of the very violence by which it inscribes itself onto its 'object' (for example, the
female body). This sort of objectivity, whilst claiming universality, thus withholds the privilege it promises from many,
whilst maintaining its exclusivity to the very few who are allowed initiation into these secrets. Because it remains a
secret, modern science is irresponsible as it cannot be held accountable.

The objectified of modern science, technologies and discourses is the subjugated: the woman, the simian, the patient,
the pupil, the prisoner etc. Because always-already in the process of being objectified, the subjugated are--by
definition--more objective; they have no secrets, as these are always-already unveiled before the sexual vision of the
knowing subject (the modern scientist). The subjugated do not operate through denial or repression; their existence is
not marked by absence. This, however, makes subjugated subjects not less innocent. The knowledge-forms of the
subjugated are embodied in experiences of being objectified and hence, are tied to the same technologies of
objectification. Seeing from below might be a preferred optics "but how to see from below is a problem requiring at
least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the 'highest' technoscientific
visualizations' (Haraway, 1988, p. 584). The objectivity of the subjugated thus involves what Haraway (1988,p. 585)
describes as a "passionate detachment"--a mood of objectification in which alienation is set into work against itself.
Passionate detachment attunes to the stranger within the self, that excess of identity that escapes representation and
therefore holds the promise for alternative visions. It is thus not a taking the place of the other, but a reflexive, dialogic
engagement with one's own partiality.

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Emika/P...20and%20the%20cyberpolitics%20of%20gender.htm (4 of 11) [2007-10-07 04:10:05]

EBSCOhost

A commitment to mobile positioning and to passionate detachment is dependent on the impossibility of entertaining
innocent 'identity' politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from the standpoints of the subjugated in order
to see well. One cannot 'be' either a cell or a molecule--or a woman, colonized person, laborer, and so on--if one
intends to see and see from these positions critically. 'Being' is much more problematic and contingent (Haraway,
1988, p. 585).

The violence that "is implicit in our visualizing practices" marks the excess that we cannot 'know' the other, nor
ourselves, because that would require a constitution of a self-identity anterior to, and as a foundation of, embodiment.
That violence marks the breaking up of the unified subject position, the self-centred, isomorphic cyclopean I/Eye, the
god trick, the view from nowhere (Haraway, 1988, p. 586).

It is with this violent transgression of self-identity that we can locate the cyborg (cybernetic organism). Haraway
employs the term cyborg (as a name, concept, metaphor and perspective) to highlight that all (human) embodiments
are already technologized. Our being-in-the-world is always-already received in mediation, that is, we cannot but
"make sense' of our-'selves'-in-the-world and engage in situated knowledge, without being appropriated by the
machinery of modern life. In this modern world, machines have already taken over all systems of command, control,
communication intelligence (C

I).

…[I]n short, we are Cyborgs. The Cyborg is our ontology; it gives us politics. The Cyborg is a condensed image of
both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In
the traditions of Western science and politics

… the relation between organism and machine has been a border war

(Haraway, 1990, p. 191).

The epistemological embodiment of the cyborg is thus a partial perspective engendering situated knowledge. The
form of this knowledge is 'science fiction' or likewise 'fictions of science'. Cyborgs embody the monstrosity of
otherness, to demonstrate the partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity of 'being' in this technological frame (Gestell) of
the end of modernity. Their objectivity is a vision from below that refutes all innocence of slave morality because it
does not dream of returning to dust, to that perfect pre-Oedipal symbiosis with the phallic mother (Haraway, 1990, p.
192). This has important political consequences. The next section therefore turns to the question of how cyborgs
realize political strategies.

Concern 2: Cyberpolitical strategies

One important consequence of embodied vision is that it marks the impossibility of full-self-disclosure (identification).
The violence of the cyborg, the border war between the machinic and the organic, signals a 'disturbingly and
pleasurably tight coupling' (Haraway, 1990, p. 193)--a violation of boundaries and taboos which have been employed
to regulate them (Douglas, 1966/1984). In today's world, information and communication technologies are a form of
life superior to that of the human. Artificial intelligence constitutes spontaneously emerging complexities whose
contingencies reach far beyond the strictly limited and regulated disciplines of modern thought. The uncertainties that
cyborgs embody, disclose the inevitable question of how to engender a politics of survival.

Cyberpolitics are essentially dialogic. Since the violence of embodiment makes it impossible to render the Other
transparent, we cannot take the perspective of the other. Moreover, we cannot understand the other because our
partial perspective also exposes ourselves as partially beyond knowledge; there is always a remainder that is a
reminder, that objectivity is an inert matter (Haraway 1990: 194). As William Gibson (1984) wrote in Neuromancer the
human body, the meat itself, has become quite redundant in the sprawling worlds of cyberspace and--without
technological appropriation--completely useless.(

)

The dialogic form of cyberpolitics is written in the very violence that constitutes the cyborg: a border war between
organism and machine. There is no essential unity, that un-divisible monad of Origin, from which all being spurns. The
fragmentation of modern life has made such myths not only implausible but also highly ineffective. To be trapped in a
singular category of subjugated, assigned by the politics of classification, is a loss. Partiality is not to territorialize one's
location as superior (on the basis of innocence--Flax, 1992), but to learn to converse, to become inculpated with
difference (Copjec, 1989).(

)

Such inculpation, however, is not at all relativist. To engender objectivity from a partial perspective is not to slide into

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Emika/P...20and%20the%20cyberpolitics%20of%20gender.htm (5 of 11) [2007-10-07 04:10:05]

EBSCOhost

relativism, because inscribed in that very partiality is a difference that matters. Relativism is only possible when
disembodied, that is, in denial of partiality (Haraway, 1988, pp. 584-86). Relativism is a refusal to be taken into
account, thus a god-trick similar to that of all seeing I/Eye of modern science: a view from nowhere. Cyberpolitics is
not liberal pluralism but, instead, are based on an agonistique, a struggle against totalitarian unification that is a
struggle over how to see.

Cyberpolitics are dialogic not in terms of 'base-superstructure' or 'individual-society', but operate through webs and
networks of communication. Its accountability is not realized in dichotomy, but through resonances (Haraway, 1988, p.
588). Cyborgs communicate by weaving alliances and in doing so, they undermine the informatics of domination (the
binary oppositions which delimit the universe of being and thinking in the modern world). The informatics of
domination provide the structure of the social formation of late modernity, a structure which--as I have argued above--
strives towards self-annihilation.

At the end of modernity, the main drive of communication and information technologies is to provide an encoding of
the world, that is, to translate inert matter into the speed of energy (Lyotard, 1991). Cybernetics is about the regulation
and control of all processes by translating these into the codes of an operational language system. Cybernetics are
information-processing systems. Cyberpolitics thus operate in the midst of these transformations; it is no longer viable
to pursue--in the name of authenticity--the original state of objectivity as cybernetics render our very sensibility
towards original objectivity redundant. Cyberpolitics engage with simulacra, copies for which no originals exist, and
engender simulations. We have to learn to converse with these new objective--virtual--realities.

Concern 3: representation and sensibility

The cyborg grants partial perspective in the form of technologized embodiment. It operates through the cyberpolitics of
virtual reality, and engages with simulacra and simulations, which it can only decode at the level of the signifier itself.
The materiality of the signifier is the matter/energy of objectivity; and hence, the question of objectivity is
simultaneously a question of semiotics. As simulations, the signifiers of virtual reality are active agents; to state it
differently, cyberpolitics allow the disclosure of an ethics of passionate detachment in which the 'perspective' is no
longer granted the exclusive privilege of subject/actor. Cyborgs do not discover the world but converse with it.

The cyborg provides a "material semiotic technology" and embodies a "material semiotic actor" (Haraway, 1988, p.
595). The material semiotic actor is not a present/ presence in the metaphysical sense, but is an absent presence
(phantasm), an "active, meaning-generating part of the apparatus of bodily production" (Haraway, 1990, p. 596). The
boundaries of embodiment materialize social interaction. The cyborg is the materialization of technology into
embodiment, it limits and materializes sensibilities into making sense, and is not only a site of mapping, but its very
actor, an "apparatus of literary production".

The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized
identities, In retelling origin stories, Cyborg authors subvert central myths of origin of Western culture. We have all
been colonized by those origin myths, with their longing for fulfilment in apocalypse

…Feminist Cyborg stories have the

task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control

… Writing is preeminently the

technology of Cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century (Haraway, 1990, p. 218).

The sliding of the signifier temporarily stops when a practice of signification closes to make a simulacrum possible. For
a simulacrum to take form, power enters into the scene and limits further deconstruction to asses a nodal point in
communication. A simulacrum is the materialization of form; it embodies the impossibility of representation; it thus
marks the limit of simulation, that is, its reality-effect. As Bakhtin (1986,p. 79) argued, an utterance only makes sense
within a specific (speech-)genre. Every deconstruction finds a temporary closure by forgetting the metaphysics of
presence (Derrida, 1978, 1982; Van Loon, 1996). The disclosure of sense in the form of meaning as the taking-place
of being-there, always involves a forgetting of difference (alternative sensibilities), but this forgetting itself should not
be forgotten. Sensibility is a gendered (finite) desire that enables the making of sense as an unfolding of the event.
Sensibility appropriates the event by affirming the difference between utterance (sense) and noise (non-sense). In
other words, gender (genre), might be a construct, it becomes very real because it makes sense, and allows
meaningful closures. "Gender is a field of structured and structuring difference, in which tones of extreme localization,
of the intimately personal and individualized body, vibrate in the same field with global high-tension
emissions" (Haraway, 1988, p. 588). The cyborg reminds us that this should not be reified to become itself an
'unmarked'; the gendered Cyborg is a transgression: it simultaneously sets and violates the boundaries of the Other/

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Emika/P...20and%20the%20cyberpolitics%20of%20gender.htm (6 of 11) [2007-10-07 04:10:05]

EBSCOhost

Self. The gendered horizon of the cyborg is thus a remainder that could be set into work as a reminder, that it has no
authentic origin to return to, nor a self-unfolding destiny to attain. As the illegitimate offspring of militarism, patriarchal
capitalism and big science, the Cyborg has no stake in displacing sexuality onto a Symbolic Order marked by Oedipal
desire. "Their fathers are inessential" (Haraway, 1990, p.193).(

)

Following Haraway it is now made clear that feminist accountability addresses the translation of representation, i.e.
the semiotic-material technology of the Cyborg. Cyborg epistemology, operating through "the boundary projects" of
the object, emphasizes "embodiments of the world as witty agent and actor" (Haraway, 1988, pp. 595-6). The Cyborg
inhabits an element of surprise. Feminist rewritings of regimes of signification such as science and vanguardist
modernism disclose the unexpected, 'monstrous selves' of cyberpolitics, in a sustained critique on technocracy and
humanism. Power is the positivity of being--that which makes meaningful being possible--and escapes the One, for it
is always already involved in a 'dialectic of apocalypse' (self-annihilation). Engendered sensibilities of cyberpolitics
operate in the active re-writing of the texts of bodies and societies via border-dialogues and border wars.(

)

Cyborgs offer possibilities to develop a political strategy on the basis of a techno-embodied sensibility that does not
aspire to unification with authenticity under an apocalyptic teleology. Cyborg-sensibilities engender an technologized
embodiment of desire that is not retrospective (towards Origin) or naively utopian (towards Telos). In that loss of a
clear sense direction, cyborgs remain apocalyptic, but not in all its totalitarian grandeur as for example the fin de siècle
of the Freudian death drive. Survival, not annihilation, is the articulation of cyberpolitics.

In the narrative of Primate Visions, the terms for gestating the germ of future worlds constitute a defining dilemma of
reproductive politics. The contending shapes of sameness and difference in any possible future are at stake in the
primate order's unfinished narrative of traffic across the specific cultural and political boundaries that separate and link
animal, human and machine in a contemporary global world where survival is at stake (Haraway, 1989, pp. 381-82).

Survival provides a sensibility that allows the cyborg to make sense, and to be selective in its sociations (alliances).
Cyborg-sociations are thus tribal. The becoming-flesh of technology articulates a desire for sociation, a sexual
dialogics, in which genders are multiplied in their embodied enactments. The apocalypse of tribal survival is different
from that of human survival (the Omega Man) because it is not based an individual but a lineage, or clan (Deleuze and
Guattari (1986) call it an agnatic solidarity). The difference of the cyborg is already a difference within and thus
engenders a sensibility in which gender is nothing like the god-trick of modern science played on nature (the
heterosexual matrix). Taking gendered simulacric constructions into account, cyborg-tribes associate with sexual
desires that remain diffused and differential. The essence of cyborg-tribes is marked by a restless desire for
transgression. It is based on sexual alliances, but these are not granted by a shared past (ancestor worship) or a self-
unfolding common destiny (fatalism). The sexuality of cyborg tribes is based on strange attractors: fractal-trajectories
that are induced by the contingency of the in-human in the excess of schizoid technologized embodiments. The
essence of the cyborg is tri-angular--technology-sexuality-tribe--and transgressive--desire/induction/excess.

Cyborg tribes thus live without the worship of tribal ancestors and do not search for pure Origins or clean reproduction/
self-purification. "Origins are in principle inaccessible to direct testimony; any voice from the time of origins is
structurally the voice of the other who generates the self" (Haraway, 1989, p. 11). Cyborgs engender tribes which are
gendered genres. Their belonging is not based on Oedipal, heterosexual kinship structures (mommy-daddy-me), but
one of alliance, a non-Oedipal 'sexuality' which does not hide behind the self-satiated Eye/I of the voyeuristic
narcissistic Master-Gaze. Cyborg tribes derive their location not from the territoriality of Blood or Earth but from the
performativity of sexuality. They are a bastardized race, a tribe of monsters.

In a world organized around "the informatics of domination", biotechnologies and microelectronics are crucial tools to
be understood as "frozen moments of the fluid social interactions constituting them" but also "as instruments for
enforcing meanings" (Haraway, 1990, p. 205). In the world of today, they constitute the most powerful the tool-myths
of our being-in-the-world (Haraway, 1990, p. 217). Signification in border dialogues, building agonistic alliances,
becomes a 'problem of coding', similar to that in cybernetics: the binary law of the digital. However, in its insistence on
difference, it simultaneously becomes a trickster, for it emphasizes uncertainty and contingency, the either/or of Zero
and One becomes a both/and: Being is Nothingness; existence is only possible in alterity, in excess of any identity
(also see Levinas, 1974). This feminist intervention in the essentialist regimes of signification, establishes a radical
break with the Human Condition as Homo Faber, the Man as Worker in the World of the Workshop (Arendt, 1959),
essential to the western-metaphysical tradition which Heidegger (1927/ 1986) ruthlessly exposed (as the tool-myth of

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Emika/P...20and%20the%20cyberpolitics%20of%20gender.htm (7 of 11) [2007-10-07 04:10:05]

EBSCOhost

self-disclosed objectivity).

Contrary to Heidegger however, this intervention is not philosophical but immediately situated in the political, albeit
through a localized ethics of 'Guerrillas in the Midst' a "project to work with and against narrative" (De Lauretis, 1990,
p. 9), an alliance of science and science fiction in order not to become an apology for what already exists (Haraway,
1989, p. 5 and p. 377). "Perhaps our hopes for accountability, for politics, for ecofeminism, turn on revisioning the
world as a coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse" (Haraway, 1988, p. 596).

The signification of Cyborgs employs oxymoronic language to deal with the paradoxes that provide their raison-d'être:
the entangled contradictions of technology and organity, culture and nature, death and fife, destruction and creation.
Alliances "with electronic technology thus represents a paradoxical desire to preserve human life by destroying it".

Indeed, the importance of locationality is highlighted by the double capacity of the Cyborg to liberate or annihilate/
assimilate (Springer, 1991, pp. 322-23). The machine therefore "is not to be worshipped" since "it takes irony for
granted". Like all bodies, Cyborgs "are maps of power and identity" (Haraway, 1990, p. 222). In the last instance, at
stake for a feminist articulation of Cyborg epistemology is therefore an affirmative ethics: "to effect another vision, to
construct other objects and subjects of vision and to formulate the conditions of representability of another social
subject", boundary projects of gender that are working towards an understanding, not of Woman, but of the
differences among women (De Lauretis, 1988, pp. 182-83).

Conclusion: towards a cyborg-ethics

In this essay I have argued for a feminist critique of modernity on the basis of Donna Haraway's appropriation of the
cyborg. The cyborg provides an optics for seeing difference differently, that is, it exposes the limits of embodiment,
situated knowledge, as a point of departure to articulate feminist concerns for epistemology, politics and ethics that do
not require either a return to essentialist prejudices or the acceptance of a relativist constructionism in which every
perspective is as good as any other. Cyberpolitics are dialogic and operate in a virtual reality of simulacra. Cyborgs
engender strategic nomadic alliances through webs and networks of communication; cyberpolitics operate through
diffusion and differentiation, rather than incorporation and integration.(

n10

) Cyberpolitical strategies are therefore

closely connected to issues of communication (representation) and reproduction as "both are aspects of strategic
reasoning in relation to survival, and they are both emblematic of the breakdown of the hermeneutically sealed
individual" (Haraway, 1989, p. 375).

The desire of cyborgs is affirmative and not geared to a return to an organic, pre-Oedipal unity. It is based on an
excess, a difference that cannot be reduced to the One. Cyborg-alliances engage in performative embodiments of
sexuality whose ontology is beyond strategy. This means that cyborg-embodiment, ultimately, is not a matter of
choice, it is not optional. Ethics are not grounded in choice, nor in actions, nor in being itself. Politics cannot be
reduced to ethics; ethics are the differential of politics.

For politics, survival is at stake; however, ethics must be located beyond survival; in the desire and pleasure of the
differential that will always be deferred in being. Such an ethics of differentiation might perhaps serve as a final
warning that cyberpolitics must not be reduced to the politics of identification on the basis of which particular alliances
are formed (inclusion/exclusion). The apocalypse of modernity, under whose mushroom we live, does not make the
ethics of dialogue redundant; instead, it requires an atopian (rather than utopian) vision that exceeds the present.

The cyborg marks the difference within that remains in excess of presence. Its monstrosity at once symbolizes the
apocalyptic self-annihilation of modernity, but also the birth of new possibilities, a destruction that becomes a
construction, that is, a deconstruction. Haraway's cyborg is therefore such a provocative challenge. Although hailed by
the very apocalypse that is taking place under the name of modernity, it offers us at once an objective of embodied
perspective (what), a politics of survival (how) and an ethics of differentiation (why). Cyborgs might ride the storm of
the apocalypse that marks the current sense of dislocation and displacement, they also attune our being to new,
radically different, modalities of existence.

Notes

(n1.) An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the British Sociology Association in
Preston in April 1994. I would like to thank Sarah Franklin, Beverley Skeggs, Jackie Stacey, Caroline Schwaller, Daryl
Spears, Ian Welsh, Helen Lomax and Caroline Owens for their criticism and comments. I would also like to thank

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Emika/P...20and%20the%20cyberpolitics%20of%20gender.htm (8 of 11) [2007-10-07 04:10:05]

EBSCOhost

Barbara Adam for her general guidance and support. Of course, the responsibility for any mistakes and
misunderstandings in this essay remains mine alone.

(n2.) Foucault (1980,p. 194) defined the dispositif as an ensemble of discourses and technologies through which
disciplinary practices are being constituted. It is thus an apparatus of regulation.

(n3.) For example Butler and Scott (1992), Morris (1988) and Nicholson (1990), present very good explorations of
possible and necessary modes of convergence and divergence of feminism and postmodernism.

(n4.) As will be argued below, the finitude of desire is engendered by an embodied enactment of sexuality.

(n5.) Emily Martin (1987,pp. 74-91), for example, quotes women who have experienced the application of the tools of
medical science whilst giving birth as producing alienation and disempowerment, in some cases even rape.

(n6.) It is equally important to note that Gibson's male protagonist, Case, perceives the body as an imprisonment,
whereas his female partner, Molly, almost exclusively works in technologically embodied forms. The fact that Gibson's
becoming-cyborg Case desires a transcendence of embodiment indicates that cyberpolitics are still engendered in
particular sexual formations.

(n7.) Inculpation is a form of reflexivity through endowment with guilt, by which the alienated (split) subject/object
induces possibilities of differentiation.

(n8.) Although as Claudia Springer (1991) has shown, in many representations (e.g. in films such as Terminator and
Robocop) the Cyborg manifests the ideal tool for ego-maintenance. However, by bringing the argument further, she
also posits that this type of Cyborg itself is an embodiment of contradiction for in order to assert masculine subjectivity,
it needs to kill the masculine body and to substitute its sexuality with violence (1991,p. 318). In contrast, Haraway's
Cyborg is from the outset involved in marking gender beyond the binary code of masculine/feminine.

(n9.) A parallel may be drawn with Spivak's (1988) writings on writing, criticism and difference.

(

n10

) This strikes some remarkable similarities with the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1986) on Nomadology, in

which they discuss the concept of machinic phylum to describe how human-technological transgressions (cyborgs)
have always been part of the exteriority of the nomadic war machine.

References

Arendt, H. (1959), The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Austin, University of Texas Press.

Beck. U (1992), Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity, London, Sage.

Buder, J. (1990), Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London, Routledge.

Butler, J. and Scott, J. A. (eds), (1992), Feminists Theorize the Political, New York, Routledge

Copjec, J. (1989), 'The orthopsychic subject, film theory and the reception of Lacan', October, Vol. 49, (Summer), pp.
53-71.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1986), A Thousand Plateaux, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press.

Derrida, J. (1978), Writing and Difference, (transl. A. Bass), Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (1982), Margins of Philosophy, (transl. A. Bass), Hemel Hamsptead, Harvester Wheatsheaf.

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Emika/P...20and%20the%20cyberpolitics%20of%20gender.htm (9 of 11) [2007-10-07 04:10:05]

EBSCOhost

Douglas, M. (1966/1984), Purity and Danger, An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London, Routledge.

Flax, J. (1992), 'The end of innocence', in Butler, J. and Scott, J.A. (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, New York,
Routledge, pp. 445-463.

Foucault, M., (1970), The Order of Things, An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York, Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, An introduction, Volume 1, (transl. R. Hurley), New York, Random
House.

Foucault, M. (1980), Power/Knowledge, Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, New York, Pantheon.

Fraser, N. and Nicholson, L.J. (1990), 'Social criticism without philosophy, an encounter between feminism and
postmodernism', in Nicholson, L.J. (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, New York, Routledge, Chapman and Hall, pp. 19-
38.

Fuss, D. (1990), Essentially Speaking, Feminism, Nature and Difference, New York, Routledge.

Gibson, W. (1984), Neuromancer, London, Harper Collins.

Haraway, D., (1988), 'Situated knowledges, the sciences question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective',
Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 575-599

Haraway, D., (1989), Primate Visions, Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science London, Routledge.

Haraway, D. (1990), 'A manifesto for cyborgs, science, technology and socialist feminism in the 1980s', in Nicholson,
L. J. (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, New York, Routledge, Chapman and Hall, pp. 199-233.

Haraway, D. (1992), 'Ecce Homo, ain't (ar'n't), I a woman, and inappropriate/d others, the human in a post-humanist
landscape', in Butler, J. and Scott, J. A. (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, New York, Routledge, pp. 86-100.

Heidegger, M. (1927/1986), Sein und Zeit (16th edition), Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Irigaray, L. (1985), This Sex which is not One, Ithica (NYS), Cornell University Press.

Irigaray, L. (1993), Je, Tu, Nous. Toward a Culture of Difference, New York, Routledge.

Jordanova, L. (1989), Sexual Visions, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester-Wheatsheaf.

Lauretis, T. de (1988), 'Aesthetic and feminist theory: rethinking women's cinema', in

Pribram, E. D. (ed.), Female Spectators, Looking at Film and Television, London, Verso, pp. 174-195.

Lauretis, T. de (1989a), 'The essence of the triangle or, taking the risk of essentialism seriously: feminist theory in
Italy, the U.S. and Britain', Differences, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 3-37.

Lauretis, T. de (1989b), Technologies of Gender. Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Basingstoke, Macmillan.

Lauretis, T. de (1990), 'Guerilla in the midst: women's cinema in the 80s', Screen, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 6-25.

Levinas, E. (1974), Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, (transl. A. Lingis.), Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff.

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Emika/P...20and%20the%20cyberpolitics%20of%20gender.htm (10 of 11) [2007-10-07 04:10:05]

EBSCOhost

Lyotard, J. F. (1979), La Condition Postmoderne, Rapport sur le Savoir, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit

Lyotard, J. F. (1988), Le Postmoderne expliqué aux Enfants, Correspondence 1982-1985, Paris, Edition Galilée.

Lyotard, J. F. (1991), The Inhuman. Reflections on Time, (transl. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby), Cambridge, Polity
Press.

Martin, E. (1987), The Woman in the Body, A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, Milton Keynes, Open University
Press.

Martin, E. (1990), 'Science and women's bodies: forms of anthropological knowledge', in Jacobus, M., Fox Keller, E.
and Shuttleworth, S. (eds), Body/Politics. Women and the Discourses of Science, London, Routledge, pp. 69-82.

McClure, K. (1992), 'The issue of foundations: scientized politics, politicized science, and feminist critical practice', in
Butler, J. and Scott, J. A. (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, New York, Routledge, pp. 341-368.

Morris, M. (1988), The Pirate's Fiancée, Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism, London, Verso.

Nicholson, L. J. (ed.), (1990), Feminism/Postmodernism, New York, Routledge, Chapman and Hall.

Singer, L. (1992), 'Feminism and postmodernism', in Butler, J. and Scott, J.A. (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political,
New York, Routledge, pp. 464-475.

Spivak, G. (1988), In Other Worlds, Essays in Cultural Politics, London, Routledge.

Springer, C. (1991), 'The pleasures of the interface', Screen, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 303-323. Van Loon, J. (1996), 'A
cultural exploration of time; some implications of temporality and mediation', Time and Society, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 64-
81.

Winhsip, J. (1987), Inside Women's Magazines, London, Pandora.

~~~~~~~~

By Joost Van Loon

Copyright of Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences is the property of Routledge and its content may
not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

View:

Citation

HTML Full Text

1 of 1