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Quote :Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that transmits all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of "Western" identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind.
Donna Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs," like Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), looks at hybridity as a powerful political tool. But Haraway goes at it through a really unusual mix of deconstruction and biology.
At a time when it was getting harder and harder to say what it was that made human beings "human," Haraway asked: what are the real differences between humans, animals, and machines? And to answer her own question, she argued that our historical opinions about those differences have always profited society's most powerful people. So, when it's assumed that animals don't have souls, it's that much easier to use them as resources. And when it's assumed that men are naturally better than women, or that certain "races" of men are better than others, that's how centuries of oppression, slavery, and genocide get justified.
Haraway is down with cyborgs because they aren't hierarchical: their hybridity does away with any questions about who, or what, is "naturally" best. Forget Western philosophy and its decrees about mind over body, man over woman, humans over animals, and everything on this planet being put here just for male, white folks to use up to their hearts' content. Let's have a cyborg politics instead! We'll explore our similarities with animals and machines, and we'll challenge all the kinds of exploitation we can find!
If that's not inspiring to just about every living or semi-living or mechanically living or maybe even dead being out there, we don't know what is.