A Cyborg Manifesto

Haraway spends the first section of A Cyborg Manifesto introducing her idea of a cyborg. While the word “cyborg” commonly refers to a science fiction being that is part-human and part-machine, the cyborg of Haraway’s essay is “an ironic political myth” (5). Haraway will go on to outline several different definitions and applications of her idea of a cyborg, but at its core, the cyborg is a metaphor she uses to illustrate several concepts and arguments relating to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Haraway admits that her essay is “ironic” and even “blasphemous,” acknowledging that parts of it might seem to contradict.

Exemplifying this contradictory irony, Haraway explains that cyborgs are both fictional and a part of lived reality. Though many people tend to think of them as aspects of fictional books or movies, like The Terminator or Darth Vader from Star Wars, Haraway believes that the line between fiction and reality is blurrier. She argues that it’s impossible to fully separate fiction from reality, since the fictional content we create influences our lived reality, and vice versa. 

This is the first mention of one of the key themes of the essay, The Rejection of Rigid Boundaries and Identities. Haraway points out that actual cyborgs exist within modern medicine. She doesn’t provide specific examples of the increasing role of technology in medicine, but in the early to mid-1980s—around the time Haraway was writing this Manifesto—imaging technologies like the MRI scanner and ultrasound were invented, and the first robot-assisted surgeries took place. These are real examples of how machines were beginning to merge with human life. 

Haraway also mentions C3I, which stands for command-control-communication-intelligence, a major defense system of the US military under the Reagan administration. The military at this time was prioritizing emerging technologies and blending them with human forces, with the military itself transforming into a kind of cyborg. The militaristic aspect is an idea that Haraway explores in more depth later in the essay.

Haraway posits that in modern society, everyone is a cyborg, as technology and machines make up a portion of everyone’s being. She writes that, “The cyborg is our ontology” (7). In philosophy, ontology is the study of being. Ontology specifically refers to how society structures and labels itself into categories and properties like “human,” “animal,” and “machine,” or “male” and “female.” This hints at the crux of Haraway’s main argument, which—though multifaceted and complex—relies on the idea that people should take a more flexible and fluid view of categories like these. 

Haraway believes that humans should stop thinking of themselves as merely human, and thus in a separate category from machines. She argues that it is harmful rather than helpful to rigidly label people as either male or female, or to identify strongly with a particular race. Insofar as the cyborg metaphor informs the way humans think of their existence, Haraway believes it “gives us our politics” (7). Haraway uses another metaphor when she likens the human inclination to distinguish themselves from machines as a “border war” (7), as though humans have been struggling to determine where, exactly, to place the dividing line between human and machine. Instead, according to Haraway, humans should embrace the lack of clear boundaries.

A Cyborg Manifesto is a postmodern work, which means that it rejects the idea of universal truths, values, and categories. As an answer and opposition to modernism, Haraway’s postmodernist views leave room for subjectivity and nuance. She writes that her “cyborg politics” draw on the “biopolitics” of the French philosopher Michael Foucault, one of the most famous postmodernist thinkers. Haraway also clarifies that she is writing this essay through a socialist feminist lens. Her belief is that society oppresses women through its flawed capitalist economic system. 

The Manifesto also rejects Sigmund Freud’s theories of gender—specifically the Oedipus complex—in favor of Jacques Lacan’s more progressive post-structuralist ideas. The Oedipus complex is Freud’s famous theory that people develop their gender and sexual identities in infancy, when they become sexually attracted to their opposite-gender parent. This idea was already outdated by the late 20th century at the time Haraway wrote her essay. Between the 1950s and 1980s, Jacques Lacan drew on some of Freud’s original concepts and adapted them to fit the postmodern and poststructuralist narrative of the time.

Haraway describes the cyborg as genderless and also as having no origin. She makes several allusions to the biblical story of Genesis, which explains the basis of the split between male and female from a traditional Christian point of view. Haraway writes that the cyborg is completely removed from this notion—it does not spawn from “original unity,” a concept from Genesis referring to some single essence that binds men and women together. She also states that the cyborg has no relation to the Garden of Eden, and it “cannot dream of returning to dust” (9)— another allusion to Genesis and the idea of “original unity.” In this rejection of the story of Genesis, Haraway implies an overall secular attitude. 

The cyborg also has no roots in Freud’s theories of gender. It is not a “post-oedipal” figure. Rather, it has no relation at all to any of these classic Western notions about the original source of gender. Haraway sees this as another ironic trait of the cyborg because, even though it has no origin, it does have a final purpose: It embodies “the awful apocalyptic telos of […] abstract individuation” (8). The cyborg is the first being that is not defined by its difference to other beings. Instead, it transcends the dichotomies of male and female, public and private, and nature and culture. Haraway considers this a utopian existence.

Haraway lays out three premises that her argument for the cyborg relies on. The first is that “the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached” (10). While historically, humans assumed an inherent superiority over other life forms, Haraway argues that modern research proves that there is no singular, unique trait that divides humans from other animals. Animals have language, social relationships, and intelligence just as humans do. The spread of evolutionary theory and animal rights movements is proof that the division between humans and animals, and thus nature and culture, is arbitrary and outdated—this boundary doesn’t exist anymore.

The second premise is that the distinction between human and machine is no longer clear. Technological advances in the late 20th century (like the internet) produced computers and other machinery that erased the line between organism and machinery. As technology becomes more human-like, humans become more machine-like. This implies further ambiguity over the boundaries between natural and artificial, as well as between mind and body.

The final premise is an offshoot of the second one. Haraway argues that there is no longer any convincing differentiation between physical and nonphysical existence. Most modern technology is composed primarily of nonphysical aspects. The silicon chip (invented in the late 1950s) “is a surface for writing” (13). Replacing a physical notepad with written words, the silicon chip is inscribed only with “atomic noise.” The most important parts of the most advanced technology are composed of nonmaterial aspects, such as computer code and electromagnetic waves. Haraway notes that humans are even more “material and opaque” than machines now. On the other hand, the nonmaterial existence of technology in the realm of numerical coding and waves of particles is akin to the nonmaterial human processes of DNA coding, or of experiencing emotion.

Haraway writes that there are a few different perspectives one could have on this “cyborg world.” She recognizes that her framing of society is frightening and threatening. At the same time, she argues that it is freeing to be able to let go of fear and accept that humankind is one with both animals and machines. Instead of being afraid, people could simply accept that the identities they hold are not as stable and concrete as they once thought. The goal, in Haraway’s view, is to understand both perspectives simultaneously. This would be the most clarifying and accurate approach— as she puts it, “Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters” (15). In other words, only examining an idea from one single perspective is more likely to give a false impression than looking at it in several different ways.