A Cyborg Manifesto

Haraway begins this section by building on the idea she ends with in the last section—that the time in which she writes this essay (the 1980s) is a unique era characterized by the impact that emerging technology has on society. She now sets out on a discussion of cybernetics, and she lays out a number of concrete examples of how societal structure has shifted from “organic” to “informational.” The essay includes a lengthy chart, including more than 30 concepts falling under “Organics of Domination” and their equivalent ideas corresponding to the more updated “Informatics of Domination” (28).

Notably, the first pairing, or development, Haraway lists on her chart is that of “representation” to “simulation.” This pairing almost seems to predict the future, as the manifesto was written in 1985 and, 40 years later, this is arguably a more apt comparison to make. It’s important to understand the context of Haraway’s ideas and how they differ from the lenses of current readers who might think of virtual reality or AI when thinking about “simulation.”

“Representation” is a broad term in general, but Haraway uses this word to refer to the way human ideas can be represented by art and politics, or how groups of people can be represented by a single idea or person. For example, radical feminism can represent the singular “essence” of womanhood—this is an idea Haraway criticizes, even though it is a popular notion in 1985. 

“Simulation,” on the other hand, refers in this essay to a postmodern concept first proposed by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In the postmodernist view, simulation is the widespread societal practice of constructing and perceiving reality solely through symbols and signs that we create through media and culture. While representation is based on reality, simulation is completely removed from, and unrelated to, reality. These basic definitions still hold true many decades later, though the context in which they are used continues to change drastically over time in light of technology’s rapidly changing effects on culture and society.

Another development Haraway lists is that from “microbiology, tuberculosis” to “immunology, AIDS” (29). Though she doesn’t go into explicit detail regarding any of these examples, it is helpful to explore her train of thought through some examples. Haraway is attempting to illustrate how the distinction between humans and other organisms is becoming less relevant in the age of informatics, or networks. Tuberculosis is a disease caused by a bacterium—a microorganism—which was one of the leading causes of death globally until the mid-20th century. Tuberculosis is a disease in which an organism infects the body, and when a vaccine or antibiotic is created by microbiologists and introduced, the organism dies, and the infected human is cured.

On the other hand, AIDS is much more representative of a network-based society. AIDS is caused by a virus, which is (arguably) not an organism but some other kind of entity. When a virus like HIV (the name of the virus which causes the syndrome called AIDS) attaches to human cells, the human and the virus influence each other’s development and existence permanently. AIDS became an epidemic in the 1980s, and so the general cultural knowledge of viruses increased greatly at this time. Human symbiosis with entities like viruses illustrates Haraway’s point that we are all cyborgs—beings composed of multiple entities. 

Another point here is that the AIDS epidemic changed how people thought about societal groups. In the United States, the majority of people who contracted AIDS in the 1980s were men who had sex with other men, which is part of what led to the wide recognition in the West of “homosexuals” as a marginalized social group. This exemplifies Haraway’s argument that new social groups are conceived of as society becomes more informatics-based and fragmented.

Other examples of Haraway’s pairings include the transitions from heat to noise, small group to subsystem, eugenics to population control, hygiene to stress management, Freud to Lacan, labor to robotics, and, finally, white capitalist patriarchy to informatics of domination. Haraway acknowledges that the first terms of each pairing—those listed on the left side of the chart, which represent the outdated architecture of society—are “comfortable” while those on the right side are “scary” (30). Nothing on the right side of the chart can be thought of as “natural,” and since “We cannot go back ideologically” (30), neither can anything on the left side. 

Even though the left side embodies some things humans once thought of as “organic,” Haraway posits that this is an outdated and flawed way of thinking. For example, she argues that sexual reproduction is not the natural and organic process humans once thought it was. Thinking of it as such would be assigning it an “essential” property, which Haraway rejects outright. Instead, sexual reproduction is just one method of replication. Microelectronics can also replicate. This relates to the aforementioned idea of simulation in a postmodern sense. Media is a form of simulation, insofar as it creates copies without originals. Thus, since sexual reproduction can no longer be thought of as organic, essential, or one of a kind, ideas stemming from it, like gender roles or the nuclear family, also lose their essential bases.

Haraway further argues that a logical consequence of this idea is that any conception of “natural” division between human social groups is irrational. For example, dividing people into primitive versus civilized is not rational, so there is no essential basis for colonialism.

Every object, including human beings, is a component of a network. They are symbols or signs within communication systems. This again recalls the ideas of Baudrillard, vital to postmodernism, that society creates reality through signs and signifiers. Even humans themselves are nothing more than parts of this greater system of signifiers. Humans are only meaningful with regard to their relationships with other components of the greater network. Every problem in society can be attributed to a failure in communication between parts of the system.

Feminism, as it is known, is informed by the old, outdated hierarchies of public versus private, nature versus culture, and men versus women. Since none of these dichotomies exist in Haraway’s new postmodernist vision, feminism as a concept must also be completely revamped to fit this reality. Haraway writes that, “The actual situation of women is their integration/exploitation into a world system of production/reproduction and communication called the informatics of domination” (33). Haraway wants to rethink socialist feminism so that it incorporates all the complexities women face as they are integrated into this network of science, technology, and communication that is the new reality.

In line with the postmodernist view that people create their own realities out of various signifiers, Haraway especially stresses the lack of boundary between intangible and material objects—including human bodies. Technology influences physical objects (including human bodies), and our bodies and technology influence our reality and what we find meaningful. Thus, the lines between object, body, idea, and meaning are all blurred. 

The vast network that includes all of this is another definition of the cyborg. It is “a collective and personal self” (33). Within the context of this cyborg, network-based society, Haraway continuously refers to “a problem of coding.” She defines this problem as the need to find a common language among all components of the network. Again, systems only break down due to communication failures. Haraway, therefore, implies that the key to social harmony—especially for feminists—is to find the right code to seamlessly integrate this multifaceted reality.

Haraway delves into a number of examples to illustrate the idea that the “problem of coding” is key to successful social integration. Cybernetics is the study of systems that operate using feedback loops to self-regulate, like heating and cooling systems, mammalian bodies, or ecosystems. Haraway reiterates that communication between parts is the only form of failure for a cybernetic system. 

She then returns to the idea of the military system, “C3I,” command-control-communication-intelligence. This is the basic formula for success that President Ronald Reagan suggested the United States military follow. Reagan was president for most of the 1980s, and he oversaw the end of the Cold War, during which the development of the military was of utmost importance to the US and impacted global politics as a whole through the US-Soviet arms race. 

In using C3I as an example, Haraway draws an analogy between her proposed social system and the US military, which is the most advanced, vast, and technical system in existence at the time she wrote A Cyborg Manifesto. Communication is as vital to the military as it is to the cyborg society—if any line of communication goes awry in the military of a powerful country, the entire world is endangered. This illustrates just how vital communication is to large-scale, complicated systems such as the society Haraway proposes.

Just as the cyborg society is analogous to the military, it also parallels biology. Biology can be broken down into code—a language understood by, and applicable to, every component of the system. Where computers have binary, biology has DNA. As an example of a biological system breaking down in communication, Haraway mentions “Human babies with baboon hearts” (35). She’s referring here to a famous experimental surgery performed on a baby, called “Baby Fae,” who underwent a heart transplant and received the heart of a baboon instead of a human heart. Though the surgery was considered semi-successful at the time, it was also controversial, and Baby Fae ended up passing away within a couple of weeks. 

The breakdown in communication was twofold. Haraway writes that people criticized the transplant on ethical grounds, but the infant also ended up dying shortly after the surgery due to her body rejecting the foreign organ. Thus, the communication breakdown happened on a macro/social level as well as on a microbiological level.

Haraway returns briefly to the subject of AIDS to exemplify communication breakdowns relating to biology. She again refers only to the actual social disruption the AIDS epidemic caused. Further to her point, however, HIV also disrupts the cybernetic system of the human body on a micro level by altering DNA and intercepting signals between cells.

Haraway concludes this section by reiterating that since the world is structured so differently than it used to be due to new sciences and technologies, “we need fresh sources of analysis and political action” (37). She therefore encourages Restructuring Social Relations in the Digital Age.