{"id":152,"date":"2018-10-05T14:34:53","date_gmt":"2018-10-05T14:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/issue-4\/?p=152"},"modified":"2024-05-13T16:18:15","modified_gmt":"2024-05-13T16:18:15","slug":"persistence-of-vision-a-cyborg-manifesto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/issue-4\/persistence-of-vision-a-cyborg-manifesto\/","title":{"rendered":"Persistence of Vision: A Cyborg Manifesto"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Cyborg Manifesto<\/em> threw away the old modernist dichotomies to make space for the technological within feminism. What has been done with that space and what can we do with it now?<\/span><\/h4>\n
\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s ever been a phenomenon like \u2018The Cyborg Manifesto\u2019.\u201d – Cary Wolfe<\/p>\n

\u201cI would rather be a cyborg than a goddess\u201d – Donna Haraway<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\u201cDr<\/p>\n

\u201cDr Haraway\u201d in Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence<\/span><\/em> (2004)<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Donna Haraway first published A Cyborg Manifesto<\/em> in the Socialist Review\u00a0of October 1985, immediately \u201cthrilling cultural studies bods, new agers, feminists, and cyberpunks alike\u201d1<\/a><\/span>\u00a0and creating an intellectual and political splash the waves of which, thirty years on, still come crashing on the shores of academic departments across the world. Cyborg\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0ideas paved the way for the research areas of cyborg anthropology, feminist technoscience, and cyberfeminism, to name a few, and it remains required reading in undergraduate seminars in anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer theory, and history of science, and more. Matthew Gandy wrote in 2010 that \u201c[Cyborg<\/em>] is one of those rare instances where a piece of writing both reflects and ultimately shapes the momentum of a critical area of thought\u201d2<\/a><\/span>, but it wasn\u2019t just the thinking in the academy that was impacted.\u00a0Some of the ideas within Cyborg<\/em>\u00a0have become widely disseminated within broader culture, and the piece propelled Haraway herself into becoming, rarest of the rare, a public intellectual with a cult following in popular culture, even homaged in 2004 feature film Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence\u00a0(however it is not entirely true that \u201ccyber\u201d wouldn\u2019t have been cool without Cyborg<\/em>\u00a0– Norbert Weiner\u2019s cybernetics and Williams Gibson\u2019s cyberpunk already gave the prefix intellectual fashionableness and aesthetic clout respectively). This is all to say, it is an important work. But, reader, you would be forgiven for never having read it, or having given it a go, quickly given up. Ironic in tone, grand in scope, and deeply embedded in the discourses of its time – \u201ca heavily poetic and almost dream-state piece\u201d3<\/a><\/span>\u00a0– it is difficult to casually navigate. And, more to the point, difficult to immediately see what can we, as political actors, technologists, artists outside of traditional academic structures and discourses, gain from this text and its legacy.<\/p>\n

What Cyborg<\/em>\u00a0accomplishes for its readers is a dissolving of borders, of borders between the organic and machinic, of nature and technology, of born and built, of human and tool; a dissolving of borders between political identities and ideologies. Haraway argues that American feminists (and socialists) of the time had integrated the modernist dualisms, which separated the sides of these borders into their political ideologies, in order to create a political project, the goals of which were to reclaim an imagined organic wholeness and essential unity, a \u201cgarden of Eden\u201d, a place of innocence and unalienated labor, which she argues has never existed. The thinking of the second wave feminist movement, Haraway argues, equated the category of \u201cwoman\u201d with nature, innocence, and victimhood in search of creating that essential unity, which is a myth that in her view prevented women from fully engaging with the world politically and paved over essential divisions in the category of \u201cwoman\u201d along lines of race, class, and sexuality. Writing during the fragmentation of second wave feminism along just those lines, Haraway argued against what we today might call \u201cwhite feminism\u201d and its need for an essential category of \u201cwomen\u201d and instead took the view that postmodern affinity groupings, such as \u201cwomen of color\u201d, which centered the political place of the affinity group within greater structures of society and societal oppression.\u00a0Thus even the boundaries around the woman identity needed to melted and recast without any notion of essentialism or purity.<\/p>\n

Central to Cyborg\u2019s <\/em>borders-undoing power is Haraway\u2019s mythos of the cyborg, a detourned vision of the cybernetic organism of science fiction and 1960s military literature. Haraway\u2019s \u201chybrid of machine and organism\u201d is a creature of \u201cfiction and lived experience\u201d, a fully alienated being \u201cresolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity\u201d, the \u201cillegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism\u201d . This cyborg is a new mythology to replace the innocent goddess myth, a being completely without natural wholeness, capable of either enforcing the reigning patriarchal order or undoing it completely. Inherent in this new mythology is the argument that \u201cfeminists definitely could and should use the master\u2019s tools to destroy (or at least disrupt) the master\u2019s house\u201d4<\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/sup>\u2013make use of technology as part of their political practice.<\/p>\n

After electrifying academia\u2019s halls for a few years, the ideas within Cyborg<\/em>\u00a0began to seriously spread at about the same time as the Internet\u2019s popular adoption. In 1991 Australian art collective VNS Matrix created A Cyber Feminist Manifesto For The 21st Century5<\/a><\/span><\/em>, an homage to and distillation of Cyborg<\/em>, which gave these ideas a label: cyber feminism. This became one word, cyberfeminism, by 1994, when cultural theorist Sadie Plant used it to describe her own work and the growing area of feminist research on technology and the Internet. By the time the cyberfeminist collective the Old Boys Network (OBN) organized the First Cyberfeminist International6<\/a><\/span>\u00a0at Documenta X in 1997, cyberfeminism had become a global art and political movement.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Dirty
\n\"VNS<\/p>\n

(Above) VNS Matrix Website, circa 1997. (Below) A billboard from VNS Matrix’s A Cyber Feminist Manifesto For The 21st Century<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cyberfeminism is Cyborg\u2019s<\/em> most visible political legacy, fully embracing the manifesto\u2019s postmodernity and eschewing any identification or structure. At the First Cyberfeminist International OBN created 100 anti-theses as a means to define cyberfeminism only by defining the things which cyberfeminism is not. But this lack of defnition left it politically unactionable and goalless, leading critics at the time to ask \u201cwhere is the feminism in cyberfeminism?\u201d7<\/a><\/span>\u00a0Moreover the movement adopted a broad techno-utopianism, which had been lacking in Haraway\u2019s more measured utopian vision, and created a sense of affinity based on career8<\/a><\/span>\u00a0and not political goals, and, like the second wave feminism that Haraway was criticizing, had no place within its movement for race and no answer to racism; issues that would lead to its fizzling out along with the dot-com bubble at the beginning of the 2000s.<\/p>\n

It is easy in hindsight to see why cyberfeminism began to languish as a movement. Right at the end of cyberfeminism\u2019s heyday in 2000, Plant would write that \u201ccyberspace is out of man\u2019s control: virtual reality destroys his identity, digitalization is mapping his soul and, at the peak of his triumph, the culmination of his machinic erections, man confronts the system he built for his own protection and finds it is female and dangerous\u201d9<\/a><\/span>. In our contemporary moment, in 2018, when everyone is online, when women are routinely harassed by men wielding bot armies, when the Internet feels more like a tool for reactionary right wing politics and conspiracy than liberation, a tool to be abused by state authorities for surveillance and masculinist control…at this moment Plant\u2019s statement feels crushingly, dishearteningly, painfully optimistic.\u00a0Writing in 2016 in response to Plant, culture critic Cecilia D\u2019Anastasio better reflected contemporary reality, saying that \u201ccyberspace is hostile to women: our identities inside it are fixed and formulated into the lowest-common-denominator feminine, a depth encircled by barbs of masculinity lest we escape\u201d10<\/a><\/span><\/i>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"100<\/p>\n

100 Anti-Theses<\/em> from OBN.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How then can a feminism of technoscience address the current moment? In the past few years a new political movement, xenofeminism, has directly connected itself to the legacy of Cyborg<\/em>\u00a0and cyberfeminism in order to answer precisely that question. Begun in 2014 with the Xenofeminist Manifesto<\/em>11<\/a><\/span>\u00a0by collective Laboria Cuboniks, xenofeminism seeks to address the failings of cyberfeminism and create an intersectional political agenda for feminism in the face of the current state of monstrous global complexity, one that embraces the hard political work and long timeframe needed to achieve feminist goals. It\u2019s a thrilling project, but one still in its early stages. Less than a year ago in November 2017, on the 20th anniversary of the First Cyberfeminist International, xenofeminist Helen Hester organized the Post-Cyber Feminist International at ICA, London12<\/a><\/span>\u00a0as an event for xenofeminism agenda-setting and platform building, and it\u2019s only been since this event that xenofeminism has begun to generate a foothold in popular awareness outside of art and academic circles.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Xenofeminism:<\/p>\n

Laboria Cuboniks’s website featuring The Xenofeminist Manifesto<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Two art and politics movements each with an additional manifesto: an enduring mythology of the highly capable feminist cyborg, and the undoing of pervasive myths of natural essentialism. Clearly A Cyborg Manifesto\u2019s\u00a0ideological lineage continues to provide sites for political and artistic engagement. And that makes sense;\u00a0reading Cyborg\u00a0today feels amazingly refreshing and relevant given that it is a dense work of a thirty four year old theory. A new edition just came out a little bit ago, from University of Minnesota Press, I encourage you to give it a go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Cyborg Manifesto threw away the old modernist dichotomies to make space for the technological within feminism. What has been done with that space and what can we do with it now? \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s ever been a phenomenon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":149,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-4"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2353,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions\/2353"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}