Longer Views (26 page)

This is something I desire—violently—be fixed in my own argument. Yet, moments after the reader's eye has passed it, it will be gone, its “existence,” around which so much of my desire is organized, remaining only as the flicker of an afterimage, a troubling absence-presence that “is” no longer “there,” like the child's spool tossed over the edge of the curtained cradle before it is hauled back on the confused and knotted string connecting memory to reality
.

The relation of the subject to the Other is entirely produced in the process of gap.

—Jacques Lacan,
The Field of the Other: Alienation

The pursuit of the radical metaphor—and the general consensus seems to be that castration (and cyborgs seem to be the figure of castration, the phallus, whether male or female) was once as radical a metaphor as any, though it is not at all one today—is a risky business; and it is arguable (indeed, it is philosophy's classical argument against metaphor) that there is something inherently reductive and, by extension, conservative, in the very metaphoric process.

As we prepare to confront our mythical, or metaphoric, cyborg, here is one model of metaphor it may be helpful to bear in mind:

Object P, with aspects (a, b, c . . . A, B, C . . . (α, β, γ. . .), is compared with object Q, with aspects (1, 2, 3 . . . A, B, C. . . . □, Ο, Δ. . .). The metaphor is logical because aspects (A, B, C . . .) are common to both
objects. Logically, the resultant metaphoric system privileges aspects (A, B, C . . .), the aspects common to both objects, and dismisses the combined set of aspects (a, b, c . . . 1, 2, 3 . . . α, β, γ. . .
, Ο, Δ . . .). Thus the metaphorical logic is reductive, disjunctive, and conservative in its logical privileging power.

But this model, at least at this stage of elaboration, leaves out something very important. (. . . there is something missing.) It does not explain the vividness with which, from time to time, metaphors strike us. It suggests, rather, that the experience of newness, liberation, and daring with which so many metaphors register is, at bottom, simply nostalgia, a pure reassurance, the wholly sedimented and completely safe called up in a flash so bright and brief we do not recognize it for what it is.

I don't think the suggestion corresponds to the lived experience of metaphor.

But to construe and critique our model in such a way that it yields something closer to what I believe to be the truth of metaphor, we must leave the logic of metaphor to read its murkier psychology.

Assume: We are reading.

As we move along through the text, negotiating a fairly familiar and coherent description of a scene or process, we encounter the mention of object P, whose syntagmatic placement (or paradigmatic displacement) announces it as metaphor. Immediately we are distracted from our familiar scene to consider the play of P's aspects, among which, for the moment, we are not entirely sure which will be the logically privileged ones.

With the aspects of P still at play in our mind, we move on through the text, till we encounter mention of another object, Q, which, syntax and expectation tell us, is the metaphor's referent. Now we are momentarily distracted from the play of P's aspects by the aspects of Q. But we must not let that first set go. Attention heightens, to hold the play of aspects about both objects—aspects that, indeed, constitute both objects. (It's important to note here that we have
not
yet perceived the logic of metaphor. We have perceived, rather, only the collective aspects of P and of Q.) From among the conjoined set of aspects of P and Q, the logic of metaphor must now be built up.

We set about pairing up aspects, identifying aspects from the metaphor with aspects from its referent, to create the logical link.

As these pairs (or identities) are located, they are, so to speak, psychologically set aside into that part of the mind reserved for conscious and conscientious systems; but what we are left with in the part of the mind that perceives, that visualizes, that imagines is the heightened image of many of those aspects of both P and Q that are in
excess
of those identities.

In brief, then: because of the heightened attention needed to create the logic of metaphor, it is those aspects in
excess
of the logical ones, highlighted by that attention, that constitute the metaphor's psychological vividness.

If this psychological explanation for the vividness of metaphor (or for those which register as vivid) is correct, then the psychological affect of metaphor is conjunctive, playful, and intensifying—nor does it require a terribly vast metaphoric leap to see such a process as always having something of a radical and disruptive thrust. It is only when metaphors become so overworked and familiar that no heightened attention to the combined play of aspects is needed to locate the identities in the play of similar and dissimilar aspects that they are finally reduced to nothing but their disjunctive, logical sediments.

Every fully functioning metaphor, then, is a cyborg.

A more Bakhtinian notion of metaphor might be that the function of all metaphor is to compare objects in such a way that their identical aspects are formed into a logical system while their nonidentical aspects gain in psychological intensity through the very search process by which the system was created. Thus the logical system and the ex- tralogical play can be at once severed, systematized (into a logically closed side and a psychologically open one), and allowed to dialogize.

“Women and men are cyborgs.” A metaphor.

The logic of metaphor seems to be saying here that, for better or worse, women and men can be both unbelievably good and inhumanly terrifying, but are nevertheless castrated (civilized) and vanquishable. Our concept of both must be complex. But something is missing from each.

The psychology of metaphor seems to be saying that women and men and cyborgs all have about them both metal and flesh, nerves and circuitry, parts that we understand, parts that are mysterious, parts that are impossible, parts that are there, and parts that are missing: that both exist in relation to the human and to the technical in diverse and intricate ways; that some of the things they can do are real (i.e., political) and some of the things we would like them to do, or are afraid they might do, are ridiculous, or fascinating, or wonderful, or unbelievable; metal and flesh may be, either one, hidden inside the other, where either may be, surprisingly, supportive or subversive; all subjects are split, but in endless, myriad, angular, and often irreconcilable ways; and . . . well, it says many more things besides. But each of these is in turn a metaphor, with a certain logic, a certain psychology, each of which might be radicalized by work (work is in demand), in a process of unlimited semiosis.

At this point I choose to read Haraway's own irony as applying to the conservative logic of the cyborg metaphor. The logical link is precisely
what urges the totality even as the diversity of the elements compared suggests (always wrongly; never enough; something will be missing) the totality will not work. I read the blasphemy as fairly well restricted to that metaphor's psychology. And as long as we clearly and responsibly retain the two (the logic, the psychology, and the highly uneasy, easily confused boundary between), then we can see that they are engaged in a serious and intense argument with one another. Here, the intensities are partial, local. They do not, together, form some mutually safe, supportive, totalized and unitary system. All right, then: I'll go along with this cyborg metaphor and say, “Sure, in its complexity—in its dialogic conflict—it's a very good one!”

But the conclusion I've arrived at (once again) is that metaphors by themselves are, finally, neither radical nor conservative. They gain their ideological slant only as they are read. And any attempt to pose a radical metaphor is only a more or less conscientious call for some hard work at a more or less radical reading.

With any metaphor, we must read it and ourselves closely and minutely in order to reach its radical potential.

It takes both effort and skill. (Possibly more than I possess, so that at best, here, only fragments of the process may be sketched, with much too much left missing.) It often resembles counting the angels on the head of a pin, if not carefully numbering there those we would have as our apostles. At the same time we must remain articulately aware our angels (or our apostles) are by no means original; they arise, rather, each and every one, from historical conditions of production, from freedoms and oppressions that we construct.

And no construction is whole.

Note: In
The Language of Psychoanalysis
(Laplanche and Pon- talis) the entry on the word “gap,” used with some frequency by both Freud and Lacan, appears to be missing.

After this “metaphoric explosion” detonated by a mere wandering of attention, of happenstance in the midst of Haraway's manifesto, we have escaped from none of our fictions—though hopefully all of them are somewhat revalued, recontoured, restructured by it, both those before and those to come.

Let us, then, continue our reading—somewhat less blind to its unitary presumptions, somewhat more open to its polyvocality.

In commenting on her twin lists in the third section of the manifesto, “The Informatics of Domination,” as she considers pairs such as “organism/biotic component” and “reproduction/replication,” Haraway writes:

Sexual reproduction is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment. Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no longer reasonably call on the notions of sex and sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms and families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically corporate executives reading
Playboy
and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly unmasking the irrationalism. (p. 81)

In an argument that I otherwise agree with, I find Haraway's closing, marginal quip somewhat naive. As with her discussion of MacKinnon, that naivete involves a blindness to the fact that
Playboy
(and the “executives” who read it—though I suspect it is part of the same naivete to confuse the male executives in the advertisements
in
the magazine with the largely white- and blue-collar male readers
of
the magazine) and MacKinnon both push a world view in which fantasy and reality equal one another, an equivocation which alone justifies their respective enterprises—whereas a
distinction
between fantasy and reality is insisted on for its very survival by the commercial pornographic films and videos shown regularly in homes and sex-moviehouses in almost all medium-sized and larger cities in the country to their overwhelmingly male, working-class audience. Sympathetic (or unsympathetic) commentators on hardcore porn may well unmask some irrationalisms in our society and its sexual and/or pornographic organization. The oversimplification of the fantasy/reality relation that MacKinnon and
Playboy
finally share tries to uphold this notion: that softcore
Playboy
, in which women are
always
pictured in static photographs naked and alone, somehow says the same thing as hardcore commercial pornographic films, in which women are
always
pictured in motion, both clothed
and
naked,
always
both with
and
without men, almost always with other women and a large majority of the time
with jobs. Playboy—
regardless of what it claims—certainly
wants
to be read as hardcore pornography
precisely
as much as MacKinnon wants to read it that way. But the fact is, it isn't. But such an uncritical fantasy/reality relation doesn't seem a very strong position from which to unmask too much of anything.

Here is also perhaps the place to note that my metaphoric explosion/ insertion occurred directly after a somewhat dubious statement on
race (and I am, after all, a black commentator, for whom, in this country, metaphors of rape court their own dangers):

“Likewise for race,” Haraway writes directly after the paragraph last quoted, “ideologies about human diversity have to be formulated in terms of frequencies of parameters, like blood groups or intelligence scores. It is ‘irrational' to invoke concepts like primitive and civilized.” (p. 81) Alas, I remain historically dubious about these particular parameters of blood and intelligence, which would seem, centered in their own mythic systems of heredity and psychology, to have been precisely the white scene of the debate at least since Louis Agassiz.

I am not sure what is new, or cyborgic, here.

This is also the moment that precedes Haraway's Spenglerian exhortation, in which “Control strategies applied to women's capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the language of population control and maximization of goal achievements for individual decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom.” (p. 81) Is it so odd, in the face of such an analysis, to wonder how the imposition of such “control strategies . . . developed in the language of population control and maximization of goal achievements” could possibly leave, say, the yes/no “degree of freedom” in the choice of, say, whether to have an abortion or not, to the women in whose bodies the fetuses happen to be growing?