Longer Views (27 page)

To me, with such control strategies developed in terms of what I know of such language today, it doesn't seem likely.

Though I offer the suggestion with no sense of completing or finishing off Haraway's twin lists, I wonder if “castration” (on the comfortable, hierarchical side) paired with “cyborg” (or, really, any “prosthesis,” on the new and scary side) might not have made a darker, more aggressive, but finally more difficult, sensitive and, possibly, self-critical array of concepts to draw from.

But the recovery of Haraway's argument comes fairly quickly, when it talks directly about what, I presume, is behind some of these assertions:

One important route for reconstructing socialist feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the system of myth and meanings structuring our imagination. (p. 82)

Throughout Haraway's piece is the feeling the women's movement has been too reliant on notions of “the organic” and “the natural,” seen in an essential opposition to the technical and the scientific. The range of feminisms, at least those most popular, Haraway suggests, give small
heed to the fact that “the natural” and “the organic” are empowered by, and indeed only exist as powerful conceptual and explanatory categories because of, modern science and technology. As an aid in the recuperation of science and technology for socialist feminism, Haraway writes: “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”

Haraway ends this section with a consideration (which also happens to work as a justification for her project so far) of the problem of such new coding options: “tool and myth,” she writes (and by extension instrument and concept, as well as historical anatomies of possible bodies and historical systems of social relations), finally and eventually “constitute each other.” In a passing move, as an ironic critique of her own formulation, she suggests that (along with a consideration of the ethical confusion around animal hearts in human babies), “Gay men, Haitian immigrants, and intravenous drug users are the ‘privileged' victims of an awful immune-system disease that marks (inscribes on the body) confusion of boundaries and moral pollution.

“But these excursions into communications sciences and biology have been at a rarefied level.” (p. 84) This quaint recall of a moment in the AIDS epidemic by this manifesto written when the number of people with AIDS was closer to seven thousand than to the well over eighty thousand who have died from AIDS today, may, four years later, not look so rarefied at all.

Haraway brings the section to a close with a consideration of the transformation by which the
tool
of microelectronics (“the technical basis of simulacra, i.e., copies without originals,” a notion courtesy of Baudrillard) controls the conceptual shift from labor and typing into robotics and word processing; of sex into genetic engineering and reproduction technologies; of mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedure. Haraway uses Rachel Grossman's image of “women in the integrated circuit” to name women's place in this intricate technologically and scientifically restructured world—restructured at the level of mutually constituting tool and concept. Her last and modestly hopeful sentence here is:

Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make socialist feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics. (p. 85)

I suspect she is right, though I'm not sure how it's going to happen. The next section is entitled “The Homework Economy.”

A new work force has been created. As a quick example, Haraway cites the women in Silicon Valley, whose work is structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs: “. . . their intimate realities include
serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating child care, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age.” (p. 85) More to the point, Haraway explains, this new class is made up of people—mostly women but not all—whose jobs have been feminized: “To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements both on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex.” (p. 86) This is what Richard Gordon has called “the homework economy,” wherever it takes place. Haraway goes on: “The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure is made possible (not caused by) the new technologies.” (p. 96) We are asked to consider this situation specifically for women in terms of “the loss of the family (male) wage,” “the collapse of the welfare state,” “[t]he feminization of poverty,” the new “integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy,” and the problem (particularly in third world countries) of “access to land.”

Fredric Jameson, Haraway reminds us, has suggested that, in terms of esthetics, realism goes along with commercial/early industrial capitalism and nationalism; modernism goes along with monopoly capitalism and imperialism; and post-modernism goes along with multinational capitalism and multinationalism. Haraway suggests that added to this tripartite alignment we should further align (1) the patriarchal nuclear family with the first, commercial/early industrial stage; (2) the modern family “mediated (or enforced) by the welfare state and institutions like the family wage,” with a flowering of a-feminist heterosexual ideologies, include their radical versions represented in “Greenwich Village around World War I,” with the second, monopoly capital stage; and (3) “the ‘family' of the homework economy with its oxymoronic structure of women-headed households and its explosion of feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion of gender itself” (p. 87) with the third, multinational stage.

The problem of the growing feminization of work is one Haraway sees for both developed and underdeveloped countries; she suggests that the general situation that black women have known for a century or more, vis-à-vis the
un
employment of black men, now will spread to become the general model for both men and women in the West—if not the world.

My only problem here is an historical one: the similarity of the problems of the current underclass and the problems of women is not a new analysis. It extends back before the American Civil War with the alliance of women's rightists and abolitionists—and arguably started that war.
The new thing that Haraway
is
suggesting here, which almost gets lost in the synoptic breadth of her rhetoric, is that the new technologies may be creating a new, vast underclass—and what's more, ten or fifteen years from now, many people who today would seem to have perfectly reasonable expectations of middle-class security may well (as our monumental national deficit snowballs closer and closer to home) find themselves right in the midst of that underclass with no way to break free.

Haraway glances at the relation of the feminization problem both to food production (“women produce about fifty percent of the world's subsistence food”) and to leisure time activities (“the culture of video games is heavily oriented to individual competition and extraterrestrial warfare . . . More than our imaginations is miniaturized”). She cites the reification of “traditional” male/female traits performed by sociobiology, and notes that, even after the success of feminist “icons” such as the speculum (and presumably books such as
Our Bodies, Ourselves
), “Self help is not enough.” The danger Haraway sees coming is “a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of color, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties,” (along with the three Rs, she no doubt means “computer illiteracy” as an important one) “and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance.” (Read: “government liquidations,” as in various South American regimes.) “An adequate socialist-feminist politics,” she concludes this section of her analysis, “should address women in the privileged occupational categories, and particularly in the production of science and technology that constructs scientific-technical discourses, procedures, and objects.” (p. 89)

The section ends with a cascade of exhortatory questions as to how various people, from various “new groups doing science” to the “high-tech cowboys” of Silicon Valley, can help.

“Women in the Integrated Circuit” is Haraway's brief, penultimate section. In an attempt to summarize “women's historical locations in advanced industrial societies,” Haraway eschews any schema appealing to notions of public and private life. “The only way to characterize the informatics of domination,” Haraway finds, “is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable.” (p. 90)

She mentions hopefully “SEIU's District 925.” Unless you know what it is, however (and I don't), the reference is opaque.

For all the work she cites being done, the hope looks rather slim.

The penultimate paragraph in this penultimate section is, however, both the most personal and the most hopeful:

I am conscious of the odd perspective provided by my historical position—a Ph.D. in biology for an Irish Catholic girl was made possible by Sputnik's impact on U.S. national science education policy. I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-World War II arms race and cold war as by the women's movements. There are more grounds for hope by focusing on the contradictory effects of politics designed to produce loyal American technocrats, which as well produced large numbers of dissidents, rather than by focusing on the present defeats. (p. 91)

Here is Haraway's “utopian moment,” if you like. And it is deeply suggestive about much of what she has been doing in this essay: she cites forces in the “organic/technological” oppositional battery that are assumed to produce evils (e.g., “loyal American technocrats”) and shows how, instead and to everyone's surprise, they produce good (e.g., a radical feminist scholar). I can remember one of the first times I encountered this particular rhetorical strategy and how impressed with it I was: in that case, it was an explanation of the uprisings in Vietnam that led to the war—astonishingly, the technophile explicator explained, the major cause for the rebellion was the importation of Western television into Southeast Asia. Knowing that the country was a political powder keg, Western capitalists introduced TV (so ran his tale) to calm the populace and distract them. Nothing even vaguely controversial was ever shown. The entire broadcast fare was American soap operas—bland enough, it was assumed, to lull anyone into general boob-tubery. What capitalism had not counted on, however, was the backgrounds and sets to these mindless domestic sagas, filled with home appliances, flocked wallpaper, fine china, and cut crystal. Tiny villages, their entire populations sitting about before the one or two TVs in the town, had their noses rubbed in the Western way of life for a couple of hours each morning at McLuhanesque intensities—and lo and behold there was an uprising and, a little later, a full-scale war.

But there is something missing from this picture, however technologically informed it is. And that is reading, aggression, critique—interpretive
work
, if you will.

Someone had to turn off the television and think hard about what she'd just seen—and had to talk, if not write, about it.

As much of a materialist as I am, I find the assumption that critique can be taken as a given, that it simply and uncritically falls out of the technology, a suspect if not an outright dangerous notion, a notion in which something crucial and distorting is always left out. Modesty perhaps prompts Haraway to leave it out of her
own
account. Nevertheless and once again: metaphors are
not
radical in themselves, whether they are delivered by TV soap operas, science education programs, science
fiction tales, or socialist feminist manifestos. Critique—critical work—is created and constituted by people, by individuals, by individuals speaking and writing to others, by people who are always in specific situations that are tensional as well as technological.

But—and this is Haraway's point in her concluding paragraph to this section—we do not need a totality, a total unity, a monovocalic feminism (or, presumably, a monolithic socialism) in
order
to work, to get at least some of the necessary work done: “We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialistic one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradictions. Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos.”

The last and longest section of Haraway's manifesto (before the Acknowledgments and References) is “Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity”—a “myth about identity and boundaries.” Here Haraway surveys a range of marginal texts, science fiction and poetry. She notes that three radical feminist poets and writers, Susan Griffin, Audre Lorde (who is black), and Adrienne Rich, “insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological.” But she is ready to justify this in light of a general world view in which capitalism is seen, in world terms, as controlling the general mode of production—while socialism is reread to encompass anything at all that is oppositional to the general mode. (Thus Griffin's, Lorde's, and Rich's antitechnology stances might be seen as part of a general oppositional activity.) There is something terribly seductive about this position—and yet there is also much about it of the exhausted collapse into a kind of intellectual pathway of least resistance.