Haraway’s Viral Cyborg

Nearly thirty years ago, Donna Haraway began writing her famous essay published in 1985 as “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Feminism in the 1980s.” In its vision, argument, and detail, it resonates strongly with what today is called viral analysis and criticism. In what follows I’ll briefly suggest how.

First, the essay was blasphemous, transgressive, and invasive, arguably all viral qualities. Its claims for the liberatory promise of her cyborg—born as “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism” in the “belly of the beast” of U.S. Star Wars dreams of a global “New World Order”—for making women’s lives better did not sit well with all feminists or, I am sure, with all socialists (bHaraway 1991b, 151). Even though she insisted that “the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity . . . is oppositional . . . and completely without innocence . . . not reverent; . . . [does] not remember the cosmos . . . [is] wary of holism, but needy of connection . . . [and] exceedingly unfaithful to . . . [its] origins”—all qualities one might think required by a feminist politics and scholarship of the day—she spoke powerfully to but also for U.S. feminism at the end of the century (a risky business at any time, even for a cyborg) (151). Moreover, she engaged, if not embraced, what many who were concerned about the human and especially gendered costs of the technology of modernity saw as a profound threat. Zoë Sofoulis (2002, 101), a graduate student of Haraway’s then, gives insight into the rippling “quake” the essay caused: “Whereas a standard feminist line on technology had been to equate it with abstract masculinist rationality, militarism, and the rape of the Earth, Haraway insisted on the intimate physicality of our relations to nonhumans, and on . . . ‘the pleasures of the interface’”; and, it should be added, with no guarantees for results that then might easily have been recognized as “success.”

This blasphemy from within, her disinclination for either intellectual or political purity, and her criticism of the exclusionary and totalizing effects of feminism’s identity politics and standpoint epistemology made the manifesto and Haraway immediately controversial and, it seems to me, viral. Indeed, each word above, from her description of the cyborg, is used today to describe the viral (see, for instance, Pearson 1997; Cohen 2011; Galloway and Thacker 2007). Finally, the essay itself was promiscuous, not, surely, in the sense of being random or disorganized, but rather in the diverse political, cultural, and disciplinary alliances and scope it effected and in giving license and encouragement to others inclined to follow. And the OED on the biological version of promiscuous offers the following: “Biol. Of a protein, organism, etc.: able to infect or interact with, or bind non-specifically to, a variety of hosts or targets” (notice the “or interact with”).

Moreover, it was precisely those elements of the essay that were “troubling” for some that were at the same time gifts to many others, disturbing the feminist “us”: “Haraway’s poetic claim that the cyborg ‘gives us our ontology’ captured the imagination of many who were . . . starting to explore new identities and forms of social life and community made possible by the Internet” (Sofoulis 2002, 101). Her insistence, then and in all subsequent work, that there are no “innocent” positions, politically or intellectually, and that pollution, boundary violation, and interfaces of all sorts—originary connectivity or relationality, as she would call it later (biologist that she is)—are “the name of the game on planet Earth” challenged leftist, feminist, and intellectual politics of the day. In this, Haraway let us see that, in Sofoulis’s words, “complicity with ‘the system’ was not an unmentionable crime nor a paralyzing political embarrassment, but understood as something inevitable, which did not necessarily prevent further effective political work for justice, peace, and survival” (2002, 101), risks and vulnerabilities to the contrary notwithstanding. These claims remain a point of contention for some even today.

Pollution, fusion, replication, paradox, partiality, and irony. These all take center stage in Haraway’s cyborg myth. Each is regularly invoked in cultural analysis and criticism using the...