Materializing a Cyborg’s Manifesto

Utopia

Once upon a time Donna Haraway wrote a manifesto for cyborgs. Inside the essay are pieces of time—a science fiction time of fantastic transmutations, an archival time of Cold War biologics and informatic cyberobjects, a spiraling time of pagan turns and returnings, a political time of retooling the very terms of feminist struggles. Outside the essay are wild oldnew times—the mythic physics of Star Wars, popular cultures of punk and aerobics, low intensities of U.S. military force in the central Americas, mass movements for Christian morality and against nuclear war. It is an essay about boundary crossing that insistently crosses the boundaries of what’s inside and what’s out, of critique and dream. It is an edge-walking essay generated by a cyborg on the edge of time, writing (with a computer, for the first time) in the cut between here and elsewhere, between now and other times. There is a kind of fantastic hope that runs through a manifesto. There’s some kind of without warrant insistence that the fantasy of an elsewhere is not escapism (2006, 152).¹

Fantastic hope was not, to be sure, the currency of the time. And yet the 1985 cyborg manifesto circulates with a kind of viral ambition as if the elsewhere it tries to materialize is a fantastic contagion moving through ready transmission routes. Its networks of circulation cross into and out of scholarly inter/disciplines, practices from art to computing to progressive activism to nursing to shape-shifting, and intellectual politics far beyond the feminist and socialist readership it addresses with a relentless, intimate demand to rethink. One of the fragments of time with which Haraway builds the cyborg manifesto is the time of utopia. What time is that? Is utopia a viral temporality? Does it transverse via historically specific movements? Does fantastic hope require fantastic time? What time is it now, in utopia?

I didn’t set out to write a manifesto; or to write what turned out to be a heavily poetic and almost dream-state piece in places (1990, 18). Socialist Review asked me to write to address what had happened to socialist feminism in the Reagan era. . . . Like the fact that it had disappeared. . . . Although it hardly ever existed as a living social movement in the United States . . . it had been a kind of compelling vision, a kind of consensual hallucination (1994, 243). Dreaming in front of the computer screen, toward a compelling hallucination, Haraway conjures the potent utopian figure of the cyborg as an imaginative resource for feminists facing a night dream of post-industrial society, the scary new networks of coded hieroglyphics that now produce so much more than just the secret ontology of Marx’s commodity fetish (1991, 150, 154, 161). In an irreverent reverb with its ironic predecessor, “The Communist Manifesto,” the cyborg manifesto materializes a future-present time when fundamental transformations in the structure of the world (1991,165) can be met—not by a revolutionary subject/collectivity of labor—but by an implosive subject/object/network of fleshly informatics that is as immersed in political possibility as in the blood Marx sees dripping from every pore of the new figure called “capital.” The time of utopia is a fictive-factual warp inside the night dream of an informatics of domination. The time of utopia is the covert “now” of which science fiction is the superb animator, through the imaginary grammars of a fabulated future tense.

It’s the fall of 2011. After catastrophic spring flooding throughout North America, 312 tornadoes in the southcentral United States in a seventy-two-hour period in April, a historically unprecedented summer drought in Texas, and a tropical hurricane in late August that devastates infrastructures in the state of Vermont and floods downtown Paterson, New Jersey, with fourteen feet of water, a candidate for U.S. president publicly states that climate change is undocumented science. It’s a joke to believe that we choose our nightmares (1997a, n.p.). Arnold Schwarzenegger, cyborg, outlives three filmic incarnations as the Terminator before presiding for two terms as governor of California, leaving office...