Wherein Haraway's Cyborgs Outbreed Rosin's Plastic Women

Donna Haraway
"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (orig. 1985)
in Manifestly Haraway (2016)

A definition:

Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity. (16)

Actually, the "chemical nuclear" sense of "affinity" has for me connotations not of choice but of absolute (or perhaps simply intractible) physical laws. The opposite approach would mean ascribing free will and consciousness to inanimate molecules. But as for human politics, the word and usage seem quite apt.

Once again, it is awfully hard to ignore Fromm's insight into the matriarchal origins of Blood-and-Soil affinities. Perhaps then affiliation by choice (hence entailing conditional rather than unconditional affinity) is one patriarchal value worth salvaging?

The feminization of poverty—generated by dismantling the welfare state, by the homework economy where stable jobs become the exception, and sustained by the expectations that women's wages will not be matched by a male income for the support of children—has become an urgent focus. The causes of various woman-headed households are a function of race, class, or sexuality; but their increasing generality is a ground for coalitions of women on many issues. That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a function of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new. (39-40)

A missed opportunity, as is customary in all things Feminist, to deconstruct/interrogate this notion of "sustain[ing] daily life," which would of course immediately render it a far less appealing reference to drop in the heat of rhetorical battle. This is because sustenance-as-cross-to-bear is also integrated, but in a decidedly NOT-new way, with natural/singular identifications (i.e. Blood and Soil) as given on p. 18. Willfully-chosen affinity group parenting of an optimally scaled cohort is an obvious solution to the burdensomeness of one- or two-parent household-based arrangements, which even when perfectly equitable impose an unacceptable sacrifice on both parents. But this presupposes an affinity, a will, a choice, and so forth; i.e. a rejection of the "naturaliz[ed] matrix" on both the level of the big tribe (race/nation) and the little one (family).

In light of various "integrations" of feminized home life with feminized work life, and of the overall "redefini[tion]" of work "as both literally female and feminized," is it not telling that the precious few ascendant "new areas of high skill" are marked by a near-obsession with collaborative structures, maximally open physical work space designs, etc.? Certainly there is a sort of total availability associated with such Creative Class sectors, which indeed dovetails with the wider postindustrial "mockery of a limited workday," but the turnover seldom betokens "vulnerability" (in fact the job-hoppers customarily have the leverage). This is the mediation that the children of the liberal high-bourgeoisie have effected with the postindustrial new-normal; we know that historically this demographic may have an inconsistent moral compass, but also very good taste and a keen eye for their own self-interest. Hence while I myself am not too inclined to work in groups, as a matter of Affinity and willfullness, it seems to me that the system gain of small-group organization as against Going It Alone is the clincher in favor of group parenting. But in how many cases even among the High Creatives does domestic life mirror/"integrate" with work life? Is this perhaps a bridge too far, even for them? Here is either a test of or a crack in this notion of "integration" of post-industrial and (post-?)domestic production.

The ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image. Feminists have recently claimed that women are given to dailiness, that women more than men somehow sustain daily life and so have a privileged epistemological position potentially. There is a compelling aspect to this claim, one that makes visible unvalued female activity and names it as the ground of life.

But the ground of life? What about all the ignorance of women, all the exclusions and failures of knowledge and skill? What about men's access to daily competence, to knowing how to build things, to take them apart, to play? What about other embodiments? Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. (66)

This is the only passage here where the cyborg trope seems essential to the broad objectives of the essay; otherwise it seems decidedly inessential, ham-handed, and attention-seeking; perhaps at once an adademic branding maneuver and an opening for a Theorist to play at Writing. There is, having said all of that, a certain logic in the metaphor as it applies to questions of daily competences and their residual+ongoing genderedness. To fully self-actualize, we must actively construct ourselves.

[from a notebook, probably late 2017]

Haraway—Situated Knowledges

Donna Haraway
"Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Persepctive"
Feminist Studies 14/3 (1988)

on the "strong" social constructionist theory of scientific (non-)objectivity:

So much for those of us who would still like to talk about reality with more confidence than we allow the Christian right when they discuss the Second Coming... We would like to think our appeals to real worlds are more than a desperate lurch away from cynicism and an act of faith like any other cult's..." (577)

This itself is just rhetoric, but it's refreshing anyway. The more recent Intersectional emphasis on Local Knowledge Claims seems to me, seeing as it is yet more Local than what DH is discussing here, to be a yet more volatile maneuver: some of the most pervasive/insidious prejudices (especially racial ones) are propagated through Local Knowledge Producers, and it remains unclear to me what the epistemological distinction is between these racists and the antiracist Intersectionalists.

the further I get in describing the radicial social constructionist program...the more nervous I get. The imagery of force fields, of moves in a fully textualized and coded world...is, just for starters, an imagery of high-tech military fields, of automated academic battlefields... Technoscience and science fiction collapse into the sun of their radiant (ir)reality—war. It shouldn't take decades of feminist theory to sense the enemy here. (577-578)

This is a brilliant insight, as well as, I would add, a sort of left-becomes-right moment. From "the strong social constructionist perspective," "all drawings of inside-outside boundaries in knowledge are theorized as power moves, not moves toward truth." (576) DH can see that this orientation treats the world as irremediably hostile, confrontational, and subject to (at least potentially) the rule of might-makes-right; and she ever so delicately implies (I am reading between the lines here) that the apparent absence of any genuine reluctance among such theorists could itself suggest motivations/agendas, i.e. a desire to see the world this way whether it is accurate or not.

Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything. ... Feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well... In traditional philosophical categories, the issue is ethics and politics perhaps more than epistemology. (579)

Indeed, ethics/politics and epistemology are quite mutually interdependent and dynamically linked, but ultimately it is ethical behavior out-in-the-world which is the goal, the question on which the success or failure of all other epistemological endeavors hinges. Feminists have too often blanched when science turns up knowledge we'd rather not know (B. Thorne and L. Eliot's books on boys/girls spring immediately to mind); but DH leads us out of the dark here, I think, with the insight that bedrock ethical principles enable us to pursue knowledge without any fear of how it might be used.

We are not immediately present to ourselves. Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies. Self-identity is a bad visual system. Fusion is a bad strategy of positioning. The boys in the human sciences have called this doubt about self-presence "the death of the subject" defined as a single ordering point of will and consciousness. That judgment seems bizarre to me. I prefer to call this doubt the opening of nonisomorphic subjects, agents, and territories of stories unimaginable from the vantage point of the cyclopean, self-satiated eye of the master subject. (585-586)

So, the subject has not died; it lives, but it is no longer "isomorphic," which is to say that it no longer resembles its (same)self in all times and places; which is to say that in time and space the subject is not of a fixed/constant nature but rather undergoes changes. I'm inclined to embrace this part (perhaps because I can actually understand it). There are ways in which this is (for the most part unfortunately) revolutionary in its simplicity. Just ask politicians who claim to have learned and evolved since their younger days only to thereby invite epithets like Wishy-Washy or Flip-Flopper. ... On the other hand, it only seems to solve the problem raised by bell hooks of individual subjectivity being questioned just as the subjugated have arrived to claim it. Indeed, "we are not immediately present to ourselves," and "self-identity is a bad visual system." Hence the "subjugated" subject who arrogates to speak as such in fact commits the same commutative/associative fallacy as does the ignorant outsider who asks "What do YOUR people think?"

[from a notebook, probably late 2017]