Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful nfidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, cate-gories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology,and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, 1991. # 29
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- I could easily escape the curse by claiming that the name of a theory is of no importance, and that, after all, serious scientists avoid the name Gaia as much as possible, preferring the euphemism “sciences of the Earth System.” But this would be cheating; it would amount to passing from one ambigu …
What captured our attention
What captured my attention was the feeling of not quite understanding—followed by moments of sudden insight, quickly disrupted again by uncertainty. Words like “demonology” and the final statement, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” particularly stayed with me. The passage is full of religious imagery, but I don't read it as being about religion. Rather, I see it as a warning against human hubris: the temptation to make technology into something almost supernatural, while forgetting our dependencies, our interconnectedness, and the limits of any totalizing explanation. Against this backdrop, it seems to take a cyborg to reveal human fragility and dependence.
Meike Gleimof our Imagination
