Longer Views
Page 20
In brief, then: because of the heightened attention needed to create the logic of metaphor, it is those aspects in excess of the logical ones, highlighted by that attention, that constitute the metaphor’s psychological vividness.
If this psychological explanation for the vividness of metaphor (or for those which register as vivid) is correct, then the psychological affect of metaphor is conjunctive, playful, and intensifying—nor does it require a terribly vast metaphoric leap to see such a process as always having something of a radical and disruptive thrust. It is only when metaphors become so overworked and familiar that no heightened attention to the combined play of aspects is needed to locate the identities in the play of similar and dissimilar aspects that they are finally reduced to nothing but their disjunctive, logical sediments.
Every fully functioning metaphor, then, is a cyborg.
A more Bakhtinian notion of metaphor might be that the function of all metaphor is to compare objects in such a way that their identical aspects are formed into a logical system while their nonidentical aspects gain in psychological intensity through the very search process by which the system was created. Thus the logical system and the ex- tralogical play can be at once severed, systematized (into a logically closed side and a psychologically open one), and allowed to dialogize.
“Women and men are cyborgs.” A metaphor.
The logic of metaphor seems to be saying here that, for better or worse, women and men can be both unbelievably good and inhumanly terrifying, but are nevertheless castrated (civilized) and vanquishable. Our concept of both must be complex. But something is missing from each.
The psychology of metaphor seems to be saying that women and men and cyborgs all have about them both metal and flesh, nerves and circuitry, parts that we understand, parts that are mysterious, parts that are impossible, parts that are there, and parts that are missing: that both exist in relation to the human and to the technical in diverse and intricate ways; that some of the things they can do are real (i.e., political) and some of the things we would like them to do, or are afraid they might do, are ridiculous, or fascinating, or wonderful, or unbelievable; metal and flesh may be, either one, hidden inside the other, where either may be, surprisingly, supportive or subversive; all subjects are split, but in endless, myriad, angular, and often irreconcilable ways; and . . . well, it says many more things besides. But each of these is in turn a metaphor, with a certain logic, a certain psychology, each of which might be radicalized by work (work is in demand), in a process of unlimited semiosis.
At this point I choose to read Haraway’s own irony as applying to the conservative logic of the cyborg metaphor. The logical link is precisely what urges the totality even as the diversity of the elements compared suggests (always wrongly; never enough; something will be missing) the totality will not work. I read the blasphemy as fairly well restricted to that metaphor’s psychology. And as long as we clearly and responsibly retain the two (the logic, the psychology, and the highly uneasy, easily confused boundary between), then we can see that they are engaged in a serious and intense argument with one another. Here, the intensities are partial, local. They do not, together, form some mutually safe, supportive, totalized and unitary system. All right, then: I’ll go along with this cyborg metaphor and say, “Sure, in its complexity—in its dialogic conflict—it’s a very good one!”
But the conclusion I’ve arrived at (once again) is that metaphors by themselves are, finally, neither radical nor conservative. They gain their ideological slant only as they are read. And any attempt to pose a radical metaphor is only a more or less conscientious call for some hard work at a more or less radical reading.
With any metaphor, we must read it and ourselves closely and minutely in order to reach its radical potential.
It takes both effort and skill. (Possibly more than I possess, so that at best, here, only fragments of the process may be sketched, with much too much left missing.) It often resembles counting the angels on the head of a pin, if not carefully numbering there those we would have as our apostles. At the same time we must remain articulately aware our angels (or our apostles) are by no means original; they arise, rather, each and every one, from historical conditions of production, from freedoms and oppressions that we construct.
And no construction is whole.
V
Note: In The Language of Psychoanalysis (Laplanche and Pon- talis) the entry on the word “gap,” used with some frequency by both Freud and Lacan, appears to be missing.
After this “metaphoric explosion” detonated by a mere wandering of attention, of happenstance in the midst of Haraway’s manifesto, we have escaped from none of our fictions—though hopefully all of them are somewhat revalued, recontoured, restructured by it, both those before and those to come.
Let us, then, continue our reading—somewhat less blind to its unitary presumptions, somewhat more open to its polyvocality.
In commenting on her twin lists in the third section of the manifesto, “The Informatics of Domination,” as she considers pairs such as “organism/biotic component” and “reproduction/replication,” Haraway writes:
Sexual reproduction is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment. Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no longer reasonably call on the notions of sex and sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms and families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically corporate executives reading Playboy and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly unmasking the irrationalism. (p. 81)
In an argument that I otherwise agree with, I find Haraway’s closing, marginal quip somewhat naive. As with her discussion of MacKinnon, that naivete involves a blindness to the fact that Playboy (and the “executives” who read it—though I suspect it is part of the same naivete to confuse the male executives in the advertisements in the magazine with the largely white- and blue-collar male readers of the magazine) and MacKinnon both push a world view in which fantasy and reality equal one another, an equivocation which alone justifies their respective enterprises—whereas a distinction between fantasy and reality is insisted on for its very survival by the commercial pornographic films and videos shown regularly in homes and sex-moviehouses in almost all medium-sized and larger cities in the country to their overwhelmingly male, working-class audience. Sympathetic (or unsympathetic) commentators on hardcore porn may well unmask some irrationalisms in our society and its sexual and/or pornographic organization. The oversimplification of the fantasy/reality relation that MacKinnon and Playboy finally share tries to uphold this notion: that softcore Playboy, in which women are always pictured in static photographs naked and alone, somehow says the same thing as hardcore commercial pornographic films, in which women are always pictured in motion, both clothed and naked, always both with and without men, almost always with other women and a large majority of the time with jobs. Playboy—regardless of what it claims—certainly wants to be read as hardcore pornography precisely as much as MacKinnon wants to read it that way. But the fact is, it isn’t. But such an uncritical fantasy/reality relation doesn’t seem a very strong position from which to unmask too much of anything.
Here is also perhaps the place to note that my metaphoric explosion/ insertion occurred directly after a somewhat dubious statement on race (and I am, after all, a black commentator, for whom, in this country, metaphors of rape court their own dangers):
“Likewise for race,” Haraway writes directly after the paragraph last quoted, “ideologies about human diversity have to be formulated in terms of frequencies of parameters, like blood groups or intelligence scores. It is ‘irrational’ to invoke concepts like primitive and civilized.” (p. 81) Alas, I remain historically dubious about these particular parameters of blood and intelligence, which would seem, centered in their own mythic systems of heredity and psychology, to have been precisely the white scene of the debate at least since Louis A
gassiz.
I am not sure what is new, or cyborgic, here.
This is also the moment that precedes Haraway’s Spenglerian exhortation, in which “Control strategies applied to women’s capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the language of population control and maximization of goal achievements for individual decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom.” (p. 81) Is it so odd, in the face of such an analysis, to wonder how the imposition of such “control strategies . . . developed in the language of population control and maximization of goal achievements” could possibly leave, say, the yes/no “degree of freedom” in the choice of, say, whether to have an abortion or not, to the women in whose bodies the fetuses happen to be growing?
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 unemployment 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.