Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  She looks approvingly at Chela Sandoval’s “women of color,” with its insistent lack of capitalization as well as its “oppositional consciousness,” which opens up, and finally deconstructs (i.e., makes radically undecidable) any hard-edged definition of what a woman of color is, save by the accrued negations of having been heretofore denied a place to speak from.

  A similar approval is given to Katie King’s more theoretical enterprise. King “emphasizes the limits of identification and the political/ poetic mechanics of identification built into reading ‘the poem,’ that generative core of cultural feminism . . .” while opposing “the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different ‘moments’ or ‘conversations’ in feminist practice to taxonomize the women’s movement to make one’s own political tendency appears to be the telos of the whole.”

  Thus, “[t]he common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification.”

  When, after another brief theoretical foray, Haraway turns to look at Catherine MacKinnon, from the first sentence of Haraway’s consideration her sympathy becomes highly strained. (“Catherine MacKinnon’s version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action.”) By the end, if any sympathy was there to start, it has vanished:

  MacKinnon’s radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme; it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any other women’s political speech and action. It is a totalization producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing—feminists’ consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of men’s desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground women’s unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, MacKinnon’s intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the “essential” non-existence of women is not reassuring, (p. 78)

  This section of Haraway’s manifesto concludes with an appeal to the strength of “partial explanations”; thus she further reinforces her support for those feminisms that do not claim to explain everything. Here, Haraway invokes the explanatory excitement of Julia Kristeva’s notion that “women appeared as a historical group after World War II, along with groups like youth.” Haraway goes on: “Her dates are doubtful; but we are now accustomed to remembering that as objects of knowledge and as historical actors, ‘race’ did not always exist, ‘class’ has a historical genesis, and ‘homosexuals’ are quite junior.” Haraway could have extended this historical revisionism to include that literature does not begin till shortly after World War I (Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, an Introduction) and that racism and anti-Semitism are products of 1886 (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism).

  My reservation here, in terms of Haraway’s critique of MacKinnon (which Haraway uses as the springboard for this terminal exhortation for a polyvocal feminism), is that in an attempt to maintain a theoretical level, she skirts the real danger of MacKinnon’s position. MacKinnon is after all a lawyer, and her enterprise is primarily a legislative one—the institution of laws against pornography and sexually explicit material that presumably degrade women. MacKinnon bases her whole program on the theoretical assumption that fantasies about actions and the actions themselves have a simple, direct, and uncritically causal relation—that, indeed, we should not consider any differences at all between them—a theoretical position that must certainly find itself hostile to, just for example, the whole complex fantasy element that motivates, controls, and that indeed represents the ends of Haraway’s manifest cyborg enterprise.

  This is certainly a more troubling reservation than my initial one about infrastructural and superstructural levels, because this blindness to what strikes me as a basic hostility in the two positions seems either suicidal—or profoundly manipulative. And, frankly, if it’s the latter, I am not sure who or what is being manipulated nor to what end. I am still willing, however, to read an irony here.

  This second section concludes:

  Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. “Epistemology” is about knowing the difference, (p. 79)

  The third section of the manifesto is “The Informatics of Domination.” It chronicles, by means of two comparable lists, a shift in sensibility that may, indeed, represent the sort of developmental discontinuity Foucault locates at the end of French classicism in Les Mots et les choses, when the science of wealth, natural philosophy, and general grammar transformed into political economy, biology, and linguistics.

  What sort of change is really involved, Haraway asks, when questions of “Representation” give way to practices of “Simulation,” when the “Bourgeois novel” and “realism” are replaced by “science fiction” and “post-modernism,” when the notion of “organism” is driven out by that of “biotic component,” or when questions of “depth and integrity” become considerations of “surface and boundary”?

  Her list runs on to 32 paired terms.

  The first in each of her pairs (“. . . Perfection . . . Hygiene . . . Reproduction . . . Microbiology, tuberculosis . . . Freud . . . Sex . . . Mind . . .”), Haraway notes, are comfortable and hierarchical. The second in each pair (“. . . Optimization . . . Stress Management. . . Replication . . . Immunology, AIDS . . . Lacan . . . Genetic engineering . . . Artificial intelligence . . .”) are, in her words, “scary” and “new.”

  “It it not just that ‘god’ is dead,” Haraway writes out of a consideration of her lists; “so is the ‘goddess.’”

  Up to this point, even with my reservations, I found myself more or less comfortable with my first reading of the manifesto. And this was the point, in the midst of the third section, that I first looked ahead to note that there were, indeed, three sections to come: “The Homework Economy,” “Women in the Integrated Circuit,” and finally “Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity.” But it was also at this moment, cut loose from that initial and dedicated, original and unitary reading—precisely at that moment in Haraway’s argument that I, as a worker caught in the murky labor of reading, sat down on the job as it were and let my eye be tempted ahead to encompass the remaining pages of the argument—that, even before I left the still legible trace of the argument fading in my mind, I snagged on:

  Any objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly . . . (p. 81)

  And:

  The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies. (p. 81)

  Certainly my own ear, here, was shut down to any play of irony that might have informed this particular section—here. With my ears closed to all revoicing and my eyes wide before a blankness and impersonal starkness of white page and black print, in a moment of Speng-lerian vertigo I read:

  Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analyzed so well. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress—communications breakdown. The cyborg is not subject to Foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operatio
ns, (p. 82)

  But as Haraway’s argument recovered with, now, a borrowing from Zoë Sofoulis’s notion of techno-digestion, now a reborrowing of Rachel Grossman’s image of women in the integrated circuit, pouring in from a margin till now silent came a rhetorical battery of discord and aggression, to damp all play in my reading: how could such an argument fall victim to such a well-worn set of flaws as those that a retired highschool teacher laid down in total patriarchal seriousness in 1919, alone in his furnished room, to map out a path followed by so many German intellectuals toward Nazism? (I was the one being manipulated! The disingenuous blindness to MacKinnon’s real flaw masked, of course, a secret complicity . . . !) How can this submission of the organic to the machine be considered in any way historically new? Isn’t this just the oldest of 19th Century stances: isn’t the love of science merely the manipulated expression with which we gaze at New Jerusalem when we are most insensible to the fact that it has already turned into Brave New World? To present such an outmoded, such an inflated set of rhetorical homilies as in any way revolutionary is hopelessly inappropriate, hopelessly angering—is, indeed, a kind of political blasphemy . . .

  But here, of course, my first reading had already ceased. In the very moment I had chosen to look ahead, I was already engaged in re-reading. I was, again and already, within a logical impasse. I had come up against something missing from my own assumptions about the argument of this text (written by a woman) so far; I had encountered an aporia that halted me, before which the notion of such a first (is it not really the notion of a final) reading could not go on. It could no longer work.

  I was fixed by it, tamed before it, at least momentarily vanquished—while, in the moment of silence, all internal urges evoked in me any and every socially given fantasy as argument or as retribution or as compensation . . .

  That, certainly, is only a somewhat Active rendering of the first half of my first reading of Haraway’s manifesto—indeed (and here our troubling dream has already returned), it is only another version of my initial reading, in italics, of McCaffrey’s text—of which Haraway’s manifesto will, after all, provide a reading, too. Doubtless more and more women must suspect mine is the reading any man must give to any women’s text with which there is not total, totalized, and terrorizing agreement—so total, indeed, that there is no possibility of dialogue. And, admit it, isn’t it the reading most men assume that everyone, whether male or female, gives every text that is, no matter the writer’s gender, disagreed with enough to make the term ‘disagreement’ necessary?

  Isn’t this aggressiveness finally the sign of just how serious the distinctions are between the voices in Haraway’s privileged, polyvocal feminisms? Will we gain anything by postulating a fundamental difference in the nature of men’s aggression and women’s aggression? What can we do with this moment of aggression, where irony closes down into monologue even as it reopens itself and—prenamed, predicted as blasphemy, as irony—only a moment on opens up the voice (s) of the text again? (For I have gone forward; I have gone back. I have reread.) Will it work simply to reread the text, looking for the missed phrase that will suggest yet another revoicing to what we have already heard as a political declaration?

  Certainly in Haraway’s text such phrases are not hard to find:

  From the seventeenth century till now, machines could be animated—given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and mental capacities. Or organisms could be mechanized—reduced to body understood as resource of mind. These machine/ organism relations are obsolete, unnecessary . . . (p. 97, italics Haraway’s).

  Certainly the Spenglerian fallacy at which I found myself stalling is part of precisely those obsolete relations Haraway has historified for us. Why not go on and construct a super-reading that merely highlights this self-criticism as contained in the manifesto, a super-reading that reduces my violent objection to a simple and controlled skewing from the main argument, the sort of reduction I had already done twice before? (What would be repressed? What would be missing?) Certainly one would then have valorized an appeal to corrections, intentions, and auctoriality through a greater and still greater exertion of lisible labor—of readerly work. Why not allow the text to oscillate, to fibrillate, to play at the plurality of polysemy?

  Because, of course, if we do, we do so at the price of leaving something out. Certainly, such a revision of my own text leaves something missing . . .

  The fantasy, the myth, the dream of aggression . . .

  Yet even as we identify it, we do so with the question: can’t we, in the name of dialogue, suppress this dream once and for all?

  Why can’t we dash it from the center of consciousness, snatch it from under the lights and lenses where it insists on engulfing, gripping, and staining (with a violence we are momentarily sure, before we act, that is greater than any we might assert against it) an innocent void, like the trace of an age-old religious rite always-already inscribed on whatever surface we gaze at long enough, a rite of both men and women, however differently and along whatever sociological trajectory it arrives there, where it insists on inserting itself (with, at this level, an equal violence, no . . .?) into the discourse? Why can’t we put it finally and fixedly beyond some marginal border, declaring it: missing in action, or permanently missing.

  Why, from the moment it is snatched away, from the moment it is outlawed, abolished, declared abhorrent and marginal, does it persist in our sight, as a pulsing blot of sunlight on the water of a lake flickers in the eye for so many moments after we have turned into the cooling and comforting woods?

  Why do I, with most men, assume it works as the metaphor for (if not the myth of) the truth of reading whenever there is dissension/conflict/ contest/agony/dialogue?

  A truly satisfactory answer—one that does not stall before the difficult and unindividuable social objects from which so many social constructions arise—can be teased out, I suspect, only by going down to a more operational level:

  What is this “work”?

  What is “reading”?

  What is “metaphor” and how do we “read” it?

  How does “metaphor” “work”?

  Frankly, I do not see how reading can be other than a violent process. The violence of the letter is the violence of the reader—a reader involved in an unclear, cloudy, struggling, masochistic relationship with a text that, at any moment it would produce joy, must do so violently.

  For without violence, all ideology—radical or conservative—is incomplete and blind to itself.

  Was not that Freud’s major insight in Civilization and its Discontents?

  The thrust of what is written here will be to search out a way to reread Haraway’s manifesto—and my own reactions to it—both productively and provocatively. For during that “first” reading (another fiction, certainly, because—and I am aware of it—I have let much remain missing from all the various fictions I’ve so far indulged), I find them both—my reading of Haraway and my response to that reading—“human, all too human.” To mitigate their organic failures and their mechanical ellipses (my reading, my reaction, and what, rightly or wrongly, I have always-already taken to be Haraway’s mistakes), I need something more rigorous, almost scientific, technical.

  If I am to deal seriously with my response to this argument that Haraway proposes and that I make my own by reading, I must, myself, become something of a cyborg to critique them . . . as she, indeed, claims in her paper I must.

  Isn’t there an irony (as she so declares) here?

  In the course of an “argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” Haraway writes: “Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.” For me, certainly, keeping the play between the two primary meanings of “construction” in mind in both sentences is to begin, at least, to read her argument most rigorously, richly, and usefully:
r />   Construction: to build, to create from former materials.

  And: Construction: to construe, to understand, to analyze, to tear down into its constituent parts.

  If, in reading her, we privilege either meaning at the expense of the other, her argument becomes trivialized. Take “understanding/analysis” as the fixed reading, and the argument soon becomes ungrounded theoreticism at play around a rather flighty image. Take hard-headed “building/making” as the fixed reading, and the argument slides in among those endless demands for action and reformation without theoretical basis.

  The boundary between them is more than confused enough today for our purposes. Pleasure? Well, perhaps.

  Nevertheless, what, above all, Haraway’s paper urges us to do is to construct/construe the cyborg—that unwhole and unholy amalgam.

  So let us turn, however tentatively, to the required work.

  “We are cyborgs,” she has written. She tells us as well: “Who cyborgs will be is a radical question.” She says: “Cyborgs are ether, are quintessence.” It is possible to read this progression as developmental. But it is also possible to read it as contradictory. (“Ether”—like “phlogiston” and the “world without end”—is something the development of science has told us does not exist. And Haraway knows it.) And I choose that reading.

  In whatever understanding I pretend to, in terms of the text I question, as my lights and lenses illuminate, magnify, or as my brush reinscribes it, carefully, like a copy of a deeply venerated image ambiguously located between religion and art, there will always be something missing in my simulation to the extent that: I am not a cyborg, not a woman, not fully a man. Thus, however fleetingly, however impermanently I take on the image, however I would try to use a woman’s image to speak with or through, there will be something missing. (Who, now, would snatch these images in anger away?) I use this troubling imagery (ceded me by the prerequisite of a dream of rape I abhor) to remind all my readers, male and female, that any man’s argument (especially against a woman’s) is always troubled by such bad dreams as were called up by the tedious, exacting, ironic, and apparently trivial work of the cyborg we began with.