Review of A Cyborg Manifesto (1985)
Donna Haraway (writer).
Read in 2024.
The title, despite its indefinite article, is not even a manifesto. It’s barely an essay. Particularly in the first half, Haraway obfuscates her sentences as if she were planning a Sokal hoax. She also hedges like mad. Her introduction is an “ironic dream”, so as to defang any serious interpretation. As a fan of science fiction, I appreciate how, in a later “myth”, Haraway acknowledges her debt to Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, James Tiptree Jr., Octavia Butler and other authors of science fiction, but she herself works like one of them, spinning trends and cool concepts into something that can only be mistaken for prediction if you squint.
There are relatively lucid passages where I think Haraway successfully rejects some bad ideas like Catharine MacKinnon’s and tries to offer a solution to the central problem of “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977). This solution is vaguely patterned after the pragmatism of Max Stirner, but coloured too deeply by futurist idealism and by the usual suspects of the contemporary political left’s escape into the dead end of uncritical postmodernism: Baudrillard, Foucault and Latour.
References here: Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004), “Helicopter Story” (2020).