Haraway, McLuhan, Benjamin, Confusion

“A Cyborg Manifesto”, for a work so utterly 80s, establishes in clear terms what I think is wrong with certain strains of feminism that still endure, as well as what I think is wrong about McLuhan, despite (as Aden rightfully points out), the definite presence of McLuhan’s influence on Haraway’s part. These two problems, furthermore, can be pretty well summarized in the same terms: both McLuhan and essentialist feminism, in their respective ways, both reduce the world to an extension of the human; on the other hand, Haraway argues that humans aren’t really even humans any more. Haraway shatters binaries between human and nonhuman, as well as between genders, races, etc.; speaking broadly, her point seems to be that we can’t just be one thing any more.

McLuhan’s media theory, for all of its worth, is anchored in its concept of “man” as the honus of the medium on a conceptual level; media are the eponymous “Extensions of Man”. However, despite not directly citing McLuhan’s theoretical placement of media in these terms, Haraway does an excellent job of refuting McLuhan’s sapien-centered media theory in her “introduction” on 293: >The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine…basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous,…They were not man, an author himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure.

To summarize, the “paranoid” McLuhan (ouch) based his theory on the machine being part of man; while Haraway does not seem to take as much issue with this concept as with its inverse, her point is that we are not able to tell the difference.

Extending this last point brings me to Haraway’s feminism, which is still really exciting to me in its weird inversions and smudges. Her central point on the feminism point is very important to me as somebody with a non-binary sibling, standing against one of the only branches of feminism that grosses me out: the gynocentric, the trans-exclusionary, the essentialist; “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices” (295); here, Haraway affirms gender as a social construct, and a pretty messy one at that, without the squeaky clean lines that essentialist feminists (and misogynists, for that matter) would otherwise have us believe exist.

This is potentially too reductive of a treatment of Haraway, but there’s SO much going on in “Cyborg Manifesto” that giving a write-up to any one facet of the work in around 300 words would hardly do it justice. Let me conclude with a comparison that sprung to my mind when reading Haraway: Benjamin’s Mickey Mouse, a figure of harmonious transgression and transformation, interfacing with nature, mechanical, and the body with equal deftness. However, Benjamin presents Mickey Mouse as a dream, whereas Haraway believes that we have already arrived at this state of glorious confusion between man, medium, nature, machine, local, global, etc.

Or even shorter: I like this piece a lot and simultaneously understand that it’s super weird.