From Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" |
The relationships for forming
wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination,
are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster,
the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration
of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate,
through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg
does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time
without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden
of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.
Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse
of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy.
Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary
of holism, but needy for connection—they seem to have a natural feel for
united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble
with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of
militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism.
But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.
Their fathers, after all, are inessential. (151)
Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. (152) |