Donna Haraway Quotes

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.

Grammar is politics by other means.

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic.

Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.

Make Kin Not Babies.

From this point of view, science - the real game in town - is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.

Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.

Life is a window of vulnerability.

The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.

To be in love is to be worldly, to be in connection with significant otherness and signifying ohers, on many scales, in layers of locals and globals, in ramifying webs.

We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species.

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.

Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

All readings are also mis-readings, re-readings, partial readings, imposed readings, and imagined readings of a text that is originally and finally never simply there. Just as the world is originally fallen apart, the text is always already enmeshed in contending practices and hopes.

I know you're on my side," an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination tends to be described with what the philosopher of science Donna Haraway would call "troubling dualisms." These dualisms pit science against nature, public against private, truth against imagination, self against other, thought against emotion, and man against woman.

Go outside English, and the wild multiplies.

The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.

Anyone who has done historical research knows that the undocumented often have more to say about how the world is put together than do the well pedigreed.

I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism.

For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender

Possesion - property - is about reciprocity and rights of access. If I have a dog, my dog has a human.

The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be like what came before. I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge. (100)

I am sick to death of bonding through kinship and “the family,” and I long for models of solidarity and human unity and difference rooted in friendship, work, partially shared purposes, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality, and persistent hope … Ties through blood … have been bloody enough already.

Our bodies, with the old genetic transmission, have not kept pace with the new language-produced cultural transmission of technology. So now, when social control breaks down, we must expect to see pathological destruction.

Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. 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.

I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess

Without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think. (39)

There are so many losses already, and there will be may more. Renewed generative flourishing cannot grow from myths of immortality or failure to become-with the dead and the extinct. (101)

What he is drawn to in their philosophy, he tells me, is the idea that you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you feel about it. Or, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” What has been done to us seems to be, among other things, that we have been made fearful. What will we do with our fear? This strikes me as a central question of both citizenship and motherhood. As mothers, we must somehow square our power with our powerlessness. We can protect our children to some extent. But we cannot make them invulnerable any more than we can make ourselves invulnerable. “Life,” as Donna Haraway writes, “is a window of vulnerability.

Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism. First is the Copernican wound that removed Earth itself, man’s home world, from the center of the cosmos and indeed paved the way for that cosmos to burst open into a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces. Science made that decentering cut. The second wound is the Darwinian, which put Homo sapiens firmly in the world of other critters, all trying to make an earthly living and so evolving in relation to one another without the sureties of directional signposts that culminate in Man. Science inflicted that cruel cut too. The third wound is the Freudian, which posited an unconscious that undid the primacy of conscious processes, including the reason that comforted Man with his unique excellence, with dire consequences for teleology once again. Science seems to hold that blade too. I want to add a fourth wound, the informatic or cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that Great Divide as well.

First, promiscuously plucking out fibers in clotted and dense events and practices, I try to follow the threads where they lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places and times.

Eichmann was astralized right out of the muddle of thinking into the practice of business as usual no matter what. ... The result was active participation in genocide. (36)

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.The cyborg is our onthology; it gives us our politics. the cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.

We” did not originally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and epistemology that imagine the reproduction of individuals before the wider replications of “texts.

Weisser plainly treasures threse feelings and these relationships. She is quick to insist that at root her love is about "the deep pleasure, even joy, of sharing life with a different being, one whose thought, feelings, reactions, and probably survival needs are different from ours. And somehow in order for all the species in thi "band" to thrive, we have to learn to understand and respect those things.

The control experiment of removing other animals than the dominant males was not done because it did not make sense within the whole complex of theory, analogies to individual organisms, and unexamined assumptions

Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile - a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque [...] The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night-dream of post-industrial society.

He also suspected that he was not her idea of the loved one. The saga that followed was not about unconditional love, but about seeking to inhabit an inter-subjective world that is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship.

We are at stake to each other...We are all lichens, so we can be scraped off the rocks by the Furies, who still erupt to avenge crimes against the Earth. Alternatively, we can join in the metabolic transformations between and among rocks and critters, for living and dying well. "Do you realize," the phytolinguists will say to the aesthetic critic, "that once upon a time, they couldn't even read eggplant?" And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike's Peak.

We are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system,” wrote Donna Haraway, “from all work to all play, a deadly game.”10 With the growing significance of immaterial labor, and the concomitant increase in cultivation and exploitation of play—creativity, innovation, the new, the singular, flexibility, the supplement—as a productive force, play will become more and more linked to broad social structures of control. Today we are no doubt witnessing the end of play as politically progressive, or even politically neutral.)

Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play.

Within this abstracted Southern culture, swamps remain tangible, physical spaces rather than simply collections of tropes. As Simon Schama, Donna Haraway, and others have claimed in a variety of ways, landscape is always, at least in part, a creation of culture-but the range and limits of that cultural creation are what interest the ecocritic. For W. G. T. Mitchell, in his 2002 book Landscape and Power, landscape becomes less a descriptive term than an act of creation: "[L]andscape doesn't merely signify or symbolize power relations; it is an instrument of cultural power, perhaps even an agent of power that is (or frequently represents itself as) independent of human intentions" (z).

Play beween humans and pets, as well as simply spending time peacebly hanging out together, brings joy to all the participants. Surely that is one important meaning of companion species. Nonetheless, the status of pet puts a dog at special risk in societies like the one I live in - the risk of abandonment when human affection wanes, when people's convenience takes precedence, or when the dog fails to deliver on the fantasy of unconditional love. Many of the serious dog people I have met doing my research emphasize the importance to dogs of jobs that leave them less vulnerable to human consumerist whims. Weisser knows many livestock people whose guardian dogs are respected for the work they do. Some are loved and some are not, but their value does not depend on an economy of affection.

Think, for example, about the acceptance of gay marriage or female clergy by the more progressive branches of Christianity. Where did this acceptance originate? Not from reading the Bible, St Augustine or Martin Luther. Rather, it came from reading texts like Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality or Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’.14 Yet Christian true-believers – however progressive – cannot admit to drawing their ethics from Foucault and Haraway. So they go back to the Bible, to St Augustine and to Martin Luther, and make a very thorough search. They read page after page and story after story with the utmost attention, until they finally discover what they need: some maxim, parable or ruling that, if interpreted creatively enough, means God blesses gay marriages and women can be ordained to the priesthood. They then pretend the idea originated in the Bible, when in fact it originated with Foucault.

But, as Haraway reminds us, there is no untouched, ‘wild’ nature to which we can ever return: ‘there is no garden and never has been’…Nevertheless, in their concern with nature and nonhuman ‘earth others,’ many ecofeminists such as Plumwood or queer ecofeminists such as Catriona Sandilands share Haraway’s desire to disrupt the nature/culture dualism…Haraway is thus in accord with much ecofeminist theory when she argues that ‘we must find another relationship to nature beside reification and possession…Neither mother, nurse, nor slave, nature is not matrix, resource, or tool for the reproduction of man.

I long for models of solidarity and human unity and difference rooted in friendship, work, partially shared purposes, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality, and persistent hope. It is time to theorize an ‘unfamiliar’ unconscious, a different primal scene, where everything does not stem from the dramas of identity and reproduction. Ties through blood—including blood recast in the coin of genes and information— have been bloody enough already. I believe that there will be no racial or sexual peace, no livable nature, until we learn to produce humanity through something more and less than kinship.

The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity - honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy - to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of dis-embodiment. The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit; the eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, colour enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTs, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system. Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.

In Haraway’s work, queering animals means not only showing that animals sometimes have unreproductive sex. It means showing the political value of unhinging animality from its heretofore seamless relationship to the concept of a ‘nature’ that is stable, predictable, and controllable. Feminism has barely begun to denaturalize or queer animal sexualities. For instance, Carol Adams persuasively argues that the sexual objectification and consumption of animals and of women follow the same models…She proposes that feminism approach the animalizing of women and the feminization of animals in patriarchal culture as a unique opportunity, namely the chance to study the oppression of animals as a particular symptom of androcentric social organization. However, Adams’s work on the visual culture aspect of meat consumption is devoted to exposing the logic and structure of a pattern of oppression and exploitation, a position depending on one important assumption: that humans are the only actors in this practice. The structure of her argument makes power and privilege pretty unambiguously distinguishable from subjugation. In that sense, it offers rather limited resources for a post- or neo-Foucauldian feminist analysis of power, desire, and norms, the production of truths and practices, and the complexities of self-care.

Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? –Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs

Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert. [...] Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. [...] Writing, power and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of the mechanism.

I resist being called the "mom" to my dogs because I fear infantilization of the adult canines and misidentification of the important fact that I wanted dogs, not babies. My multi-species family is not about surrogacy and substitutes; we are trying to live other tropes, other metaplasms.

A dark bewitched commitment to the lure of Progress (and its polar opposite) lashes us to endless infernal alternatives as if we had no other ways to reworld, reimagine, relive, and reconnect with each other in multispecies wellbeing

It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems

One who is not dominated, who knows that by the service of the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the self.

Facts are theory-laden; theories are value-laden; values are history-laden. —DONNA HARAWAY, IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD: THE GENESIS OF BIOLOGICAL THEORY, 1981

Postmodernist literature is vast and highly diverse. From these many writings I have selected two books to examine here: Donna Haraway's Primate Visions (1989) and W. J. T. Mitchell's The Last Dinosaur Book (1998). These two books offer postmodernist analyses of two fields of science that have much popular appeal, primatology and dinosaur paleontology

Estaré siempre, decididamente, del lado del potencial liberador e incluso transgresivo de estas tecnologías, contra aquéllos que intentan reducirlas a un perfil predeterminado y conservador, o a un sistema orientado al beneficio que favorece y acrecienta el individualismo. Creo que una de las más agudas paradojas de nuestros días consiste precisamente en la tensión entre la urgencia de encontrar nuevos modelos alternativos de responsabilidad ética y política para nuestro mundo tecnológicamente modificado y la inercia de los hábitos mentales consolidados. Donna Haraway lo afirma con su acostumbrada agudeza: ¡las máquinas están tan vivas, mientras que los humanos están tan inertes! (Haraway, 1995). Como para reflejar esto, los science and technology studies hoy son un ámbito floreciente en las instituciones académicas, mientras las ciencias humanas atraviesan una fase seriamente problemática.

Preferisco essere cyborg che dea.

Hoy la situación parece mucho más compleja: el cuerpo individual funciona como una extensión de las tecnologías globales de comunicación. Dicho con la feminista americana Donna Haraway, el cuerpo del siglo XXI es una plataforma tecnoviva, el resultado de una implosión irreversible de sujeto y objeto, de lo natural y lo artificial. De ahí que la noción misma de «vida» resulte arcaica para identificar los actores de esta nueva tecnoecología. Por ello, Donna Haraway prefiere la noción de «tecnobiopoder» a la foucaultiana de «biopoder», puesto que va no se trata de poder sobre la vida, de poder de gestionar y maximizar la vida, como quería Foucault, sino de poder y control sobre un todo tecnovivo conectado.

The concept of the body politic is not new. Elaborate organic images for human society were richly developed by the Greeks. They conceived the citizen, the city, and the cosmos to be built according to the same principles.

Women know very well that knowledge from the natural sciences has been used in the interests of our domination and not our liberation, birth control propagandists notwithstanding. Moreover, general exclusion from science has only made our exploitation more acute. We have learned that both the exclusion and the exploitation are fruits of our position in the social division of labour and not of natural incapacities.

We have challenged our traditional assignment to the status of natural objects by becoming anti-natural in our ideology in a way which leaves the life sciences untouched by feminist needs.

Sex as danger and as nature are central to Freud's system, which repeats rather than initiates the traditional reduction of the body politic to physiological starting points. The body politic is in the first instance seen to be founded on natural individuals whose instincts must be conquered to make possible the cultural group.

We find the themes of modern America reflected in detail in the bodies and lives of animals. We polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves.

understand Marxist humanism to mean that the fundamental position of the human being in the world is the dialectical relation with the surrounding world involved in the satisfaction of needs and thus in the creation of use values. The labour process constitutes the fundamental human condition. Through labour, we make ourselves individually and collectively in a constant interaction with all that has not yet been humanized. Neither our personal bodies nor our social bodies may be seen as natural, in the sense of existing outside the self-creating process called human labour. What we experience and theorize as nature and as culture are transformed by our work. All we touch and therefore know, including our organic and our social bodies, is made possible for us through labour. Therefore, culture does not dominate nature, nor is nature an enemy. The dialectic must not be made into a dynamic of growing domination.4 This position, a historical materialism based on production, contrasts fundamentally with the ironically named historical materialism based on reproduction that I have tried to outline above.

In addition to direct investigation of physiological sex and social behaviour in human beings' closest relatives, Yerkes exercised, along with his peers, a tremendous influence on the overall direction of the scientific study of sex in this country. He was for twenty-five years chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded National Research Council Committee for Research on Problems of Sex (CRPS). This committee, from 1922 until well after the Second World War when federal funding became massively available for science, provided the financial base for the transformation of human sex into a scientific problem.

The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding 'Western' epistemology, But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological determinism destroying 'man' by the 'machine' or 'meaningful political action' by the 'text'. Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn't we (de Waal, 1982; Winner, 1980)?

The biosocial sciences have not simply been sexist mirrors of our own social world. They have also been tools in the reproduction of that world, both in supplying legitimating ideologies and in enhancing material power. There are three main reasons for choosing to focus on the science of animal, especially primate, groups

We actively determined our design through tools that mediate the human exchange with nature. This condition of our existence may be visualized in two contradictory ways. Gazing at the tools themselves, we may choose to forget that they only mediate our labour.

The debate has been bounded by the rules of ordinary scientific discourse. This highly regulated space makes room for technical papers; grant applications; informal networks of students, teachers, and laboratories; official symposia to promote methods and interpretations; and finally, textbooks to socialize new scientists.

unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival.

The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine.

In short, we need to know the animal science of the body politic as it has been and might be.6 I believe the result of a liberating science of animal groups would better express who the animals are as well; we might free nature in freeing ourselves.

We have granted science the role of a fetish, an object human beings make only to forget their role in creating it, no longer responsive to the dialectical interplay of human beings with the surrounding world in the satisfaction of social and organic needs.

I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.

In that step she prepared for the logic of the domination of technology - the total control of now alienated bodies in a machine-determined future. She made the basic mistake of reducing social relations to natural objects, with the logical consequence of seeing technical control as a solution.

Second, animal sociology has been central in the development of the most thorough naturalization of the patriarchal division of authority in the body politic and in the reduction of the body politic to sexual physiology.

In short, he started to link the elements of natural and political economy in new and important ways. The classic Darwinian conception of natural political economy of populations began to be integrated with the physiological and psychological sciences that greatly flourished in the early twentieth century. The integration would be complete only after the Second World War, when Sherwood Washburn and his students transformed physical anthropology and primate studies by systematically exploiting the evolutionary functionalism of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and the social functionalism of Bronislaw Malinowski's theory of culture.

The functionalist disciplines underlay strong ideologies of social control and techniques of medical, educational, and industrial management.

The political principle of domination has been transformed here into the legitimating scientific principle of dominance as a natural property with a physical-chemical base. Manipulations, concepts, organizing principles - the entire range of tools of the science - must be seen to be penetrated by the principle of domination. Science cannot be reclaimed for liberating purposes by simply reinterpreting observations or changing terminology, a crass ideological exercise in any case, which denies a dialectical interaction with the animals in the project of self-creation through scientific labour.

But the sciences are collective expressions and cannot be remade individually.

Throughout the period around the Second World War, similar studies of the authoritarian personality in human beings abounded; true social order must rest on a balance of dominance, interpreted as the foundation of co-operation. Competitive aggression became the chief form that organized other forms of social integration. Far from competition and co-operation being mutual opposites, the former is the precondition of the latter - on physiological grounds.

This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism.

The degree to which the principle of domination is deeply embedded in our natural sciences, especially in those disciplines that seek to explain social groups and behaviour, must not be underestimated. In evading the importance of dominance as a part of the theory and practice of contemporary sciences, we bypass the crucial and difficult examination of the content as well

as the social function of science

Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense.

The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed.

Third, the levels at which domination has formed an analytical principle in animal sociology allow a critique of the embodiment of social relations in the content and basic procedures of a natural science in such a way as to expose the fallacies of the claim to objectivity, but not in such a way as to permit facile rejection of scientific discipline in our knowledge of animals.

We have believed it important to convert the animal into as nearly ideal a subject for biological research as is practicable. And with this intent has been associated the hope that eventual success might serve as an effective demonstration of the possibility of re-creating man himself in the image of a generally acceptable ideal. (Yerkes, 1943

The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, Utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household.

First, its subject and procedures developed so as to span the nature-culture split at precisely the same time in American intellectual history, between 1920 and 1940, when the ideology of the autonomy of the social sciences had at last gained acceptance, that is, when the liberal theory of society (based on functionalism and hierarchical systems theories) was being established in the universities. Intrinsic to the new liberal relations of natural and social disciplines was the project of human engineering - that is, the project of design and management of human material for efficient, rational functioning in a scientifically ordered society. Animals played an important role in this project. On the one hand, they were plastic raw material of knowledge, subject to exact laboratory discipline. They could be used to construct and test model systems for both human physiology and politics. A model system of, for example, menstrual physiology or socialization processes did not necessarily imply reductionism. It was precisely direct reduction of human to natural sciences that the post-Spencerian, post-evolutionary naturalist, new ordering of knowledge forbade.

However, the opening was double edged; the committee, in its practice and ideological expressions, was structured on several levels according to the principle of the primacy of sex in organic and social processes. To make sex a scientific problem also made it an object for medical therapy for all kinds of sexual 'illness', most certainly including homosexuality and unhappy marriages.

In our search for an understanding of a feminist body politic, we need the discipline of the natural and social sciences, just as we need every creative form of theory and practice. These sciences will have liberating functions in so far as we build them on social relations not based on domination. A corollary of that requirement is the rejection of all forms of the ideological claims for pure objectivity rooted in the subject-object split that has legitimated our logics of domination of nature and ourselves.

At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.

The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century.

This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation.