Donna Haraway has fascinated me and frustrated me ever since I first read her manifesto four years ago. I was incredibly relieved to find that, while there are still swaths I find confusing, I feel like I’m getting a picture of how irony, and the cyborg as ironic, allow her to maneuver around binaries like human/machine human/animal and nature/culture. What is still a bit murky to me is how she connects this back to identity politics and what it offers as an alternative to identity politics. That said, I will speculate.

One thing that helped me understand was Donna Haraway’s brief mention of ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant’s Death of Nature, in which Merchant argues that patriarchy coded nature feminine and that industrialization’s rhetoric about taming nature strengthens patriarchy’s demand to subjugate woman. She is arguing that this still keeps us in a binary of nature/culture and man/woman, binaries which she wants to smudge the lines between, and once we do that, then we have to question our lines between animals and humans and humans and technology. It feels a bit like she’s dissolving Renaissance humanism and its insistence on humans as discrete and separate entities that exist along with technology and nature, but are not penetrated by it, do not comingle with those outside forces.

I’m on board so far. This is Hegel, is it not? (I don’t know; most of my knowledge of Hegel is second-hand) My smartphone is not something that diminishes my ability for memory, as that alarmist Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” laments, nor does it augment my memory abilities like transhumanists would argue. It is part of me. It’s like a Snickers bar. I’m not me when I’m hungry. I’m not me when I don’t have a smartphone. Because “me” is a fickle concept. Am I my body? Which one? The one when I was seven? The one when I was twenty and didn’t have a gut? The one that was hungover Saturday morning? There is no unified and static body. Am I my personality? Again, which one? The optimistic kid, the cynical adult, the cranky guy you would be unwise to wake up before 10am, the one a half hour after popping a Xanax, the one in a panic attack minutes before taking the Xanax? Again, there’s nothing static. My memories? Memory is fickle. We all misremember stuff, we forget stuff, we change our perspectives on those memories. Nothing we can rely on.

We are a bit like a Ship of Theseus problem.

Then there’s issues about language being the sole domain of humans but Koko the gorilla has language and really, so do dogs and even plants if you really want to explode the concept of “language.”

More or less, posthumanism removes us from Renaissance humanism. Copernicus moved us from the geocentric model but the human-centric model has remained.

I’ve gotten off track. (Or have I?)

Here’s where I get confused: The category “women of color” is a big focus for Haraway but I don’t know what she wants to make of it. She obviously seems to understand a Crenshawian model of intersectionality, which is to say that women of color, by way of experiencing racism along with sexism, experience sexism in a manner that white women do not. But I don’t know what the cyborg does for that separation. Is she worried that intersectionality (she doesn’t use the term, but it’s the term we now use for it) will atomize us until we are in a political gridlock due to the fact that the sum of our identities (race, gender, sexuality, ability, education, class, etc.) make it so that nobody can completely understand anybody else’s struggles? This is the best I can make of it but something tells me I’m off base. But I can see how the cyborg, by collapsing subjectivity, can make identity politics moot. As Joe asks, what does the cyborg do for us? Or to ask retrospectively, and with another 80s figure in mind, “What has the cyborg done for me lately?” Though, “me” seems the wrong term to use in regards to her posthumanism. Joe says Haraway’s cyborg is more hopeful but hope seems like such a humanistic concept that I’m not sure if it applies.