Life and the Technological: Cyborgs, Companions, and the Chthulucene

Abstract

Donna Haraway’s cyborg is a widely traveled figure with an important relation to life writing. This article traces the cyborg through modes of life writing and routes through feminist science fiction and science studies. It examines attachments and anger, looking at the return of the alienated cyborg in recent accounts of Haraway’s work.

One of Donna Haraway’s most charismatic and widely travelled figures is that of the cyborg. It emerges as a figure in her writing in the 1980s and 1990s, and enables important interventions in thinking about lives as always already technological and prosthetic. One of its gifts is that it offers a different way into this than either technological evolutionism or the posthumanism of actor-network theory. The cyborg is a figure of specificity, of fiction but also of real-life couplings of technology and flesh, which are neither evolutionarily determined nor neutral but, in Haraway’s terms, are non-innocent encounters. The non-innocent relationality of the cyborg is posited as one of responsibility, which, in Haraway’s lexicon, evokes both an ability to respond to others and an ethics of encounter. The cyborg is a singular figure, although, in Haraway’s work, singularity is always multiple and allows for thinking about the life of life story and technology.¹

The figure has generated strong attachments, multiple stories, and anger over the last thirty years. This article traces a partial examination of the manifesto as life writing, and surveys debates about and practices of cyborg life writing, including autobiography and fiction. It examines the possibilities of the cyborg, including anger, rejection, and reconfiguration (as embryo and doppelgänger), as well as its relation to life itself more broadly conceived.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For example, see Henwood, Kennedy, and Miller, Cyborg Lives?

2 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 1.

3 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 42.

4 Haraway and Wolfe, Manifestly Haraway, 96.

5 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 27–28.

6 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 42.

7 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 30.

8 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 2.

9 Haraway and Goodeve, How Like a Leaf, 135.

10 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 9.

11 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto.

12 Stiegler, On Pharmacology; Morton, Hyperobjects.

13 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 30.

14 Broad indicative examples include Balsamo, Technologies; Sollfrank and Old Boys Network, First Cyberfeminist International; Kirkup et al., The Gendered Cyborg; Wolmark, Cybersexualities; Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Flanagan and Booth, Reload; and Zylinska, The Cyborg Experiments.

15 Smith, “The Autobiographical Manifesto,” 209.

16 Smith, “The Autobiographical Manifesto,” 209.

17 Huff and Haefner, “His Master's Voice,” 155.

18 Kennedy, “Technobiography”; Jolly, “E-Mail”; Harcourt, Woman@Internet.

19 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 30.

20 Therapeutic human cloning practices were licensed in the UK in 2004 by the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority. See, for example, McNeil et al., Human Cloning.

21 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto.”

22 See also Franklin, “Life Itself.”

23 Franklin, “The Cyborg Embryo,” 168.

24 McNeil, “New Reproductive Technologies”; Spallone, Beyond Conception.

25 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 1.

26 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 2.

27 Piercy, Body of Glass, 584.

28 Haraway and Wolfe, Manifestly Haraway, 204.

29 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women.

30 Haraway, Primate Visions, 138.

31 Haraway, Primate Visions, 139.

32 Lewis, “Cthulhu Plays No Role.”

33 Lewis, “Cthulhu Plays No Role.”

34 Turner, “Ms. Cayenne Pepper,” 24.

35 Turner, “Ms. Cayenne Pepper,” 20.

36 Turner, “Ms. Cayenne Pepper,” 25.

37 Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” 161.

38 Lopez and Gillespie, Economies of Death, 9.

39 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 9.

40 Haraway, “Cyborgs for Earthly Survival!”

41 Bassett, “Actually Existing Cyborgism.”

42 Terranova, Storytelling for Earthly Survival.