Cyborg Identity: So Much to Gain, but What is Lost?

From the vantage point of 2011 it's clear that Donna Haraway's ideas have seeped into the general public consciousness. Consider three of the most critically and popularly successful female music acts of 2010/11:

[Of course it begs the question: did Haraway foresee the commodification of the cyborg figure?]

But it's impossible not to ask: is this what Haraway had in mind when she wrote "The Cyborg Manifesto?" Declaring that "the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion" and that the figure of the cyborg represents is "a creature of the post-gender world," Haraway calls upon the cyborg as a model for feminism (or, more specifically, materialist feminism) in the late 20th century and beyond. Radically deconstructing the traditional Cartesian concept of the unified self, Haraway call the cyborg "a kind of disassembled and reassembled post-modern collective and personal self." What's immediately striking about Haraway's ideas is how freeing they immediately seem, how they seem to offer a great deal of individual agency--we can construct and reconstruct our identities as we best see fit!

And yet… despite agreeing with many of Haraway's ideas about the formation of identity and recognizing that identity is indeed a jumble of heterogeneous parts that each of us bricolage in various configurations as we best see fit, there's something intensely disquieting about Haraway's ideas that I admit I sense much more than I can put into words at this point. For one--and I recognize this is pretty much an inevitability anytime the word "manifesto" is invoked--I can't help but feel a bit skeptical of the extremely optimistic position "The Cyborg Manifesto" takes. Nowhere does Haraway consider for any length of time the potential downsides of taking on this kind of role, the great potential, but also the great risk that breaking down the boundaries and hierarchies between machine/human, animal/human, etc. entails. As she expresses it, it can only lead to positive things.

But even more than that, even though Haraway insists that "coalition" will indeed form via "affinity, not identity," I can't help but wonder if as much as creating new and (hopefully) more meaningful communities, there's also the risk of alienation, of creating identities so specialized and particular that what becomes lost is the potential for community, or more specifically communities large enough to resist and offer respite from the restricting forces of historical and cultural hegemony (something we're witnessing right this moment with the OWS Movement).

This all comes back in the end, I admit, with something I've been wresting with the last few weeks as we've taken on Butler, Gates and others--I've been completely haunted by the Angela Davis's words that concludes Thompson's essay on Anna Deavere Smith and I keep returning to it after everything we read on issues of identity and identity formation. Thinking of gender, race and sexuality as tropes, thinking of identity as something that can be "disassembled and reassembled:" I keep thinking that these theories are all fine and good, but how well do they or can they hold up when the rubber hits the road, when they slide off the page and enter the real world? That's why I responded to Davis's statement that while "we have to find different ways of coming together" (which itself echoes Haraway's sentiments), communities should serve as anchors and "rope attached to that anchor should be long enough to allow us to move into other communities, to understand and learn" (137). Implicit, of course, is that in the midst of (necessary) exploration, there's always community--whatever that community might be--to return to. And that's just something I just don't see much of in the figure of the cyborg, itself evoking a sense of indestructible, impersonal individuality.