Well, this was intended to be sort of a "cyberwommyn" issue. I'd hoped to have an interview with a woman who teaches cyberpunk literature in the university discussing what that was like with sidelines into a feminist take on the genre and maybe a bit on the situation in Europe. But no show. Instead, the usual Infodrone, sound bytes, and more perspective from Pat Cadigan. Next time out a full-blown issue of Interference on the Brain Screen.
And I coined this word cyborg. I remember he said, "Oh, that sounds like a town in Denmark." -Manfred CynesFor many years now, cyberpunk fiction has appeared almost exclusively in dense, university journals. Elsewhere it's been repudiated as an embarrassment by most of its Mirrorshades progenitors and otherwise abandoned or superseded by the post-Snow Crash flavor of the month. A lazy film reviewer might throw around the term as a kind of short-hand description (signifying nothing) but otherwise the old-fashion variety of CP is mostly gone. Yet it continues to be vivisected in the operating rooms of academic publications, particularly in Science Fiction Review. It's fate there has not been pretty. (See CNS #4.) I'm reminded of Phil Dick's remark: "You know, if they can't destroy you by ignoring you, they can destroy you by annexing you." It's astonishing how much philosophical and political freight a poor literary sub-genre/publishing niche now has to carry on it's un-augmented shoulders. Oh, the post-humanity! Like clockwork, two texts are always mentioned in these articles: Gibson's Neuromancer and Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto". Gibson, of course, is only natural -- but what's up with Haraway? I wish I could tell you.
This much-cited work began life in 1985 as "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" in Socialist Review. It is now collected under the shorter title "Cyborg Manifesto" though whether this title change reflects a new point of view (i.e., a statement going out to the cyborgs in the former but coming in from the cyborgs in the latter) or a shrewd sense of brand name positioning I cannot say. Certainly this new, pithier title has more impact. But it's not really a "manifesto," if by that word you mean something on the order of "The Communist Manifesto" or even "The Riot Grrl Manifesto." Nor is really about (or for) "cyborgs," if by that you mean a "cybernetic organism," a human/machine hybrid. Haraway does go on about that sort of thing, speaking of the collapse of sharp distinctions between "animal-human (organism) and machine" though this sounds pretty perfunctory. For the most part her cyborg is a "fiction," a tool whereby she hope to explore the situation of feminism and women. Sometimes, however, she acts as if this "tool" were an actual class of women; either Third World women of color or, perhaps, "white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies." But she absolutely never means the Schwarzenegger-Terminator ubermensh of popular fiction and film. Which is to say, the definition of cyborg that almost everyone who knew the term in the first place would picture.
There is a certain "subversion" in appropriating this loaded symbol of hyper-masculinity for feminist use. After all, she could have used unicorns or elves if all she wanted was a tool to examine the state of women in the late 20th Century. "A Unicorn Manifesto" certainly doesn't sound as serious -- or as hip. The trouble with highjacking a term already in common usage is that it carries imagery and meaning that are not automatically jettisoned just because some academic wants to give it a new spin. Haraway may want us to view her creature as "ether, quintessence" and "resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity" but how many can really erase the Arnold-image: huge, implacable, heavily armed, murderous and male? Haraway as much as admits this when she says, "The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism." Indeed so. And no amount of wistful theorizing will make them any different. "Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos." Nor are they so easily turned from their original purpose as personification and icon of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, the Frankenstein monster updated for the end of the 20th Century. I'm at a loss as to why Haraway picked a word with so much baggage. Even "replicant" might have been easier to work with, certainly it is more poetic. Though perhaps that would have been too easy to parody as "replicunt."
Actually, what Haraway has in mind is a new hyphenated feminism: cyborg-feminism. Much of the Manifesto is a critique of other sorts of feminists (Marxist, "organic", Dworkian). She finds them to be too limited, too unimaginative, too old-fashioned to meet the challenges and possibilities of the technological future rushing down on us like a tsunami. But would women want to be cyborgs? Would they embrace the concept? Well, maybe, if cyborg really meant "women who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life." But can the term ever really mean that? Or does it still mean "cybernetic organism?" Would it make sense to the Southeast Asian village women workers in Japanese and American electronic firms, who Haraway gives as examples of "real-life cyborgs?" I hope I'm not being occluded here but given a choice between being a "cyborg" or, say, an "autonomous human being" or even an "enfranchised citizen" which would they more likely choose to be come?
Of course these are the very women most obviously not the intended or expected audience for Haraway's work. That audience would be the "five or ten thousand men and women," to quote Samuel Delaney, "many of them professors and still more of them graduate students, for whom the problems of literary criticism are of deep and pressing concern and who have the energy and interest to do the hundreds of hours of reading necessary to follow the various dialogues on Althuserian Marxism, Saussurian linguistics, Russian formalism, structuralist anthropology, post-strucuralist critiques of structuralism, Foucauldian archeologies, Barthesian semiology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Kriestevan and Iriguarayan feminism, and speech-act theory that form the context in which deconstruction is meaningful." No Southeast Asian village women workers in this lot, to be sure, though all of them doubtless own high-end telecommunication, computer and entertainment electronics produced by those same workers. Needless to say, it is from this audience that those Science Fiction Review articles are written and read.
Which brings us back to our original question, What does "Cyborg Manifesto" have to do with cyberpunk? Well, in truth, nothing. While Haraway does have some fascinating things to say about "human-machine interpenertations" they appear in her other writings and are only mentioned in passing in the Manifesto. The science fiction she discusses is the mid- to late-70s feminist variety; Russ, Butler, McIntyre, Tiptree et.al. (By the way, these are the very writers, according to Delaney, who really made cyberpunk possible. Though, as others insist that cyberpunk is a suburban, white boy adolescent masturbation fantasy gone ballistic, it seems that those authors might want to deny parentage And could someone please ask Gibson if he kept a dog-eared, heavily underlined copy of Picnic on Paradise by his bedside?) There is no evidence that Haraway had read Gibson or Sterling or Rucker at the time she was writing her piece. Certainly they don't really have anything to do with what she is exploring in the Manifesto. The constant references to her article in so much academic criticism strikes me as being a reflex, a genuflection before what has become Holy Writ amongst certain literary circles. How can a po-mo critic write about science fiction and not at least footnote Haraway? Plus, it sounds great. It's new and improved title even has political overtones that must appeal to a class now pretty much without power except in their own classroom. Alas, as a political statement, "Cyborg Manifesto" is pretty hopeless. Too opaque by half and lacking the sort sound bite necessary to storm the barricades or bomb a city. "I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess" -- no one is going to shout that as the firing squad starts shooting. Slogan-wise, the "VNS Manifesto" beats the hell out of Haraway's journal-speak in every way.
It looks as if Haraway will be forced to continue delivering measure jolts of electricity to the twitching frogleg of cyberpunk for a bit longer. For cyberpunk, at least, some end is in sight. It appears that even academics are beginning to tire of it. At the end of the 1990s it no longer seems so fruitful a topic for journal articles, conference round tables and dissertations. This particular vein may be played out, though some useable ore might be left over at the Snow Crash mine. The hot new property now is "cyborg anthropology." Poor Haraway has just had her tour of duty extended.
Text: "Long ago, Sangrella, before these nuture tubes were invented, humans were forced, in order to reproduce, to commit certain repulsive acts with another species. As we progressed and were no longer dependent upon Andromorphus Anthropidian, or "Man" as they were called, they gradually died of uselessness and just a general sense of self pity."
As intelligence becomes more valuable than strength, the strong sense of purpose and identity that once served the masculine so well becomes nothing more than a liability in a world of Net schizophrenia, self-organizing systems, and emergent planetary intelligence.
The real problem is not that there are buttons marked "delete" and "kill". It's that women have never been allowed to press them.
Masculine identity has everything to lose from this new technics. The sperm count falls as the replicants stir and the meat learns how to learn for itself.
CYBERNETICS IS FEMINIZATION.
NATURALLY enough, outlaw zones are coming. Automatically.
Post-human porn is the thing.
Intelligence is no longer on the side of power. That's the point.
Anybody who asks the state for anything is almost already fucked up.
Just as machines get more intelligent, so women get more liberated.
The male is basically becoming redundant. Traditionally, it's been about the male in the abstract. The white man. Capitalism, commodities, new machinery and women -- all the things that served man's ends -- are starting to pick up and go their own way. This is on a global scale.
Men are effectively catching up. Women, too, will become more feminine -- even though we have no idea what that is. We are going to experiment with it; we are going to find out.
The matrix is the universal hooker, the abstract machine of what was once a man's world. Women's emergence is man's emergency; history was remembered, but the future is unmanned.
Perhaps the future of VR is more than bi-sexual, and perhaps in the future gender will be more of a job description and less a designation of genitalia. -Pat Cadigan
the VNS MATRIX
terminators of the moral code
mercenaries of slime
go down on the altar of abjection
probing the visceral temple we speak in tongues
infiltrating disrupting disseminating
corrupting the discourse
we are the future cunt
Why is it that cyberpunk, a movement with the potential to deal with the fragmentation of the subject, becomes obsolete just at the moment when women writers begin to explore the connections between race, gender, sexuality and cyberspace? -Karen Cadora
The political (or even revolutionary) potential for SF, realized so strongly in 70s feminist SF, is relegated in Gibson's cyberpunk to a form of scary feminized software; his fiction creates an alternative, attractive, but hallucinatory world which allows not only a reassertion of male mastery but a virtual celebration of a kind of primal masculinity. -Nicola Nixon
Cyberfeminism simply points out the subversive alliance between women and all non-human intelligent activity, and also the extent to which these connections have always been in place. -Jyanni Steffeusen
More from the Pat Cadigan interview. The entire interview is scheduled to appear in the next issue of The HardCore. [The HardCore, P.O. Box 1893, London, SW16 2ZB, UK]
Tanya Brown: How far would you say that female characters in cyberpunk are enabled, or invaded, by technology?
Pat Cadigan: Women have been invaded by technology for ever, like birth control, and it's up to us. Sterilisation, who do you sterilise? We get spayed! We've always been the ultimate end users of technology. There weren't always a lot of very believable women characters in science fiction who were doing stuff. Originally there were plucky scientists' daughters and love interests. Of course I was glad to see this change. This is one of the things I really loved about the first two Aliens movies; there were plot holes you could drive trucks through, but there's one virtue that those movies have that almost no other movie has, which is that men and women actually behave like they are true peers. Women don't get rescued all the time, men don't do all the rescuing all the time. The condescension isn't there that women often experience, or the deference or whatever. It took me a long time to understand why I liked these characters and movies so much; I should be picking the science apart, what's wrong with me? You can pick the science apart, but often the errors in science are not as grievous as the errors in human behaviour. Men writers who can't write women characters, women characters who can't write men characters - or what's really pathetic, women writers who can't write women, men who can't write men. Maybe they've created too many and not met enough.
Women characters in fiction and women writers are two totally different subjects, and yet many times when I've been at conventions and been on a panel where people want to talk about women in science fiction, I find it amazing that they mean the women characters in the stories. Usually someone will mention Molly right away, in Neuromancer, and Molly is a very rich character and there's a lot to her and what's the problem?
TB: I've heard people say that she's been invaded by the technology.
PC: But so have the men. It'd be an interesting society where the women were all invaded by technology and the men were completely untouched. That would be an extremely complex, stylized world to live in, because the division between the sexes would be so sharp. I don't think that's true in any of the cyberpunk science fiction - everyone has been invaded by technology, we're all overrun with it. Technology, unless it is specifically engineered to be so, is not dependant on sex. When we all get invaded by technology, we will probably all have our different needs, but that is almost as much a reflection of us as individuals as it is of our gender differences. I don't like to jump at shadows. I can think of plenty of sexist things that I've experienced, in the field and out of it, every day, but that isn't it.