Haraway, Donna (1991) — A Cyborg Manifesto

Rina Chen’s living notebook on digital craft and design.

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

This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.

It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the Utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.

In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I would like to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture indebted to socialist and feminist principles of design.

Main arguments

  • By the late 20th century, we live in a mythic, cyborg time:

    “We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.”

  • Western science and politics have long treated the organism/machine divide as a site of conflict:

    In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics - the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.

  • Haraway’s chapter argues for:

    • Pleasure in boundary-confusion, and

    • Responsibility in how boundaries are constructed.

  • Her project contributes to socialist-feminist theory, reimagined in a postmodern, non-naturalist mode.
    It belongs to the Utopian tradition of imagining a world without fixed gender or fixed origins (“no genesis”).

Three Crucial Boundary Breakdowns

Haraway identifies three collapsing distinctions:

  1. Human / Animal

  2. Organism / Machine

  3. Physical / Non-physical (e.g., information, code, networks)

These collapses redefine what counts as nature, embodiment, and agency.

Cyborg Figures and Global Labor

Haraway critiques both the technological imaginary and global labor exploitation:

  • Engineers of advanced technologies become “sun-worshippers,” mediating a new scientific revolution.

    Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. The diseases evoked by these clean machines are ‘no more’ than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, ‘no more’ than the experience of stress.

  • Diseases appear as minor coding changes: biological metaphors extend into technoscience.

  • The labor of Asian women in chip factories, or women in prisons, becomes emblematic of cyborg production:

The nimble fingers of ‘Oriental’ women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with doll’s houses, women’s enforced attention to the small take on quite new dimensions in this world. There might be a cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies.

This reframes global gendered labor as part of cyborg politics.

From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once.

Rethinking Resistance: From Unity to Affinity

Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.

The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition - affinity, not identity.

Progressive politics have historically relied on:

  • A fantasy of unity,
  • A return to an “organic” body,
  • Or an essential identity (gender/race/class).

Haraway argues:

  • We can no longer dictate reality from a single standpoint.
  • Identity based on “natural” categories is neither possible nor desirable.
  • The alternative is affinity, not identity.

Chela Sandoval’s oppositional consciousness is central here:

  • “Women of color” marks a constructed, political identity based on difference, specificity, and coalition.
  • There is no singular “she,” no essential unity—only conscious political kinship.

These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting over time, especially those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialist-feminism. Literally, all other feminisms are either incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit ontology and epistemology.

None of ‘us’ have any longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape of reality to any of ‘them’.

Cyborg feminists have to argue that ‘we’ do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage.

Cyborg feminism therefore rejects:

  • Innocence
  • Victimhood as the sole ground of insight
  • Essential ontologies or stabilized feminist taxonomies (radical/liberal/socialist)

The inheritance of Marxian humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me. The contribution from these formulations has been the emphasis on the daily responsibility of real women to build unities, rather than to naturalize them.

The Informatics of Domination

we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system - from all work to all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the following chart of transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination:

Haraway situates cyborg identity within a global transition:

  • From organic, industrial society → to polymorphous, information systems.
  • From hierarchy → to networks.
  • From “all work” → to “all play,” framed as a deadly game.

This is the shift she visualizes in the informatics of domination chart:

  • A movement toward disassembly, reassembly, and global flows of information, labor, and capital.
  • No category—race, gender, nature—remains “natural.”

haraway'schart

Methodological Shift: From Essence to Systems

Haraway discourages essentialist questions (“What is a woman?” “What is nature?”).
Instead, she proposes a systems-oriented analysis:

  • Design: How something is built or arranged
  • Boundaries and flows: What crosses the system
  • Costs and trade-offs: What is gained or lost in different configurations

Example: Sexual reproduction is just one design among many possible reproductive systems — and it has certain costs and benefits depending on the environment or technology involved.

Ideas like “natural gender roles” or “natural races” no longer make sense.
Now, identity and difference are understood through data — frequencies, parameters, statistics — rather than through essence or “nature.”

→ It’s irrational, she says, to call some people “primitive” and others “civilized.”
Both scientific racism and cultural essentialism get replaced by technocratic or data-driven ways of classifying people.

Identity becomes statistical, informational, or parametric—not natural or fixed.

In the age of biotechnology and global capitalism, nothing — not gender, not race, not nature itself — can be thought of as purely natural anymore. Everything is hybrid, designed, and part of complex systems of information, power, and meaning. We are all cyborgs — part human, part machine, part story.

Instead of imagining society as a single, unified organism, new social thought focuses on fragmentation, hybridity, and play—what she calls “experimental ethnography.”
Anthropologists and cultural theorists now analyze not fixed “organic” communities but the writing and construction of culture itself.

New cultural theory emphasizes:

  • Fragmentation, hybridity, incongruity
  • Experimental ethnography that studies how culture is constructed, not inherited

She then links this to economics:
Modern capitalism — visible in global finance, export-processing zones, and free-trade areas — operates through flows of information, capital, and labor, not through stable, “natural” social structures.

Everything — people, machines, ideas — can be disassembled and reassembled, in new configurations, interchangeable.
Nothing is sacred or fixed anymore.

Managers vs. Resisters: Two Modes of Cyborg Semiology

In the emerging global order:

  • Managers (those in power):
    See the world as communication systems needing control.

  • Resisters (artists, feminists, theorists):
    Work through texts, interpretation, and meaning-making.

Both are engaged in cyborg semiology—decoding a world where humans and machines are inseparable.

Cyborg Identity and Feminist Design

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

Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings.

Haraway emphasizes:

  • The cyborg is a disassembled and reassembled self—both personal and collective.
  • This is the self feminists must code.
  • Communications technologies and biotechnologies:

    “Are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies… instruments for enforcing meanings.”

communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move - the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.

Technoscience translates the world into coding problems, enabling:

  • Disassembly
  • Reassembly
  • Exchange

This creates both threats and opportunities for feminist politics.

After thoughts

Cyborg is born from militarism, capitalism, but it can be an resistant force, rely on affinity on the same project, instead of identity

Holding contradiction, cyborg is building and destroying relationship, it represents and embraces messiness

The charm of Haraway’s writing also comes from her reconstructing language itself

For thesis, I want to propose a synthesis that challenges the false dichotomy between the technical and the handmade by combining coding with craft.

This aligns with Haraway’s argument that:

  • Tools are “frozen moments” of social relations
  • Boundaries between human, machine, and medium are actively made—and can be remade

An example of cyborg praxis

  • cyborg: any entity that blurs the boundary between “human” and “machine.” It emphasizes that humans are always already entangled with technology
  • praxis: reflective, ethical, and transformative action, practice informed by theory, aimed at changing the world or reshaping relations

using hybrid methods to resist reductive, technocratic systems of meaning.

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