Episode 164 - Closer Look: Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:20] David: The podcast where your two favorite cyborgs talk about philosophy and everyday life.

[00:00:24] Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:26] David: And I'm David Pena Guzman.

[00:00:28] Ellie: As always, for an extended version of this episode and other additional content, check out our Substack. David, today we're doing a closer look episode on Donna Haraway's essay, the Cyborg Manifesto. This is an essay that was published in 1985, and it is a landmark in post humanist theory, feminist theory, post humanist feminist theory.

I feel like it's been, I mean, let's be real. It's been a trendy essay among the grad students for a number of decades now. I feel like my students are still talking about it. They really wanted to read it this past semester, and then I was like, I couldn't fit it into the syllabus, so let's talk about it on Overthink.

But it was very much, you know, something that students were discussing a lot when we were in grad school in the 2010s as well.

[00:01:14] David: The text has had a lot of staying power, largely because it's both outlining a really interesting critique of some of the dominant discourse that people in these fields have traditionally relied on for engaging in the task of social critique.

And also it's outlining a vision for the future that, you know, may or may not be to our liking. We'll talk about what we think about the kind of vision of cyborg futurism that she's talking about, but I think it wasputting its finger on the pulse of something that was beginning in the 1980s and that we are feeling perhaps even more clearly in the 2020s, I would say

[00:01:53] Ellie: Yeah, absolutely, because. I would say Haraway is working from at least two different angles, both of which felt extremely relevant as I reread this. So I actually hadn't read this text since grad school and reading it back, I'm not sure I ever read the entire thing to begin this might have been the first time.

[00:02:11] David: It's a little long.

[00:02:11] Ellie: Well, yeah, for an essay as long it's 63 pages. I'm kind of surprised it was like first published in a journal at that length. But you know, it's definitely shorter than a book, which we sometimes feature in Closer Look episodes. But I think the two angles that Haraway is coming from our one, the increasing technologization of everyday life.

And you know, the influx of, at that time it would've been sort of like computer, more cybernetic era, advent of the internet. Now it's more generative AI microchips everywhere, proliferation of our tiny computers that are glued to our bodies, our phones.

And then the second angle is a question about what it means to be a feminist, given that it can be very hard to define who counts within the category women and whether or not women should be the organizing category of a feminist project altogether.

So there's a move away from feminism based on identity and more towards affiliation that Haraway is drawing on largely from women of color feminism that actually feels really contemporary to me as well.

[00:03:18] David: I think that's right. And in terms of the origin story for this article, the article was born when the editors of the Socialist Review asked Haraway to write a piece explaining what socialist feminist priorities look like in the wake of Reagan. Like in the Reagan years. And so this is a reflection of that.

[00:03:38] Ellie: I didn't know that.

[00:03:38] David: Yeah. And so there is a sort of explicit attempt to think about the relationship between politics, technology, and identity. And of course the editors of this publication thought that Hawe was the right person to write this. Not only because she identifies as a feminist socialist in her own commitments, you know, even though she's also critical of feminist theory and Marxism, but also because of her specialization in a feminist science study.

So, Haraway studied zoology when she was an undergrad, combining a major in zoology with a minor in English. Then went on to get a PhD from Yale University in Biology. And I found out I didn't know this, that she wrote her dissertation on the role of metaphors in scientific thinking and how the metaphors that we use for thinking about biological phenomena actually changed the course of the experiments that we perform in laboratories and therefore in some ways determine the outcome of our inquiries and investigations.

And, she was active in various leftist movements. Like she was an active member of the anti-war movement. I also read that she lived in an academic commune while getting her PhD in biology.

[00:04:56] Ellie: Wow does you Living at Emory Woods, the really sad apartment complex in Atlanta with all the other grad students count as an academic commune.

[00:05:04] David: Not even close, but I like the idea of, you know, academics living in a commune and that shaping their way of thinking and their research.

[00:05:12] Ellie: Yeah. And so, although this is definitely a philosophical essay, it's worth noting that haraway, unlike most of the other thinkers that we talk about in Closer Look episodes, doesn't have a PhD in philosophy, or I guess Epicurus didn't have a PhD in philosophy either. Let's say was not trained as a philosopher.

And one thing that, that I think is interesting about this text is just how influential it's been in a really wide variety of different departments and, you know critical theory in general.

[00:05:41] David: Today we are talking about Donna Haraway's as Cyborg Manifesto.

[00:05:45] Ellie: How does the figure of the Cyborg challenge traditional paradigms of humanism?

[00:05:50] David: How are social relations altered by new developments in science and technology?

[00:05:54] Ellie: And what would it look like to build a cyborg future? Alright, so it's time to get into what a cyborg is and what it means for us. First things first, Haraway identifies her aim in this essay. As being one of building an ironic political myth that is faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. So she's taking these three ways of thinking, feminism, socialism and materialism, and bringing them together in this political myth of the cyborg.

But she says that the way to be faithful to those traditions is to be blasphemous. And part of the blasphemy here is in breaking apart the category of women and actually the category of the human altogether and moving towards the cyborg. So the cyborg is the center of this blasphemous faithful vision.

[00:06:54] David: She offers a really good and crisp definition at the very top of the essay where she says, A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. And so even at the level of that definition, we see that the cyborg is that which brings together fields and disciplines and realities that are thought to be opposed to one another.

So it's a point both of friction, but also of traffic and connection. Hence this notion that the cyborg as a figure is blasphemous or ironic.

[00:07:31] Ellie: Maybe we can use a couple of examples of cyborgs here at the beginning because she says that, you know, they're both like real and fictional, so a fictional cyborg. You got any examples there, David?

[00:07:42] David: Robocop, Terminator, the Borg in Star Trek.

[00:07:47] Ellie: Great. But then, you know, in a more kind of everyday fashion, somebody who has a cochlear implant is a cyborg. If you have an artificial knee, 'cause you've had knee replacement surgery, like those are also examples of cyborgs. I also think, and we'll talk more over the course of the episode about the extent to which things have changed or like become even more Haraway-esque in recent decades, but I think the way that most of us use our smartphones is very cyborg esque as well too.

It's not physically attached to us or implanted within us, although as we know, that is like the future that a lot of Silicon Valley technofeudalists see for us. But it's basically a prosthesis and an extension of our body, like it is part of who we are. Our phones are.

[00:08:33] David: Yeah, it's the blending of the organic and the technological. And one important thing to point out at the very beginning of our discussion of this essay is that for Haraway, the cyborg is a figure of the future, but it doesn't mean that it's a figure to come in. In other words, we're not waiting for the cyborg to arrive. The cyborg is already here. We are already cyborg, like.

[00:08:56] Ellie: Well, no, we actually are stronger than that. She says we are all cyborgs.

[00:09:00] David: Yeah. And so she says, we find cyborgs, of course, in the world of imagination, like in sci-fi, but we also find them in the world of medicine, like with the knee replacement. We find them in the world of war. Think about a soldier that has all this technology in order to enhance their sensory capacities, to detect danger movement, to spot bombs, to be able to protect themselves.

That has an armor also in the world of production. So when we go to work in factories, we often produce commodities with the aid of large machines, right? That function as extensions of our physical body, and that give us capabilities that our biological bodies wouldn't have. Think about a machine that I used to lift very heavy objects that makes me a cyborg.

And so everywhere we look, humans are already intertwined with technology, even when it comes to seemingly basic human functions or quintessentially human functions like labor or thinking or even experience, right? Like if you wear glasses, for example, you are achieving sight through a mixture of biology and technology.

[00:10:14] Ellie: And I think the reason that Haraway says that we're all cyborgs, is because the proliferation of new technologies and the intertwining of human and machine as you described it, actually has led to a breakdown of the distinction between the organism and the machine. And so she thinks that the age of the cyborg is the age of the breakdown of three crucial distinctions.

The first is the human-animal distinction. The second is the organism-machine distinction, and the third is the physical-non-physical distinction. So maybe we can say a little bit about each of those. David, I would love to go out of order because we've just been talking about the organism and machine distinction.

So do you think that makes sense to start with, or do you think we should go in her order?

[00:10:59] David: I think we can go into her order So you mentioned the breakdown of the distinction between the human and the animal

[00:11:04] Ellie: Okay.

[00:11:05] David: Keep in mind that Haraway herself has written quite a lot also in the field of animal studies.

[00:11:10] Ellie: And after this point, we're doing old school Haraway here, but she's written a ton of stuff since.

[00:11:15] David: Yeah, but even, I mean, her first book after her dissertation, I believe was primate Visions, which is about primatology. And one of the insights from primatology, especially in the wake of Darwin's theory of natural selection, of course, is that we are animals. And so the old humanist dream of humans as separate from the rest of the natural world has completely evaporated.

And so we live in a world where we recognize our ity, but we have anxieties around the human-animal distinction. And so she says already, we know that this distinction is not sustainable and that we cannot police it without risking serious contradiction. And so we're cyborg in that we are human and not human at the same time.

The second distinction that also has become porous in our culture is the distinction between organism and machine. Think about how our very life as living organisms is now inseparable from the technologies that we rely on for maintaining and protecting and extending that life.

The third distinction, the final one, which honestly was the one that I struggled with the most, is the distinction between the physical and the non-physical. And Haraway talks a lot about miniaturization, the fact that technologies are becoming smaller and smaller and smaller, and somehow that challenges the physical versus non-physical dimensions.

And I'm wondering, Ellie, whether you understood that connection better than me and maybe can help me understand it.

[00:12:50] Ellie: Okay. Yeah. So the idea is that the boundary between the physical and the non-physical has started to become blurred. I actually think this totally tracks with the increasingly virtual lives that we live. And part of the argument here gets into what she describes as miniaturization, which I wanna come back to because it has to do with the kind of rise of feminization in the workplace as well.

So yeah, Haraway writing about the feminization of the workplace decades before you get that conservative column that went viral a few months ago about the feminization of the workplace. She has a very different understanding of it though, so we will come back later to that. But in the context of this claim about the breakdown of the physical-non-physical distinction, she talks about how modern technology is often straight up tiny.

So silicon chips, for instance, that becomes a kind of surface for writing. So tiny in fact, that, you know, in the move from, say, a cotton gin or a Ford assembly line for constructing automobiles to a silicon chip. There's also a move to a less physical way of experiencing that technology. So think about your iPhone.

The iPhone is a piece of machinery. It is physical in the sense that it is something that you hold in your hand, but it comports us to a non-physical realm of the virtual where I actually hold the world in my hand when I hold my iPhone in my hand. I'm scrolling through images of Italy or Egypt or you know, somebody's home that I don't even know where it is, or a stranger's feed.

And so it's taking us beyond the physical, it's taking us into a different realm or world and thereby kind of blurring the line between the physical and the non-physical. And that's even just talking about an iPhone. I think we could also talk about virtual reality headsets here. She talks about video games. I think those are ways of thinking about it.

[00:14:46] David: Yeah. Okay. So if I think about it in terms of our experience of those technologies, maybe the fact that we forget how many pieces some of these technologies have and all the labor that goes into the construction of them, maybe I can understand it. I just don't know that I would want to say that miniature pieces are non-physical, you know, that's where I was experiencing a little bit of resistance to her line of thinking, because I don't think that the virtual is the same as the miniature.

So I agree that the virtual is non-physical, but I would wanna draw a distinction between those two.

[00:15:17] Ellie: So I think she's trying to maybe say that like with the increasing miniaturization also comes a tendency towards virtuality altogether. And so she writes, our best machines are made of sunshine. They are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves and so on and so forth.

And so the iPhone, while physical, it's a shiny screen. Nowadays it's very different to have an iPhone face that is just a clear screen than it is to have an iPhone that also has buttons on it. Or if you think about like, you know, the old cell phones where there was just a tiny screen and then a bunch of buttons.

I think like that's a place where we see miniaturization also becoming non physicalization.

[00:16:00] David: Yeah. And in terms of the progression of the article, you know, she's talking about the cyborg. She's talking about what the cyborg represents and how it emerges because of changes in, science and technology, but also politics. Remember, this is about trying to make sense of liberatory leftist discourse in the age of Reagan in the 1980s.

And she then makes the argument that the reason the cyborg is, as she puts it, our ontology, it is what we are. It's largely because our social reality has changed and moved in the direction of cyborg dynamics. So here she's thinking largely about how, we kind of live in a cyborg world. So it's not just us who are cyborgs, it's the world that we inhabit. So, for example, she points out that we now live under a political regime that she calls the informatics of Domination, where domination works not by targeting the biological bodies of subjects that are unified and sort of torn as under by external political forces, but rather it works at the level of coding, at the level of robotics, at the level of genetic engineering.

So we nowadays inhabit a world that is ruled by concepts like systems, informatics, cybernetics, and that's what makes the world require a new model of resistance that's ultimately also going to be provided for Haraway by this figure of the cyborg. We live in this new world and so we need new models and new myths of freedom and revolution.

[00:17:42] Ellie: I mean, I think we do need new models and myths of freedom, but I take it that part of what she's saying is that the informatics of domination are not targeting the body in the way that they used to. So she says that the cyborg is not subject to Foucault's Biopolitics. And some of the examples that she uses in the move from old domination to new informatics of domination are things like a move from reproduction to replication, a move from a racial chain of being to neo imperialism, a move from eugenics to population control.

And I just think it's way too optimistic to think that we've moved away from some of those things in the first category, like eugenics, reproduction, and what was the other thing I said?

[00:18:37] David: Oh, I forget which one you said,

[00:18:38] Ellie: Racial chain of being. Yeah. Like those things are all things that the Trump administration right now is absolutely leveraging in its fascist rule.

And so I, I think we're sort of seeing new forms of domination while also still seeing new versions of old ones. And so I think there's often an overstatement of the kinds of changes that are being wrought in the present day. And also an overstatement around like the extent to which we are cyborgs.

Because I also think I really want to talk to you about AI here. I don't think the distinctions are quite as leaky as she suggests.

[00:19:11] David: Yeah, and we'll get to our criticisms of this text, of which I'm sure there will be many. But she has this list halfway into the article where she has two columns. One is the old world of domination, and one that really stood out for me is that in the old world, we used to think about mind. And in the new world, we think about artificial intelligence.

In the old world, we think about World War II. In the new world, we think about Star Wars. In the old world, this is the last example I'll use, we still are committed to the notion of representation, whereas in the new world, it's all about simulation and simulacra. And so at the very least, she is trying to give us a new diagnosis of the social circumstance in which we find ourselves and explaining the need for a new theoretical lens, which this cyborg manifesto, I suppose, is meant to provide a model or a blueprint.

[00:20:10] Ellie: Yeah, and I mean, one thing I do think she's absolutely right about is that the new forms of domination involve an intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment. I think she's, right. I think we've seen a huge rise in precarity in wealth inequality and in like a real lack of creativity around not only hobbies, but also just actual life projects in recent decades due to the rise of, you know, just like scrolling or watching TV or whatever.

Not that I'm against those things in general, but I do think that they've had obviously negative effects too. So I take it that that's a really important point here.

[00:20:47] David: One thing that clicked for me about the aims of this essay is when she says, because we live in this world of the informatics of domination, most of the theoretical frameworks that the left has used for diagnosing and trying to undo the status quo, we need to get rid of them. So for example, if you ask a classical feminist, and by classical I here mean 1980s and 1970s feminism.

What the source of the problem is, they would say patriarchy. If you ask a Marxist what the problem is, they would say it's capitalism. And so all these discourses, as far as haraway is concerned, have a monocultural interpretation of the problem where all the problems in the world are reducible to one explanation.

And unfortunately, that explanation does not actually fit the new reality in which we find ourselves. And so we need to abandon our concern with racism, patriarchy, and capitalism as like individual systems and rather see how they are all interacting in very complex ways in this new informatics of domination.

[00:21:55] Ellie: Yeah, and this is where her feminist project comes in because she's trying to resist the sort of politics of identity that I mentioned earlier, because nothing about being female binds women. And she has a critique of feminist who sort of take this identifying project, or even like you said, a sort of identification of patriarchy as the root problem.

She thinks that's, you know, an issue. And this is where she moves to women of color theory. She draws particularly on the work of Chela Sandoval, who is trying to offer a vision of unity without appropriation or identification. On Haraway's reading of Sandoval women of color constructs a postmodernist identity out of otherness difference and specificity.

This postmodern identity is fully political. And so women of color is an identity category, but not one that has any essential content to it. It has only a political, strategic form of identity. And I found this to be so interesting to read in the present day when women of color has become such a more popular term than it ever would've been in the eighties when Sandoval and Haraway were writing.

Because I think what you often see, is an appeal to women of color as an essential form of identity. And then a questioning of like, well, what does that mean? What does actually tying these people together? And from Sandoval's perspective, nothing is tying them together like, and that's actually the point.

And so Haraway suggests from the perspective of cyborgs, we're freed of the need to ground politics in a privileged position of the impression that incorporates all other domination. So sometimes, you know, you'll hear an appeal to the perspective of the marginalized as needing to be centered in overcoming oppression.

And that's actually something that Haraway resists. She thinks that that's a sort of privileging of an identity-based position that's not gonna work either. And it ultimately ends up kind of appealing to the idea that the oppressed are closer to nature, which of course is gonna be something she resists 'cause she's interested in thinking through the overcoming of the distinction between organism and machine.

And so one final note about that is that it also means recognizing that we are all fully implicated in the world. There are not some who are complicit and some who are innocent. And so move away from a politics of innocence towards a politics of complicity, stripped of identity, and freed from the need to root politics in identification.

[00:24:27] David: I'm really happy that you mentioned the essentialism point because that's what unites her references to women of color theory. And in particular, she says, this came out of anti-colonial and post-colonial discourses where women in colonial settings came to the realization that, look, there is no essence to who women of color are, were rather united by political circumstances shifting alliances, without any appeal to a transcendental thing that makes us women of color.

And that's what appeals to haraway about the figure of the cyborg. And that is that the cyborg by definition is a character without any essences, right? It's a combination. It's a mixture. It's a brick collage of competing elements to make up a cyborg. You take pieces of very different things and you make a subject, and this is what makes the cyborg ultimately radical and revolutionary, a cyborg she says, has no genesis. They're not born in a traditional way through reproduction.

They have no gender. A cyborg can live beyond the boundaries of a classical human life because of its reliance on technology. Aside from that, she also says that cyborgs blur the public-private distinction in really interesting ways, and they are. By their very nature not seeking unity, they are just seeking survival. And she says, that's what we find in the writings of women in the anti-colonial struggle.

That's what we find in Latinx feminist writings. And in the writings of, the black feminist tradition, it's an emphasis on survival rather than essence.

[00:26:12] Ellie: The Cyborg for Haraway is a potentially liberatory figure, but it also has roots in pretty rough conditions, the ones in which we find ourselves. She says that the cyborg is the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, but she also notes bastard children can be the most unfaithful to their father.

So she thinks we should reclaim the idea of the cyborg here.

[00:26:40] David: In favor of patricide.

[00:26:41] Ellie: Yeah. Well, we should kill the fathers of militarism and patriarchal capitalism and go for our cyborg identity.

[00:26:50] David: well before you go on, I'll just point out that this is also what she likes about the cyborg. That the cyborg is not caught up in the oedipal structure of the mother and father. The cyborg has no problem killing its father because there is no traditional family structure allegiance. Hence her claim that we also need to go beyond psychoanalysis.

[00:27:10] Ellie: Yeah, and that is definitely a big theme here too, the taking issue with the psychoanalytic kind of nuclear family structure, which is, you know, really rooted in the organismal and human model. So one of the things she says is that a lot of people think that the rise of technology has deepened a dualism between body and mind.

You might think about the way that there's like been a rise of the non-physical through the virtual world as a version of this, and if you think that the rise of technology has deepened the dualism between body and mind. Another way that this comes up is actually in one of the closer look episodes we did recently, which is Herbert Marcuse.

This idea that like with the rise of machines, human bodies are, you know, becoming less and less agential and we sort of need to reclaim them. Foucault talks about bodies and pleasures as being liberatory. She says. No resistance is not gonna be found in the organic body. We should move away from the false assumption that technology has deepened mind, body dualism, and instead recognize that it's actually overcome it.

It's broken it down, and therefore our resistance isn't gonna come from some nostalgic appeal to the organic body, but instead in the form of embracing our cyborg life. And I was thinking about this a lot in the context of some of the arguments around generative AI that we've seen and sometimes even ourselves made over the course of recent months, where the idea is like, well, generative AI like chatGPT and LLM is not actually a mind.

It doesn't do any thinking of its own. It's not an organism and therefore it's, you know, something that we need to resist. And whether or not I agree with Haraway that this is the wrong way to think about things, she certainly would think it's the wrong way to think about things. So I want us to put on our haraway hats and think about how she might respond to the rise of generative AI.

I mean, she's like literally still alive, but at least like on in the, on the basis of this particular, you know, essay that was written over 40 years ago.

[00:29:14] David: To answer this question, I want to add two points. The first one is to emphasize what you said earlier about the ambiguity of the figure of the cyborg. So yes, the cyborg appears in sci-fi as this rejection of gender, rejection of the oedipal family, new possibilities.

But the cyborg is also the eroticized fantasy of the police state, right? That's what Robocop is. That's what Terminator is. And so it's a sword with two edges, and she's very aware of this. So it's not as if technology is good, is her thesis. I think her thesis is that technology represents new challenges and therefore also new possibilities.

And there is a sentence that I really like from the essay that I marked. S he says, we need to start thinking about our new reality as making possible the emergence of quote, new pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game.

So she's asking us to think about how developments and changes that are not of our own creation and that we did not bring about as individuals, maybe offer us possibilities for staging a strategic resistance from within the system, from within technology, from within science, from within capitalism, and the cyborg is one of them.

Now, the second point here is. She does mention artificial intelligence once as our new way of thinking about the mind, and so artificial intelligence is part of that system of capitalism that seeks to convince us that, you know, we're just code and therefore code is just like us. I think she would raise certain questions about AI, certainly about the monopoly that certain corporations have over AI.

She would raise questions about the ecological impact of AI, but she also would encourage us to think creatively about how we can turn AI against its masters, and I don't really have a good answer as to what that looks like, but we cannot foreclose from the get go the possibility that AI is also the cradle for new possibilities of resistance as well.

[00:31:29] Ellie: Yeah. And when you think about the way that we humans tend to use LLMs, it is in a very cyborg like fashion. We're working with them, we are prompting them. There is a kind of at least relationship between organism and machine, whether or not you agree with her that the boundary is, you know, sort of falling away.

And she describes writing specifically as preeminently the technology of cyborgs. So she sees writing already as a technology that is cyborg oriented. And I think nowadays the automatic writing that happens through the output of the LLM after the prompt is really like an interesting version of what a post-structuralist would say has always been the structure of writing, which is that it has a certain kind of automatic character to it.

And I actually looked, I know we're doing a closer look episode, and so we really just like talk about the text mainly here and don't bring in a bunch of secondary material. But I did see online that there was, there's a scholar named Dave Yan who published an article last year that was about Cyborg subjectivity and Chat GPT and basically arguing that chatGPT offers us a way to embrace post-human creativity and therefore could kind of, you know, realize a certain dream of haraway vis-a-vis the cyborg.

[00:32:56] David: So I don't know how I feel about that because it makes chat, GPT and coding basically the God of post-structuralism and especially of Derridean deconstruction as if when these figures such as Derrida talk about writing, what they had in mind was something like a large language model. I actually think it's perfectly fair to say that chat, GPT and other large language models are not cyborgs, and that is because a cyborg has to be a combination of human flesh and technology, right? It has to have a combination of the two.

And I think in the case of large language models, they're just a technology, they're just a machine. The way we use them, of course, is cyborg. Like, especially if you consider some of the observations we made in recent episodes about how a lot of people use chat GPT as therapy. They ask it to clarify their sentiments to themselves, so on and so forth. So we use it in a cyborg way, but I don't think it on its own is a cyborg, because it doesn't have experience. And I think that's essential for a cyborg. It has an experience. It's just an experience without essences. It's an experience of hybridity.

[00:34:15] Ellie: I don't know though, David, I feel like you might be falling short of where Haraway wants us to go. So for one, the idea that a cyborg has to be a combination of human flesh and machine, although dictionary wise, that is a definition of a cyborg, I think Haraway wants us to really think through the way that the animal machine distinction is, or the organism machine distinction is breaking down.

And so I don't know whether you can really hold on to human flesh versus machine there and for another, I think you could say that on a certain level, the LLM is at least making use of human experience in virtue of the fact that it's trained on human made data. So I think if you don't just think about the output itself, but you think about what it's trained on, like there is a cyborg relationship there.

[00:35:11] David: So I want to object to the phrase it is making use of human experience. 'cause it is not making use of anything. It doesn't have interests, it doesn't have objectives or goals.

[00:35:20] Ellie: So we are making use of it through that medium, which would be even more cyborg-like.

[00:35:25] David: Oh yeah, yeah. We as like technological beings. Our cyborgs and our use of the internet as an example, our use of large language models is, but I think the argument in the present is often going one step beyond. And that is to say that the LLM itself independently of human interactions with it, once it has been created, is itself a cyborg.

And certainly, I don't wanna say that a cyborg has to have a human component, but I do think it has to have an organic component in order to be a cyborg. And that's what a large language model doesn't have. And that's where it falls short of this figure, at the very least.

[00:36:07] Ellie: Well then I think maybe we could just say that the LLM itself is not a cyborg on your reading, but I still think it's fair to say that the way people use LLMs is, you know, cyborg existence.

[00:36:17] David: Oh, I agree with that.

[00:36:20] Ellie: Yeah. And you know, in relation to this, I was thinking about the feminization that she describes in which we alluded to earlier as being related to like her miniaturization argument.

So I wanna walk us through this a little bit and then I'm curious what you think about it in the context of what we've just been saying. She suggests, as you mentioned earlier, that the cyborg is not structured by a polarity between the private and the public. But it definitely seems like the cyborg while breaking down or trading on an existing breakdown of the public-private distinction is related to private life.

So she says that the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos household. Why did I choose to read that very dense passage? I think it makes sense, but now I have to break it down.

Basically. technology has led to a revolution of social relations within the household. Like some of the ways that people use technology first and foremost are in things like laundry machines, dishwashers, et cetera. Certainly the rise of smartphones has revolutionized the household, and I'm also thinking about the way that people tend to use chat GBT for kind of basic household needs. The way that I have found chatGPT to be most useful, I use it very sparingly, as we've talked about in our Chat bots episode, like I'm pretty critical of a lot of features of it, but I'm not a hundred percent just like an.

Abolitionist of it. I would, I'm an abolitionist of open ai, but you know, I think like the technologies and LLMs themselves there could be a very small place for, and I had, there was like some weird stuff in my childhood bedroom attic where I now live. I don't live in the attic, but I do live in my childhood home.

And so there was like a weird thing in the attic there and I didn't know what it was. And my sister was like, Ellie just cave and upload it on chatGPT and chatGPT identified what it was, which was like fallen down insulation and it saved us a special trip to the house. And I've been hearing about a lot of people using it for sort of household needs.

And so I feel like there's acommon idea that AI is most useful in the workplace, but actually like a lot of people are using it within the household. And I think it speaks to what Haraway describes as a sort of homework economy and the feminization of work. And one other additional point there, sorry, I feel like I have a lot, I'm like really going off on a soapbox here, so I hope I'm not talking much.

But, she talks about how work is being redefined as both literally female and as feminized. And like one angle that we could take on that is the fact that so many of these LLMs are feminized also just, I mean, AI in general, feminized like Siri, Alexa, et cetera, all of those voices being feminized. But then also the way that people are using cha GPT, you know, so pervasively involves the sexualization eroticization of it that's tied up with its feminization.

So I feel like those were some things I was thinking about here.

[00:39:25] David: Yeah, and I think the larger point that I extracted from Haraway in connection to this homework economy, the feminization of work, and also the way in which science and technology impacts the governance of the household, the oikonomos, is that whenever you have a new technological or scientific development, it cannot but change how we live in private space, in the home.

And since the home is also the sort of encasing for other social relations like the family, those developments ultimately have an impact on the family as well. And therefore on everything that the family implies, right? Like the reproduction of children, the creation of a whole new generation of citizens, the futurity of the nation, so on and so forth.

So for example, whenever you have changes in the workplace, it affects the structure of the family. Think about the fact that during World War II, when men primarily had to go to war, women had to go to work in factories because you couldn't find male workers. And that really changed gender dynamics and family dynamics.

You could give a contemporary version of this in terms of the rise of the nomad worker or men workers who now work from home, even if they have high paying jobs. It has transformed men. Those men who now work regularly from home because they're working virtually into domestic subjects, which was traditionally the space of femininity. And the work that happened in the home used to not even be recognized as work.

Also, as new technologies liberate us from the need to perform domestic tasks. You know, I saw that some company was rolling out a robot that will fold your clothes. It liberates those who are expected to do that labor, from that labor making possible new relationships.

And one of the examples that is really central to understanding her argument, that work as a whole has become feminized is her claim that in the age of the informatics of domination, where it's all about cybernetics and electronics, what we really need in order for this regime of power to reproduce itself is literally that electronics and who performs the labor of creating electronics.

It's primarily women working under terrible conditions in the third world. And so yes, work is feminized, but changes in work also end up having an effect on family dynamic, gender dynamics, so on and so forth.

[00:42:05] Ellie: Alright, David. Time has come to talk about some of our takes based on reading or rereading this text. And a place I wanna start is just by mentioning the last line because it's a very famous line where Haraway concludes by saying, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. And I have to say on rereading it, even though that line's really famous, I feel like it doesn't hit, I think what she actually means is I would rather be a cyborg than a woman because the whole point of the text has been to contest the category of woman as like a valid category to use in feminist theory.

The goddess barely even comes in and I don't think it really matters that much. So I actually think what she means to say is, I would rather be a cyborg than a woman. Rather than, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. I think that takes me to the first kind of critical comment I wanna make about this text, which is that sometimes she says things that sound good, but I'm like not totally sure what they mean.

I was noticing how many times she uses lists. So like there is a whole discussion of these different domains of contemporary life, home, market, workplace, clinic, hospital, church, school, and state. And the contents of that list are just in turn lists of like strings of words together. So under home, it's women headed households, serial monogamy, flight of men, old women alone, and so on and so forth.

And I'm just like, we, those are interesting phrases, but I don't know what I'm supposed to take from this. And so I think part of what was appealing to me about rereading this text is the sense that it is so highly relevant to a lot of things that we're experiencing today. And yet I also had the feeling that maybe I was reading more into it than was there because there is so much room for interpretation.

It's almost like her appeal to lists and the way the text is written sometimes felt like a Rorschach test where you could interpret it in whatever way it just kind of struck you.

[00:44:07] David: And to be clear, this is not an easy text even independently of all those lists. I think the lists do complicate the text, but also it's long, it's difficult, it's high theory, but it's imprecise in many places in its use of important terms precisely because it's moving through a lot of terms relatively quickly.

So I agree with you that it's easy to maybe apply a principle of charity that allows us to see in it what we wanna see.

Now in terms of the central figure of this essay, which is the cyborg, one thing that worried me at the end of the piece is that it's really hard to pinpoint the political orientation and the political content of that figure. And she herself recognizes it when she talks about ambiguity, right? The cyborg is a figure of liberation and progressivism, and you can find a cyborg in an Octavia Butler short story.

[00:45:06] Ellie: You had these beautiful descriptions of like science fiction.

[00:45:09] David: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I agree with that. But you also find the cyborg in techno militarism in the military industrial complex, in the police state, in the surveillance state. And so if we were to embrace the cyborg identity, or whatever we wanna call it, how do we ensure that the orientation of our cyborg futuristic project leans left rather than right?

And moreover, given the capture of projects by these larger systems of domination, do we even get to make that choice about our own cyborgs? So if I literally go out there and implant a bunch of technologies that, you know, have an origin in military r and d projects, do I get to determine that it's liberatory Just because my intentions drove me to it independently of the material reality that made possible those technologies and the social meaning that is attributed to them by forces larger than me.

[00:46:06] Ellie: Yeah. I was thinking about a couple of things as you were speaking. One is the fact that I think a really contemporary example of the cyborg, although it's one that's less attended to than the LLM human relationship, is the people in the global south who are remotely monitoring the delivery robots that one sees in cities like LA and San Francisco.

You know where that's like the epitome of alienated gig work under cyborg capitalism. And then also I'm reading this really interesting and fun novel right now called Made for Love by Alyssa Nutting. And there are two kind of cyborg relations that emerged there.

One is the woman. She was like married to a Google type of founder, you know, fictionalized in the novel, who wanted to meld their minds together through implanting silicon chips in the brain. But you know, she sensed that that was actually gonna be a tool of domination and a very like gender domination because he was extremely controlling. And then she goes back to her father's trailer park in Florida and she finds that he is like now in a relationship with a sex doll.

And so then there's like this kind of cyborg sex too that's happening. And I don't know that I have like any point to make about that other than that was just coming to mind as like, these are examples that I think are very contemporary examples of cyborgs that really aren't necessarily liberatory.

[00:47:32] David: No, and I can imagine also how, think about what we talked about in our biohacking episode and think about also developments like cryogenics, how any effort to blend with technology is already rendered legible, only as a yearning for masculine immortality, for transcending our biology. And so the meaning again, may not be up to us.

[00:47:56] Ellie: Yeah, and I think related to this, but from a different angle. One of the things that I wanted to chew on from the article is her suggestion that a lot of the scientific and technical workers in Silicon Valley, the high tech cowboys included, she says, do not wanna work on military science. And so she wonders whether the personal preferences and cultural tendencies of these tech workers who tend, or at least tended to be in the eighties, kind of like anti-military industrial complex, could be welded into a progressive politics among the professional middle class that in which women, including women of color, are coming to be fairly numerous.

So she had a sort of positive vision of what Silicon Valley could look like. Centering women of color, which as we know is not like a contentful identity for her, but actually a postmodern identity that disrupts like identity politics altogether. And I just read that and I was like, oh, oh sweetie. 1985 must have been so optimistic because now like the Silicon Valley tech workers are totally in the pockets of the military industrial complex.

And does that stand at odds with the fact that most of them are in a sort of professional middle class that tends to skew liberal? Yes. Do any of them seem to care? No. Are we heading headlong into fascism? Yes.

[00:49:23] David: I love this sequence of questions because I do think it highlights the danger that I think she's not taking seriously enough of co-option. But this also brings me to another criticism of the article that I want to articulate that has to do with what's the point of this article and what's the objective.

So very early on, she says, this is a quote where she outlines her mission in this project, she says, this essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. So she says, we need to recognize that these boundaries are breaking down and that we can find new pleasures, embrace new subjectivities, take up new projects in that confusion.

Secondarily, we have to take responsibility for the role that we play in the construction of those boundaries and those projects in the first place. So my criticism here is about both of the key terms here, pleasure and responsibility. In connection to pleasure if the purpose of this article is to encourage us to take pleasure in this confusion, I'm not sure that I see that as sufficient for grounding a progressive project.

I don't think pleasure understood as like enjoyment of the breaking down of boundaries is accessible in the same way for everybody. Because many of these boundaries that we talked about, like the human animal distinction that has collapsed for people of color for a long time, who have been animalized.

[00:50:56] Ellie: Oh my goodness.

[00:50:57] David: Should I be taking pleasure in the animalization of the human as a person of color, similarly for women, similarly for other identity positions.

And so how far does pleasure? Take us when it's the end all be all of a political project. What's the relationship between pleasure and justice? What's its relationship to liberation? What's its relationship to equality? The second part of this is responsibility where she says, we have to take responsibility for the construction of these boundaries.

I actually think that's a commendable goal that I share. But this is where her appeal to irony gets really, really confusing for me because over and over again, she says we need to embrace the cyborg as an ironic figure and sort of do so in an ironic way. And the thing about irony is that it allows you, by definition, irony is when you say something, but you actually convey a very different message than what you say.

So if I tell you, Ellie, and I'm trying to be ironic, I really love your top today, but I do so in a way that conveys that I actually don't like it at all, it allows me to hide behind the surface of what I've actually stated. And so in relation to the cyborg, I just don't understand how this fosters responsibility.

If our relationship to the cyborg is ironic or if the cyborg is an ironic character, because in fact, that only makes the co-option by the right wing and by conservative forces even easier, right? I f somebody says, Hey, I wanna pump funding into the creation of a literal Robocop, wink, wink, I'm being ironic, I don't really know how to interpret that. So the role of irony here made me wanna jump off of the bandwagon.

[00:52:49] Ellie: I think these are excellent points. Like I totally agree with you that this appeal to pleasure and responsibility is difficult to square with some of the other claims in the text, and I actually don't really know what to make of it. It kind of feels like the, I, you know, mentioned Foucault earlier, this appeal to bodies and pleasures, which I feel like comes in the history of sexuality, kind of out of nowhere and is meaningless, but people totally fixate on.

I feel something similar here, although maybe for not entirely the same reasons. So I think I wholly agree with your argument about pleasure and confusion of boundaries. How does that work when like many of the people whom we would want to center actually have been associated with the animal to begin with and also, I feel like pleasure is always kind of a tricky place to start a political project or even an ethical project to be honest.

And the responsibility point. I really liked the way that you'd articulated that, but I wanna like mention two related things. So one is reading this back, it's so strange that she says we need to take responsibility for the construction of boundaries, because I thought she was all about the kind of breakdown of boundaries.

And so is she saying we now have control to construct boundaries. What if one of the boundaries that people in 2026 want to construct is the boundary between organism and machine? Because the machines are, you know, increasingly seeming to take over our lives in the case of LLMs and, and you know, the robots, and so forth.

So the robot gig workers. So I think that's a little strange to me. But then I think a different way of putting the responsibility concern is that I think she has cut off at the knees any possibility for responsibility by saying that there's no like identity or self. And so one of the things that I also have an issue with in this text is her conflation of identity politics with a concept of self.

And she's all about like dispersion. And I actually think we need to hold onto the concept of the self while also questioning kind of an identity-based feminist politics. Because I think the self is the locus of responsibility. And I know that kind of like seems cringe, but I really do think that's the case.

And so when she talks, for instance about moving from identity politics to affinity following Chela Sandoval. An affinity might be taken to be an affinity of values, but who has values? We have collective values, but we also need to take responsibility for our values individually. And so I think like a more communicative politics where we are building values, both individually and in relation to one another would be required for responsibly constructive boundaries.

[00:55:31] David: Even the idea that there is this Western traditional humanist self that we need to transcend through becoming cyborg, I'm not sure that she succeeds in that regard either, because where she ends is in this idea that what Cyborgs do is write, they tell stories, and that's what she likes about the black feminist tradition.

That's also what she likes about science fiction, and I found it somewhat ironic that she ends up reifying writing as like the ultimate value, where in fact, that's also very much a humanist position, right? That what separates us from the rest of the animals is that we have writing and that we are storytellers as opposed to all the other animals.

And so I felt like she, she ended in a kind of crypto humanism, a humanism that is not recognized as such by using this invocation of writing is the pathway to liberation, which I don't really see why writing plays that privileged role in this essay.

[00:56:33] Ellie: Well much to chew on here. I did really enjoy revisiting this essay. It made me think I should go back and and teach it in some of my future classes. I'm looking forward to talking more in the Substack bonus. Segment. So if you subscribe, join us over there, and if you don't, I hope you'll consider subscribing.

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our substack for extended ad-free episodes, community chats, and additional overthink content.

[00:57:00] David: To connect with us, find episode transcripts and make one time tax deductible donations. Go to overthink podcast.com. You can also check us out on YouTube as well as TikTok and Instagram at overthink_pod.

[00:57:13] Ellie: We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistants Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.