Before you read this, it's worth your time to check out Haraway's Wikipedia page. The criticism section sums things up nicely:
Haraway's work has been criticized for being "methodologically vague" and using noticeably opaque language that is "sometimes concealing in an apparently deliberate way". Several reviewers have argued that her understanding of the scientific method is questionable, and that her explorations of epistemology at times leave her texts virtually meaning-free.
This manifesto is exactly the kind of nonsense that led Alan Sokal to send his fake paper to Social Text. Essays like this should come with a Surgeon General's warning: this writing may be amusing, but if you take it seriously it will rot your brain.
> at times leave her texts virtually meaning-free.
This statement makes no sense. What is the methodology these reviewers used such that they can determine how much meaning is in a text? And what is the difference between a text that is "virtually" meaning-free and 100% meaning-free with no modifier? What is the threshold for a text to have an epsilon of meaning? I'm sure those reviews came with p-values.
I might say that those reviewers' understanding of continental philosophy is questionable and at times leave their texts virtually meaning-free.
> methodologically vague
This criticism shows the ignorance of those who made it. This isn't a scientific empirical study, it is humanistic philosophy in the continental tradition. Nietzsche and Camus didn't have a methodology either.
Out of curiosity: what kind of philosophy do you like? Are you open to any psychoanalytic or marxist methods, if executed with enough scientific rigor? Honest question. I'm guessing basically all of HN agrees with you, so no offense intended!
TBF, AFAIR Sokal was criticizing Literary Criticism, not philosophy. I guess she does invoke a few science fiction stories here so the line is blurred, but its clearly instrumental. Namely for this purpose:
Haraway uses the cyborg metaphor to explain how fundamental contradictions in feminist theory and identity should be conjoined, rather than resolved, similar to the fusion of machine and organism in cyborgs. The manifesto is also an important feminist critique of capitalism by revealing how men have exploited women's reproduction labor, providing a barrier for women to reach full equality in the labor market.
Sorry, I've been a die hard fan of her for the past 30 minutes, as you can probably tell! So I'm more than a bit biased.
I was forced to read this in freshman English… it was awful. Realized you could make it say whatever you want and used that for the essay I wrote
You're right, English teachers should only be teaching works of literature that have one and only one objectively correct interpretation, like the Bible.
> [T]eachers should only be teaching works of literature that have one and only one objectively correct interpretation, like the Bible.
That's a non-sequitur. What they are saying is that: "if a text can mean anything, then by definition it means nothing."
Not coincidentally, this nothingness is part of the postmodernist project of "destabilizing meaning" which is in direct opposition to, as a rejection of, the progress of technology and science, which instead seeks to discover empirically what things are and what the truth is.
> AN IRONIC DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT
Despite being written before LLMs, it really does seem like it was written by one from that title alone.
Stuff like this and CCRU is some of my favorite literary junk food.
There's an Instagram account called @cyborg.asm that famously matches up quotes from this text with Hajime Sorayama illustrations. Gotta love a good gimmick.
I remember this era of cool and transgressive feminism and it had echoes of the late 60s "scum manifesto," and I even still have some Jenny Holzer art around here somewhere. "biological-determinism" was the thing to revolt against at the time. seeing writing from that time now, I remember presentations about archeological finds of crude goddess icons and carved stone sexual aids from more idealized ancient (and ostensibly non-patriarchal) civilizations and wondering how nobody else seemed to notice that these were all that remained of them.
I think what's come out of it is that 35+ years ago this was a conversation, and now it's just a power struggle.
she was right in that tech and feminism are inseparable because the homogenization of roles and overcoming physical sexual dimorphism is only possible with some kind of external technical aid. the argument at the time was even "nature," was part of the patriarchal ontology that must be rejected. sure, we can subordinate people to machines and processes that sustain an equality narrative, but they get quickly overrun by people who are not subject to it.
imo, millennia from now archeologists will be finding our own silicone dongs and wondering what could have befallen a civilization so advanced that it could produce these things in the billions, and yet so little else of it remains.
Wow, thanks for sharing, incredible stuff. I'm happily surprised to see this upvoted on here, I guess HN hides a sizable-yet-silent group of my fellow hopeless hippies!
Before approaching the content, the writing style here is one of the best versions of the vaguely french provocative style loved by psychoanalysts -- this is what Zizek, Boudrillard, and Foucault are/were ever striving towards. Occasionally funny yet deadly serious, poetically symbolic yet scientifically minded, and unique yet eminently comprehensible. It's infectious!
Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste.
Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.
Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction... We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.
Thanks again, OP. I'll have to look into this author more!