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A MANIFESTO FOR CYBORGS:
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND
SOCIALIST FEMINISM IN THE 1980s
AN I R O N I C D R EAM O F A C O M M O N LAN G UAGE FOR WO M E N IN T H E I N TEGRAT E D C I R C U I T
This essay i s a n effort t o build a n ironic political myth faithful t o fem inism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist-feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still in sisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialecti cally, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honored within socialist feminism. At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organ ism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construc tion, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed "women's experience:' as well as uncovered or discov ered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction
8 • A Man ifesto for Cyborgs
of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs-creatures simulta neously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings be tween organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sex uality. Cyborg "sex" restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against hetero sexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization of work, a dream that makes the nightmare ofTaylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3 1, command-control-communication intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1 984's U.S. defense budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruit ful couplings. Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cy borg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transforma tion. In the traditions of "Western" science and politics-the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tra dition 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. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This essay 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 post-modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe al�o a world without end. The cyborg incar nation is outside salvation history. Nor does the cyborg mark time on an Oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral-symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis
10 • A Manifesto for Cyborgs
for connection-they seem to have a natural feel for united front pol itics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this essay, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary breakdowns that make the following political fictional (political scientific) analysis possible. By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beach heads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks-language, tool use, social behav ior, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation ofhuman and animal. And many peo ple no longer feel the need of such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are dear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolu tionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects ofknowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social sciences. Within this frame work, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in sci entific culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is much room for radical political people to contest for the meanings of the breached boundary. 1 The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from sig naling a walling off of people from other liv ing beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange. The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was al ways the specter of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a di alectical progeny, called spir�t or history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-mov ing, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream,. only mock it. They were not man! an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream.
Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s • 1 1
To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late-twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. Technological determinism is only one ideological space opened up by the reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world. 2 "Textu alization" of everything in post -structuralist, post-modernist theory has been damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its utopian disre gard for lived relations of domination that ground the "play" of arbitrary reading.3• It is certainly true that post-modernist strategies, like my cy borg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (e.g., the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature-a source of insight and a promise of innocence-is under mined, probably fatally. The transcendent authorization of interpreta tion is lost, and with it the ontology grounding "Western" epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, i.e., some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological determinism de stroying "man" by the "machine" or "meaningful political action" by the "text:' Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of surv ival. Both chimpanzees and artifacts have politics, so why shouldn't we? The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on
- A provocative, comprehensive argument about the politics and theories of "post-modernism" is made by Frederick jameson, who argues that post-modernism is not an option, a style among others, but a cultural dominant requiring radical reinvention of left politics from within; there is no longer any place from without that gives meaning to the comforting fiction of critical distance. jameson also makes clear why one cannot be for or against post-modernism, an essentially moralist move. My position is that feminists (and others) need continuous cultural reinvention, post-modernist critique, and historical materialism; only a cyborg would have a chance. The old dominations of white capitalist patriarchy seem nostalgically innocent now: they normalized heterogeneity, e.g., into man and woman, white and black. "Advanced capitalism" and post-modernism release heterogeneity without a norm, and we are flattened, without subjectivity, which requires depth, even unfriendly and drowning depths. It is time to write The Death ofthe Clinic. The clinic's methods required bodies and works; we have texts and surfaces. Our dominations don't work by medicalization and normalization anymore; they work by networking, communications redesign, stress management. Normalization gives way to automation, utter redundancy. Michel Foucault's Birth of the Clinic, History of Sexuality, and Discipline and Punish name a form of power at its moment of implosion. The discourse of biopolitics gives way to technobabble, the language of the spliced substantive; no noun is left whole by the multinationals. These are their names, listed from one issue of Science: Tech-Knowledge, Genentech, Allergen, Hybritech, Compupto, Genen-cor, Syntex, Allelix, Agrigenetics Corp., Syntro, Codon, Repligen, Micro-Angelo from Scion Corp., Percom Data, Inter Systems, Cyborg Corp., Statcom Corp., lntertec. If we are imprisoned by language, then escape from that prison house requires language poets, a kind of cultural restriction enzyme to cut the code; cyborg heteroglossia is one form of radical culture politics.
Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s • 13
one part of needed political work. One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formulations, and physical artifacts associated with "high technology" and scientific culture. From One-Dimensional Man to The Death of Nature, 6 the analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance. Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies.
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 War apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appro priation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war? From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily reali ties 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 because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimagin able from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are mon strous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools of technological apocalypse, and com mitted to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long" enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name of the affi.Q.ity group in my town. (Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity. )
FRACT U R E D I D E N TITI E S
I t has become difficult t o name one's feminism b y a single adjective or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis
14 • A Man ifesto for Cyborgs
for belief in "essential" unity. There is nothing about being "female" that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as "being" female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. 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. And who counts as "us" in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called "us:' and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women's dominations of each other. For me and for many who share a similar historical location in white, professional middle class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies-the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the U.S. left and U.S. 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. 8 Chela Sandoval, from a consideration of specific historical moments in the formation of the new political voice called women of color, has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called "oppositional con sciousness;' born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. 9 "Women of color;' a name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorpo rate, as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic breakdown of all the signs of Man in "Western" traditions, constructs a kind of post modernist identity out of otherness and difference. This post-modernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said about other possible post-modernisms. Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of color. She notes that the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation. For example, a Chicana or U.S. black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities, left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial categories called "women and blacks," who claimed to make the impor tant revolutions. The category "woman" negated all non-white women; "black" negated all non-bl11ck people, as well as all black women. But there was also no "she;' no singularity, but a sea of differences among U. S. women who have affirmed their historical identity as U. S. women of color. This identity marks out a self-consciously constr�cted space
16 • A Man ifesto for Cyborgs
feminisms have also undermined their/our own epistemological strate gies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all "epistemologies" as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to build effective affinities. It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary stand points, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of identifica tion. The acid tools of post-modernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival. We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically con stituted body. But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the na"ivete of innocence. But what would another political myth for socialist feminism look like? What kind of politics could embrace par tial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective-and, ironically, socialist feminist? I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of "race;' "gender;' "sexuality;' and "class." I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible. None of "us" have any longer the symbolic or material capability of dic tating the shape of reality to any of "them:' Or at least "we" cannot claim innocence from practicing such dominations. White women, including socialist feminists, discovered (i.e., were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the non-innocence of the category "woman." That consciousness changes the geography of all previous categories; it denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein. 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. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give late-twentieth-century people pause as well. In the fraying of identities and in the reflexive strategies for con structing them, the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history. Both Marxist/socialist feminisms and radical feminisms have simul taneously naturalized and qenatured the category "woman" and con sciousness of the social lives of "women." Perhaps a schematic caricature can highlight both kinds of moves. Marxian socialism is ro_oted in an
Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s • 1 7
analysis of wage labor which reveals class structure. The consequence of the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the worker is dissoci ated from his [ sic] product. Abstraction and illusion rule in knowledge, domination rules in practice. Labor is the pre-eminently privileged cat egory enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world. Labor is the humaniz ing activity that makes man; labor is an ontological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge of subjugation and alienation. In faithful filiation, socialist feminism advanced by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. The main achievement of both Marxist feminists and socialist feminists was to expand the category of labor to accommodate what (some) women did, even when the wage relation was subordinated to a more comprehensive view of labor under capitalist patriarchy. In particular, women's labor in the household and women's activity as mothers generally, i.e., reproduction in the socialist feminist sense, entered theory on the authority of analogy to the Marxian concept oflabor. The unity ofwomen here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological structure of "labor." Marxist/socialist feminism does not "naturalize" unity; it is a possible achievement based on a possible standpoint rooted in social relations. The essentializing move is in the ontological structure oflabor or of its analogue, women's activity. 13' 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.
Catharine MacKinnon's version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action. 14 It is factually and politically wrong to assimilate all of the diverse "moments" or "conversations" in recent women's politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon's version. But the teleological logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontology-including their negations-erase or police difference. Only one of the effects of MacKinnon's theory is the rewriting of the history of the polymorphous field called radical feminism. The major effect
· The central role of object-relations versions of psychoanalysis and related strong universalizing moves in dis cussing reproduction, caring work, and mothering in many approaches to epistemology underline their authors' resistance to what I^ am calling post-modernism. For me, both the universalizing moves and the versions of psy choanalysis make analysis of"women's place in the integrated circuit" difficult and lead to systematic difficulties in accounting for or even seeing major aspects of the construction of gender and gendered social life.
Science, Technology, and Social ist Feminism in the 1980s • 19
of all difference through the device of the "essential" non-existence of women is not reassuring. In my taxonomy, which like any other taxonomy is a reinscription of history, radical feminism can accommodate all the activities of women named by socialist feminists as forms of labor only if the activity can somehow be sexualized. Reproduction had different tones of meanings for the two tendencies, one rooted in labor, one in sex, both calling the consequences of domination and ignorance of social and personal reality "false consciousness." Beyond either the difficulties or the contributions in the argument of any one author, neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view have tended to embrace the status of a partial explanation; both were regularly constituted as totalities. Western explanation has demanded as much; how else could the "Western" author incorporate its others? Each tried to annex other forms of domination by expanding its basic cate gories through analogy, simple listing, or addition. Embarrassed silence about race among white radical and socialist feminists was one major, devastating political consequence. History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies. There was no structural room for race (or for much else) in theory claiming to reveal the construction of the category woman and social group women as a unified or totalizable whole. The structure of my caricature looks like this:
Socialist Feminism- structure of class//wage labor//alienation labor, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race Radical Feminism- structure of gender//sexual appropriation//objectification sex, by analogy labor, by extension reproduction, by addition race
In another context, the French theorist Julia Kristeva claimed women appeared as a historical group after World War II, along with groups like youth. Her dates are doubtful; but we are now accustomed to remem bering that as objects of knowledge and as historical actors, "race" did not always exist, "class" has a historical genesis, and "homosexuals" are quite junior. It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man-and so the essence of woman-breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex. ''Advanced capitalism" is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment. In the "Western" sense,
20 • A Manifesto for Cyborgs
the end of man is at stake. It is no accident that woman disintegrates into women in our time. Perhaps socialist feminists were not substantially guilty of producing essentialist theory that suppressed women's particu larity and contradictory interests. I think we have been, at least through unreflective participation in the logics, languages, and practices of white humanism and through searching for a single ground of domination to secure our revolutionary voice. Now we have less excuse. But in the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. "Epistemology" is about knowing the difference.
T H E I N FOR MAT I C S OF DOM I NAT I O N 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. The frame for my sketch is set by the extent and importance of rearrangements in worldwide social relations tied to science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; 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:
Representation Bourgeois novel, realism Organism Depth, integrity Heat Biology as clinical practice Physiology Small group Perfection Eugenics Decadence, Magic Mountain Hygiene · Microbiology, tuberculosis Organic division of labor
Simulation Science fiction, post-modernism Biotic component Surface, boundary Noise Biology as inscription Communications engineering Subsystem Optimization Population control
Obsole�c ce, Future Shock
Stress anagement Immu ology, AIDS. Ergonomics/ cybernetics of labor
22 • A Manifesto for Cyborgs
the level of ideology, we see translations of racism and colonialism into languages of development and underdevelopment, rates and constraints of modernization. Any objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no "natural" architectures con strain system design. The financial districts in all the world's cities, as well as the export-processing and free-trade zones, proclaim this elementary fact of"late capitalism." The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications engi neering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies. One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary con ditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries-and not on the integrity of natural objects. "Integrity" or "sincerity" of the Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems. For example, control strategies applied to women's capacities to give birth to new hu man beings will be developed in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decision-makers. Con trol strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other component or sub system, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analyzed so well. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress-communications breakdown. 16 The cyborg is not subject to Foucault's biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations.
This kind of analysis of scientific and cultural objects of knowledge which have appeared historically since World War II prepares us to no
tice some important inadequacies in�· feminist analysis which has pro
ceeded as if the organic, hierarchical d alisms ordering discourse in "the West" since Aristotle still ruled. They ave been cannibalized, or as Zoe Sofia (Sofoulis) might put it, they hav been "techno-digested." The di chotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, prim itive and civilized are all in question ideologically. The actual situation of women is their integration/exploitation into a world system of produc tion/reproduction and communication called the informati.cs of domi nation. The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself-all
Science, Technology, a nd Socialist Feminism in the 1980s • 23
can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others-consequences that themselves are very different for different people and which make potent oppositional international movements difficult to imagine and essential for survival. One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disas sembled and reassembled, post-modern 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 worldwide. 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. The boundary is perme able between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other. Furthermore, 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 resis tance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange. In communications sciences, the translation of the world into a prob lem in coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic (feedback con trolled) systems theories applied to telephone technology, computer de sign, weapons deployment, or data base construction and maintenance. In each case, solution to the key questions rests on a theory of lan guage and control; the key operation is determining the rates, direc tions, and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information. The world is subdivided by boundaries differentially permeable to informa tion. Information is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, basis of unity) which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumen tal power (called effective communication). The biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication. Any system breakdown is a function of stress. The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C31, command-control-communication-intelligence, the military's symbol for its operations theory. In modern biologies, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology, socio-biological
Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s • 25
and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated. The boundary-maintaining images of base and superstructure, public and private, or material and ideal never seemed more feeble. I have used Rachel Grossman's image of women in the integrated cir cuit to name the situation of women in a world so intimately restructured through the social relations of science and technology. 18 I use the odd circumlocution, "the social relations of science and technology;' to indi cate that we are not dealing with a technological determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured relations among people. But the phrase should also indicate that science and technology provide fresh sources of power, that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action. 19 Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make socialist feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics.
T H E H O M EWO R K ECONOMY The "new industrial revolution" is producing a new worldwide working class. The extreme mobility of capital and the emerging international division of labor are intertwined with the emergence of new collectivi ties, and the weakening of familiar groupings. These developments are neither gender- nor race-neutral. White men in advanced industrial so cieties have become newly vulnerable to permanent job loss, and women are not disappearing from the job rolls at the same rates as men. It is not simply that women in third-world countries are the preferred la bor force for the science-based multinationals in the export-processing sectors, particularly in electronics. The picture is more systematic and in valves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption, and production. In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women's lives have been structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional commu nity, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age. The ethnic and racial diversity of women in Silicon Valley structures a microcosm of conflicting differences in culture, family, reli gion, education, language. Richard Gordon has called this new situation the homework economy.20 Although he includes the phenomenon of literal home work emerging in connection with electronics assembly, Gordon intends "homework economy" to name a restructuring of work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to female jobs, jobs literally done
26 • A M anifesto for Cyborgs
only by women. Work is being redefined as both literally female and fern inized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. Deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers. However, the homework economy does not refer only to large-scale deskilling, nor does it deny that new areas of high skill are emerging, even for women and men previously excluded from skilled employment. Rather, the con cept indicates that factory, home, and market are integrated on a new scale and that the places of women are crucial-and need to be analyzed for differences among women and for meanings for relations between men and women in various situations. The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure is made possible by ( not caused by) the new technologies. The successs of the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men's unionized jobs is tied to the power of the new communications technologies to integrate and control labor despite extensive dispersion and decentralization. The consequences of the new technologies are felt by women both in the loss of the family (male) wage ( if they ever had access to this white privilege) and in the character of their own jobs, which are becoming capital-intensive, e.g., office work and nursing. The new economic and technological arrangements are also related to the collapsing welfare state and the ensuing intensification of demands on women to sustain daily life for themselves as well as for men, children, and old people. The feminization of poverty-generated by dismantling the welfare state, by the homework economy where stable jobs become the exception, and sustained by the expectation that women's wage will not be matched by a male income for the support of children-has be come an urgent focus. The causes of various women-headed households are a function of race, class, or sexuality; but their increasing generality is
a ground for coalitions of women �many issues. That women regularly
sustain daily life partly as a functi of their enforced status as moth ers is hardly new; the kind of integr tion with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new. The particular pressure, for ex ample, on U.S. black women, who have achieved an escape from (barely) paid domestic service and �ho now hold clerical and similar jobs in large numbers, has large implications for continued enforced black poverty with employment. Teenage women in industrializing areas. of the third
