Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other...
Donna J. HarawayThe cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.
Donna J. HarawayIrony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour an serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism.
Donna J. HarawayThough both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
Donna J. HarawayIn a sense, a cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense โ a โfinalโ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the โWestโsโ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.
Donna J. HarawayCyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, 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.
Donna J. Haraway