Book Review: A Cyborg Manifesto - Donna Haraway

Either I'm particularly thick, or this is the most over-written and under-explained academic claptrap I've read in some time.

Some of the language is pure poetry:

the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion

It doesn't actually mean anything. You have to be able to parse unexplained concepts like "an oedipal calendar" and deal with interminable footnotes which blithely declare "postmodernism release heterogeneity without a norm, and we are flattened". Quite.

If you take a drink every time postmodernist theory is mentioned, you'll be blotto within a few pages. Tragically, I read it sober - so I've got no excuse not to understand it.

It is so wound up in theory that it becomes an uncuttable Gordian Knot of unrelated concepts.

I do find value in the way that it skewers (what was then) modern feminism:

King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different ‘moments’ or ‘conversations’ in feminist practice to taxonomize the women’s movement to make one’s own political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting over time, especially those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialist-feminism.

But the author doesn't appear to be self-aware enough to realise that they're involved in yet another schism.

There are occasional snatches of clarity in amongst the verbiage:

Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures. The new biotechnologies concern more than human reproduction.

And there are some stunningly precisent predictions:

ironically corporate executives reading Playboy and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows

We are there now; the co-opting of feminism into corporate sanitisation seems almost complete.

But whatever sense there is, in hopelessly intermingled with a laundry list of seemingly unrelated complaints.

The culture of video games is heavily orientated to individual competition and extraterrestrial warfare.

The writing is, at times, exquisite:

Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts.

There is, of course, no explanation about what that cyborg theory might be. Perhaps we are meant to wait for it to be revealed to us in a dream?

If you're prepared to enjoy the rhythm of the words which are almost devoid of context, it it stunning.

Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right.

An almost a total parody of academic writing - words written not to be read, not to be understood, not to advance an argument, not to form the basis for a discussion. Just an endless stream of automatic-writing that, ironically, sounds like a rogue Markov chain.