"It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts and Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Crédit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them." ~ Karl Marx (Grundrisse, pp. 110)
Donna Haraway constructs her own mythological being, the cyborg, from a position she contends to be "faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism,"1 but it's a faith immediately qualified as being"blasphemous". Why is it blasphemous? Haraway contends that "the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now."2 Reality, to Haraway, is incapable of being "taxonomized" due to the vast ocean of perspectives and positions that an individual can take in mediating reality through their own consciousness. A Black woman and a White woman experience life differently, and, as such, produce an internal consciousness different from each other which is then reflected out through the prism of objectified being. Haraway believes that feminism fails at the precise moment it begins the process of generalizing the "lived experience" of particular women.3 A question soon follows: How are we to reach a critical mass of revolutionaries if we are incapable of appealing to a totalizing common ground?
Haraway, in a fashion not unlike that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, finds shelter in appeals to multiplicity, the infinite expanse of impermeable being. In response to our question previously posed, Haraway writes, "I prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic."4 She then goes on to say, "'Networking' is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy—weaving is for oppositional cyborgs."5 Only the "oppositional cyborg" is foolish enough to think that they can bridge the unassailable boundary between the personal "bodies and spaces" of particular individuals. The true cyborg is much more clever, they recognize the contradiction present in unversalist determinations and instead link up each other with appeals to a universalist-difference. All people are different therefore all unity must include difference.
The formulation appears dialectical, but is quickly revealed to be nothing more than the classic Aristotelian logical identity function A = A: everything is as it seems. Dialectics is rejection of such a naive formulation.6 Ironically, Haraway comes close to this realization when she says, "Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic."7 Haraway casts the contradictory spirits out from her conception of identity not from the inherent ontologically contradictory position that all life is staked on, but rather from the failures of language to accurately describe womanhood writ large. Haraway fails to recognize that it is identity which fails itself.
The cyborg comes onto the scene only when "the boundary between human and animal is transgressed."8 But the "transgression" of the human and animal is nothing new to the epoch of global capitalism (or "multinational" capital to use Haraway's term). Appeals to primitive technologies aside, we can point to the ultimate unity of beast with man: the slave. Haraway's definition is poetic and has a kind of visceral appeal, but it cannot be said to sync up with reality. Furthermore, when describing the world-historical shift of society from the "Organics of Domination" to the "Informatics of Domination", all Haraway can point to is changes in language. "Perfection" becomes "optimization", "physiology" becomes "communications engineering", and "reproduction" becomes "replication."9 A shift in ruling class vocabulary is proof of what exactly? That computers exist? That data scientists were annoying back in 1985? I don't believe she's wrong in pointing out adjustments in the language of global capital, but this is hardly a genuine materialist critique of ideology.
Haraway sees the cyborg (the "geniune" cyborg, not the decidedly reactionary "oppositional" cyborg) as the emancipatory sleight-of-hand that the oppressed peoples of the world can utilize in order to instill a sense of unconditional acceptance of their beautiful differences. What does a socialist care about the acceptance of differences? A socialist fights for one thing and one thing only: the appropriation of the means of production into the hands of those who use them. The calls for the "acceptance of difference" is idealism at its finest. What if the capitalist takes Haraway up on her offer and accepts that difference inherit to the lived experience of those who dish out wages and those who are chained to them? What good is difference then? The proletariat imbued with class-consciousness are more than well aware that some people are "different" than others---they are not blind. The proletariat recognizes what binds them together: labour! The mythology of the cyborg is precisely what it claims to be, a mythology. Perhaps Achilles is no longer "possible with powder and lead,"10 but now we see a new possible phantom emerge, that of the cyborg.