Haraway seizes and transforms the term ‘replication’ (the mode in which viruses, both biological and machine, proliferate) and makes it the emblematic term for the new, the postmodern. Replication as material-semiotic practice, she explains, undermines the structuring binary opposition between machine and human. A non-binary machine-human becomes Haraway’s term for the postmodern subject: the cyborg citizen. Perhaps, she argues, cyborg citizenship can become central in a late twentieth century socialist feminism. Cyborg citizenship appealed to us at the time because it was one amongst many ideas and practices that broke with the notion of ‘reproduction’. We were uneasy with the connotations of ‘reproduction’ for the theorisation of stasis and change, whether psychic or social, for a range of reasons: Many of us were lesbian, gay, trans, non-binary, and queer. We were the post-pill, post Roe vs Wade, and post Section 28 generations for whom the separation of sex and reproduction were assumed, that is, not taken-for-granted but taken up, fought for within the reproductive rights movement and LGBTQ rights movements. Studying with Donna Haraway in Northern California in the 1980s, we lived through the AIDs epidemic. Haraway was speaking out of a particular place and time, Northern California at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and a grief for loved ones lost.
Re-reading Haraway’s text now, I think: cyborg feminism had a good run but there hasn’t been a clear, once-and-for-all transition from modernity to postmodernity. Hierarchies and binaries still coexist with more rhizomatic formations of kinship. The arguments for ‘cyborg citizenship’ still chime uneasily with the particular binaries of the public/private, machine/human, and human/animal distinctions that have structured kinship in much of the west since the long eighteenth century.
When Haraway argues that the trope and practice of ‘replication’ was taking over from the trope and practice of ‘reproduction’ in the contemporary informatics of domination, by means of the focus on viruses both microbiological and computational, she’s speaking both about death and about new ways of living, new forms of kinship. As Haraway is at pains to remind us, replication covers a much wider range of forms for continuance of life: sexed reproduction, even for mammals, is only part of the story. For example, we can draw on epigenetics, theorising, in this way, the transmission of intergenerational trauma. Or, the cyst, a kind of three dimensional scarring, as elaborated on by Abraham and Torok in their psychoanalytic work and writing. Haraway isn’t addressing psychoanalytic theory, but the resonances of her argument are with Abraham and Torok, Laplanche, de M’Uzan, and a whole range of psychoanalysts who have developed these Ferenczian arguments overcoming oppositions between body and mind, machine and animal, animal and human. I discuss Laplanche (2011) and de M’Uzan (2013) at the end of this paper, linking that argument to a discussion of my Prismatic Heresy, to which I now turn.
As the passage I quote from “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” illustrates, Haraway’s approach includes what Clifford Geertz (1973) called “thick description”, the stylistics that was introduced to counter the inequities of the power-relation between anthropological informant and anthropologist. Geertz’s argument is that theorisation is an emergent quality, developing out of the richness of the descriptions, neither on the anthropologist’s side nor on the informant’s. So, Prismatic Heresy is a collaborative project. The violence of my interpretation, that is, the meanings of the power-relation inherent in the relation between artist or theorist and her subjects are imbricated in the colour- coding of our discourse in the work.