Missionary Positions

Haraway’s ‘Manifesto’ is unapologetically post-Modern, rather than Modernist.  As such, it sets a predictable challenge to hierarchical order, uniformity of tasks, and goal-centred planning - valorising the unique, the contingent, and the situated within lived practice.  She continues to argue, not only that women should find a place within the institutional structures which embed science and technology in Western culture, but also that women should engage in strategic political and social play.  This entails that the private, the domestic, and the maternal are opened up for interrogation and re-negotiation.  Within Haraway’s project there are few safe havens, and where these exist, they are only ever temporary [1].

She has also frequently advocated the use of science fiction to explore speculative and situated possibilities and, like a science fiction story, her manifesto confronts its heroines with two speculative alternatives by which children might be integrated within a cyborg persona [2].  Both are only implied in the manifesto, and perhaps because of this are expressed in pragmatic and wholly unsentimental ways, the first comes from her initial definition:

Cyborgs are post-Second World War hybrid entities made of, first, ourselves and other organic creatures in our unchosen ‘high-technological’ guise as information systems, texts, and ergonomically controlled labouring, desiring, and reproducing systems [3].

The second comes at the end of the manifesto.

I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing.  For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of the former injury [4].

 

If we are to extend the cyborg myth, children are to be figured either as organic prosthesis within information systems, or suffer a more monstrous form of incorporation – as that which is ‘regenerated’ in response to injury.  Both strategies, of course, subsume the child’s identity.  The first binds the child to the mother whenever she is forced to present herself as an 'intersection for information exchange' [5].  The second responds to the mother’s damaged condition by making the child a promiscuous symbiont - one whose promiscuity comes from the fact that it must enter into multiple and heterogeneous social relations as part of its mother’s cyborg identity [6].  Its status as symbiont is less obvious, but comes from the logic of Haraway’s own suggestion.  Figured as parasite, the child would offer no strategic advantage to the mother – unless it was deployed as a means to deplete the resources of a threatening 'other'.  Figured as replacement limb, the child’s affiliation with the mother becomes more permanent and valuable [7].

Spielberg’s film, AI: Artificial Intelligence, exemplifies the first option by presenting a child-monster whose consciousness is trapped within the logic of advanced capitalism.  The commercial realities underlying the little mecha’s production subvert normal assumptions of domesticity and social relationship.  Cast out from this edenic state, it strives to dominate new discourse situations in order to preserve an identity that is always already radically compromised [8].  The strategic importance of memory to this process is emphasised throughout the film – but David’s memory runs around and around the same scenes of a lost felicity.  The structure of his conscious life is bounded by the fixed-frame of a pre-ordained operational environment.

For Professor Hobby, releasing this artificial intelligence unit from its prior imprinting – making it once again a blank consciousness embodied as one of a multiple that is also a potentially unique ‘David’ – re-produces its use value while mechanically/commercially simulating the birth of consciousness.  The notion of the child as throw-away prosthetic is avoided, but only to be replaced by a process in which the uniqueness of each situated consciousness becomes a waste product.  Extending Haraway’s account to include a mother-child dyad operating as an information intersection implies that both the child and the mother face a similar threat of annihilation as they shift from one strategic position to another.  Of course, this is to talk in analogies and metaphors, but one still searches for a better outcome.

Ridley Scott’s film, Blade Runner, provides such an alternative, but the result is equivocal at best.  The film features replicant: humans manufactured and enhanced for the extremes of various off-world environments.  As a replicant, Rachael appears as a young adult, but she is in fact only a few years old.  Her memories of an appropriately distanced childhood are fabricated, and to support them she possess several photographs supplied by her makers, the Tyrell Corporation.  Her eventual rejection of these as false images releases her own strategic potential, allowing her to begin the construction of a new and unpredictable future with another individual who remains ambiguously human/replicant [9].

The film makes clear that the normal role of replicants is as organic prosthetics to the various corporations existing at the time; they are, indeed, the ultimate ‘children’ of advanced capitalism.  Like David, Rachael's ‘real’ identity formation begins from the recognition that she is less than human, but much of the subject matter of the film emphasises that she is also far more than human [10].  However, the new identity which Rachael develops, like David’s unique imprinted self, acts as a potential obstacle to their respective society's designs on their futures  – unfortunate ‘personal’ inflections to be overcome before they can be re-deployed, i.e., become again the subject of unrestricted information exchange [11].  And, at the end of Blade Runner, one is left guessing if the Tyrell Corporation has been more commercially astute than even Professor Hobby.  Just how free is Rachael - what if each new identity she develops as she sloughs off the old is a calculable response to her environment [12]?

The negative figurations offered by AI: Artificial Intelligence and Blade Runner point to what is at stake for childhood if the culture of information exchange extends so as to absorb nature: culture itself becomes an all-embracing system dominated by use value.  A child caught up in its mother’s struggles against the imposition of such a system will indeed have a troubled identity.  At each turn within the labyrinth of discourse it will confront the same threat faced by David: the liquidation of difference.  But Haraway stresses that this increasingly familiar trajectory is not inevitable; the future can be turned and even transformed.

In relation to these systems, she argues that the cyborg construct will always be strategic to the degree that it can resist the temptation to simply oppose nature to culture.  This entails that the cyborg works to re-negotiate boundaries, and the natural and the manufactured become subject to new forms of situated experience.  In terms of child identity, one is thrust into the contemporary situation in the West, with its progressively more invasive forms of reproductive technology.  Discourses which are, or are not, already taking place between professionals, scientists, genetic parents, and other care-givers become the target for cyborg action.  Without such interventions mothers and their children allow the worlds of the mecha and the replicant to move ever closer.

The second formation available to the cyborg child – as promiscuous symbiont – also involves a re-negotiation with the natural [13].  However, its unfamiliar reference creates a representational challenge hard to meet using the resources of contemporary popular culture [14].  Only one negative figuration - expressed in almost pre-industrial terms - really answers to the present need: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus [15].  As is well known, once the monster is brought to life, Frankenstein rejects this product of his own scientific craft, and the monster is forced to wander the land gaining an untutored Rousseauesque education.

Unlike David, it has everything to learn from experience; but the fruits of this education are tainted by the manner of its learning.  All it comes to know of human felicity is gained through observing an impoverished family from the vantage point provided by a ‘small and almost imperceptible chink’ [16].  Eventually its warm regard for the family prompts it to enter into discourse [17].  It starts cautiously by first approaching the blind father, presenting itself as a friendless wanderer; and as such, it is welcomed.  But when the rest of the family returns, they immediately recognise the monstrous strategy of its embodiment and turn against it in horror.

Both the monster and the sighted members of the family are trapped within their own scopic regimes; this determines the nature of the inscriptions they ‘read’ upon each other's bodies.  Rather than their situatedness on either side of the same cottage wall being the pretext to discourse, it becomes the mark of separation between observed and observer.  The monster as observer is charmed by the family member’s mutual regard for one another, yet as a ‘child’ it has already learned to avoid interaction.  The family as observed enjoys an assumed domestic privacy, but since fate has been so cruel they are not drawn to question the miraculous supply of firewood and other forms of support which the monster is secretly providing.  Both observed and observer remain secure so long as their respective perspectives are unchanged.

But as Haraway has pointed out in various texts, cyborg politics ‘is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code which translates all meaning perfectly’ [18].  Shelley’s own response – in her case to the triumphalism of nineteenth century science - is doubly ironic.  Having placed the monster in the position of a scientific observer, she gives her own creation the nobleness of spirit to confound the rules of separation and objectivity; it finally attempts discourse.  The scandal of the monster’s broken embodiment is apparently contradicted by its unified sensibility, but this also is undercut by the monster’s naïve belief in the power of disembodied language[19].

When the monster finds that discourse involves embodiment in situated experience, and this is something from which it is always likely to be excluded, it responds by structuring its identity around the experience of victimhood.  Frankenstein understands this as a strategic response – an attempt by his ‘child’ to place moral responsibility upon him for rejecting his paternity; but also an attempt to wrest discourse from at least one other human being.  In this respect, Spielberg’s Professor Hobby is both more optimistic and more controlling:

Company Executive: If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold towards that mecha in return?’

Hobby: The oldest one of all.  But in the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?

 

Frankenstein’s monster provides an almost perfect negation of the promiscuous symbiont.  Rather than being like a chameleon, able to strategically select and conceal aspects of itself to meet the shifting demands of discourse, it remains fixed in its monstrosity as a constant rebuke to its maker and pretext for rejection by others.  Similarly, once it realises this rejection is total, its relationships are invariably destructive; there is never any symbiosis, never any support to mutual advantage.  As emblem of Frankenstein’s fantasy of creating a new race, its fingers are sticky with blood.

The warning to cyborg mothers and their children could not be starker.  The ‘becoming’ of a promiscuous symbiont demands the earliest possible recognition of dual agency, i.e., the ability of the child to live apart in various situations.  But the situatedness of child-rearing requires something else; children’s agency, in particular, develops.  The challenge faced by all primary care-givers is the reverse of that faced by Frankenstein.  When the monster’s flesh became word, the resulting unified identity implored Frankenstein to put aside the blasphemy of its embodiment.  But when the words of the world become flesh, won’t their diversity irreversibly fragment the perfect identity of the new-born child? 

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