Simians, Cyborgs, and Women Quotes

“Grammar is politics by other means.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”
― Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“All readings are also mis-readings, re-readings, partial readings, imposed readings, and imagined readings of a text that is originally and finally never simply there. Just as the world is originally fallen apart, the text is always already enmeshed in contending practices and hopes.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“Irony 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 and 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. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“Our bodies, with the old genetic transmission, have not kept pace with the new language-produced cultural transmission of technology. So now, when social control breaks down, we must expect to see pathological destruction.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity - honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy - to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of dis-embodiment. The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit; the eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, colour enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTs, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system. Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The control experiment of removing other animals than the dominant males was not done because it did not make sense within the whole complex of theory, analogies to individual organisms, and unexamined assumptions”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding 'Western' epistemology, But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological determinism destroying 'man' by the 'machine' or 'meaningful political action' by the 'text'. Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn't we (de Waal, 1982; Winner, 1980)?”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The political principle of domination has been transformed here into the legitimating scientific principle of dominance as a natural property with a physical-chemical base. Manipulations, concepts, organizing principles - the entire range of tools of the science - must be seen to be penetrated by the principle of domination. Science cannot be reclaimed for liberating purposes by simply reinterpreting observations or changing terminology, a crass ideological exercise in any case, which denies a dialectical interaction with the animals in the project of self-creation through scientific labour.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“In our search for an understanding of a feminist body politic, we need the discipline of the natural and social sciences, just as we need every creative form of theory and practice. These sciences will have liberating functions in so far as we build them on social relations not based on domination. A corollary of that requirement is the rejection of all forms of the ideological claims for pure objectivity rooted in the subject-object split that has legitimated our logics of domination of nature and ourselves.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“But the sciences are collective expressions and cannot be remade individually.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“We find the themes of modern America reflected in detail in the bodies and lives of animals. We polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“We actively determined our design through tools that mediate the human exchange with nature. This condition of our existence may be visualized in two contradictory ways. Gazing at the tools themselves, we may choose to forget that they only mediate our labour.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The debate has been bounded by the rules of ordinary scientific discourse. This highly regulated space makes room for technical papers; grant applications; informal networks of students, teachers, and laboratories; official symposia to promote methods and interpretations; and finally, textbooks to socialize new scientists.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, Utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The biosocial sciences have not simply been sexist mirrors of our own social world. They have also been tools in the reproduction of that world, both in supplying legitimating ideologies and in enhancing material power. There are three main reasons for choosing to focus on the science of animal, especially primate, groups”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert. [...] Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. [...] Writing, power and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of the mechanism.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The concept of the body politic is not new. Elaborate organic images for human society were richly developed by the Greeks. They conceived the citizen, the city, and the cosmos to be built according to the same principles.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“The degree to which the principle of domination is deeply embedded in our natural sciences, especially in those disciplines that seek to explain social groups and behaviour, must not be underestimated. In evading the importance of dominance as a part of the theory and practice of contemporary sciences, we bypass the crucial and difficult examination of the content as well”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature