So I finally got around to reading “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway’s extremely influential 1985 essay about the intersection of technology, feminism, and late capitalism. I can see why it’s so popular: Haraway is excellent at diagnosing the conditions of modern life. It’s almost like she’s got the present in her garage, and she’s busy under the hood; it turns out that weird rattle was our truck’s way of saying it needs a new timing belt.
As I understand it, for Haraway, the cyborg is the avatar of a new mode of oppositional feminist ideology suited for the place in history we find ourselves1. It’s predicated on a society-wide shift from organic modes of understanding and production to informatic ones2. “Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the following chart of transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination,” she writes.
Et cetera. For Haraway, the cyborg is a fusion of man and machine, where the boundary trespass is the point. “This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction,” she writes. “It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.”
Her cyborgs subvert the Western origin myth: they are outside the doctrine of original sin by virtue of their creation, and don’t feel the resonance of the fall — somehow both pre- and post-lapsarian. “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust,” Haraway writes. “Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy.”
There’s a lot more in the essay about cyborgs and late 20th century feminism — it really is worth a read!!! — but I was stopped in my tracks here, reading those lines, because I felt like they perfectly described Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō, a manga created by artist Hitoshi Ashinano that ran from 1994 to 2006. I haven’t read much of it yet, but I have watched the four episodes of animation it got back in the early 2000s, which I think give an accurate idea of what the whole thing’s about.
The series follows Alpha Hatsuseno, the interim owner of a coffee shop — Café Alpha — somewhere on the Miura peninsula in Japan. Alpha is an android, and the series takes place in the post-apocalypse, where climate change has claimed most of the built world. None of this is ever explained in the series — only implied. There’s not much of a plot, either; Alpha’s owner has left on a trip of indeterminate length, and Alpha’s only real job is to serve coffee to whomever manages to get to the remote area the shop is located in.
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō is a slice of life series, meaning that it’s more about its characters than any driving narrative action. Here’s a bit from the end credits of the first episode, which should give you a good idea of the tone of the series.
“The festival-like world had slowly settled to a leisurely pace. To think that an era came to its twilight so pleasantly,” Alpha says. “The dangerous times have since been called the “Age of Evening Calm.” I think I will continue… watching this twilight world… as long as time flows.”
And she means that literally; because she’s an android, Alpha is immortal. There are humans left in the world, but they’ve mostly turned away from technology: they run one pump gas stations, crumbling airports, or small food stalls. Everything moves slower because the end of the world has already arrived. And Alpha is there to see and chronicle it all: in the first episode, her owner sends her a camera — whose lens uses the same technology as her eyes — and entreats her to use it.
It reminds me of Haraway, a little3. “No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defnes a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household,” she writes:
Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden—that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos.
The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not remember the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection—they seem to have a natural feel for united-front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism.
Alpha is sheltered, and knows nothing of the world; her family members, as it were, are the nameless old man who runs the gas station where she fills her scooter, his grandson, and another robot girl, Kokone, who delivers her the camera. She’s the only person in her household. The apocalypse has already happened, and she’s lived through it.
Haraway’s cyborg is a reaction to the world as it is now — a political and ideological technology developed in response to the conditions of modern life. Ashinano’s robots are the opposite: they’re relics from another time, developed for forgotten purposes; outdated technology, in other words, that’s now been turned from its original mysterious purpose to witnessing the slow end of humanity.
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō is unbelievably nostalgic, both in its art and in its tone. (There are many, many scenes where Alpha’s just watching the light change as the sun sets.) The grandchild grows up and moves away; Café Alpha is destroyed by a typhoon; Alpha gets struck by lightning and needs to spend a day in the hospital. Watching Alpha move through her world is fascinating to me, because it’s like getting a tour through the future. She’s curious by the same things that I might be: like how her hair and skin fixes itself after she’s been treated by a doctor.
It’s a little like she’s new to the world she lives in. She approaches the unfamiliar with childlike curiosity — she doesn’t or can’t understand that after the fall humanity has somehow returned to a kind of pre-lapsarian, edenic state. Which is why their lives are more organic and much less informatic. Aside from the androids, technology is old school: radios, propeller planes, and gas-powered 100cc scooters.
In the second episode of the animation4, Alpha travels to a place where her owner took her once: a hill, overlooking a valley. There, she runs into the doctor who treated her, and together they watch the valley light up at night — with streetlights and lamps and walk signs, the last remnants of a drowned city. A child of Eden and a child of the future look back into their shared past, to the moments just before the fall.
I think what I’m trying to say is that I find it beautiful, the idea that the world will go on after we’re through needing our cyborgs. That they’ll persist to chronicle our end — but that they’ll do it to better understand themselves. Not us.
As always,
Bijan
Here she cites Chela Sandoval’s theory of oppositional consciousness. “Chela Sandoval (n.d.; 1984), from a consideration of specific historical moments in the formation of the new political voice called women of color, has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called “oppositional consciousness,” born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. Women of color, a name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorporate, as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic breakdown of all the signs of Man in “Western” traditions, constructs a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity.”
One thing about “A Cyborg Manifesto” is that it’s a little impenetrable. Something to live with for a while and return to when you need it.
Though I didn’t mention it here, Haraway’s essay contains an acute critique of capitalism; the lines about the homework economy and the marginalization of workers hit pretty hard, as does the line about the interpenetration of sex work and the labor market. I also found the end section pretty illuminating, as it’s a full-throated defense of writing as an important anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial technology. “Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man,” Haraway writes, near the end. “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”
Anyway, I found myself highlighting a bunch of choice quotes. Maybe you will too!
Oh, and in case you’d like to watch Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō yourself, here’s a link to the first two episodes and here’s a link to the second two.