Haraway's Viral Cyborg

Author(s): Joseph Schneider

Source: Women's Studies Quarterly , SPRING/SUMMER 2012, Vol. 40, No. 1/2, VIRAL
(SPRING/SUMMER 2012), pp. 294-300
Published by: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York

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Haraway's Viral Cyborg

Joseph Schneider

Nearly thirty years ago, Donna Haraway began writing her famous essay
published in 1985 as "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and
Feminism in the 1980s." In its vision, argument, and detail, it resonates
strongly with what today is called viral analysis and criticism. In what fol
lows I'll briefly suggest how.
First, the essay was blasphemous, transgressive, and invasive, arguably
all viral qualities. Its claims for the liberatory promise of her cyborg—born
as "the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not
to mention state socialism" in the "belly of the beast" of U.S. Star Wars
dreams of a global "New World Order"—for making women's lives better
did not sit well with all feminists or, I am sure, with all socialists (Har
away 1991b, 151). Even though she insisted that "the cyborg is resolutely
committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity... is oppositional
... and completely without innocence ... not reverent;... [does] not re
member the cosmos ... [is] wary of holism, but needy of connection ...
[and] exceedingly unfaithful to ... [its] origins"—all qualities one might
think required by a feminist politics and scholarship of the day—she spoke
powerfully to but also for U.S. feminism at the end of the century (a risky
business at any time, even for a cyborg) (151). Moreover, she engaged,
if not embraced, what many who were concerned about the human and
especially gendered costs of the technology of modernity saw as a pro
found threat. Zoe Sofoulis (2002, 101), a graduate student of Haraway's
then, gives insight into the rippling "quake" the essay caused: "Whereas a
standard feminist line on technology had been to equate it with abstract
masculinist rationality, militarism, and the rape of the Earth, Haraway

2Q4 Women's Studies Quarterly 4D: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2012) © 2012 by Joseph Schneider.
All rights reserved.

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 Haraway's Viral Cyborg 295

insisted on the intimate physicality of our relations to nonhumans, and on

... 'the pleasures of the interface'"; and, it should be added, with no guar
antees for results that then might easily have been recognized as "success."
This blasphemy from within, her disinclination for either intellectual
or political purity, and her criticism of the exclusionary and totalizing
effects of feminisms identity politics and standpoint epistemology made
the manifesto and Haraway immediately controversial and, it seems to me,
viral. Indeed, each word above, from her description of the cyborg, is used
today to describe the viral (see, for instance, Pearson 1997; Cohen 2011;
Galloway and Thacker 2007). Finally, the essay itself was promiscuous,
not, surely, in the sense of being random or disorganized, but rather in the
diverse political, cultural, and disciplinary alliances and scope it effected
and in giving license and encouragement to others inclined to follow.
And the OED on the biological version of promiscuous offers the follow
ing: "Biol. Of a protein, organism, etc.: able to infect or interact with, or
bind non-specifically to, a variety of hosts or targets" (notice the "or inter
act with").
Moreover, it was precisely those elements of the essay that were "trou
bling" for some that were at the same time gifts to many others, disturb
ing the feminist "us": "Haraway s poetic claim that the cyborg 'gives us
our ontology' captured the imagination of many who were . . . starting
to explore new identities and forms of social life and community made
possible by the Internet" (Sofoulis 2002, 101). Her insistence, then and
in all subsequent work, that there are no "innocent" positions, politically
or intellectually, and that pollution, boundary violation, and interfaces of
all sorts—originary connectivity or relationality, as she would call it later
(biologist that she is)—are "the name of the game on planet Earth" chal
lenged leftist, feminist, and intellectual politics of the day. In this, Haraway
let us see that, in Sofoulis's words, "complicity with 'the system' was not
an unmentionable crime nor a paralyzing political embarrassment, but
understood as something inevitable, which did not necessarily prevent far
ther effective political work for justice, peace, and survival" (2002, 101),
risks and vulnerabilities to the contrary notwithstanding. These claims
remain a point of contention for some even today.
Pollution, fusion, replication, paradox, partiality, and irony. These all
take center stage in Haraway's cyborg myth. Each is regularly invoked in
cultural analysis and criticism using the material-semiotic figure of the

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296 Joseph Schneider

virus. While allowing that in the early 1980s a "cyborg world" could be
read as, and in fact could be, terrifying and hopeless (think, for the viral,
"emerging infectious diseases" and "system/network 'failure'" as Steven
Soderbergh's new film, Contagion, plays at your local multiplex, offering
no doubt images of both), she insisted it also "might be about lived social
and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship
with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities
and contradictory standpoints" (Haraway 1991b, 154). In this and similar
claims, Haraway (1991b, 151-153) further weakened a set of boundar
ies that already in the past century's final quarter were unstable and had
begun to "leak": "between human and animal" or "other living creatures,"
between "(organisms) and machines," and "between [the] physical and
non-physical" or the material and nonmaterial.
This focus on the porosity of boundaries, their "fleshliness," and the
attendant ambiguities about what or who an entity is (even, if it is "an
entity") and when and where such a claim might be made about "it" that
Haraway elaborated became itself a signature of "post" thought, although
she then mostly positioned herself to one side of that prefix and still does
so. The figure and the material or materiality of the porous boundary, with
selective and varying rates of flow across it, part of a dynamic "metastable"
system or network of interfaced and similar boundaries and "nodes" linked
by vectors or "edges" could hardly be more central to our understanding
of what "a virus" is in both biology and informatics, of its conditions of
possibility, and of the diverse risks of narrowly focusing only on "it" as a
closed or clearly bounded entity (see Galloway and Thacker 2007,31-32).
Ed Cohen, writing on "the paradoxical politics of viral containment,"
gives us an example of such an "it" definition from the bio-sciences: "Tech
nically speaking, virus describes a small quantity of genetic material, either
RNA or DNA (which can appear in single or double strands), enclosed
within a protein coat, and sometimes surrounded by a lipid envelope.
Viruses appear to exist everywhere on Earth and may in fact constitute
'the most abundant biological entities on the planet'" (2011, 18). Radi
cally decontextualized, although still both multiple and partial, the defini
tion is a stunning instance of how naming inevitably conceals more than
it reveals, including often long and contentious biopolitical and profes
sional struggles over who/what "owns" what objects and who/what
should be held accountable for both knowledge of them and policy or
action toward them, not to mention what the named objects and move

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 Haraway's Viral Cyborg 297

ments "do."1 Much, then, is "in a name"; or is it perhaps not enough? Both,
at the same time.

Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, in The Exploit: A Theory

of Networks, define computer viruses much more contextually than the
above, hut, similarly, as fragments or parts of code from one system or net
work that "worm" their way into or "exploit" the inevitable "design flaws"
and choices built into another, causing copies or replicants to be made,
changing the "host" system and themselves, and hiding their tracks as they
move on (2007,83). They argue that it is impossible to think about viruses
as separate from the particular networks that they access and so often
upset, since the viral access and the particular vulnerabilities of a given
network define one another. As if describing a cyborg on speed, they write
that such viruses "are defined by their ability to change their signature and
yet maintain a continuity of operations (e.g., overwriting code, infiltrating
as fake programs, etc.). Viruses are never quite the same" nor, it seems, are
their "hosts" (but then who/what is which?) (83). But computer viruses,
unlike their older biological siblings, for the most part don't "just happen."
They are made by human intelligence and motive.
Cohen specifies the paradox and irony further: "Viruses cannot pro
duce themselves by themselves [They] exist only insofar as they have
successfully spurred a cellular organism [or, in informatics, a program or
its documents; each of which it then will "infect"] to commit some of its
own resources and processes to producing more 'copies' of the original'"
(2011,18). In Sofoulis's terms, this is "complicity with 'the system"' with a
vengeance. Up so close, but yet not personal; indeed, not human; but not
always a body's or a network's "enemy" (see Haraway 1995a)2; and per
haps not alive, but even that notion is here opened further, with the latest
generation of viruses proclaimed to be artificial life (or, might artificial life
come first, then "the viral"?) (see Galloway and Thacker 2007, 85). "Us"
and "we" and "them" altogether, but who/what and under what condi
tions? In this, viruses are, Cohen adds, citing Haraway, very trick[ster]y
(Cohen 2011, 18)3; she might add "imploded," putting it with her later
named "stem cells of the technoscientific body": "nodes that [can] explode
into entire worlds of practice . . . [the] chip, gene, seed, fetus, database,
bomb, race, brain, ecosystem" (Haraway 1997, ll).
There are viral insights in Haraway s cyborg text that I have missed
and not mentioned. The essays collected here will, I am sure, detail a num
ber of them, even without necessarily drawing on her text. The technosci

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298 Joseph Schneider

entific capacity actually to "see" a virus and the impact of this visualization
for its history (see Cohen 2011, 20), not to mention the linkable insight
from Haraway (1991c, 200) and Katie King (1991, 1994) about what
came to be called an "apparatus of bodily production," thinking here about
the body of the virus itself and the technology of its "being," surely would
be another (see also Karen Barad s [2007] concept of intra-action).
I want to end with a turn to speculation about what Haraway might
say about the implications of what I have been calling a viral analysis and
criticism. This is perhaps more difficult, in part because for all her encour
agement of boundary transgression, critique of human exceptionalism,
and love of what she calls "the mud and slime of my proper home world"
(2008, 30) of biology, her writing keeps the human "in the game" as an
important material-semiotic entity, even if not the most important or the
most capable. That seems important but also honest. There are no innocent
positions. Her own recent choice of an "obligatory" connection is not virus
but dog-human relationality in the form of "companion species," leaving a
much larger part—even if still inevitably partial—in her story for "us." She
remains committed to the aim of flourishing, a value choice that has been
an abiding one for her, and that does include Homo sapiens, as she might
name us. While perhaps not drawn to the abstractions of "network theory,"
she would appreciate the many parallels that Galloway and Thacker draw
to her ideas and their attention to what Gilles Deleuze (1992) called "soci
eties of control" and securitization. And although she would have a much
sharper "political" vision on the viral than I can here imagine, she would
underscore the paradox that is so present in "viral writing"—on which she
might offer a riff linking that phrase to her own "cyborg writing" toward
developing greater literacies for critical feminist readings of this terrain
(see Haraway 1991b, 175; 1995b). Cohen makes the theme of paradox
"personal" in a quote from Michel Serres s The Parasite: '"Let us try to face
it head on, like death, like the sun. We are all attacked, together [sotto voce,
we hear Haraway's (199lb, 181) cyborg: "We have all been injured, pro
foundly"]. ... We parasite each other and live amidst parasites.... They
constitute our environment'" (Serres qtd. in Cohen 2011, 24) (but where
does the "body" or the "system" or the "network" end and its "environ
ment" begin? The boundaries are indeed porous; the "system" is open).4
And Cohen begins his own essay with Haraway (199la, 224) from the
relevant "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies," written in part out of her
personal experience with HIV/AIDS: "Life is a window of vulnerability. It

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 Haraway's Viral Cyborg 299

seems a mistake to close it. The perfection of the fully defended, 'victori
ous' self is a chilling fantasy."

Joseph Schneider is Ellis and Nelle Levitt Professor of Sociology at Drake University.
He has written on the medicalization of deviance, the experience of chronic illness,
social problems theory, and postmodern ethnography. His most recent book is Donna
Haraway-. Live Theory and he is at work on a book that argues for the importance of
"new materiality" in cultural theory.

Notes

1. As both Alfred North Whitehead, whose work has influenced Haraway

more, and Jacques Derrida have made clear.
2. See Donna Haraway (1995b) on cyborgs and symbionts. No question,
"virus" has had a very "bad press," historically. Lynn Margulis and Dorion
Sagans (2002) work on symbiosis and symbiogenesis offers a picture of what
might be called the "viral process" with considerably less moral "starch" such
that "symbiont" highlights "living together with" a "virus" and thus lets us see
more complexity.
3. His point is that Haraway uses the trickster figure—coyote but also the
world in Native American lore and even dogs in her recent work—to fore
ground the porosity and dynamic ambiguity if not undecideability of impor
tant boundaries and objects. Cohen cites Haraway s How Like a Leaf (2000,
66-67). See also Joseph Schneider (2005, 81,111-13).
4. An important tangent to this discussion turns on the critique of autopoie
sis and the question of the nature of the system/environment relationship.
While for some time seen as a defining feature of life, the authors cited here
writing on the viral, and Haraway herself (2008,30-31), distance themselves
from this view of life as a closed, self-maintaining system. Pearson (1997,
140-142) and Galloway and Thacker (2007, 55-63) similarly seek to com
plicate this view. See also Cary Wolfe (2010, 111-112; 120-122) and his
discussion of Niklas Luhmanns systems theory in this regard.

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