The Task of the Illegitimate Offspring
Anna Wermuth • Colorado College
The Task of the Illegitimate Offspring
Imagine for a moment a society much like today’s in regard to its political climate but with one major difference: the entire manual workforce has been automated. Robots in industrialized factories assemble consumer goods, personal electronics, processed food, auto bodies, weapons, and other robots. The market still controls supply and demand, and “unskilled” members of the population are left without jobs, or worse, reserved and regulated by the state for other political purposes. For many, a sense of dread and even helplessness arises in this imaginary space. It begs the question: what is it that we fear? Is it the machines themselves, or their potentially insidious applications? Facing this hypothetical reality, do we seek to dominate or do we feel helpless in the wake of domination?
Many scholars and philosophers have posited that our sociopolitical reality defines our orientation toward technology; therefore, we must investigate the forces which build our social structures in order to analyze our relationships to technology in the modern age. One such investigation might lead the astute observer to conclude that present social hierarchies and economic systems are designed to ensure that the benefits of technological development are bestowed disproportionately to the powerful and wealthy. Meanwhile, the working class remains an “undeveloped” entity, a body of subhuman labor reserves which is subject to technological implementation and dominance but is not active in its production or integration into society. This is, in fact, a stark and pressing political issue considering the dense biopolitical terrain of militarism and capitalism in which we live––one that weaponizes technology for the control of populations and the maximization of profit.
The perceived inevitability of technology’s omnipresent role contributes to a sense of dread that the majority of society will remain powerless in the face of its exponential expansion. However, one could argue that this view strips vulnerable parties of their political agency and instills a sense of technoparanoia that grants further authority to those who are most intensely feared for their control over technological development. Philosopher of science Donna Haraway makes such an argument; she brings to the table an alternative view which centers people experiencing oppression as the most important actors in the reshaping of reality. Her groundbreaking 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” is a myth of the future, a declaration of empowerment for those who live in uncertainty on the margins of society, and a way of visualizing resistance to the dominant biopolitical forces of our time. Haraway urges us to dissolve the restrictive dichotomies which separate self from other, man from woman, and even human from machine. Her underlying fundamental claim is that we must embrace technology because we are all already cyborgs––“cybernetic organisms” who are communicative chimeras of the organic and the technological. Having used technology to aid in our social development throughout the ages, human beings are anything but removed from the weapons and cell phones we bear.
This embrace of technology is by no means politically neutral. Haraway situates herself as a socialist feminist and a strong advocate on behalf of the working class. She recognizes that throughout time, the top-down tendencies to naturalize and instrumentalize human bodies have led to a much larger political concern: the exploitation of racialized and feminized populations in the global labor force. Science has not been, in her perspective, an “objective” descriptive apparatus––it has actually played an active role in the subjugation of specific social groups. This history contributes to what she has deemed “the informatics of domination”: the complex matrices of information and communication technologies that reinforce the authoritarian power structures of our present society. Her uniquely imaginative notion of “technoscience” on the other hand, is a hybrid of science, technology, and radical politics: an embodiment of demilitarized technological tools that are designed and implemented through a mode of resistance to the oppressive power structures of our time. While we, cyborgs, are, in fact, “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,” Haraway draws in those of us who are implicated in this political struggle by noting that “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.”
The question now becomes, how might working-class individuals and groups express such infidelity to the exploitative economic system that employs them? Or, as Haraway asks, “What kind of political accountability can be constructed to tie [us] together across the scientific-technical hierarchies separating us?” Using Haraway’s argument for the effectiveness of political affinity and accountability as a mode of resistance and by outlining Foucault’s theory of biopower to contextualize that resistance, I will suggest that cyborg politics create new terrain for the working class in the struggle to overcome the informatics of domination. An example of how such a politic applies to current technological developments will be explored through a discussion of automation in the workplace, which has pressing implications for the global labor force. I will contend that cyborg politics can build solidarity among working-class people, allowing for increased agency and resistance to the concentrated control of knowledge and resources which has created our highly militarized capitalistic society. Collective liberation for a marginalized labor force can be found in the vision of a socialist, egalitarian cyborg society––one which consciously demilitarizes and democratizes the use of technology while deconstructing the binaries that divide us.
Biopower and the Informatics of Domination
One expression of authoritarianism in the technological terrain of modern society is the exercise of biopower. Michel Foucault articulated the theory of biopower in 1976, defining it as the state regulation of populations. The assertions made by biopower theory that are relevant to my argument include the following: 1) the production of knowledge informs the use of power; 2) the “biological” human body is the site of knowledge and power reproduction as well as the site of state regulation; 3) where there is power, there is resistance; and 4) biopower is intrinsically connected to the exploitation of the global labor force. In regards to the final point, Foucault writes: “Biopower was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production.” This point is also highlighted by political theorist and author Kathleen R. Arnold when she writes that in controlling the labor force, “species thinking and thus biopower are at work. Racial, gendered, and ethnic thinking, prejudice, and antagonisms are the ideological and discursive effects of biopower, as sovereign power and capitalist values increasingly intersect.” Thus, the pyramid structure of today’s economy––with its vastly underpaid and mistreated workforce at the foundation, supporting the material and political wealth of the oligarchy––has been made possible through the exercise of biopower.
The instrumental, top-down division of the labor force has been carried out with the help of biological essentialism and reductionism. Delegating tasks based on “biological” factors such as race and gender has been a useful tool in the colonial projects of capitalism and militarism since it allows for nation-states to regulate and exploit the physical bodies of subjugated populations. A strong critic of biological essentialism, Donna Haraway traces the social-historical path of the “life sciences” in her essay “The Biological Enterprise: Sex, Mind, and Profit from Human Engineering to Sociobiology.” In doing so, she problematizes the origins of biologically deterministic ideologies such as racism and sexism.
Between the First World War and the present, biology has been transformed from a science centered on the organism, understood in functionalist terms, to a science studying automated technological devices, understood in terms of cybernetic systems. Organic form, with its hierarchical and physiological co-operation and competition based on ‘natural’ domination and division of labor, gave way to systems theory with its control schemes based on communications networks … This fundamental change in life science did not occur in a historical vacuum; it accompanied changes in the nature and technology of power, within a continuing dynamic of capitalist reproduction.
To trace the development of the aforementioned “control schemes based on communication networks,” Haraway writes of the “informatics of domination,” the complex web of communication technologies that fortify the logic of militarism and capitalism. She argues that this matrix of control over populations contributes to “cultural impoverishment” and creates a “common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable.” The vulnerable population at the heart of this essay, of course, is the working class, which by definition lives within precarious subsistence networks due to the illusion of scarcity that accompanies low socioeconomic status. Haraway’s conceptualization of authoritarian technology, therefore, demonstrates the complicity of non-working class actors in keeping well-oiled and efficient the informatics of domination and exposes how the exploitation of human bodies for labor is made possible through state regulation.
The constructed biological binaries of history have been nothing short of devastatingly violent for those subjugated. To further emphasize potential empowerment for the global labor force, Haraway goes on to write, “as Marx showed for the science of wealth, our reappropriation of knowledge is a revolutionary reappropriation of a means by which we produce and reproduce our lives.” Here, the hegemonic machinery of biopower is at stake: in reclaiming our bodies and the production of knowledge about them, as Haraway challenges us to do, the mechanics of biopower’s efficacy over our physical forms is called into question.
With regards to the concrete and rather pressing example of workplace automation, philosopher of technology Mark Coeckelbergh (2015) discusses the master-slave dialectic that informs our perception of automation technology. He, like Haraway, writes about the harmful dichotomy between humans and machines, one which turns the self into either a passive subject under the influence of the device (slave) or an active authority figure who oversees the activity of the device (master). He notes that “even if and when machines are given ‘agency,’ this agency can only be understood in relation to the human. It is delegated agency, and delegation is a human process. There is not the machine apart from the human.” The key point here is that we must acknowledge technological integration into society as a highly social process. In the spirit of Foucault, Coeckelbergh goes on to provoke the reader:
Automation is not only about a kind of power struggle between humans and technology ... it is also about social relations between humans. Is automation in the form of robotics and AI used to increase inequality and injustice? By whom is it used, or will it be used? If the use and development of automation grows, who will gain and who will lose? What will be the societal consequences? How does automation change and make possible different power relations?
Haraway is, of course, concerned with these very questions on power relations, and cyborg theory provides a point of engagement. In her view, “the cyborg is not subject to Foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations.” If cyborgs are inherently hybridized and cannot be described in essentialist biological terms, then they are no longer the targets of biopower. Instead, cyborgs create an entirely new terrain in which political struggles are played out. The question is no longer about the machines themselves, but about who controls their design and implementation. Within this terrain, a working class, theorized as cyborgs, could gain the agency to resist the informatics of domination.
The Terrain of Cyborg Politics
The cyborg metaphor carries with it many imaginative tools which can be strategically employed in the interests of working-class solidarity and empowerment. In the same way that the Internet is coded with certain algorithms to direct online traffic, Donna Haraway urges that we, cyborgs, in the development of a feminist socialist science, must “code” ourselves toward our political orientation. Ideas of what to code to ensure the empowerment of the global labor force include reclamation of the means of production, equal distribution of resources, and a post-gender anti-racist society which no longer relies on biological essentialism for social stratification and economic hierarchy. As Haraway emphasizes, “it is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.” In transgressing the binaries which have historically constrained us, we as cyborgs embody the metaphor of the unfaithful offspring––a rebellious new generation borne of an emergent technoscientific revolution.
The terrain of cyborg politics, as I see it, is fertile with resistance to the informatics of domination. It must hold true that resistance is at play, according to Foucault’s claim that “where there is power, there is resistance.” If the informatics of domination communicate directly with the power we seek to resist, the role of a feedback-controlled cybernetic organism is essential in disturbing that communication: “Information is just that kind of element which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power … The biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication.” If the working class (i.e., the majority) could, for example, interfere with the operational norm of command-control-communication-intelligence (C3I) that constitutes military informatics, a global uprising against economic instability would become possible. Additionally, the threat of an automated workforce that would leave the most vulnerable without political agency becomes obsolete if the informatics of domination are actively deconstructed. Grounding the example even further, Haraway writes:
The computer is not just a machine built according to laws of domination related to labor and war. Communications sciences, including sociobiology, are human achievements in interaction with the world. But the construction of a natural economy according to capitalist relations, and its appropriation for purposes of reproducing domination, is deep. It is at the level of fundamental theory and practice, not at the level of good guys and bad guys.
If the terrain of cyborg politics requires a radical reshaping of our current biopolitical terrain, how is it possible that a heterogeneous body of working-class citizens around the world can come to a common understanding of cyborg politics? What is necessary for the paradigm shift into socialist feminist technoscience to take place?
Political Affinity as a Bridge to Cyborg Politics
Affinity: related not by blood but by choice … actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state.
A relevant shortcoming of political movements in the liberal sphere is their tendency to restrictively focus on identity politics. This problem can be seen in the mobilization of white feminists, who unwittingly exclude women of color and other people who do not conform to stereotypical, naturalized descriptions of “woman,” which Haraway warns is deeply counterproductive to cyborg politics. Instead, she stresses that we learn “to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification.” She claims that affinity, rather than normative identity, can serve as an imaginative bridge to solidarity in cyborg politics.
I interpret the basis of that affinity among cyborgs to be their “illegitimate origins,” and the need to be “unfaithful” to those origins. Such a commonality could be a uniting force for the global working class, which is, in its entirety, a product of white supremacist militarism and patriarchal capitalism. The radical restructuring of who performs labor, through what means, and for what purpose requires a new vision of an egalitarian cyborg society––one which is concerned not with the “biological” identity categorizations of race, gender, and ability, but with the collective consciousness of affinity in the efforts to resist the informatics of domination. The blurring of binaries between male and female, humanity and nature, and nature and technology creates a generative societal challenge––one which requires us to form social bonds that transcend categorical experience.
Haraway writes, “in the fraying of identities and in the reflexive strategies for structuring them, the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse.” Without negating the real historical implications of these identities, affinity unites movements through common cause. The development of technology for democratic and life-affirming purposes rather than violence is a struggle we have yet to lean into. Thus, affinity is one potential outcome of fractured identities. When the working class struggle of resistance to illegitimate origins is seen as a common political ground for cyborg politics, an unbreakable affinity can be formed.
Furthermore, I believe affinity is the first step toward the “political accountability” question posed by Haraway. If we are to unite “across the technical-scientific hierarchies separating us,” we must first recognize that the outdated biological descriptions of human communities may no longer serve to tell our complete origin stories. Instead, “feminist cyborg stories have the task of re-coding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control.” Through the act of being rebellious to their origins, working-class cyborgs redefine and re-code political affinity and accountability to each other.
Coding resistance through the modes of affinity and accountability will ultimately weave rich networks of solidarity among the working class. Solidarity is defined in one context as a set of “shared practices reflecting a collective commitment to carry ‘costs’ (financial, social, emotional, or otherwise) to assist others. It is important to note that solidarity is understood here as a practice, and not as an inner sentiment or an abstract value.” If solidarity is the practice of carrying costs, then cyborg affinity is the jumping-off point for that practice, and political accountability is the method by which to practice it. In this example, the burdensome cost of unionizing or striking against exploitative working conditions is carried by the whole of the community, the survival of the vulnerable is made possible, and the doors to further acts of resistance are opened. This is achieved so long as the nuances of identity do not isolate or alienate certain groups, and if demilitarization of technology is the common goal through which responsibility to each other is formed. A solidarity network of working-class cyborgs would, in theory, be able to interrupt the communication flow of the informatics of domination, paving the way to a radically transformed society of technology.
Embodied Technoscience for Egalitarian Society
The implications of technological innovation for the global labor force are inextricably bound up in the production of knowledge, power, and the informatics of domination. In our sociopolitical reality of extreme militarism and late-stage capitalism, the image of automated work robots fashioning highly advanced weaponry at lightning speed is not an entirely absurd one. Yet, however fearsome this may seem, there is little progress to be found in an outright rejection of technology. If we accept that we live in a technological age and that technology can be empowering rather than oppressive, how can a new culture of egalitarianism be coded?
Donna Haraway leads us to think that a literal, material embrace of technological tools is the only way to resist their potential destructiveness. By reclaiming the methods of production through which our tools are designed and created, we eradicate the sense of alienation between laborer and product. Then, we can integrate those self-made tools into our solidarity networks, striving for the active democratization of technology and the empowerment of our communities. “Intense pleasure in skill, in machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment … We can be responsible for our machines; they do not dominate or threaten us.” Here, Haraway is nudging us toward a greater affinity for the desire to arm ourselves with technology that augments our political agency and to subvert the potential for its domination by embodying its deployment. This radical embodiment exists outside of the realm of biopower that Foucault describes. Cyborgs cannot be taxonomized, essentialized, or naturalized; likewise, cyborg society cannot be divided, regulated, and exploited on the basis of sociobiological characteristics.
The cyborg metaphor creates more than just an imaginative ontological terrain––it is the philosophical foundation of a new society. Having presented us with the deeply political consequences of cyborg theory, Haraway sends us out to do work:
There is a myth system waiting to become a political language, to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination––in order to act potently … Taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts.
Her vision is indeed a potent one. Using the coded language of cyborg politics, the working class can be mobilized. Through embodied technoscience, a solidarity network of communicative, rebellious cyborg offspring can be built. Egalitarian technological access can pave a way to collective liberation for those whose labor has been exploited in the interests of militarism and capitalism. The paradigm can shift to a new one, a socialist feminist cyborg society.
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