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Issue 5.02 | Feb 1997

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You Are Cyborg (continued)
By Hari Kunzru

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"Imagine you're a rice plant. What do you want? You want to grow up and make babies before the insects who are your predators grow up and make babies to eat your tender shoots. So you divide your energy between growing as quickly as you can and producing toxins in your leaves to repel pests. Now let's say you're a researcher trying to wean the Californian farmer off pesticides. You're breeding rice plants that produce more alkaloid toxins in their leaves. If the pesticides are applied externally, they count as chemicals - and large amounts of them find their way into the bodies of illegal immigrants from Mexico who are hired to pick the crop. If they're inside the plant, they count as natural, but they may find their way into the bodies of the consumers who eat the rice."

International border controls, the question of natural versus artificial, the ethics of agribusiness, and even the politics of labor regulation are networked together with the biology of rice plants and pests. Who lives? Who dies? That's what Haraway means when she talks about politics being inside technoculture. We can't escape it. It's just that sometimes it's hard to see.

The religion of biology

Maybe it was inevitable that Haraway would wind up blending science and politics and thus breaking one of the big taboos. While studying for a biology doctorate at Yale in the late '60s, Haraway realized "what I was really interested in was not so much biology as a research science, but the way it was a part of politics, religion, and culture in general." Part of a commune active in gay liberation, women's rights, and civil rights; part of a graduate biology program "up to its ears in anti-Vietnam War work centering around chemical herbicides"; and part of a university integral to the military-industrial complex prosecuting the war, she could hardly help being political.
Her doctoral work in cell biology ("nothing bigger than a microbe") dragged on, and she found herself in Hawaii, teaching general science to kids destined to be hotel staffers and tour guides. She had gone there with her husband, Jaye Miller, who was actively gay and a fellow commune member. "We figured out ultimately that we wanted to do a little brother-sister incest, but at the time we didn't have any other model than getting married." A few years later, they "stopped being married" but continued to live as part of the same household, along with their respective partners, until Miller's death from an AIDS-related illness in 1991.

The immune system has since figured frequently in Haraway's work - as an information system; as something that wasn't even clearly understood as a single entity until the 1960s; as she says in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, a "potent and polymorphous object of belief, knowledge, and practice." The immune system is a perfect example of the networked consciousness of the cyborg age. It's also a good example of what Haraway means when she denies there's any such thing as the abstract. In the end, her work and her life, her friend's death, and theoretical biology are all tangled together: a messy web of personal pain, politics, and science.

By the late '70s, Haraway was at Johns Hopkins teaching the history of science and thinking about apes and the people who study them. "At that time," she remembers, "primate behavior was a matrix for all kinds of debates about aggression, sexual violence, dominance, and hierarchy." As she wrote in Primate Visions (1989, Routledge), the book that came out of her academic work at the university, "The commercial and scientific traffic in monkeys and apes is a traffic in meanings, as well as animal lives."

Primatologists, she argues, are working in the "borderlands," where the differences between animals and humans are defined - differences that are messier than people think. If apes are not fundamentally different from people, then our feeling of righteous superiority over animals may be based on thin air. And since primates are our close evolutionary cousins, their behavior may contain significant clues to the development of our own - or serve to mirror our view of it.

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