Enabling Cyborg Repair: Serious Play with the Ironies of Postmodern Subjectivities (from 1995)

Written in 1995, my Enabling Cyborg Repair is a rigorous and thorough exploration of the intersections between technology, identity, and human embodiment, emerging at a time when the internet was still in its infancy and the field of Digital Humanities (DH) had yet to take shape.

And I am confident it is still a worthy read today as it turns 30. 

This work engages with Marxism, psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari, and post-humanism to interrogate the ways digital technologies transform labor, political activism, subjectivity, and the human-machine interface. Drawing on Marxist critiques of labor and alienation, the rhizomatic structures of Deleuze and Guattari, and the nascent post-humanist discourse of its time, the paper anticipated the critical questions that would later define the DH field.

To situate its innovation in its historical context, Enabling Cyborg Repair was conceived in a world where the World Wide Web was only two years old, Netscape Navigator had just been released, and email was primarily the domain of academics and tech enthusiasts. Platforms like Google, social media, and collaborative online archives were years away. What existed were nascent listservs, rudimentary websites, and early virtual communities like those on Usenet.

By engaging these theoretical frameworks and situating them within the emerging digital landscape, the paper not only critiqued the sociopolitical implications of technological development but also laid the groundwork for a post-humanist rethinking of identity and agency. Enabling Cyborg Repair was far ahead of its time, a prescient inquiry into the digital transformations that now more obviously underpin contemporary scholarship and everyday life.

Enabling Cyborg Repair: Serious Play with the Ironies of Postmodern Subjectivities

By Eric Anders

Some influential postmodernist theorists have mapped out what might be called utopias (maps to nowhere) via “cognitive mapping” (Jameson) of the subjectivities or bodies that would populate these utopias.  I find two postmodern figurations of “(now)here bodies” especially intriguing because they are considered monstrous with respect to the traditional modernist and modern value systems, desires, and aesthetics that linger frustrated but are ultimately dominant within postmodernism and its cultural logic (Jameson): Donna Haraway’s cyborg from “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (no)mad “subject” in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.  

From Frankenstein to the Terminator, cyborgs have traditionally figured a dread of technological encroachment on conceptions of humanity and humanism, a displacement of the vital by the mechanical, and science’s threat to the master narratives of the soul.  The schizophrenic, cut off from reality by a dysfunctional ego and unable to communicate outside of the society within her or his mind (despite sometimes verbose articulations), connotes a miserable, institutionalized abjection, thus suggesting that schizoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari’s mode of addressing a body’s suffering, could only lead to more suffering.  However, the “subject” of Anti-Oedipus, part one of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, is only “mad” in that she-he-it-they exist on a continuum of possible normalcy marked by poles of schizophrenia and paranoia, a continuum intended to subvert the dualism of sanity-insanity by establishing a “pathology of normalcy” (Fromm 6) and associating some health with insanity. 

Contrary to many readings of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari are not interested in the common schizophrenic, which they consider to be a capitalist production, but in a process of decoding and “deterretorialization” (divesting of libido from culturally prescribed objects) they call "schizophrenia," and in a form of analysis devoted to bringing about this process they call “schizoanalysis.”  Their conception of “subjectivity”—Anti-Oedipus is anti-ego and anti-subject—theorizes a monster which is analogous to Haraway’s hybrid in that it is both biotic and mechanical: it is a body with(out) “desiring machines” as organs.  Deleuze, like Foucault, describes his theory as a “tool box” (Colombat 10), and, unlike the psychoanalyst, the “schizoanalyst is not an interpreter … he is a mechanic” (338).  These cyborgs are considered “promising monsters” (Haraway) with respect to these postmodern perspectives because of the fear these “monsters” instill in those clinging to outmoded notions of where the boundaries lie between organism and machine, normality and madness—because they de-monster-ate the illusion of set boundaries.

Both cyborgs are fictional, but not in the sense of some hierarchy based on positivist notions that subordinate fiction to facts or truth.  These are fictions in a realm where facts, truth, history, realism, identity, the human body, and even science, among many other fields of political contestation, are recognized as necessary fictions.  Haraway writes,

Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.…  Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.  The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience …  This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.  (Cyborg 149)

What follows is a comparison of these two cyborgs, these two political fictions, with the intention of enabling my own theorizing of cyborg repair— the repair needed when individual cyborgs breakdown and when cyborg populations become what Evan Watkins calls “obsolete” in Throwaways: Work Culture and Consumer Education.

I imagine this process of enabling theory as being somewhat similar to the traditional notion of laying the groundwork or foundation of “grand theories” in that it provides a theoretical positioning which informs the initiation of political interventions.  What I am calling enabling is also significantly different from establishing the groundwork of a totalizing theory in that it is part of what Todd May calls “tactical” rather than “strategic” theory in his book, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism:

… strategic political philosophy [“grand theory” such as Marxism] involves a unitary analysis that aims toward a single goal.  It is engaged in a project that it regards as the center of the political universe.  For Marxists, of course, the substructure of economic relations holds that central position.…  Strategic political philosophy can be thought loosely to picture its world as a set of concentric circles, with the core or base problematic lying at the center.…  What is crucial is not the content or nature of the core circle, but the fact that thinking proceeds concentrically.  This is what distinguishes it from tactical thinking, which pictures the social and political world not as a circle but instead as an intersecting network of lines.…  For tactical political philosophy, there is no center within which power is to be located.  Otherwise put, power, and consequently politics, are irreducible.  (10-11)

The irony and partiality of cyborg politics, as I hope to show, is tactical; the power network it exists within, what Haraway calls the “informatics of domination” is irreducible, as are the boundaries between this network and the cyborgs who/that populate it.  Cyborg political intervention, therefore, is understood as one involving the competing fictions of the irreducible spaces that include individual bodies and networks of power.  Power is not understood as simply negative and oppressive, but as both negative and positive and that which must be harnessed in order to enable political intervention.

Ideology and Repair

The primary difference between the two cyborgs is that Deleuze and Guattari’s ideal body has machinery that is “broken down” and yet still produces—even better, it produces production.  What we could call schizo-production would mean transforming the “mechanical”—“discrete parts working harmoniously together to perform work”—into the “machinic,” which works “unsubordinated” to the law of utility (Massumi 192).  For Deleuze and Guattari, utility implies a teleology, which they argue is always ideological and, therefore, restraining. 

The product of the machinic is “the process of becoming” (Massumi 192).  The product of machinic desiring machines is new and different modes of production.  The “mechanical” cyborg, on the other hand, would reproduce the ideology of political stasis by (re)producing according to a conception of utility in the context of that ideology and its teleology.  As the schizophrenic is viewed from the context of sanity as mad, the “machinic” cyborg would be viewed from the context of utility as broken down.  “Broken down” could mean transformed to the realm of anti-utility, as the schizophrenic might be viewed from the context of a society that views subjects as labor commodities and consumers: schizos, Deleuze and Guattari remind us, aren’t salable (Anti-Oedipus 245).  Deleuze and Guattari paradoxically theorize a utopia where the means of production do not create ideology, a base without a superstructure—truly nowhere.

Haraway also calls for the subversion of teleology via a type of becoming-ontology, but she has a different appreciation of the necessity of political fictions for the establishment of communication and community.  Political fictions can be considered something like ideology here, but without the negative connotations.  In Ideology: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton argues that the “word ‘ideology,’ one might say, is a text, woven of a whole tissue of different conceptual strands . . . [and] traced through by divergent histories” (1).  Eagleton continues by listing sixteen different definitions.  Of these, Haraway would probably overlap with Deleuze and Guattari on a few:

(a) the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life …

(f) that which offers a position for a subject;

(g) forms of thought motivated by social interests …  (1)

Other definitions, those without negative connotations, seem to fit better with only Haraway’s theory:

(h) identity thinking …

(i) socially necessary illusion …

(k) the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their worlds …

(o) the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure …  (2, italics mine)

And others, those with more negative connotations, seem to fit Deleuze and Guattari’s theory better:

(c) ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power … 

(e) systematically distorted communication …

(j) the conjuncture of discourse and power …  (1-2)

Of course, Haraway would agree, for example, with definition (c).  My intention here is merely to suggest subtle differences in the theorists’ relation to Eagleton’s definitions of ideology—and particularly to the political role of necessary fictions—not to set strict definitional boundaries.

Deleuze and Guattari seem to rejoice in the idea of a nomadic body experiencing ever greater decoding and “deterretorialization” and thus eventually being able to approach a situation practically free of any Heideggarian “pre-understandings” (Eagleton 3) even though this “freedom” would make communication, community, and group political action impossibilities. 

Rather than necessary fictions, what Haraway calls “political constructions” are ideological constructions for Deleuze and Guattari, if not inevitably “always already” paranoid (projecting and enforcing meaning) and fascistic (fascism being stasis achieved by oppression and constructed out of myth, abjection, and terror).  Indeed, Anti-Oedipus, a political construction itself, resists being reduced to a system, to any kind of narrative or theoretical machine of utility; thus, it resists being reduced to ideology, a political fiction, or a reading such as mine—that is, it resists utility.

In A Thousand Plateaus, part two of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari argue that language “is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience” (76).  They seem to desire some extralinguistic or metalinguistic experience unencumbered by the deleterious effects of the forces that ultimately “compel obedience.” Repair must happen within language, which, I will argue, does not necessarily compel obedience to some Foucauldian sense of power that Deleuze and Guattari seem to conflate with language. 

Language has an intrinsic subversiveness with respect to the construction of “terretorializations,” which Derrida calls différance.  The context in which repair occurs will necessarily be the dominant ideology, what Jameson calls the cultural logic of late capitalism, and what Haraway calls the “informatics of domination.”  This context is not so determinant that it does not allow for political fictions and interventions that are potentially subversive—for example, Anti-Oedipus itself.  Moreover, even necessary fictions have a certain literariness that can’t be “territorialized.”

In this context of postmodern styles, “broken down” might also be considered analogous to obsolescence (cf. Watkins), especially with respect to the culture of late capitalism where there is a concomitant fetishizing of newness alongside the fetishizing of commodities.  Capitalism, as Marx points out in Capital, is an economy of constant change; therefore, the inculcation by consumers of an ever-changing exchange value and its ideology of obsolescence is dependent on a relatively consistent fetishizing of newness, a common fetish within the techno-teleologies of both modernism and postmodernism. 

In Throwaways, Watkins expands this theme of obsolescence within postmodernism—a realm of what he calls “technoideological coding” (2)—and calls for a type of political-educational “repair,” a mode of education and political activism that subverts hegemonical coding that determines what is obsolete (a “throwaway”) and what is innovative.  This “recoding,” as Deleuze and Guattari would call it, is not interested in the past, but in establishing what counts for “pastness” in the present (3).  According to Watkins, the ideology, political myth, or contested fiction that determines the temporal construction also determines what is recoded obsolete and what is recoded innovative after the consumer education evolves in the constant flux of decoding-recoding of late capitalism, the economy of rapid change.  This process determines social position and, therefore, informs community identity for various populations. 

Repair is also a solution to breakdown of individual cyborgs (subjects, bodies) whether we undersdtand the breakdown as being one of machines or of psychological states.  Within the context of this paper, however, any boundary between machine and psychology is a fiction, perhaps a necessary one.  Repair for either discrete cyborgs or cyborg populations, I shall argue, is ultimately a process of tactical (re)coding, of competing fictions, and the teaching and learning of those fictions as oppositional politics.  “Repair” according to these terms is therefore contrary to Deleuze and Guattari’s decoded utopian figure since recoding is a necessary aspect of repair in this context. 

I shall argue that Haraway’s cyborg is a more promising monster than Deleuze and Guattari’s cyborg since the process of schizophrenia precludes recoding and, therefore, education.  What is needed is education within hegemony in the interest of subverting it--and education that resists the establishment of another oppressive hegemony.  My privileging of Haraway’s cyborg over Deleuze and Guattari’s, however, does not mean that both political fictions have not added many tools to my theory toolbox—essential tools for repairing cyborgs.

Cyborgs as an Ironic Measure of Some Things

According to May, if “poststructuralist political thought could be summed up in a single prescription, it would be that radical political theory, if it is to achieve anything, must abandon humanism in all its forms” (75).  Though May probably would not consider Haraway a poststructuralist, he considers Deleuze to be one of the dominant forces in poststructuralism alongside Lyotard and Foucault.  Though Haraway may not be strictly a poststructuralist, both the cyborg of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” and the one of Capitalism and Schizophrenia are fundamental and thorough critiques of humanism.

Derived from the Latin term humanitas, humanism “includes the sense expressed in the Greek word paideia: that is, education in the liberal arts, understood as forms of learning that separate human beings from animals and barbarians” (Childers and Hentzi 141).  Humanist conceptions of the soul have consistently set boundaries between humankind and animals, and also between homo humanitas from homo barbaritas (ibid.).  Scientific and theological camps within humanism have battled over borders for centuries.  Though humanism came to emphasize the limitations of humanity by distinguishing it from divinity after the Middle Ages, it has also been consistently based on the establishment of boundaries between the qualities of souls, not to mention between those earth dwellers with a soul and those without one—thus creating various stratifications of humans in relation to divinity (ibid.).  The relatively recent rise of the phrase “secular humanism” was a reaction to the metaphysical origins of humanism, despite its Renaissance claim to make humankind “the measure of all things” (ibid.) rather than God.  

Haraway’s critique of humanism is a critique of its construction of boundaries and the signaling of “three crucial boundary breakdowns that make [her] political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis possible” (Cyborg 151).  These breakdowns occur between the humanist-constructed boundaries between 1) human and animal, 2) organism and machine, and 3) a subset of the second, that which is physical and non-physical (Cyborg 151-53 passim).  Haraway, a primatologist, argues that “the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached,” citing that little difference has been found with respect to “language, tool use, social behaviour, [and] mental events” (Cyborg 151-52).  

Haraway’s primary focus is the second boundary between organism and machine.  As she does with animals, Haraway looks to what are commonly referred to as machines and sees that differentiation between them and humans has become more difficult.  Machines are tools and they are increasingly doing work for humans, work that was done before “by hand.”  Manufacturing was the handicraft mode of production prior to the Industrial Revolution.  This term has remained dominant in our lexicon even though it is misleading in a capitalist context where manual labor has increasingly been replaced by machine labor.  The common misplaced use of this term and the general fear of cyborgs as monstrous may have the same source: the fear of technology encroaching on humanity.  The machinofacturing of assembly lines has, by definition, become increasingly less populated by biotic bodies.  As capitalism “progresses,” machines increasingly produce machines with decreasing human labor involved.  Haraway, however, may exaggerate when she argues that the machines of early capitalism “were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous,” but that now “we are not so sure” (Cyborg 152). 

Machines have been “self-moving” since motors were … machinofactured.  At the end of the regress of today’s machinofacturing it is hard to find a simply human origin—a site of the innocence of the designer-deity—because the designer of the machine that machinofactured this machine … probably sits at a CAD terminal.  Yet even with those machines that seem to design aspects of themselves—such as the mathematical machines of algorithms that evolve like organisms in the virtual worlds of neural network experimentation—the constraints are ultimately set by humans.

On the other hand, with respect to common understandings of the terms, machines are becoming more human-like, and, more significantly, humans are being understood in terms of machines and are becoming more difficult to differentiate from them. 

For example, the simple act of a vaccination is a reprogramming of the immune system, one of the many bodily information processors.  The dominant conception of machines is no longer one of the pistons, levers, crankshafts, pulleys, and pressure-driven motors but one of the information machines: computers and communication systems.  Bodies are understood as complex cybernetic information systems that work in various types of physical media.  These information systems are not cordoned off from the production or work of the information machines supposedly outside the body—those machines that drive the “informatics of domination”—because these informatics are the context within which bodily information machines are formed. 

The bodily information machines that are commonly placed under the vast system called the mind are especially influenced by the context of these informatics, thus potentially establishing a new type of metaphor with which to retheorize psychoanalysis in its thermodynamic or topographical forms. 

With cyborg politics, the boundaries between mind and body, inside body and outside body, are understood as part of the dominant political fictions of the “informatics of domination” rather than as a part of nature.  Cyborgs are the product, the technology, and the manufacturing-machinofacturing of interrelated desiring and thought machines that make up the human bodies that populate the “informatics of domination.”

The mechanistic attributes of humans have a history that has greatly influenced the philosophy of biology, Haraway’s formal discipline.  Haraway’s efforts to confuse boundaries subvert the traditional mechanism-vitalism philosophical axis of contention.  Whereas a vitalist “assumes the presence of some force or principle within the organism not reducible to the categories of physics” (Reese 614), a mechanist “begins with the assumption that an organism is a machine … [which] can be completely explained and understood by calling on no more theoretical resources than those of physics” (Holt 142). 

Though Haraway’s cyborg is surely more the (illegitimate) progeny of materialist mechanism, there are aspects of her-him-it that are reminiscent of idealism and vitalism.  Haraway rejects the boundary between humans and animals, much as the vitalists did.  According to Holt, “[v]italistic theories substitute some other, secular concept—a vital principle or force—for the soul” (142).  This vital force is in all organisms; the first boundary between human and animal becomes less clear when the soul is subverted by the vitalists’ vital force.  Like the idealist panpsychists (e.g., Berkeley), Haraway would differ from the vitalists who insist that “the animate and inanimate worlds are fundamentally different” (ibid.).  She would argue that the boundary often constructed between these two categories, thus defining them, is dubious: animate machines, which lacked the vital forces, were always problematic for vitalists.  Of course, mechanists posit a “panphysics” of sorts, thus bridging any boundary between the “animate and inanimate.”

The physics of the mechanists was of the Newtonian kind, classical or mechanical physics.  Theorists working from paradigms of classical physics have struggled to explain what is called the psyche or soul, and have often reverted to some form of vitalism.  Thomas Hobbes critiqued the idea of soul from a materialist, protomechanist perspective as ultimately contradictory since it required an “immaterial material” (Reese 542).  Contemporary philosopher Gilbert Ryle considers the soul as nothing more than a category mistake (read boundary-setting mistake).  For him, the soul is the “ghost in the machine” of the Cartesian subject (ibid.). 

Freud’s prepsychoanalytic Project for a Scientific Psychology is an anti-Cartesian, mechanistic attempt at an explanation of the psyche.  Though enabled by the Project to create what came to be psychoanalysis, Freud eventually abandoned it and his sole commitment to mechanism.  Indeed, Freudian psychoanalysis is fundamentally vitalistic.  In Freud Reappraised, Robert R. Holt argues convincingly that Freud’s conception of psychic energy is teleological (158), a defining element of vitalism, and that it is functionally equivalent to Hans Dreisch’s “entelechy” or vital force (159).  

Recent theorists of the mind, such as Roger Penrose, have “jumped from” a mechanistic paradigm of classical physics to one of quantum physics where physical states jump around and the term “mechanical” becomes of uncertain value.  In The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics, Penrose addresses Haraway’s third boundary between the physical and non-physical—“physical” here denoting classical physics and the mechanical—when he claims that it is “our present lack of understanding of the fundamental laws of physics that prevents us from coming to grips with the concept of ‘mind’ in physical or logical terms” (4). 

Quantum physics is the closest we have to the fundamentals of physics, and, in the quantum state, there is a strange phenomenon of “jumping” from one physical reality to another.  Since the measuring apparatus and the measuring scientist all are in a quantum state, certainty in this physical realm—i.e., the physical world—seems rather elusive.  Despite this jumping around, quantum physics is said to only make a difference at a certain scale of investigation—that is, the very small. 

Penrose explains the connection between quantum theory and theories of subjectivity, and he refutes claims that quantum physics is a special kind of physics:

One tends to think of the discrepancies between quantum and classical theory as being very tiny, but in fact they also underlie many ordinary-scale physical phenomena.  The very existence of solid bodies, the strengths and physical properties of materials, the nature of chemistry, the colours of substances, the phenomena of freezing and boiling, the reliability of inheritance—these, and many other familiar properties, require quantum theory for their explanations.  Perhaps, also, the phenomenon of consciousness is something that cannot be understood in entirely classical terms.  Perhaps our minds are qualities rooted in some strange and wonderful feature of those physical laws which actually govern the world we inhabit, rather than being just features of some algorithm acted out by the so-called “objects” of a classical physical structure.…  Might a quantum world be required so that thinking, perceiving creatures, such as ourselves, can be constructed from its substance?  Such a question seems more appropriate for a God, intent on building and inhabiting a universe, than it is for us! (225-56)

Penrose’s “strange and wonderful feature” of thought and quantum physics seems to be analogous to the conception of soul in panpsychism: both theorize a common element in the “object” world and what might be called a “soul.”  The mechanism-vitalism philosophical polarity is dependent on a classical conception of physics, on “mechanics.”  Penrose’s application of quantum theory to thought might be considered a type of “jumping” over a boundary in an attempt to make fun of (to play with seriously) the boundary between the physical and non-physical—that is, if “physical” is defined in Newtonian terms. 

Penrose’s “strange and wonderful feature” of thought and quantum physics—his speculation of a quantum mechanistic theory of subjectivity—seems to subvert the polarity between mechanists and vitalists by theorizing what might be analogous to a vital force in physical terms.  His “strange and wonderful feature” differs from most conceptions of soul in that—like the mechanists and Haraway, and unlike the vitalists—it is not teleological.  There is no final cause or narrative that begins with innocence and ends with apocalypse—just playful border jumping from state to state.  

Cyborg Affinity Groups

For Haraway, the “relation between organism and machine has been a border war” in the “traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics” (Cyborg 150).  Her “Cyborg Manifesto” works against what she considers to be a racist, sexist, capitalist, teleological, nature-appropriating, and narcissistic tradition by arguing “for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” (ibid.).  Though Deleuze and Guattari would probably be sympathetic to Haraway’s rendering of “Western” tradition, they would be unsympathetic to what is her ultimate respect for the necessity of some boundaries for the construction of necessary fiction.  For them, any such construction, what they would call “reterritorialization” and “recoding,” would inevitably limit the free play of the schizo-libido, obstruct their ideal of nomadism, and punctuate their utopia of permanent revolution with ultimately fascistic periods of stasis.

Though Anti-Oedipus resists utility, it does seem to promote an ethic.  In his introduction to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault wrote, “I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics” (xiii).  The good preceeds the bad regarding the anti-oedipal moral axes that follow: nomadic or anarchistic schizophrenia is opposed to fascistic paranoia; molecular—“fragmentary processes operating particle by particle through strictly local connections” (Massumi 48)—is opposed to the molar—“locally discrete particles [that] have become correlated at a distance” (Massumi 54-55); code—ultimately molar—is opposed to language—potentially ideological when it overlaps code, as in “standard language,” but also potentially transformational and deterritorializing (Massumi 188); and the machinic—molecular and “unsubordinated to the laws of resemblance or utility” (Massumi 192)—is opposed to the mechanical—molar with “discrete parts working harmoniously together to perform work” (ibid.).  Free, local, nomadic, transformational, partial, and unstable are good; constrained, global, settled, unchanging, whole, and stable are bad.

According to Childers and Hentzi, the “term code refers to the shared set of rules, conventions, restraints, and norms that permit the communication of a message between a receiver and a sender” (46).  Is communication, and therefore community, possible outside of code?  Is language?  Are any of these possible without Heideggarian “pre-understandings”?  Or without something Deleuze and Guattari would call “ideology” and Haraway would call “political fictions”?  Anti-Oedipus seems to theorize an anti-ontology that finds communication essentially a restraining activity and community a notion that is obviously inimical to the nomadic ethos of Anti-Oedipus.  Deleuze and Guattari factor the impaired communication of autism without its rigidity into schizophrenia.  For them, there seem to be few differences between constraints and restraints.  “That power is always a matter of constraints upon action,” May argues, “does not imply that we must define those constraints in terms of restraints” (67).

For Deleuze and Guattari, territorialization is the process of establishing social structures through the designation of appropriate objects for libidinal investment.  For example, in societal structures constructed within an oedipal paradigm, the incest taboo is the fundamental constraint, and the model of heterosexual object relations that reproduce the parents’ projection of normality is the predominant one for object choice regarding marriage and love relationships.  The process of deterritorialization would thus mean escaping from these inhibiting structures, freeing up social constraints on object choice and libidinal investment.  In a contemporary “Western” context, deterritorialization would mean revealing the ideological illusion that heterosexuality, marriage, love, and incest are a part of natural reality rather than linguistic constructions and aspects of a particular social life.  Yet, anything similar to love relationships, family, affinity groups (Cyborg 155), or united political action all seem to be impossibilities in a realm of mere deterritorialization.  Communication, communion, and community seem to be the anti-theses of Anti-Oedipus.

Haraway’s cyborg, on the other hand, is “needy of connection” and has a “natural feel for united front politics” (Cyborg 151) and affinity groups.  Deleuze and Guattari would probably be tempted to equate the cyborg in a united political front with the automaton-like followers of Hitler and Stalin, or the “ditto heads” who listen to Rush Limbaugh or join Ross Perot’s “United We Stand.”  Certainly, the fascistic, rationalistic, consumerized, and Taylorized automaton is a specter haunting any cyborg figuration—a different kind of ghost in/of the machine.

Political Fictions of Timely Cyborgs

Homo Humanitas, according to the West’s master narratives, at times seems to be a paradoxical “soulful automaton” playing out a messy game for a narcissistic and sadistic Führer—for example, Milton’s God in Paradise Lost.  Haraway’s cyborg, however, is based on an irreconcilable antithesis to the master narratives of the West, of which fascism, consumerism, “communism,” and monotheism are monstrous forms that construct promises (Nietzsche) yet are not “promising”:

In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense—a “final” irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the “West’s” escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self united at last from all dependency, a man in space.  An origin story in the “Western,” humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. (Cyborg 150-51)

These latter two myths are powerfully inscribed in my own faith, my own “ironic political mythology” (Cyborg 149), and it is troubling for me to connect Marxism, especially with, for example, fascism in this severely truncated “Western” ideological genealogy.  The specter of Lenin’s vanguard and Stalinism, however, does seem to haunt Marxism. 

With respect to psychoanalysis, on the other hand, the connection to fascism, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, seems considerably less problematic: the psychoanalyst uses transferences to clean up whatever free libido might be spewing out unterritorialized by Oedipus; oppressive civilization as a necessity for the repression of the death instinct (bringing its destruction to rest by enveloping itself).  Ironically, however, Anti-Oedipus can be read as an apocalyptic end to the narrative of the development of Freudo-Marxism.  Haraway’s cyborg, by definition, is not the product of, and does not produce or reproduce according to, the totality of any master narratives; therefore, it is not haunted by the specters of a fascistic, Stalinistic, consumerist, discontented, or civilized automaton.  All of these specters, despite their anti-Christian sentiments, are holy ghosts; they all depend upon master narratives of mastery and metaphysics of presence, the ancestors of the “informatics of domination.”

Master narratives require an ending, closure, and usually a returning to the state of innocence (the beginning, prior to the conflict)—an actualization of the telos.  In a Freudian context, the return is to the Zero by way of Thanatos,  what Freud called the Nirvana Principle.  In monotheistic contexts, the return is to being at-one with God after the apocalypse, to atone for the Fall.  Haraway argues, however, that “with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either” (Cyborg 157).  In other words, if we do away with narratives of lost innocence, we do away with a desire to return to the Garden.  In fact, and in her fiction, there is no Garden. 

Haraway’s distrust of origins and innocence is in harmony with Foucault’s Nietzschean-genealogical approach to constructing political fictions.  According to Todd May, 

Genealogy seeks to trace the emergence of its object, a practice, or a concept.  In such seeking, however, it does not look for a unitary origin, a single source from which its object springs.… To look for the sole origin is, according to Foucault, to make three mistakes.  First, it is to assume that there are essences behind appearances, an assumption that runs counter to the picture of social relations as an irreducible network.  Second, it is to see historical beginnings as grand affairs, when they are more often lowly and dispersed.  Last, it is to import a notion of truth into beginnings: the origin of an object is its truth, its moment of transparency to itself.  (May 90; Foucault 142-44).

Though the political fictions constructed according to the ontology of Haraway’s cyborg may seem like Foucauldian genealogies, Haraway claims that “Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics” (Cyborg 150).  According to May, as “one moves away from analysis and toward suggestions for intervention, one passes from philosophy [or history] to programmatics” (9-10).  Haraway might call Foucault’s biopolitics “flaccid” because it seems incapable of such programmatics, of making “suggestions for intervention,” because it has gone “beyond good and evil” and therefore cannot ground itself in an ethic for fear of reproducing oppressive forms of representation. 

Cyborg politics, on the other hand, is fundamentally about survival and, therefore, about programmatics.  It appreciates the problems of representation, of telling non-activist cyborgs what they should want and do.  It does not seek grounding in holistic and transcendent ethics but in partial, temporary, and tactical ethics.  It seeks the creation of affinity groups between cyborgs who have experienced marginalization.  Oppressive categorizations are boundaries to deconstruct, whereas the categorizations that form affinity groups are boundaries to construct.  The irony is that these boundaries may be theorized as the same, thus requiring ironic fictions of concomitant deconstructing and reconstructing.

Cyborg Ontology

Human desire is Other to the Beings of master narratives, to the Zero of Freudianism, or to the soul without flesh.  We lost the Garden, according to the dominant master narrative of the “West,” due to (woman’s) desire.  The Fall, and therefore desire, created the recognition of boundaries and the problems of time according to this plot: Eve is a monotheistic Pandora. 

Innocence in psychoanalysis—a discourse devoted to subverting all notions of innocence—comes only with the absence of desire prior to life and in death.  The “bodies” of powerful master narratives are about conflict brought on by desire.  Rejecting the atemporal beginning and endings of these master narratives—i.e., rejecting beginning, endings, and master narratives in general—means rejecting the notion of an ontology at odds with time and desire and the notion of time and desire as somehow Other to our Innocence.  Ontology in its traditional forms, it seems, requires atemporality, eternity.  The rejection of atemporality, of Being as an end, leaves us with just the “body” of the narrative without a beginning or end, and with desire and time: all seemingly essential elements to cyborg “ontologies” of becoming, of middleness, of the body of political fictions. 

The cyborg body, composed of biotic desiring machines, is just a middle of conflict and flux; it is essentially temporal and not at all teleological.

In its other essential mode of irony, the cyborg is concomitantly descriptive (now here) and utopic (nowhere).  Haraway’s cyborg seems to be less a goal at the end of a historical progression than a matter of establishing a contemporary fiction that produces readings for progressive resistance.  Her utopia does not depend on the recognition of an ideal, nor even the “at-one-ment” (Campbell) with an eternal God, or even a somewhat historicized, evolutionary-specific “species being” (early Marx).  It is rather dependent on the acceptance of the ironic permanence of flux (Heraclitus), a displacement of Platonic being-centered ontologies by science fictions with real lives of becoming. 

The boundaries discursively constructed to articulate fictions are in flux, as are (and thus so is our experiences of) our be(com)ings. 

Accepting being and the existence of boundaries “out there” that merely evade exact correspondence to our progressively “scientific” discourses as fictions is a fundamental part of the “now here” aspect of Haraway’s cyborg theory.  An appreciation of the political potential of the displacement of these powerful fictions with the subversive fictions of the Cyborg Manifesto is the utopic aspect.  Since this displacement could only happen after a great deal of change within the ever-changing “informatics of domination” (Cyborg 161), another ironic political ontology besides the cyborg would be needed after some time well before its actualization—thus, the cyborg fiction is also “nowhere.”

What seems to transcend the flux for Haraway is the problem of domination and the need for general acceptance of flux, and therefore of becoming and irony.  Haraway also seems to recognize the importance of a sense of—that is, creating fictions of—“being” within the flux; her theory creates the ironic allies of ontology and flux, being and becoming, synchronic and diachronic fictions.  On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenia resists ontology, being, and synchronic fictions; therefore, they seem to resist this irony.  Deleuze and Guattari, like Haraway, attempt to be anti-platonic; their theory seems even more ardently one of becoming, of processes with no ends, than Haraway’s, if it could be.  Schizophrenia is for them a process of decoding, and of maintaining the flux of permanent revolution, thus making structural/synchronic ontologies potentially fascistic fictions.

Their process of schizophrenia would seem to end with a nomadic “schizophrenic” body.  This body’s libido would be free and unconstrained, but also unconnected and incommunicable.  Despite their seemingly frenzied attempts to break free of all traditional constraints, the authors of Anti-Oedipus seem to have created a part of the ideological genealogy that Haraway describes as the “‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self united at last from all dependency” (Cyborg 151).  If Anti-Oedipus could be reduced to something like an ontology, it would be a radically individualistic, even narcissistic, one.  Despite what seems to be their failing here, Deleuze and Guattari seem to embrace the necessity of an ironic sensibility as described by Haraway:

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into 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 political method …  At the centre of my ironic faith … is the image of the cyborg.  (Cyborg 149)

Keats called this sensibility “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after the fact and reason … incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge” (Bate 349).  Anti-Oedipus acts as one of the grand tests of the reader’s Negative Capability.  Haraway’s cyborg is “wary of holism” (Cyborg 151) and “not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (Cyborg 154).  Haraway argues in a chapter called “Situated Knowledges” that “it is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspectives that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective inquiry rests” (Cyborg 191).  

Of course, these last three adjectives are antithetical to the ethos of Anti-Oedipus. Like other forms of literature, the utility of Anti-Oedipus’s fictional productions is the deconstructive potential it has for its readers.  Whereas Haraway wants to playfully move boundaries about, Deleuze and Guattari seem to want to dissolve them all.  Perhaps the idea of moving boundaries about is misleading; her call for responsibility for their “construction” might assume that the boundaries being replaced were deconstructed or destroyed, thus the utility of Deleuze and Guattari and other deconstructive/destructive theoretical tools.  My conception of human ontology, my faith, is an ironic combination of being and becoming, one that tactically risks “the positivist essentialism” (Spivak 3) of positing the human need for human communication and community.  Therefore, I would privilege Haraway’s “ironic political myth” over Deleuze and Guattari’s.  This choice of Haraway over Deleuze and Guattari, however, seems unnecessary in this context where survival may require the “ironic allies” of Deleuze and Guattari’s “acid tools” and Haraway’s ironic combination of similar “acid tools” and “ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects.”

What is There to Repair?

Once made, this choice to privilege Haraway’s cyborg political fiction (perhaps full of a delusion of self-determination) allows (forces) me to consider my responsibility in constructing boundaries.  This construction is a linguistic act, one of (re)coding: “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” that must be coded (Cyborg 163).  The act of (re)coding the cyborg is potentially the act of resistance; the (re)coding is where mythopoeic activism happens, thus bridging the gap between the real fiction of the “now here” and the fictional reality of the “nowhere.”  The (re)coding or, more simply, the reading and writing of these realities and fictions is activism in the realm of education (Watkins, Gramsci).  These potentially writerly (Barthes) readings, according to Haraway, are a matter of survival.  

In Throwaways, Evan Watkins begins, much like Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, by pointing out that, as Marx explains in Capital, “capitalism is the economy of change” (1) and that “social change is a touchy topic for ruling groups.”  Deleuze and Guattari support this aspect of capitalism and characterize it as the positive process of decoding, but they abhor the relentless process of recoding, which also occurs under capitalism.  This process of decoding-recoding unstably establishes the exchange value of commodities and the concomitant commodity fetishism of consumers, processes of interrelated recoding and reterritorialization.

Watkins refers to contemporary or postmodern forms of (re)coding as “technoideological coding.”  Unlike the modernist master narrative of social Darwinism where the field of reference is nature and the “educational paradigm of change … permitted the continuing naturalization of ruling social position” (2), Watkins’ argues that 

the field of reference [for technoideaological coding] is not nature but technology; social disaster is not the equivalent of biological extinction but of obsolescence; and survival is no longer the name designating ‘the fittest’ but what identifies the obsolete as relics from the past, those left behind by the innovations of the present. (2)

In social Darwinism, survival was the sign of success.  Within the “informatics of domination” of technoideological coding, “survivals” are those populations that have been designated obsolete—the unsuccessful.

Under the social Darwinist educational paradigm that dominated Western culture in early and Fordist forms of capitalism, the master narratives were often grounded in Nature, thus supplying the subordinate technological realm with a Darwinist teleology of nature’s progress toward perfection via natural selection.  Combating this hegemony required a process of “demystification” which “exposed the natural as in fact ideological” (Watkins 4). 

Technoideological coding, however, “requires no natural frame of explanation to legitimize its powers to educate” (ibid.).  With the technoideological coding of late capitalism, Watkins argues, teleology is technological: progress is defined negatively by the process of abjection called obsolescence, and the dominant technological realm supplies nature, including its human element, with a teleology of change and fetishized newness.  “Demystification,” Watkins points out, is no longer a viable form of political subversion.  Since there is no unmediated access to nature—that is, access untainted by ideology—that would be opposed to ideology in order to separate rhetoric from truth, political activism requires competition between different political fictions.

Watkins cites Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” early in Throwaways (2) and borrows from her “informatics of domination” the theme of obsolescence (19).  His focus on repair as a remedy to the process of abjection of whole populations as obsolete seems to be flawed in that it is a fiction that does not work outside of a paradigm of obsolescence-innovation dictated by the hegemony of technoideological coding, and within the temporal context this coding establishes.  Watkins’ repair does, however, work against this coding with its own recoding. 

Watkins calls for a working against ideology from within it, perhaps seeing no outside.  Yet, when Watkins argues that “repair of the obsolete can be strategically inventive” (214), he seems to be suggesting that oppositional politics do not have to accept completely the terms or temporality of contestation.  Deleuze and Guattari take their concept of inventiveness to an extreme, calling for something only and always outside of ideology, and seeing language as necessarily a medium that creates subjects, in both its phenomenological sense and in the sense of being subjected to authority (e.g., the subject of a monarchy).  For Deleuze and Guattari, invention can only happen outside of language.

A concept of repair requires a concept of the smooth-running, productive machine, which, of course, is a type of concept that has invariably led in the past to the type of ideology where “smooth-running” becomes synonymous with “broken down” in a competing fiction.  In other words, when being “smooth-running” causes suffering, either for the discrete subject or for populations (usually the suffering is felt most keenly in marginalized populations), then a competing fiction where “smooth-running” or “mechanical” appears “broken down” or “machinic” is needed. 

Suffering, however, seems to have aspects that are constructed within ideology and others that seem to transcend it.  Deleuze and Guattari’s ethic of Anti-Oedipus seems to recognize this: why theorize schizoanalysis if there were no suffering bodies?  What suffers?  If suffering is merely a power network conflicting with itself, or if it is merely the epiphenomenon of forces that use bodies as one of many mediums, why theorize?  There must be something transcendent that Deleuze and Guattari are interested in protecting from recoding and reterretorialization, something constant within the flux of capitalism.  Libido? Self? There must be something constant within the permanent revolution they prescribe, or else for what would it be prescribed?  Can theorists afford to be completely anti-ontological?  Can there be only becoming?

Watkins points out that Marx and Engels “were able to recognize how the insistence of the natural might in fact pose an obstacle … to capitalist expansion” (17) since they argue in their Manifesto that the “bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production” (ibid.).  The natural, Marx seems to suggest, could provide a context of immutability that would contrast with capitalism’s “permanent revolution.” 

Watkins, who focuses on consumption more than production, sees this process of flux within capitalism as one that requires ever-changing exchange values and, therefore, constantly evolving consumer education.  Watkins sees in the contemporary consumer an “internalization of change” (8), which might be theorized in terms of a “self” based on utter openness to decoding and recoding with respect to the flux of exchange values.

During industrial capitalism, this recoding, according to Watkins, was a process of “renaturalization,” an “ongoing, even ‘avant-garde’ process, usefully buttressed by myths of a scientific and scholarly ‘progress’ of knowledge as well as of technologies” (18).  “[I]deological renaturalization,” Watkins continues, “began to assume the status of a kind of metarationale,” where “rather than functioning as an immediate field of reference for explanations of stratified relations of social position, constructions of the natural could occupy the higher ground of ‘disinterested’ inquiry into what the social process of stratification had made visible” (ibid.).  Nature could not be an “immediate field of reference” since the flux of capitalism would then hardly seem natural.  As a field for metarationale, the master narrative of “immutable nature” could then subsume the change of capitalism into its rubric by displacing the context of nature into a metacontext.

Marx saw the immutability of nature as a way of “demystifying” the ideology of capitalism by revealing its “permanent revolution” as artifactual ideology.  Since these social processes are played out subjectively in Marx’s theory, he posited the “species being” as the natural, somewhat immutable component of humans.  According to Mihailo Markovic, 

Marx described his position [on human nature] as a unity of naturalism and humanism.  Naturalism is the view that man is part of nature.  He has not been created by some transcendental spiritual agency but is the product of a long biological evolution, which at a certain point enters a new specific form of development, human history, characterized by an autonomous, self-reflective, creative way of acting—praxis.  Thus, man is essentially a being of praxis.  Humanism is the view that as a being of praxis man both changes nature and creates himself.  (244-45)

In this paradigm, nature and human essence could be considered as evolving on a relatively vast temporal scale, while the means of production and consumer education of capitalism are evolving on a relatively minute one.  Again, this backdrop of human nature, though not immutable but certainly much less in flux than capitalism, provides a contrast to the artifactual aspects of subjectivity. 

Marx’s conception of human nature is not simple essentialism.  It contains ironic allies of historicism and ahistoricism: it deals with universal invariants, what he called “human nature in general” (Capital I, ch. 22), and with “human nature as modified in each historical epoch” (ibid.).  His being of praxis is at the same time a beginning and an end, but not necessarily a lost innocence and certainly not an apocalypse.  His master narrative requires no solution of atemporality, no end outside of time. There is no final cause and no atemporality; but history is a vector and, therefore, it seems to be teleological.  History works toward self-reflexivity through human nature.  Manufactured history reconstructs itself as humans become beings of praxis within a context of communism.

Marx’s utopia of communism—what he would call his “scientific socialism”—is populated by his utopian subjects: beings of praxis, who have actualized “the transformation of [alienated] labour into self-activity” (Bottomore 437).  Like Haraway’s cyborg, these beings are now here and yet nowhere, both is and ought.  The production of these beings is self-production: it comes from the self, objectifies the subject, but also subjectifies the product.  Since, as Robert M. Young argues, “human labour transforming nature for collective human purposes is central to the Marxist conception of praxis” (535), and since “technology is the product—artifacts which embody value and have use values” (ibid.)—self-production can be understood in marxian terms as a process of self-technologizing and technologizing of the self.  Praxis would, therefore, require and be the effects of a process of increasing self-production via a combination of (hu)manufacturing and machinofacturing.  Since self-production would mean the production of a materialist-mechanist-artifactual self, this self’s machines would then be partially responsible for machinofacturing.  Marx’s theory of subjectivity is readily theorized as a cyborg ontology.

Repair in this context where it is human nature to change nature and to perform the self-activity of self-production—thus positing a human nature of changing the self, of producing the self—would ultimately be forced to theorize what those more universal components of human nature might be in order to provide some kind of grounding of the repair.   The suffering caused by such things as obsolescence, fascism, domination, and other abuses of power is part the frustration of the “mechanical” desiring machines produced within the context of hegemony; but, it is also part the frustration of aspects of desires which have as their ultimate source these “more universal components of human nature.” 

Coding of the “species being,” however, has historically been the most obviously ideological practice—and that is “ideology” defined as “ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power” (Eagleton 1).  If the temporality of obsolescence-innovation and the change of capitalism is not to be reproduced, and the crescendo of decoding-recoding is not to be continued, then something on a different temporal scale, working against the flux of postmodern production and consumer education and stabilizing the semiotic confusion it causes, seems to be needed for oppositional activism. 

A concept of cyborg repair that does not theorize a process that would ultimately reproduce the aspects of ideology that cause suffering—the socio-cultural antitheses to self-activity (Marx), freedom (Deleuze and Guattari), and survival (Haraway)—would need to go beyond the temporal scale of change created by the technoideological coding of capitalism to a more vast scale proportional to the changes in human nature from epoch to epoch.  Positing tactical “essentialisms” in order to ground political fictions should be a process that recreates temporality and recognizes temporalities of scale.

“What is to be done?” (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin)

Though natural coding is illusory, the natural component of the cyborg is not. Coding nature is not the same as natural coding.  “Recent political critique,” according to Watkins, “has to some great extent altered the contours of familiar debate by refusing from the outset any appeal to nature, even as grounds for oppositional practices” (19).  He then cites Haraway as a “particularly dramatic example” of this phenomenon. 

In “The Promises of Monsters,” however, Haraway argues that nature “may be speechless, without language in the human sense; but nature is highly articulate” (324).  For Haraway, nature is “a topos, a place, in the sense of a rhetorician’s place or topic for consideration of common themes; nature is strictly a commonplace … nature is the place to rebuild public culture.…  Nature is a topic of public discourse on which much turns, even the earth” (Promises 296).  More true to Watkins’ claim regarding Haraway and appeals to nature, Haraway argues that nature is “also a trópos, a trope [an act of turning]. It is figure, construction, artifact, movement, displacement.  Nature cannot precede its construction.…  Troping, we turn to nature as if to the earth, to the primal stuff—geotropic, physiotropic.…  Nature for us is made, as both fiction and fact” (Promises 296-7).  Even though nature “cannot precede its construction” it is, at the same time, articulate, what Haraway might call an “actant” independent of human discourse.  There seem to be two natures here: a “nature” constructed in human discourse and a nature that articulates nondiscursively, and which can precede its construction in human articulation: “Discourse is only one process of articulation” (Promises 324).

Proper repair of cyborgs and cyborg communities requires what Haraway calls “ironic allies.”  One pair of ironic allies seems to reside in the aporia—what there is of one—of Haraway’s take on nature.  The pragmatics of these allies would simply be the coding of nature while deconstructing these codings, what Gayatri Spivak and Stephen Heath call risking essentialism while using deconstructive tools (Spivak 3).  Haraway suggests a similar, if not the same, pair of ironic allies: 

The acid tools of postmodernist theory [such as Deleuze and Guattari and Haraway] and the constructive tools of ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects [such as Haraway and Marxism] might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival (Cyborg 157). 

The totalizing aspects and potentially centered subjects of Marxism, its strategic political philosophy mapped as concentric circles of influence around a center of the economic base (May), its teleology of praxis, the seemingly inevitable necessity of representation in the form of a vanguard in theory (Marx) and in practice (Lenin; see May 41)—all of these attributes are antithetical to the partial and “rhizomatic” (Deleuze and Guattari) explanations of power, the decentered “subjectivity” of cyborgs, the tactical political philosophies mapped as networks of forces (Deleuze) or as an “informatics of domination,” the temporality that sees final causes as part of fictions of oppression, and the resisting of representing people to themselves (Foucault; see May 132) in the postmodern theories of Haraway, Deleuze and Guattari.  

The irreconcilable differences between Anti-Oedipus and “Cyborg Manifesto” also call for the establishment of “ironic allies” since Deleuze and Guattari provide many useful tools for my toolbox of concepts—tools that certainly are useful, despite their resistance to utility—for the repair of broken down cyborgs and obsolete cyborg populations. 

The differences are centered around recoding and the communication this coding allows for after the decoding of the capitalist flux of exchange value.  Survival requires the construction of anti-hegemonic political fictions (ideology) that resist Watkins’ conception of “renaturalization” (ideology, definition "p" of Eagleton’s list) while at the same time resisting the construction of “ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power” (ideology, definition "c") via the “systematically distorted communication” (ideology, definition "e"). 

Lenin failed to foresee that his practical application of his reading of Marx’s cyborg political fiction would create a society that caused suffering on the scale of the one it replaced.  In other words, subversive political fictions (ideology) are required to counter the political fictions of hegemony (ideology).  Tactical assemblages of affinity groups, not necessarily identity groups (Cyborg 155), are required to counter the molar forces of the “informatics of domination.” 

Lenin’s question—“What is to be done?”—is potentially a very dangerous question.  It can lead to the replacement of one dynamic of domination with another, such as the replacement of a Tsarist form of oppression with a Stalinist one.  It is, however, a necessary question for survival.  The tools of theory must eventually be put to work.

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