Donna Haraway Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour an serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism.

Donna Haraway
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.

Donna Haraway
Scientific practice may be considered a kind of storytelling practice...

Donna Haraway
The cyborg would not recognize the garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.

Donna Haraway
The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion

Donna Haraway
Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic.

Donna Haraway
Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously.

Donna Haraway
Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?

Donna Haraway
Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.

Donna Haraway
Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters.

Donna Haraway
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

Donna Haraway
Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections — and it matters which ones get made and unmade.

Donna Haraway
Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

Donna Haraway
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.

Donna Haraway
From this point of view, science - the real game in town - is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.

Donna Haraway
Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.

Donna Haraway
We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.

Donna Haraway
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.

Donna Haraway