ABSTRACT
I feel it is necessary to give Haraway’s cyborg a lengthy treatment here; it has had a long and complex life, or series of lives, and the ‘cyberquake’ it generated rumbles on in endless aftershocks. So I shall start with the Cyborg Manifesto, not the birthplace of the cyborg, not its ‘origin story’ – these things being resolutely un-cyborgian – but as the place where the author began to think through a particular and located figuration, in a particular intellectual and political context, which needs to be mapped out with some precision if we are going to understand the significance (and also the limitations) of thinking with the cyborg. And like its sci-fi kin the replicants, in the movie Blade Runner (1982), the cyborg has been tasked with a lot of difficult and dirty work, so we also need to spend quite a bit of time exploring that here.
