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Postmodernism and cultural theory

organism are already hybridised, she posited the ‘cyborg’ as a
‘fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imagi-
native resource’ (Haraway, 1991, p. 150). ‘The cyborg is a kind of
disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and
personal self’, she argued: ‘This is the self feminists must code’
(p. 163). The feminist potential of such cyborg imagery should
be readily apparent: ‘The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender
world’, she wrote; its ‘imagery can suggest a way out of the maze
of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools
to ourselves’ (pp. 150, 181).
Like Huyssen and Kaplan, Haraway also noted the twin faces
of posthumanism. ‘From one perspective’, she wrote, ‘a cyborg
world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the
planet,... about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a
masculinist orgy of war’. But from another, she continued, it
‘might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people
are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines,
not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory
standpoints’. No doubt she was right to conclude that ‘each
reveals both possibilities and dominations unimaginable from
the other’ (p. 154). And it is difficult not to be affected by her
enthusiasm for the positive potential of science and technology.
As she writes elsewhere: ‘to “press enter” is not a fatal error, but
an inescapable possibility for changing maps of the world . . . It’s
not a “happy ending” we need, but a non-ending’ (Haraway,
1992, p. 327). Her alternative perspectives are not simply logical
possibilities, however; they are also socio-historical potentials, the
effectivity of which is conditioned by the balance of historical
probabilities and social forces. And at this level, in the short term
at least, endings do sometimes happen and they are as likely to
be unhappy as happy.

Postmodernism and the collapse of traditional humanism
The coexistence of these twin faces of postmodernism is not
so much a feature of the 1960s in particular as of the postwar
period in general. It arose, moreover, as the effect of an absence
rather than a presence. Where critical theorists have detected

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