This essay uses the demise of the cyborg candidate to challenge faith in social constructionism without an examination of how authenticity sows meaning. I begin by revisiting the cyborg as an entry point to feminist social science, drawing a connection to Kamala Harris as the cyborg’s political manifestation, and placing both in an epistemic context defined by algorithmic logic. In part 2, I propose the node as a theoretical successor to the cyborg, however representative of a new way of thinking that I call matrix thinking.
Part 1: The Cyborg is Dead
Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was socially constructed as a feminist cyborg (Haraway 1991 [1985]). Her public persona fused two irreconcilable parts: one-half relatable woman running an historic campaign with profound appeal to marginalized groups; and one-half cold, hard prosecutor transcendent of race and gender (Gaddini and Figueras-Pont 2024). This contradictory hybridity belies Harris’s tenuous position within a hegemonic power structure where whiteness evokes authority, competence, and safety (Deutsch 2023; McIntosh 1990). By the official launch of her campaign in August 2024, Harris’s messaging had evolved to center the liberation of American women from encroachment on their reproductive rights (Gaddini and Figueras-Pont 2024). Ironically, the call for women’s liberation was rejected by voters in favor of an opponent who could be construed as the grotesque figurehead of patriarchy.
Harris’s electoral loss suggests that the cyborg, as an avatar of feminist social science (Åsberg 2010), is also defunct. The reason why is captured by Audre Lorde’s (1983) adage: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Despite its subversive framing, the cyborg, like the master’s tool, can only ever be a thinly veiled extension of the oppressor. Haraway’s (1991 [1985]) cyborg and Harris as a cyborg candidate fail as liberatory figures because, despite narratives to the contrary, each emerges from an algorithmic logic that is shared with militaristic capitalism. Such logic, which arguably underpins the Modern era, tends to flatten complex needs and social dynamics into linear calculations and simple recipes that lack depth and authenticity. The social sciences are not immune from the influence of algorithmic thinking. This essay uses the demise of the cyborg candidate to challenge faith in social constructionism without an examination of how authenticity sows meaning. I begin by revisiting the cyborg as an entry point to feminist social science, drawing a connection to Harris as the cyborg’s political manifestation, and finally placing both in an epistemic context defined by algorithmic logic. In part 2, I propose the node as a theoretical successor to the cyborg, however representative of a new way of thinking that I call matrix thinking.
Cyborg Origins and Politics
Early feminist STS scholars challenged strict binaries of male vs. female, natural vs. artificial, and internal vs. external and sought to disrupt the presumption of the male body as universal (Suchman 2008, 141). At the forefront of this wave was Donna Haraway, who introduced the cyborg as “a hybrid of machine and organism” to represent the relationship between “imagination and material reality” (1991 [1985], 149-150). Haraway (1991 [1985], 150) describes the cyborg as a figure with the “potential” to be liberatory; arguing that it would subvert patriarchy and oppression despite emerging from a world dominated by militaristic capitalism. Haraway (1991 [1985], 150) proposes that oppressed, would-be cyborgs could self-liberate from dehumanizing “cyborg colonization” through a rejection of traditional narratives, including acknowledgement of natural human origins, because out of natural difference comes natural domination. Illustrating the extent of the cyborg’s capacity to sever the restrictive legacies of tradition, Haraway famously argued that her cyborg “would not recognize the Garden of Eden” (Haraway 1991 [1985], 151).
The theoretical cyborg’s capacity to blend imagination and material reality has shaped liberal, American feminism which, specifically in the case of Harris, relied on the dissonant messaging that a politician can emerge unrepentantly from a political legacy of militaristic capitalism and nevertheless still serve as the progressive feminist choice. For example, Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention came to a terrifying crescendo with a rallying vision for an America that boasted “the most lethal fighting force in the world” (Harris 2024: 8). It is notable that Harris carries the same vision for America championed by overt defenders of patriarchy, thus normalizing the role that Harris herself plays in upholding oppression, despite her liberatory messaging to women.
The Cyborg’s Algorithmic Thinking
Harris’s loss to an adjudicated rapist should be jarring to American feminist scholars because of the profound failure of the political cyborg as a liberatory social construct. Coalition-building is central to liberation (Harro 2000), and cyborg politics offers a weak mechanism for this. For example, Haraway called for the messy, incomplete, partial, and sometimes contradictory gravitation of cyborgs towards defiant “affinity groups” (Haraway 1991 [1985], 150-151). Haraway’s description of affinities suggest that liberatory coalitions are forged spontaneously. Spontaneous affinity is useful for connection, but it is merely a starting point. Moreover, it is not a fleeting affinity that is liberatory, but a deeply forged, interconnected unity.
The shallow nature of cyborg politics parallels a growing social reliance on AI technologies that also speak to our superficial affinities: the cyborg candidate and your Amazon product recommendations are both optimized for cursory appeal. But these calculations belie a darker truth: managing the complex human experience under linear algorithmic processes invites suffering and oppression (O’Neil 2019; Eubanks 2018). Preeminent STS canon, including Theodore Porter’s (1995) Trust in Numbers and James C. Scott’s (1998) Seeing Like a State, critiqued the algorithmic management of people and environments decades ago. Both algorithmic logic and the earlier coined “computational logic” (Porter 1995) standardize and flatten thick, interconnected worlds into thin, linear representations that allow for faster and easier decision-making devoid of empathy or care. Some have argued that the advent of generative AI has initiated an entirely new episteme defined by reliance on machine-mediated, algorithmic truth (Pasquinelli and Joler 2020). I disagree. Drawing from Foucault’s (2018 [1970]: 393) “return to origin” theory that Modernity is driven by humankind’s existential quest to be governed under a God-like authority which can never be reached, I think it’s more likely that symbolic demise of cyborg and the rapid acceleration of AI proliferation are interrelated phenomena that portend epistemic instability of the Modern era.
In short, Haraway’s (1991 [1985]) cyborg is governed by old, computational logic, rendered by an awkward fusion of disparate parts; fantastically confusing but insufficiently complex to inspire truly liberatory networks among heterogenous actors. Similarly, AI technologies represent cyborg logic made manifest. The technological, political, and cultural chaos of the moment demands a liberatory figure that departs from algorithmic thinking altogether.
The Cyborg is Dead (CC0) photo sourced from pexel.com (c) Tara Winstead
Part 2: The Node Rises
To reconceive the cyborg as something epistemically new, I return to Haraway’s description of physical bodies as “material-semiotic generative nodes” (Haraway 1991 [1988]: 200). As a site of generative interconnectedness, I argue that the node offers a richer symbolism than the cyborg. For example, while the hallmark of the cyborg is algorithmic hybridity, the node reflects a complex, dynamic, and critical process: lymph enters the lymph node and leaves materially changed, while the lymph node is also changed by exposure to pathogens and cells carried in the lymph. The figurative translation is this: if you and I are nodes and empathy or care is the lymph that transfers between us, then we are both changed with every single interaction. Our dynamic connection exists within an infinitely larger system of networked nodes that I imagine as a matrix.
From philosopher Malcolm Ferdinand (2021), the word ‘matrix’ draws from the Latin mater or mother, while ‘matrix’ also refers to the ’womb’ in French. As it relates to the node in my proposed symbolism, the matrix that holds all the interconnected nodes is not one body, but infinite bodies, in the way that the French ‘matrix’ is the maker of bodies. Furthermore, bodies acting as nodes are not limited to humankind but can be anything that serves to evoke change upon another node, from animals to mechanical objects. I call capacity to leave others positively changed the quality of nodality.
As a descendant of material-semiotics, nodality accepts that meaning is made through interactions of language and culture on physical bodies but goes further to acknowledge the specialness of nodes. Adding tension to disciplinary wisdom, nodality avoids reliance on generic distinctions, like male vs. female, but surely appreciates that any individual node can carry unique qualities that inspire connection. Nodality is thus unbounded by the physical body or form, because distinguishing qualities are often formless. For example: when I hear a bird sing, her song travels to me like lymph. Her song evokes emotion and is imprinted as memory, and I am changed for having heard it. Day after day the songbird and I strengthen that lymphatic pathway and feelings of empathy, until I can no longer imagine life without her, despite hardly having seen, let alone touched her body. Once I have gotten to know her song this way, I would still be reminded of her if I heard a recording or even an artificially generated song. Ironically, the cruder the rendering the more it would make me long for her authentic song. Whereas feminist standpoint theory posed that understanding the lives of women strengthened objectivity (Harding 1992), so is our own capacity for authenticity strengthened by our greater understanding of nodality, or the unique physical or psychic attributes that inspire heterogenous nodes to connect.
The node draws from material-semiotics as a site of intersection between the material body, language and culture, but further considers the bidirectional exchanges with other nodes, as symbolized by the lymphatic system. Dynamic interconnections among and between human and non-human nodes form a complex matrix, wherein the affective quality of nodes is called nodality. The example of the songbird’s tune on my psyche captures the problem with disciplinary overemphasis on the body: it denies the persistence of disembodied authenticity and the role of nodality within a larger social matrix.
Conclusion
As a manifestation of Donna Haraway’s (1991 [1985]) theoretical cyborg, candidate Kamala Harris was defined by an algorithmic concoction of shallow affinities. The logic of the cyborg candidate reduces the national constituency to simple cohorts whose favor can be gamed in process that has parallels with AI. As AI technology rapidly proliferates and political cyborgs lean more into imagination than material reality, the stage is set for a liberatory figure that is governed by non-algorithmic logic.
Drawing from Haraway (1991 [1988]: 200), I propose the node as the cyborg’s theoretical successor. In contrast to the cyborg, the node is warm, internally integrated, and generative in the way that it attracts empathic connection with other nodes. It has a driving purpose that is more indicative of its state of mind than the output of an algorithmic process. Its logic draws from the contributions it retains from nodal connections, rendering it future-facing, collaborative, and unafraid of change.
As social scientists, we can contribute to the creation of liberatory networks by shifting from investigations of embodied hybridity to examinations of nodality: why nodes connect and how they authenticate social constructions. Arguably, this shift supports an epistemic departure from algorithmic Modernity to whatever qualitative, post-AI ethos may come next.
To close, I return to Haraway’s statement that the cyborg wouldn’t recognize the Garden of Eden. The difference between the cyborg and the node is perhaps best summed up by this: the node would easily recognize Eden by its many birdsongs.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Dayna Jeffrey.
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