Notes for Donna J. Haraway Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
Key concepts: coding trickster, coyote, cyborg, cyborg politics, embodiment, feminist objectivity, informatics of domination, material-semiotic actor, objectivity, phallogocentrism, positioning, science question in feminism, situated knowledges, sociobiology, visualization technologies.
Ethical imperative to reappropriate scientific knowledge. Foucault biopolitics foreshadowed cyborg, which exhibits leakages between human, animal, and machine. The challenge is to reappropriate not the objects of knowledge but the epistemological position to be resisted, theories of language and control, because this approach is the one best suited to comprehend technoscience for heuretics. Try taking cyborg identity positively, suggesting pleasure in machine skill and technical competency as crucial aspects of embodiment. Coyote trickster for situated knowledge engagement supports my research in learning exercise of machine communications and alien phenomenology. Compare her detailed elaboration of immunology to Derrida's teaching plant fecundation. From the totalizing, reductive vantage perspective of “ideological doctrines of disembodied scientific objectivity,” science is rhetoric serving desire and power. Feminist objectivity as situated knowledge, embodied objectivity, complicates division of vision and marked body. Epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating. Is granting agential status to objects by as a consequence of admitting social and cultural determinants of sciences equivalent to actor network theory?
Related theorists: Bogost, Dawkins, Derrida, Flores, Foucault, Grossman, Marx, Ulmer, Winograd, Yerkes.
Chapter Three
The Biological
Enterprise: Sex, Mind, and Profit from Human Engineering to
Sociobiology
The opening quotation from Richard Dawkins suggests that human individuality is no longer the center of human being: the genes are center, and we are their survival machines.
(43-44) So science
is part of the struggle over the nature of our lives. . . . I would
like to explore biology as an aspect of the reproduction of
capitalist social relations, dealing with the imperative of
biological reproduction.
(43 table 1) The nature of analysis is
technological functionalism, and ideological appeals are to
alleviation of stress and other signs of human obsolescence.
Let us accept the cybernetic model for our study of machines to detect the contours of the default epistemologies governing philosophy as Socratic self questioning: so it is phallagocentric, what better means do we have of comprehending the technologically mediated world in which we abide, although at the same time, let the emphasis on embodiment foster situated knowledges of the phenomenology of machine life; Haraway invites such an approach in her call for reappropriation of sociobiological knowledge, as below on page 164.
(45) Between the
First World War and the present, biology has been transformed from a
science centered on the organism, understood in functionalist terms,
to a science of studying automated technological devices, understood
in terms of cybernetic systems.
(45) This chapter sketches those
changes in an effort to investigate the historical connection between
the content of science and its social context. The larger question
informing this critique is how to develop a socialist-feminist life
science.
We must be interested in this task or reappropriating knowledge, Haraway commands, because Marx said so.
(45) As Marx
showed for the science of wealth, our reappropriation of knowledge is
a revolutionary reappropriation of a means by which we produce and
reproduce our lives. We must be interested in this task.
(45) it
examines them [Yerkes and Wilson] as representing important
formations, so as to give an idea where to continue a critical
reading of classical biology in the process of formulating another
biology.
(46) Yerkes worked to establish the utility of primates
for interpreting the place of human beings in scientifically managed
corporate capitalism - called nature.
(47) But a constant
dimension of primate studies has been the naturalization of human
history; that is, making human nature the raw material rather
than the product of
history. Engineering is the guiding logic of life science in the
twentieth century.
(47) Psychobiology, as sociobiology later, was
faced with rationalizing altruism in a competitive world - without
threatening the basic structure of domination.
ROBERT YERKES: THE PRIMATE LABORATORY AS PILOT PLANT FOR HUMAN
ENGINEERING
(48) The life
sciences which studied organic capacity and variation from a
physiological viewpoint provided the scientific underpinnings for the
application of human engineering.
(49) Two committees formed under
the auspices of the National Research Council (NRC) are relevant to
the themes of this chapter: the Committee on Scientific Aspects of
Human Migration (CSAHM) and the Committee for Research on Problems of
Sex (CRPS). Yerkes was chairman of both. . . . Neither committee
worked from a population perspective, but rather from a physiological
model of organic capacity, variation, and health.
(50) Animal
models for human organic capacity and variation allowed human
engineering to be an experimental natural science.
(50) Research
centered on the idea of evolution, and all but ignored the idea of
populations. . . . All this would change with the post-Second World
War synthesis of ethology, neural biology, and population genetics
and ecology.
(53) But the association of 'leadership' and
biological dominance was considered natural.
(54) The existence of
chimpanzee differences in 'techniques of social control' suggested
that human modes were also psychobiologically legitimated and
inevitable. . . . [quoting Yerkes] That the female is,
chameleon-like, a creature of multiple personality, is clear from our
observations.
(54) 'Personality differences' should be managed,
not foolishly denied.
(55) Though less differentiated than in the
human species, personality 'clearly' existed among chimpanzees 'as
the unit of social organization'. . . . It is significant that the
culture concept depended on personality in the anthropology of the
1930s. We have moved with Yerkes from instinct, through personality,
to culture, to human engineering. Scientists themselves interwove
sex, mind, and society in a vocation of scientific service
establishing a promising new life science of comparative primate
psychobiology, reaching form learning through motivation to
experimental sociology. Primatology served as a mediator between life
and human sciences in a critical period of reformulation of the
doctrines of nature and culture. Yerkes ordered his life in the
belief this science would serve to foster a higher state of
individual and social consciousness, the ideological goal of liberal
humanism.
(56) Yerkes believed that industrial systems had evolved
from slavery, to the wage system, to the present system based on
co-operation and that only now could the value of the person be
realized. . . . Yerkes and his liberal peers advocated studying
traits of the body, mind, spirit, and character in order to fit 'the
person' perfectly into the proper place in industry.
(56) By
Yerkes' logic, equality was everyone's right to occupy one's natural
place determined by disinterested science. Differences
were the essential subject for the
new science.
(57) Although the person should be the object
of scientific management - an
essential structure of domination in the science of co-operation -
the ideology of self-expression was also intrinsic to Yerkes'
exposition. . . . Satisfaction of basic instincts, themselves known
through science, was the essence of self-expression in this model.
SYSTEMS
ENGINEERING AND SCIENCES OF INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT:
SOCIOBIOLOGY
(57-58)
Organic engineering based on the person is not the dominant form of
life science in the late twentieth century. It can even be argued
that biology has ceased to exist and the the organism has been
replaced by cybernetic systems, which have radically changed the
connections of physical life, and the human sciences. . . . By the
early 1960s, the communications revolution was established in power;
its effects can be followed in biology in four revealing, collective,
authoritative texts, culminating in a well-published,
state-of-the-art introductory biology text by E. O. Wilson and his
colleagues.
(59) Furthermore, sociobiology, like all modern
biologies, studies a control machine as its central object. Nature is
structured as a series of interlocking cybernetic systems, which are
theorized as communications problems. Nature has been systematically
constituted in terms of the capitalist machine and market.
Interestingly, my approach to reverse engineering a microcomputer based control unit arrives at a similar perspective (communications problems of a control machine) by employing an ancient, Socratic method; here the progress and scarcity involve the hardware interface and operating system tools available.
(59)
Progress and scarcity were the twin forces in capitalist
development.
(59) Sociobiology (Wilson, 1975, p. 10) is a
biological understanding of groups
-
societies and populations.
(60) The genetic calculus of
sociobiology concerns maximization strategies of genes and
combinations of genes. . . . Sociobiology analyses all behavior in
terms of the ultimate level of explanation, the genetic market
place.
(61) Sex is a constraint on the formation of societies
because sexually reproducing individuals are not identical
genetically. They therefore compete with different investment
strategies. . . . the rapid production of new genotypes which can
respond to environmental changes or other contingencies. Such
diversification maximizes the chances of long-term success. . . . The
best to be anticipated is a harmonious management of competing
investment strategies, in such a way that the system as a whole
(natural evolution) is preserved.
(62)
Chapter Eight
A Cyborg Manifesto:
Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century
(149) A cyborg is
a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature
of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.
(150) Michael
Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a
very open field.
(151) By the late twentieth century in United
States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is
thoroughly breached.
(152) The second leaky distinction is between
animal-human (organism) and machine.
(153) The third distinction
is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and
non-physical is very imprecise for us. . . . Cyborgs are ether,
quintessence.
(154) From another perspective, a cyborg world 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.
FRACTURED IDENTITIES
THE
INFORMATICS OF DOMINATION
(163)
One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is
through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of
science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and
meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of
disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal
self. This is the self feminists must code.
(164) In each case,
solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and
control; the key operation is determining rates, directions, and
probabilities of flow of a quantity called information. The world is
subdivided by boundaries differentially permeable to information. . .
. The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the
metaphor C3I,
command-control-communication-intelligence, the military's symbol for
its operations theory.
Agreeing microelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra, the challenge is to reappropriate not the objects of knowledge but the epistemological position to be resisted, theories of language and control, because this approach is the one best suited to comprehend technoscience for heuretics (Ulmer); this really is the same as taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies, which Haraway will say in a few pages, by applying the same critical, epistemological perspective to cyborgs as human bodies.
(165)
Microelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of
copies without originals.
(165) I have used Rachel Grossman's
(1980) image of women in the integrated circuit to name the situation
of women in a world so intimately restructured through the social
relations of science and technology.
THE 'HOMEWORK ECONOMY' OUTSIDE 'THE
HOME'
WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT
(172-173)
Ambivalence towards the disrupted unities mediated by high-tech
culture requires not sorting consciousness into categories of
'clear-sighted critique grounding a solid political epistemology'
versus 'manipulated false consciousness', but subtle understanding of
emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential
for changing the rules of the game.
CYBORGS: A MYTH OF POLITICAL
IDENTITY
(175) 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.
(176) Cyborg politics is the struggle
for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against
the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma
of phallogocentrism.
(178) There is no fundamental, ontological
separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of
technical and organic. The replicant Rachel in the Ridley Scott film
Blade Runner
stands
as the image of a cyborg culture's fear, love, and confusion.
(178)
For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be
prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves.
Consequences of viewing cyborgs as other than enemies: intense pleasure in skill as an aspect of embodiment; consider with respect to Zizek notion of utopia.
(180)
There are several consequences to taking
seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies.
Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs
are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a
garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate
antagonistic dualisms without end. . . . Intense
pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect
of embodiment. The
machine is not an it
to
be animated, worshiped, and dominated. The machine is us, our
processes, an aspect of our embodiment. . . . Cyborgs might consider
more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual
embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it
has profound historical breadth and depth.
(181) We require
regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our
reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous
world without gender.
(181) Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out
of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our
tools to ourselves.
Chapter Nine
Situated Knowledges:
The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective
(183) Academic
and activist feminist enquiry has repeatedly tried to come to terms
with the question of what we
might
mean by the curious and inescapable term 'objectivity'.
As patriarchal, biased, colonizing, reductive and decontextualizing, modernist, Cartesian objectivity also interpellates all artifacts of built environments reflect the scientific knowledge enshrined in the cradle to grave design processes causing them, for it is enough that these facile beliefs yielded the productive forces, including engineers and marketers, that produced and continue to produce them; from this totalizing, reductive vantage perspective of ideological doctrines of disembodied scientific objectivity, science is rhetoric serving desire and power.
(184)
The only people who end up actually believing
and,
goddess forbid, acting on the ideological doctrines of disembodied
scientific objectivity enshrined in elementary textbooks and
technoscience booster literature are non-scientists, including a few
very trusting philosophers.
(184)
From this point of view, science—the real game in town, the one we
must play—is rhetoric, the persuasion of the relevant social actors
that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of
very objective power.
War, again, reached by Benjamin, Kittler, and so many others as implicated if not the driving force of all things; sounds like a repetition of ancient Greek philosophy.
(185) Like all neuroses, mine is rooted in the problem of metaphor, that is, the problem of the relation of bodies and language. . . . Technoscience and science fiction collapse into the sun of their radiant (ir)reality – war.
Must do more than clever applications of the general critical methodology, perhaps beyond insistence, which is ultimately rhetoric trying to motivate others to enact change, operate at the production level of producing change by producing science and technology.
(187) Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything.
Blake Scott thinks this is a great three-part imperative for faithful, real world accounts.
(187) So, I think my problem and 'our' problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own 'semiotic technologies' for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a 'real' world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.
THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION
Feminist objectivity as situated knowledge, embodied objectivity, complicates division of vision and marked body; connect to sound studies.
(188)
I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so
reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out
of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. . . . I
would like a doctrine of embodied objectivity that accommodates
paradoxical and critical feminist science projects: feminist
objectivity means quite simply situated
knowledge.
(189)
And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make
techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of
masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second
birthing.
(190) We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with
primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to
our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are
and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly
know how to name. . . . All Western cultural narratives about
objectivity are allegories of the ideologies of the relations of what
we call mind and body, of distance and responsibility, embedded in
the science question in feminism. Feminist objectivity is about
limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and
splitting of subject and object.
Inspired to think about embodiment of vision by wondering how dogs perceive the same physical space: no passive vision, always mediated by ways of life.
(190)
These are lessons which I learned in part walking with my dogs and
wondering how the world looks without a fovea and very few retinal
cells for color vision, but with a huge neural processing and sensory
area for smells. . . . The 'eyes' made available in modern
technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision; these
prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic
ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and
specific ways
of
seeing, that is, ways of life.
(191) But how
to
see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with
bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the 'highest'
techno-scientific visualizations.
Generative doubt contemplating what can the master subject not perceive due to the distortions of its unreflective disembodiment.
(192) I prefer to call this generative doubt the opening of non-isomorphic subjects, agents, and territories of stories unimaginable from the vantage point of the cyclopian, self-satiated eye of the master subject.
Positioning as key grounding knowledge organized around visual imagery.
(193)
Positioning
is,
therefore, the key grounding knowledge organized around the imagery
of vision, as so much Western scientific and philosophic discourse is
organized. Positioning implies responsibility for our enabling
practices. It follows that politics and ethics ground struggles for
the contests over what may count as rational knowledge.
(194) A
dichotomous chart expressing this point might look like this
Universal rationality |
Ethnophilosophies |
Common language |
Heteroglossia |
New organon |
Deconstruction |
Unified field theory |
Oppositional positioning |
World system |
Local knowledges |
Master theory |
Webbed acounts |
. . . The primary distortion is the illusion of symmetry in the
chart's dichotomy, making any position appear, first, simply
alternative and, second, mutually exclusive. A map of tensions and
resonances between the fixed ends of a charged dichotomy better
represents the potent politics and epistemologies of embodied,
therefore accountable, objectivity.
(195) It is in the intricacies
of these visualization technologies in which we are embedded that we
will find metaphors and means for understanding and intervening in
the patterns of objectification in the world, that is, the patterns
of reality for which we must be accountable.
Epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating.
(195) I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location,
positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is
the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims.
(195)
Feminism loves another science: the sciences and politics of
interpretation, translation, stuttering, and the partly
understood.
(196) Rational knowledge is power-sensitive
conversation (King, 1987a).
OBJECTS
AS ACTORS: THE APPARATUS OF BODILY PRODUCTION
(197)
And yet, to lose authoritative biological accounts of sex, which set
up productive tensions with its binary pair, gender, seems to be to
lose too much . . . The same problem of loss attends a radical
'reduction' of the objects of physics or of any other sciences to the
ephemera of discursive production and social construction.
Is granting agential status to objects as a consequence of admitting social and cultural determinants of sciences equivalent to actor network theory?
(198) Indeed, coming to terms with the agency of the 'objects' studied is the only way to avoid gross error and false knowledge of many kinds in these sciences. . . . A corollary of the insistence that ethics and politics covertly or overtly provide the bases for objectivity in the sciences as a heterogeneous whole, and not just in the social sciences, is granting the status of agent/actor to the 'objects' of the world.
A statement of the coyote position as knowledge that is knowingly tricked.
(199) Acknowledging the agency of the world in knowledge makes room for some unsettling possibilities, including a sense of the world's independent sense of humor. . . . The Coyote or Trickster, embodied in American Southwest Indian accounts, suggests our situation when we give up mastery but keep searching for fidelity, knowing all the while we will be hoodwinked. I like to see feminist theory as a reinvented coyote discourse obligated to its enabling sources in many kinds of heterogeneous accounts of the world.
Connection to Bogost unit operations in concepts of material-semiotic actor and bodies as objects of knowledge.
(200-201)
I wish to translate the ideological dimensions of 'facticity' and
'the organic' into a cumbersome entity called a 'material-semiotic
actor'.
This unwieldy term is intended to highlight the object of knowledge
as an active, meaning-generating axis of the apparatus of bodily
production, without ever
implying
immediate presence of such objects or, what is the same thing, their
final or unique determination of what can count as objective
knowledge at a particular historical juncture. Like Kant's objects
called 'poems', which are sites of literary production where language
also is an actor independent of intentions and authors, bodies
as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.
Their boundaries
materialize
in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices:
'objects' do not pre-exist as such.
(201) Perhaps the world
resists being reduced to mere resource because it is – not
mother/matter/mutter – but coyote, a figure for the always
problematic, always potent tie of meaning and bodies.
Chapter Ten
The Biopolitics of
Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System
Discourse
LUMPY DISCOURSES AND THE DENATURED BODIES OF BIOLOGY AND
MEDICINE
(207)
Language is no longer an echo of the verbum
dei,
but a technical construct working on principles of internally
generated difference.
THE APPARATUS OF BODILY PRODUCTION: THE TECHNO-BIOPOLITICS OF ENGAGEMENT
Studying simulacra technosciences like electronics, computer programming, and communications could be a good introductory exercise.
Revisioning world as coding trickster, looking for a link in Harraway discovered the coyote thinking quote was not present even though it fits well with a programming style, that is, like Turkle employing computer technology to embody postmodern themes, philosophy reterritorializes itself while territorializing adjunct technical skills involving programming demonstrated in these three projects. Use in first exam question is to lead up to coyote concept.
(209) Perhaps our hopes for accountability in the techno-biopolitics in postmodern frames turn on revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse. . . . Coyote is not a ghost, merely a protean trickster.
Strong support for the learning exercise of machine communications and phenomenology, for example the pinball machine example yields component subsystems localized within a system architecture whose modes of operation are probabilistic although governed by discoverable design specifications making them epistemologically transparent; in terms of mythmaking, the pinball machine cyborg can be imagined today as the future embodiment of obsolete but valuable technological artifacts.
(212) One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries, not on the integrity of natural objects. . . . 'Degrees of freedom' becomes a very powerful metaphor for politics. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic. . . . In particular, there is no ground for ontologically opposing the organic, the technical, and the textual. But neither is there any ground for opposing the mythical to the organic, textual, and technical. . . . The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress - communications breakdown. . . . The cyborg is text, machine, body, and metaphor - all theorized and engaged in practice in terms of communications.
CYBORGS FOR EARTHLY SURVIVAL
Winograd and Flores doctrine of interdependence and situated preunderstandings.
(213) Terry Winograd and Fernando
Flores' (1986) joint work on Understanding
Computers and Cognition is
particularly suggestive for thinking about the potentials for
cultural/scientific/political contestation over the technologies of
representation and embodiment of 'difference' within immunological
discourse, whose object of knowledge is a kind of 'artificial
intelligence/language/communication system of the biological
body'.
(213) Drawing on Heidegger, Gadamer, Maturana, and others,
Winograd and Flores develop a doctrine of interdependence of
interpreter and interpreted, which are not discrete and independent
entities. Situated preunderstandings are critical to all
communication and action.
THE ONE AND THE MANY: SELVES, INDIVIDUALS, UNITS, AND SUBJECTS
Is Haraway detail elaboration of immunology similar to Derrida teaching plant fecundation?
(218) The hierarchical body of old
has given way to a network-body of truly amazing complexity and
specificity.
(218) The notion of the internal
image is the key to the
theory, and it entails the premise that every member of the immune
system is capable of interacting with every other member.
(220)
The individual is a constrained accident, not the highest fruit of
earth, history's labors.
IMMUNE POWER: IMAGES, FICTIONS, AND FIXATIONS
(230)
From this field of differences, replete with the promises and terrors
of cyborg embodiments and situated knowledges, there is no exit.
Anthropologists of possible selves, we are technicians of realizable
futures. Science is
culture.
Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.