Notes on: Haraway D (1988)
Situated Knowledges:The Science Question in
Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3)
575--99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066
Dave Harris
[Long, complex and polemical. I have vulgarised]
There have long been debates about objectivity,
sometimes polarised into an' imagined ''they"',
masculine scientists and an equally imagined "we",
those who are not allowed to have a body, those
disqualified. This is built on 'paranoid fantasies
and academic resentments', to which she confesses
(575). Feminist contributors have been seen as a
mere special interest group.
There is a 'tempting dichotomy'— 'a strong social
constructionist argument for all forms of
knowledge claims'on the one hand, where boundaries
of power moves, scientists arguments about
objectivity are mere parables, official ideologies
not describing practice. Disembodied scientific
objectivity, is the other pole, and the only
people who really believe that are nonscientists
including some philosophers, although this might
be 'just a reflection of a residual disciplinary
chauvinism', because she is an historian and
sociologist (576). Paranoia was deepened by Lacan
on the law of the father solving problems based on
'always already absent referents, deferred
signifieds, split subjects and the endless play of
signifiers'. Matters such as gender or race were
just seen as the results of high-speed play of
signifiers. Some social constructionist have
argued that the real scientific game is a matter
of rhetoric, an attempt to persuade social actors
of the authority of knowledge, one which can 'take
account of the structure of facts and artefacts as
well' (577). Knowledge is merely 'a condensed node
in an agonistic power field'. Both the sociology
of knowledge and semiology and deconstruction have
pursued this notion.
But can we still talk about reality, especially as
others still do [like the Christian right]. Is it
just an act of faith? Can we reject cynicism?
Social constructionism 'and a particular version
of post-modernism', energised by critical
discourse can produce an unfortunate 'imagery of
force fields, of moods and a fully texturised
encoded world', closely resembling 'high-tech
military fields'. This is a dangerous support for
'abstract masculinity' (578).
Pursuing deconstruction of truth claims everywhere
in science only ends with 'self induced
multiple personality disorder' which makes it
impossible to contest claims about the real world
[made by cranks in the public eye]. It is always
easy to show a bias, with no real need for strong
constructionism — that just moves the debate
beyond good and bad aspects of science, rejecting
bias, misuse, pseudoscience. Although the aim was
to regain historical subjectivity and agency for
women, we ended with 'one more excuse for not
learning any post-Newtonian physics', and a simple
abandonment of science to 'the boys'.
Is there a feminist version of objectivity?
Humanistic Marxism offered possibilities, but it
was still wedded to the idea of the domination of
nature in the self construction of man, and it's
downplaying of women except insofar as they earned
wages. But it did help to [stave off mindless
relativism]. Some versions of psychoanalysis also
helped here, especially object relations theory
rather than any Marxist Freudianism. '"Feminist
empiricism"' (579) was also useful, especially in
resisting the excesses of semiology and
narrativology. There is a need to produce a
positive account of the world not just showing the
contingency of everything. There is a link here
with 'many practising scientists' who still
believe they are 'describing things by means of
all their constructing'. This led to a call for
feminist '"successor science"', associated with
Harding, aiming at a more adequate and better
account of the world and critical reflection on
practices of domination and oppression. The focus
then is on 'ethics and politics perhaps more than
epistemology'
The problem then is to simultaneously allow for
radical historical contingency, a self critical
awareness of how we make meanings, and 'a
no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a
"real" world that can be partially shared, and
that is friendly to liberating projects —
successor science and a post-modern insistence on
the 'radical multiplicity of local knowledges'.
Each component is risky and paradoxical, 'and
their combination is both contradictory and
necessary'. We do not go back to a transcendental
notion of objectivity without understanding its
mediations, to 'the theory of innocent powers to
represent the world', where language and bodies
are just reconciled. We don't want to give support
to global systems but we do need 'an earth wide
network of connections including the ability
partially to translate knowledges' (580). We need
modern critical theory not just to deny meaning
but to build it [meanings and bodies].
Science is only oppressive when it offers a
reductionist account where only one language must
be enforced as a universal standard, the
equivalent of money in the exchange system of
capitalism. 'Immortality and omnipotence are not
our goals' but we do need some 'enforceable
reliable accounts of things not reducible to power
moves and agonistic' games. This affects every
topic, whether about genes or races or texts. Many
feminists have tried to hold onto both ends of the
project. A shift of metaphors might help.
We need to place 'metaphorical reliance'(581) on
vision. Vision avoids binary oppositions, it is
embodied, even if it has turned into an abstract
dominating gaze, leaving unmarked 'positions of
Man and White'. We need instead 'a doctrine of
embodied objectivity' that can embrace the
paradoxes above. Here, 'feminist objectivity means
quite simply situated knowledges'.
The eyes do show a capacity to distance the
knowing subject from other things and bodies.
Visualising technologies have done this without
limit, producing 'the God trick of seeing
everything from nowhere' and making it available
to ordinary practice. It can be monstrous,
cannibalistic, and when applied to extra
terrestrial projects seem to be headed to
'excremental second birthing'
[An example is in the celebration of visual
technology in the hundredth anniversary edition of
the National Geographic Society which has brought
to everyday understanding infinite and
infinitesimal objects]. Infinite vision 'is an
illusion, a God trick' and we need to insist
instead on 'the particularity and embodiment of
all vision', but allowing further technological
mediation. This will allow a 'usable, but not an
innocent, doctrine of objectivity'. It will help
us expose all the 'visualising tricks and powers
of modern sciences and technologies' and learn
instead to use our own 'theoretical and political
scanners in order to name where we are and are
not'. There is no transcendent vision beyond all
limits and responsibilities — 'only partial
perspective promises objective vision' (583). All
the usual 'Western cultural narratives about
objectivity are allegories of the ideologies
governing the relations of what we call mind and
body, distance and responsibility', splits between
subject and object. She learned this 'in part
walking with my dogs and wondering how the world
looks' through their eyes, or through the eyes of
machines before they have been transformed for
human use. We realise that eyes are 'active
perceptual systems' with specific ways of seeing.
In science, there is no unmediated photograph or
passive recording machine, but only 'specific
visual possibilities', each with a way of
organising the world, different pictures of the
world, revealing 'elaborate specificity and
difference' [shades of deleuzian virtuality again
here]. We can try to learn 'how to see faithfully
from another's point of view' even if the other is
a machine. That will not be alienating distance.
Feminists need to understand how visual systems
work 'technically, socially, and psychically'.
It is not enough to just trust 'the advantage
points of the subjugated', even if this can be
useful as a critique of the powerful. The real
point is that abstract vision claims to be
unlocatable and thus irresponsible. We must avoid
the' danger of romanticising and/or appropriating
the vision of the less powerful' (584). It is not
easy to see from the position of subjugated
others, even if women share their subjugation. The
subjugated and their positions also need to be
critically examined, deconstructed and interpreted
— they are 'not "innocent" positions'. The might
be preferred because they lack the usual ways to
deny the critical and interpreted elements of
knowledge, even though they also have other forms
of denial — 'through repression, forgetting, and
disappearing acts' [the last one is disappearing
from your perspective so that your vision looks
comprehensive]. Subjugated knowledge can help
expose the God trick and they do seem to provide
better transforming accounts of the world. But how
to see from below is still a problem, no different
from techno-scientific visualisation.
Preferred positioning is hostile to relativism and
its twin, totalising versions of claims. The real
alternative to relativism is 'partial, locatable,
critical knowledges' that can lead to
communication and solidarity. Relativism claims
thinkers are 'everywhere equally', but this
apparently equal positioning is really 'a denial
of responsibility and critical inquiry'. It is
another God trick.
We want to preserve the pursuit of objectivity
'that privileges contestation, deconstruction,
passionate construction, web connections, and hope
for the transformation of systems of knowledge and
ways of seeing'. This requires more than just
'self-critical partiality', but rather a
commitment to research perspectives which are not
known in advance, that are ideally 'potent for
constructing worlds less organised by axes of
domination' (585) [emerging from extensive
research of the other and subsequent discussion?].
This would be both imaginary and rational,
visionary and objective, along the lines of the
successor science above — both hope for
transformative knowledge and the 'severe check and
stimulus of sustained critical enquiry'. We might
even be able to see natural science and its
revolutions in this way: 'science has been utopian
and visionary from the start; that is one reason
"we" need it'. We need mobile positioning and
passionate detachment, not 'the impossibility of
entertaining innocent "identity" politics and
epistemologies'. We cannot just pretend that we
can be a member of the subjugated. We can't just
relocate to any advantage point. Power is always
involved in visualising practices. Similarly, we
are not 'immediately present to ourselves' but
require 'a semiotic – material technology to link
meanings and bodies'. The 'boys in the human
sciences' have called this a problem of the death
of the subject, the abandonment of the notion of a
single order for will and consciousness' (586) but
this is a death only of the master subject. We
need to reawaken the 'wandering eye… travelling
lens' always present in Western perspectives, and
providing some skill at least in re-visualising
worlds which have been turned upside down.
The 'split and contradictory self' is exactly what
is needed to interrogate positionings and be
accountable, 'construct and join rational
conversations and fantastic imaginings'. Splitting
is a 'privileged image 'for feminists invoking
'heterogeneous multiplicities' that cannot be
reduced, and multi dimensional vision. We commonly
join together partial insights and identities
without making one fundamental or making them
equal and this is 'the promise of objectivity', to
seek subject positions, not identities, aware of
partial connections rather than whole beings. For
example, no one can simultaneously be in
privileged or subjugated positions 'structured [in
the same direction] by gender, race, nation, and
class'. We must resist fetishisation and
essentialism, including the 'the centralised Third
World Woman'. Subjugation alone 'is not grounds
for an ontology… [Only]… a visual clue'. Vision
needs to be developed through instruments and
optics: there is no immediate standpoint vision.
'Identity, including self-identity, does not
produce science': we need critical positioning or
objectivity. Only the oppressors claim to be self
identical, disembodied, unmediated, and the
subjugated should not attempt to occupy that
subject position in turn. We should be careful not
to mistake standpoints for creativity and
knowledge and certainly not for
'omniscience'(587).
Positioning is key to grounding knowledge. It has
already yielded much 'Western scientific and
philosophic discourse'. It implies responsibility
and leads to politics and ethics in considering
what counts as rational knowledge. Rationality is
no longer some optical illusion 'projected from
nowhere comprehensively'. Science has its own
history relating to 'ways of life, social orders,
practices of visualisation' just as technology
does. They both involve skilled practices to
decide what to see and where to see it from, what
the limits of vision might be, how points of view
develop and are limited, and what other sensory
powers might be cultivated. Scientific revolutions
have undoubtedly contributed to improvements in
science, but not all revolutions are liberatory,
as with 'the science question in the military'.
There are struggles over how to see.
We need to develop a sense of location rather than
relativism [with a chart of dichotomies — oh dear,
looking rather like binaries]: universal
rationality versus ethnophilosophy; common
language versus hetero glossia; 'new organon'
versus deconstruction; unified field theory versus
oppositional positioning; world system versus
local knowledges; master theory versus 'webbed
accounts'(588). We should not assume by this that
the options are symmetrical or even mutually
exclusive. For example local knowledges are often
in tension with structures that force unequal
translations and exchanges, knowledge and power.
Webs can build a systematic approach and even
become 'centrally structured global systems'.
'Feminist accountability requires a knowledge
tuned to resonance [actually 'reasonance' in the
text] not to dichotomy' it celebrates structured
and structuring difference. There are no fixed
locations in reified bodies but rather notes,
inflections, differences in fields of meaning.
Objectivity cannot celebrate fixed vision because
there are crucial issues about what counts as an
object.
How can we develop such a position? Ordinary
vision already fixes and distances things, but the
metaphor also invites us to consider 'varied
apparatuses of visual production' including
prosthetic technologies, particular machines which
have, for example, processed regions of the
electromagnetic spectrum. These provide a source
of metaphors to grasp simultaneously both the
concrete real and the processes of semiotics and
production. Partiality is 'the condition of being
heard', not a claim to totality. Our bodies and
lives are complex contradictory structuring and
structured. We do not solve the problems by a God
trick. Feminism should be about 'interpretation,
translation stuttering and the partly understood',
multiple subjects, double vision, a definite
position in actual social space. These activities
are always partial and critical and also 'a ground
for conversation', not pluralism, but sensitivity
to power, not codified stereotypes as in some of
the 'antiscience ideology'in some feminist models
but a dream of what might be perfectly known.
Stressing location stresses vulnerability,
openness, and resists simplification and fixation.
There is no single feminist standpoint, but we all
aim at 'an epistemology and politics of engaged,
accountable positioning… Better accounts of the
world, that is "science"' (590). There is no
disengagement, but a constant process of critical
interpretation between fields and people, 'power –
sensitive conversation' focusing on what is
contestable. Instead of 'clear and distinct
ideas', we should go for split senses, confusion,
not totalising phallogocentrism but 'partial sight
and limited voice', valuing 'connections and
unexpected openings'. Finding a larger vision
depends on being somewhere, not escaping or
transcending limits but joining partial views and
voices 'into a collective subject position' [so we
are getting into transcendental subjectivity here
— Seek ye the virtual instead, my child]
Objects are also ambiguous. Science is not
homogeneous, nor is it equally implemented in
institutions, whether publishing weapons or
pharmaceuticals. One issue turns on the status of
objects, whether they are entirely passive and
inert as is often assumed, whether they can be
simply appropriated following dominant interests.
Sex is an object of biological knowledge, for
example and this has often led to biological
determinism, apparently resisting feminist notions
of difference. Yet sex cannot simply be removed
from discussion since it can leave the body as a
blank page, and ignore the effects of 'social
inscriptions, including those of biological
discourse' nor should we radically reduce the
objects of any science to mere 'ephemera of
discursive production and social construction'
(592.) Bad kinds of objectivity have arisen from
the classic analytic tradition 'that turns
everything into a resource for appropriation' so
that objects are there only for the power of the
knower, not agents in themselves. This has led to
'2nd birthing ' as Man homogenises the world in
order to pursue his projects. Nature is only raw
material, sex is only matter to be developed by
gender 'which "we" can control' with our culture.
Nature/ culture distinctions seemed wedded to the
logic of domination. What is required is a
feminist manoeuvre 'begun in dialectics' — the
object of knowledge can be 'pictured as an actor
and agent', in some sort of master slave dialectic
to the human knower. In social human sciences it
is crucial to come to terms with the agency of the
object being studied, and this 'must apply to the
other knowledge projects called sciences' (593).
It is an important corollary to recognising ethics
and politics that we grant 'the status of
agent/actor to the "objects" of the world'. The
world is not just raw material, but an active
entity encountered in knowledge projects: 'no
particular doctrine of representation or decoding
or discovery guarantees anything'. We also have to
reject simple realism. We need a feminist edge to
an older manoeuvre. Eco-feminists see the world as
an active subject. It might even have 'an
independent sense of humour'. We need not 'lapse
into appeals to a primal mother', but think rather
in terms of coyotes or tricksters 'in south-west
Native American accounts' — we know we will be
hoodwinked, and we must give up mastery, but we
can still 'keep searching for fidelity' if only as
a useful myth (594). Our technical devices might
be used to 'try to strike up non-innocent
conversations'. Science fiction has been 'such a
rich writing practice in recent feminist theory'.
The previously passive categories of objects of
knowledge have been activated, which immediately
'problematises binary distinctions like sex and
gender, without eliminating their strategic
utility'. The body 'becomes a most engaging being'
resisting simple biological determinism: sex has
been so re-theorised [in biology] that it now
becomes 'practically indistinguishable from
"mind"'. Biological females are almost now
entirely structuring and active, agents.
Difference in biology is seen as situational
rather than intrinsic, even at the genetic level.
Implications for the whole relation between sex
and gender need to be considered. These 'new
pictures of the biological female'are still
contested, but they 'foreground knowledge as
situated conversation at every level of its
articulation', and have implications for the
boundary between machine and organism as well as
animal and human.
We can see this by investigating 'the apparatus of
bodily production' (595). This has been developed
in analysing the poem through the notion of an
apparatus of literary production, 'at the
intersection of arts, business, and technology… a
matrix', joining writers and writing technologies.
The same might be applied to the production of
bodies. Of course there is a certain level of
facticity in biological discourse which might
raise doubts about whether bodies are 'produced or
generated in the same strong sense as poems'. But
there is a tradition in Romanticism 'that poetry
and organisms are siblings', with Frankenstein as
a meditation on this connection. We don't need to
return to Romanticism, but refer to a '"material –
semiotic actor"' instead of thinking of the
cultural and the organic. This refers to 'a
meaning generating part of apparatus of bodily
production' [compare again Deleuze and Guattari on
the semiotization of some affects]. We need not
assume 'the immediate presence of such objects'
nor accord to them a final determination of what
counts as knowledge. They are 'generative nodes.
Their boundaries materialise in social
interaction', and 'objects are boundary projects',
shifting as boundaries shift.
Objectivity is not disengagement but rather
'neutral and unusually equal structuring' (596),
assuming that human beings are never in final
control, can never achieve clear and distinct
ideas. What counts is a biological body that
'emerge[s] at the intersection of biological
research and writing, medical and other business
practices, and technology' including visualisation
technologies. There is also an analogue to
languages and their active creativity — the coyote
as one of 'protean embodiments of the world as
witty agent and actor'. The world resists us
because it is not just matter but 'the figure of
the always problematic, always potent tie between
meaning and bodies' (596). This is what provides
the possibility of feminist embodiment, 'Here is
where science, science fantasy and Science Fiction
converge in the objectivity question in feminism'.
Perhaps feminist politics, including eco-feminism
'turn on re-visioning the world as coding
trickster with whom we must learn to converse'
[Long and gripping notes]
back to key concepts
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