Notes on interferences and cyborgs

Visions of science. Donna Haraway offers an important feminist version of method-and-politics that is also an ontological politics.

What, asks Haraway, would it be to be ‘objective’? In standard practice the answer is usually detachment. Disentanglement from location. This is the kind of response offered by Merton, and by the empiricists and the positivists whom he follows. But, says Haraway, detachment is never possible. As we produce knowledges we are all located somewhere, in our practices and in our bodies. We are caught up, as she puts it, in a dense material–semiotic network. That is, we are caught up in sets of relations that simultaneously have to do with meanings and with materials.56 We are entangled in our flesh, in our versions of vision, and in relations of power that pass through and are articulated by us. So detachment is impossible. At best a self-delusion, more often it is also a form of irresponsibility. It is irresponsible because it attempts what she calls the ‘god- trick’. That is, it pretends to see ‘everything from nowhere’ (Haraway 1991b, 189). Whereas it is, indeed, somewhere. And it makes and remakes the textures of the material–semiotic networks.

How, then, to imagine objectivity? The answers vary (Daston 1999). But it seems that we cannot step outside, either to be neutral, or to find some special place – for instance a feminist or women’s standpoint that sees further than the alternatives. But if we are always a part of what we explore then, writes Haraway:

only partial perspective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the gen- erativity of all visual practices. Partial perspective can be held accountable for both its promising and its destructive monsters.

(Haraway 1991b, 190)

But why partial perspective? We have touched on the answer above. Subjects, people, are not coherent.

The topography of subjectivity is multi-dimensional; so, therefore, is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another. Here is the promise of objectivity: a scientific knower seeks the subject position not of identity, but of objectivity; that is, partial connection.

(Haraway 1991b, 193)

We are sets of partial connections. We are, to use the language that I am proposing, both in-here, as subjects, and out-there, as networks of meaningful and material relations. Or, to put it differently, people are, or form a part of,

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methods assemblages. In their envisioning practices they, we, bundle together not very coherent but nevertheless structured hinterlands. And objectivity, in the way Haraway redefines it, is possible if we acknowledge and take responsibility both for our necessary situatedness, and for the recognition that we are located in and produced by sets of partial connections.

Partial connection. This is the metaphor that lies behind Haraway’s trope of the cyborg. Haraway:

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.

(Haraway 1991a, 149)

Cyborgs, then, are sets of partial connections. These may present themselves as political. They may present themselves as material (between machine and human, or between human and animal). And, as the citation suggests, they may present themselves as lying somewhere between reality and fiction. For, another visual metaphor, cyborgs are about interfering in the distributions between reality and fiction. Which is why Haraway picks up and plays with the metaphor of the cyborg. A product of the space age, a rarefied achievement of the military- industrial complex, Haraway seeks to tear the metaphor from its location of birth and bend it to interfere, to make interference patterns, in the unjust material–semiotic networks of what she calls ‘the current disorder’. Indeed ‘a world-changing fiction’. Reality and fiction relate to one another. They are included in one another. But they cannot and should not be reduced to one another.57So

Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control.

(Haraway 1991a, 175)

Multiplicity and partial connection. There is no gold standard. No single reality. Realities may be made and remade. They are made and remade. This is a version of ontological politics.

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