Witnessing the Postmodern Jeremiad: (Mis)Understanding Donna Haraway's Method of Inquiry

The jeremiad, a rhetorical form that borrows its name from the biblical prophet Jeremiah, is a lament that foretells cultural downfall. In contrast, "the American jeremiad," writes Sacvan Bercovitch, "was born in an effort to impose metaphor upon reality. It was nourished by an imagination at once defiant of history and profoundly attuned to the historical forces that were shaping the community." ¹ Like the American jeremiad, Donna Haraway's work is a litany of hope, one that attempts to impose metaphors, or promising monsters, that are at once articulated by, attuned to, and defiant of the historical forces that shape oppression in a postmodern world.

At the heart of the threat and hope promised by Haraway's monsters--the cyborg, the trickster, and, more recently, the vampire--is her strong feminist commitment to the ethics and material consequences of playing with metaphor to reimagine life itself. To unravel her take on these ethics and consequences, we make the distinction between relativism and relationality--a difference that revolves on materiality. Unfortunately, her uses of metaphor as a political strategy have been both fetishized and demonized. ² Her critics and supporters alike often fail to recognize the politics of the way in which metaphor is always already tethered to materiality in her work. Consequently, there are severe divisions in feminist receptions and interpretations of her work. The struggles among these divisions often erupt on the battlegrounds of "standpoint theory" and essentialist/ antiessentialist debates in which standpoint theory is (mis)construed as essentialist and conflated with a mere perspective attributed to women. ³

Those who fail to see the relationship between the literal and the figurative in Haraway's writing often miss the political weight of her rhetoric as a manifesto or a postmodern jeremiad. Framing her work as a postmodern jeremiad, we explicate the ways in which her metaphors are purposeful, rhetorical moves deployed to force a particular kind of politics--specifically, a postmodern identity politics based on the tense but hopeful promise of coalition. After reviewing the distinction between standpoint theory and situated knowledges, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of two of her metaphors, the cyborg and the vampire. The reclaimed image of the vampire often offers a more politically salient model for feminist politics than does the cyborg. This argument hinges on the distinction between a relative and a relational perspective. The point, however, is not to reify the vampire over and against the cyborg, but to investigate the potent politics of Haraway's rhetorical practice as a means to implicate the reader as a coparticipant in her political practice. Using the example of mitigated wetlands--wetlands built by developers according to federally mandated guidelines--we illustrate the rhetorical and political limits of the cyborg metaphor. Her method is to exploit the threat and hope exposed in the conundrum where metaphor and materiality merge, where essentialism and antiessentialism collide, as a fruitful site for feminist politics at the end of the second millennium. ⁴

Haraway's Postmodern Jeremiad

The American jeremiad has been used repeatedly in American political discourse, both secular and religious. A mode of public exhortation, it "helped sustain a national dream through two hundred years of turbulence and change. The American jeremiad joins social criticism to spiritual renewal, public to private identity, the shifting 'signs of the times' to certain traditional metaphors, themes, and symbols." ⁵ As Bercovitch explains it, the American jeremiad "posits a movement from promise to experience--from the ideal of community to the shortcomings of community life--and thence forward, with prophetic assurance, toward a resolution that incorporates (as it transforms) both the promise and the condemnation." ⁶

Seeking to incorporate both the promise and the condemnation of our time, Haraway offers a vision of the future and a plan for achieving that vision...