Technoscientific Politics: Cui Bono?

Donna Haraway’s Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium is a complex, wonderfully dizzying meditation on the strangely political world of technoscience, molecular biology, and feminist science studies. It is also a call for responsibility in the face of what Haraway calls the regime of technobiopower, a field of political contestation constituted by the late 20th century implosive imbrication of informatics, biologics, and economics. In Haraway’s view, the contemporary world of technoscience is no Venn overlay of science and politics, science and society; rather, it is a heterogeneous assemblage of “the technical, organic, political, economic, oneiric, and textual.” (12) Just as we have come to understand Michel Foucault’s hyphenated joining of power-knowledge, we must come to understand such assemblages as “category fusions” and to recognize that the category separations marked by the “and” are arrestations of “multifaceted, heterogeneous, interdigitating practices...” (62) As Haraway notes:

The point is simple: ...Potent categories collapse into one another. Analytically and provisionally, we may want to move what counts as the political to the background and to foreground elements called technical, formal, or quantitative, or to highlight the textual and semiotic while muting the economic or mythic. But foreground and background are relational and rhetorical matters, not binary dualism or ontological categories. The messy political does not go away because we think we are cleanly in the zone of the technical, or vice versa. Stories and facts do not naturally keep a respectable distance; indeed, they promiscuously cohabit the same very material places. Determining what constitutes each dimension takes boundary-making and maintenance work.

(68)

The challenge for the reader—as well as for the technoscientifically literate citizens Haraway would like us to become—is to enter into this messy cohabitation, into a still new and strangely fascinating material-semiotic universe where political actors are of both human and nonhuman sorts and where orthodox political theory and familiar political calculation lose their way. Here the “subjects” and “objects” of our day-to-day politics are not only unusual, they are unfamiliar in their constitution.

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium stands as a richly provocative and useful reading of the politically transformative effects of scientific and technological practice, realigning the political and the technoscientific in a way that allows us to ask in all seriousness: Cui bono? Who lives and dies in the force fields of technoscience? How are “questions about possible livable worlds [to] lie visibly at the heart of our best science”? (39) Haraway comes to her project and these questions alive to the seriousness of her enterprise and her own complicity: “[f]ollowing an ethical and methodological principle for science studies that I adopted many years ago, I will critically analyze, or ‘deconstruct,’ only that which I love and only that in which I am deeply implicated.” (151) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium deserves a respectful reading.

Haraway’s heterogeneous, networked argument is perhaps best approached through a consideration of the stated goals for Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium, followed by a close look at the central actors in her text: the generative culture of technoscience, the imploded cyborg stem cells that are the sites and “objects” of technoscientific practice and politics, the “mutated modest witness” that is the political “subject” of technoscience, and the play of technoscientific liberty within/as what I would argue are the pluralization practices for constituting a heterogeneous technoscientific commons.

Haraway treats her work as a “narrative net” that exemplifies the “materialized refiguration” she sees comprising the manifold projects of technoscience and situated feminism. It is a narrative webwork aimed at transformation, refiguring “the subjects, objects, and communicative commerce of technoscience into different kinds of knots. (23) Recognizing that the credibility of an experimental way of life has required the ongoing boundary-work by which a public/private distinction was enacted, Haraway is concerned to point to and join in restructuring the materially and epistemologically privileged space of scientific practices. A key goal is to “trouble what counts as insiders and outsiders in setting standards of credibility and objectivity.” (277) The dense, rhizomic practices that delineate the “inside” of the sciences—the “culture of no culture”—from the...