Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (review)

Summarizing Donna Haraway is like trying to distill an orange—much is lost in the process. The author of Primate Visions (1989) and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991) presents an aphoristic review of New World Order bioinformatics, ranging broadly from the semiotics of Science ads to SimLife’s animation and Michael Jackson’s artifactual body. The book is a festival of word- and ideaplay, sometimes sparkling and brilliant, sometimes annoyingly recondite. Haraway does not make a fetish out of clarity. Not every passage is easy to digest—but that is part of the point, to jar us from the regular run of things. The text bristles with verbs like “queering” and tropes in praise of “diffraction” or “double-vision.” This is not really jargon but a kind of sensualist techno-poetics, moved by a desire “for tearing down the Berlin Wall between the world of objects and the world of subjects” and to create “a new experimental way of life to fulfill the millennarian hope that life will survive on this planet” (p. 270).

Haraway begins by refiguring Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), a top-primate text of the eighties, which she faults for failing to recognize the gender contours of Boyle’s now-famous “modest witness.” Elizabeth Potter is enrolled to argue that modesty had different force for men and women in early experimental science: women were pushed from the scientific scene, while men effaced themselves as transparent witnessing agents. Gender relations were “hardened” in the early modern meeting of science and civility; the air pump was, among other things, a “technology of gender at the heart of scientific knowledge” (p. 28).

It is clear what Haraway is against—narratives of Eden and Apocalypse, for example, along with overzealous literalism and what she calls “heterosexual epistemological erotics” (p. 33)—but we also get hints of what she is for, including “a more culturally and historically alert, reliable, scientific knowledge” (p. 121). She likes “metaphoric realism” and a “cyborg surrealism” (p. 16). She repeats her trademark call for “self-critical technoscience committed to situated knowledges” (p. 33)—which made me wonder, though, whether the forms of knowledge she and I would deplore (military R&D, for instance, which still gets more than half of all U.S. research dollars) are in any sense “unsituated”: it seems these boys know pretty much where they stand and what they are doing. I also found myself wondering about the ethics of her tireless celebration of border-crossings, category fusions, genre-bending, and so forth. She clearly wants to “trouble what counts as insider and outsider in setting standards of credibility” (p. 277), but one also gets the sense that end-of-the-millennium hybrids—du Pont’s OncoMouse^TM, for example—can be seen as “blasphemous antiracist feminist” figures (p. 281). The OncoMouse suffers, female and Jesus-like, complete with human breasts and limbs, in one of the provocative paintings by Lynn Randolph that adorn the text.

Haraway sees both a peril and a hope in such category implosions, but we do not hear enough about which of these (nature into culture, for example) to embrace, and which to shun. She is not really a civil libertarian, and she even shies from environmentalism, given her distrust of discourses of natural harmony. (There is one reference—perhaps ironic—to feminists as “natural deconstructionists” [p. 175].) She does not look at really nasty border-crossings—like Nazism or military technoscience—perhaps because of her ethical and methodological principle of deconstructing “only that which I love and only that in which I am deeply implicated” (p. 151). This may reflect her fear that science studies will be branded “antiscience”; I also suspect, though, that it has to do with her sense that every sacred cow—including feminism, Marxism, and postmodernism—deserves at least some spoofing.

Postmodernity...