Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

0. Introduction.

Claim: Situated knowledge for Haraway is embodied feminist objectivity, which means "a view from somewhere" (590). It is the knowledge that opposes transcendence and splitting of subject and object. (583) There is no way to be in all, or wholly in any, positions structured by race, class and gender. This means that knowledge, instead of going towards universality, needs to strive to become partial (while nevertheless rigorous). However, that does not mean rejection of Science all together - that would mean to lose rigorousness in favor of total relativism.

Method: The truth claims (of science) can be deconstructed by showing historical specificity and so contestability (578). A usable doctrine of objectivity can be devised by comparing radical constructivism (successor science project) with feminist critical empiricism (postmodernist accounts of difference). (580)

Her usual analytical tool is a table of the common themes in scientific/ideological discourses. She puts them side by side to visualize how within each theme the opposing elements structure each other dialectically. However, she also points out that the table view implies that the terms are mutually exclusive or simply alternative (588, 599). She explains the terms rather as nodes in the network of meanings.

STS critique of objectivity. Haraway aligns with Social constructionists in her claim? Equals science to rhetoric. Ideological doctrine of scientific method and all the philosophical verbiage about epistemology, she claims, were cooked up to distract our attention from getting to know the world effectively by practicing the sciences.

Feminist critique of objectivity: Marxism polluted at the source because its theory is structured around the domination of nature in self-construction of man and inability to acknowledge the things women did outside of wage labour (eg ignoring social reproduction). Haraway finds it helpful though because of its provides the tools for nuanced theories of mediation and critiquing hegemony without disempowering positivisms and relativisms.

She points out though that object relations theory in psychoanalysis has given feminism in the US much more than Marx or Althusser (578).

Objectivity in postmodernism, she notes, cannot be about unproblematic objects, but about specific prosthesis and partial translations. It is about crafting a comparative knowledge (597).

Feminist empiricism - Haraway is critical of that too, since to her it is quite positivist and also insists on legitimate meanings of objectivity.

She sees a problem is to balance the account of radical historical contingency of all knowledge claims and knowing subjects with a faithful account of a 'real' world.

We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life (580).

Science to Haraway is a discourse contained in English language and is reductionist in the same way as money is reductionist in capitalism: "What money does in the exchange orders of capitalism, reductionism does in the powerful mental orders of global sciences" (580) - hence the call for "successor science projects" (quoting Sandra Harding, 1987).

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1. Vision

Method: "Parallel dissections". In order to crack open mystified units like science or woman, Haraway finds the common ideological aspects of discourse on science and gender.

Vision is crucial for Haraway here because it is a point of convergence of various aspects such as the gaze and point of view. It is about the power to see (587). The gaze is approached critically as something that constructs the idea of male and white.

Haraway talks about irresponsibility of vision, irresponsible meaning unable to be called into account. The way I see it, this argues scientific view which 'irresponsible' because it always seeks suppot from other claims, and thus is not accountable on it own. Point of view goes back to the voice of the subaltern and the discussion of the ways in which such voices are preferred because they are allow for denial and interpretive core of all knowledge. (584) However, Haraway also warns that the 'capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths' (583) also should not be romanticised and needs to be subjected to critical reexamination, decoding and deconstruction.

Haraway opposes relativism equally to totalisation, deeming them both as 'myths in rhetorics surrounding science' (584). She argues that these two positions do not stand in opposition to one another, as it is usually assumed. To her the alternative lies a responsible kind of partial view, something that she defines as "passionate detachment" (587) - this means detachment from dominant axes of knowledge.

Vision is entangled with moral, technological and political discourses. Who gets to see, who gets blinded and who gets multiple points of view? (587)

The notion of location embedded in the definition of "situ"-ated knowledge is gaining a new traction in the context of my project which sees software as the site of ideological production. "Location is about vulnerability" Haraway suggests (590). It resists the politics of closure and finality. The only way to find objectivity, to her is to be somewhere in particular - a view of objectivity as positioned rationality.

2. Apparatus of bodily production

Claim: there is an ambiguity when referring to "science" because the field is highly heterogenous. Haraway admits that she reduced the whole of this broad field, generally defining it as an institutionalized knowledge production with high stakes in ideological struggles. Haraway's resolution to such ambiguity is that throughout all sciences, no matter how varied, there is a pattern that refers to how faithful the account of object of knowledge is to "real world" - i.e., objectivity (591)

Meanwhile, feminists shy away from doctrines of scientific objectivity (on the basis of the "object" of knowledge being passive), a tendency deplored by Haraway. This, she says, damages the critique because only leads to two understandings such knowledge: either (1) as a reduction of the view of the world to an instrument for destructive capitalist projects, or (2) as masks for certain hegemonic interests.

In her example of sex vs gender, Haraway points out that there needs to be a "productive tension" between the authoritarian biological account of sex and gender as socially positioned difference. To strip gender of any biological category would be to lose too much. Not only would it give up the analytic power of particular Western tradition, but would also assume the body as blank page for social inscriptions. Similar damage from tension happens in other natural sciences. (591) As she mentions earlier in the essay, science is needed precisely because it has always been utopian and visionary (585).

Here Haraway takes time to discuss the position of capitalist colonialism in greater detail: "White Capitalist Patriarchy", a.k.a humanists, need a representation of the world as an object, and nature as raw resource for culture.

She opposes this view by the vision of a world as an actor and agent - something she calls situated knowledge (592). As she explains, the world becomes an agent when it is explicitly shown that politics and ethics provide the grounds for objectivity across all of science, both natural and sociological included (593).

What does Haraway propose instead? (1) view of the world as active subject implies that science will be tricked, yet seemingly no example for such "trickstery" is proposed. (2) "activation" of previously passive objects of knowledge (Haraway's own method used in Primate Visions, 1989). By interpreting the sociological construction of the notion of gender via primatology, the binary distinctions get "permanently problematized" (594). Body is no longer the resource, but an agent. What is important to Haraway here is that such activated image (of the female in this case) creates a situated conversation at every level of its articulation. In other words, embodied feminist objectivity.

Haraway adopts the notion of apparatus from literary theory and applies it to critical scientific discourse. Katie King's (1987) "apparatus of literary production" is a methodological framework she develops to analyse women and writing technologies (595). It is a matrix of art, business and technology from which "literature" is born. Haraway adopts this framework to the analyse production of bodies and other objects in scientific knowledge projects.

She presents bodies as "material-semiotic actors", which, similarly to poems being sites of literary production, are sites of bodily production. In poems, language is an actor intependent of intentions and authors, bodies are too the objects of knowledge all of and in themselves.

This allows her to argue that objects are boundary projects, with boundaries seen as shifting, not entirely reliable parameters. The bodies, to Haraway, emerge at the intersection of biological research and writing, medical and other business practices, and technology, as the visualisation she looks earlier in this essay.