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Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience
Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances, and politics in twentieth-century technoscience.
The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, OncoMouse.
The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, OncoMouse.
376 pages, Hardcover
First published January 16, 1997
About the author
Donna J. Haraway
52 books997 followersDonna J. Haraway is an American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. She is a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies, described in the early 1990s as a "feminist, rather loosely a postmodernist". Haraway is the author of numerous foundational books and essays that bring together questions of science and feminism, such as "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1985) and "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective". Additionally, for her contributions to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, Haraway is widely cited in works related to Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Her Situated Knowledges and Cyborg Manifesto publications in particular, have sparked discussion within the HCI community regarding framing the positionality from which research and systems are designed. She is also a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism, associated with post-humanism and new materialism movements. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.
Haraway has taught Women's Studies and the History of Science at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins University. Haraway's works have contributed to the study of both human-machine and human-animal relations. Her works have sparked debate in primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway participated in a collaborative exchange with the feminist theorist Lynn Randolph from 1990 to 1996. Their engagement with specific ideas relating to feminism, technoscience, political consciousness, and other social issues, formed the images and narrative of Haraway's book Modest_Witness for which she received the Society for Social Studies of Science's (4S) Ludwik Fleck Prize in 1999. In 2000, Haraway was awarded the Society for Social Studies of Science's John Desmond Bernal Prize for her distinguished contributions to the field of science and technology studies. Haraway serves on the advisory board for numerous academic journals, including differences, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Contemporary Women's Writing, and Environmental Humanities.
Haraway has taught Women's Studies and the History of Science at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins University. Haraway's works have contributed to the study of both human-machine and human-animal relations. Her works have sparked debate in primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway participated in a collaborative exchange with the feminist theorist Lynn Randolph from 1990 to 1996. Their engagement with specific ideas relating to feminism, technoscience, political consciousness, and other social issues, formed the images and narrative of Haraway's book Modest_Witness for which she received the Society for Social Studies of Science's (4S) Ludwik Fleck Prize in 1999. In 2000, Haraway was awarded the Society for Social Studies of Science's John Desmond Bernal Prize for her distinguished contributions to the field of science and technology studies. Haraway serves on the advisory board for numerous academic journals, including differences, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Contemporary Women's Writing, and Environmental Humanities.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
October 25, 2020
Reread 2: still slaps, haraway thinks she's a genius (and maybe she is!!), some really important and interesting things in here
science is not objective
science has an agenda
knowledge is not innocent
the way we make knowledge is burdened and empowered by the history of who makes it
Etc etc
science is not objective
science has an agenda
knowledge is not innocent
the way we make knowledge is burdened and empowered by the history of who makes it
Etc etc
May 21, 2023
God I’m a sucker for old Donna Haraway books. I’m embarrassed about it, but I just love reading anything by her that’s like older than 10 years old. She’s a bad Marxist, but sometimes her sarcastic humour and exalted style remind me of Marx’s literary flourishes. This thing she utters in an interview at the start of the republished 2017 edition of this book is very on brand for Haraway:
“Because, unlike men, they were the marked body; the body infected by particularity, so they were never considered a disinterested witness.Their speech was tainted by bias, by the body.”
I love the phrase she uses “infected by particularity.” She says this in response to her interlocutor Thyrza Nichols Goodeve mentioning how women, with the exception of Margaret Cavendish on one occasion, were generally excluded from witnessing the spectacles of Robert Boyle’s experiments, which included suffocating various animals to prove that his air pump had created a vacuum (and hence provoked women to protest such cruel experiments). The audience were largely gentlemen, who Shapin and Schaffer call ‘modest witnesses’ in their book “Leviathan and the Air Pump”. These gentlemanly ‘modest witnesses’ would collectively observe and corroborate scientific demonstrations in what was becoming a new form of experimental philosophy. They would describe the results they observed in a removed and detached way, eschewing exalted literary flourishes — 'modest', quite literally, at a rhetorical level, and most certainly not by way of class. So the title of Haraway’s book is a direct allusion and response to Leviathan and the Air Pump, which Haraway accuses of not incorporating any of the recent insights of feminist science studies that were circulating at the time, not dissimilar to what Boyle did in his collective experimental practice.
The “OncoMouseTM” at the other end of her long title (which is supposed to be an email address apparently, honestly could pass as an ugly Mastadon address) is an allusion to a genetically modified mouse developed at Harvard for laboratory experiments and whose exclusive rights were given to DuPont. OncoMouse was the first patented mammal, and Haraway draws a line from Boyle’s air pump, a lab instrument that used to suffocate mice, to this mammal which is now a living organism that has been itself transformed into a commodified lab instrument.
The "FemaleMan" of the title, is one of Haraway's main jokes, and she describes her as: "the chief figure in the narrative field of feminism in this book. S/he is about the contingent and disrupted foundational category of woman, doppelganger to the coherent, bright son called man," (i.e. the partial marked figure, infected by particularity, biased by the body).
Haraway’s book is divided into three sections: Syntactics, Semantics, and Pragmatics. Haraway says each of the chapters are self-contained essays, but read successively, they function as “a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress through the story fields, material-semiotic apparatuses, and political stakes where biologics and informatics cohabit and reproduce.” This is what the millennium alludes to, as this book was originally published in 1997 and there was all sorts of eschatological frenzies that were taking place within American popular religion. (My parents, being fundamentalist Christians, thought the rapture was going to happen lol and had a VHS tape about it.) Haraway is actually good at deploying theological language and I've heard her on numerous occasions talking to scholars of religion or theologians in a very interesting way. But she discusses millenarianism and millenialism throughout the book in a rather interesting way:
“Figuration is a complex practice with deep roots in the semiotics of Western Christian realism. I am especially interested in a specific sense of time built into Christian figuration. I think this kind of time is characteristic of the promises and threats of technoscience in the United. States, with its ebullient, secular, disavowed, Christian national stories and practices. Despite the extraordinary multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious populations in the United States, with quite various traditions of signifying time and community, U.S. scientific culture is replete with figures and stories that can only be called Christian. Figural realism infuses Christian discourse in all of that religious tradition’s contested and polyvocal variety, and this kind of figuration shapes much of the technoscientific sense of history and progress.That is why I locate my modest witness in the less than universal—to put it mildly—time zone of the end of the Second (Christian) Millennium. In the United States, at least, technoscience is a millenniarian discourse about beginnings and ends, first and last things, suffering and progress, figure and fulfillment. And the Onco- MouseTM on the back cover of Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium doesn’t have a crown of thorns on her head for no reason.
As Erich Auerbach explained in his great study of mimetic practice in Western literature, “Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. . . .They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life” (1953:64). The heart of figural real- ism is the Christian practice of reading the story of Christ into Jewish scripture. Although in Christian figuration both figure and fulfillment are materially real, history is fully contained in the eternal plan of Divine Providence, which alone can supply the key to historical meaning. Containing and fulfilling the whole, (Christian) salvation history is history. Auerbach insists that this kind of temporality is utterly alien to the conceptions of classical antiquity, both Jewish and Greek.
Auerbach examines Dante’s development of figural realism in The Divine Comedy. Dante’s innovation was to draw the end of man with such extra- ordinary vividness and variety “that the listener is all too occupied by the figure in the fulfillment. . . .The fullness of life which Dante incorporates into that interpretation is so rich and so strong that its manifestations force their way in to the listener’s soul independently of any interpretation.The image of man eclipses the image of God” (1953:176).The sense of history as a totality remains in this humanist order, and the overwhelming power of the images that promise fulfillment (or damnation) on earth infuses secular histories of progress and apocalypse. Secular salvation history depends on the power of images and the temporality of ultimate threats and promises to contain the heteroglossia and flux of events.This is the sense of time and of representation that I think in forms technoscience in the United States.The discourses of genetics and information sciences are especially replete with instances of barely secularized Christian figural realism at work.”
In addition to eschatological offerings, the first section (actually just composed of just one short chapter) explains her really weird book title / email address, which honestly is an awful title in my view lol. But I would have loved it in high school or as an early undergrad student (which is when I first encountered Haraway), because I was corny back then, even more than I am now. She also stakes out her claim as a Marxist but one that is accounting for more-than-human actors like animals:
“Something of an unreconstructed and dogged Marxist, I remain very interested in how social relationships get congealed into and taken for decontextualized things. But unlike Marx, and allied with a few prominent and deliberately crazy scholars in science studies, with armies of very powerful and paradigmatically sane scientists and engineers, and with a motley band of off-the-wall ecofeminists and science-fiction enthusiasts, I insist that social relationships include nonhumans as well as humans as socially (or, what is the same thing for this odd congeries, sociotechnically) active partners. All that is unhuman is not un-kind, outside kinship, outside the orders of signification, excluded from trading in signs and wonders.”
The second part of her book (Semantics) works through the Scientific Revolution and its figure of the ‘modest witness’ and Shapin and Schaffer’s categories material (experimental), literary (modest), and social (gentlemanly) technologies in the new practices of experimentation. She elaborates on Leviathan and the Air Pump by bringing in feminist theories such as boundary objects, situated knowledges, agential realism (Barad), and strong objectivity (Harding). The following chapter in this section interrogates the multi-species kinship between FemaleMan and OncoMouse covering economics, research practices, visual materials and projects to construct a more democratic science.
The third part of the book (Pragmatics) explores subjects such as the Human Genome Project, reproductive technologies across borders, emerging biological approaches to race at the turn of the century, cyborg kinship in ecology, medical technology, cinema, and evolutionary biology. She also takes a chapter to reflect on optical metaphors and instruments in Western philosophy and science, proposing diffraction (making material-semiotic difference within apparatuses) as an alternative to reflexivity (which she critiques as “a bad trope for escaping the false choice between realism and relativism in thinking about strong objectivity and situated knowledges.”
One other approach I appreciated in this book was its emphasis on interpreting visual cultures of science. Haraway, attentive to the modes by which capitalism operates within scientific knowledge production, interprets advertisements within scientific journals throughout the book, which I think is a great historical source for situating how ideology operates within science at different points in time.
Anyway, a very enjoyable read. I’ll finish with some of Haraway’s commentary on Marxist commodity fetishism, gene fetishism, and the more-than-human:
“I hope Marx would recognize his illegitimate daughters, who, in the ongoing comedy of epistemophilia, only mimic their putative father in a pursuit of undead things into their lively matrices. Marx, of course, taught us about the fetishism of commodities. Commodity fetishism is a specific kind of reification of historical human integrations with each other and with an unquiet multitude of nonhumans, which are called nature in Western conventions. In the circulation of commodities within capitalism, these interactions appear in the form of, and are mistaken for, things. Fetishism is about interesting “mistakes”—really denials—where a fixed thing substitutes for the doings of power-differentiated lively beings on which and on whom, in my view, everything actually depends. In commodity fetishism, inside the mythic and fiercely material zones of market relations, things are mistakenly perceived as the generators of value, while people appear as and even become ungenerative things, mere append- ages of machines, simply vehicles for replicators.Without question, contemporary genetic technology is imbricated with the classical commodity fetishism endemic to capitalist market relations.”
“The Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács defined this kind of reification as follows:“Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people” (1971:83). Marx defined commodity fetishism as “the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour” (1976:176). Corporealization, however, is not reducible to capitalization or commodification, although in capitalist societies the multiple reaction sites joining and separating the processes remain both crucial and badly understood, partly because of ideological preconceptions held by everybody, on all sides, who has studied (or refused to study) the linkages and partly because of the daunting complexity of the issues.
I am defining corporealization as the interactions of humans and nonhumans in the distributed, heterogeneous work processes of technoscience. The nonhumans are both those made by humans, for example, machines and other tools, and those occurring independently of human manufacture. The work processes result in specific material-semiotic bodies—or natural-technical objects of knowledge and practice—such as cells, molecules, genes, organisms, viruses, ecosystems, and the like. The work processes also make humans into particular kinds of subjects called scientists. The bodies are perfectly “real,” and nothing about corporealization is “merely” fiction. But corporealization is tropic and historically specific at every layer of its tissues.
Cells, organisms, and genes are not “discovered” in a vulgar realist sense, but they are not made up. Technoscientific bodies, such as the biomedical organism, are the nodes that congeal from interactions where all the actors are not human, not self-identical, not “us.” The world takes shape in specific ways and cannot take shape just any way; corporealization is deeply contingent, physical, semiotic, tropic, historical, located. Corporealization involves institutions, narratives, legal structures, power-differentiated human labor, technical practice, analytic apparatus, and much more.The processes “inside” bodies—such as the cascades of action that constitute an organism or that constitute the play of genes and other entities that go to make up a cell—are interactions, not frozen things.”
“A gene is not a thing, much less a “master molecule” or a self-contained code. Instead, the term gene signifies a node of durable action where many actors, human and nonhuman, meet.
Commodity fetishism was defined so that only humans were the real actors, whose social relationality was obscured in the reified commodity form. But “corporeal fetishism,” or more specifically gene fetishism, is about mistaking heterogenous relationality for a fixed, seemingly objective thing. Strong objectivity, in Sandra Harding’s terms, and situated knowledge, in my terms, are lost in the pseudo-objectivity of gene fetishism, or any kind of corporeal fetishism that denies the ongoing action and work that it takes to sustain technoscientific material-semiotic bodies in the world.The gene as fetish is a phantom object, like and unlike the commodity. Gene fetishism involves “forgetting” that bodies are nodes in webs of integrations, forgetting the tropic quality of all knowledge claims. Thus, my claim about situated knowledges and gene fetishism can itself become fixed and dogmatic and seem to stand for and by itself, outside of the articulations that make the claim sensible.That is, when the stuttering and swerving are left out, a process philosophy can be just as fetishistic as a reductionist one. Both scientists and nonscientists can be gene fetishists…”
“Because, unlike men, they were the marked body; the body infected by particularity, so they were never considered a disinterested witness.Their speech was tainted by bias, by the body.”
I love the phrase she uses “infected by particularity.” She says this in response to her interlocutor Thyrza Nichols Goodeve mentioning how women, with the exception of Margaret Cavendish on one occasion, were generally excluded from witnessing the spectacles of Robert Boyle’s experiments, which included suffocating various animals to prove that his air pump had created a vacuum (and hence provoked women to protest such cruel experiments). The audience were largely gentlemen, who Shapin and Schaffer call ‘modest witnesses’ in their book “Leviathan and the Air Pump”. These gentlemanly ‘modest witnesses’ would collectively observe and corroborate scientific demonstrations in what was becoming a new form of experimental philosophy. They would describe the results they observed in a removed and detached way, eschewing exalted literary flourishes — 'modest', quite literally, at a rhetorical level, and most certainly not by way of class. So the title of Haraway’s book is a direct allusion and response to Leviathan and the Air Pump, which Haraway accuses of not incorporating any of the recent insights of feminist science studies that were circulating at the time, not dissimilar to what Boyle did in his collective experimental practice.
The “OncoMouseTM” at the other end of her long title (which is supposed to be an email address apparently, honestly could pass as an ugly Mastadon address) is an allusion to a genetically modified mouse developed at Harvard for laboratory experiments and whose exclusive rights were given to DuPont. OncoMouse was the first patented mammal, and Haraway draws a line from Boyle’s air pump, a lab instrument that used to suffocate mice, to this mammal which is now a living organism that has been itself transformed into a commodified lab instrument.
The "FemaleMan" of the title, is one of Haraway's main jokes, and she describes her as: "the chief figure in the narrative field of feminism in this book. S/he is about the contingent and disrupted foundational category of woman, doppelganger to the coherent, bright son called man," (i.e. the partial marked figure, infected by particularity, biased by the body).
Haraway’s book is divided into three sections: Syntactics, Semantics, and Pragmatics. Haraway says each of the chapters are self-contained essays, but read successively, they function as “a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress through the story fields, material-semiotic apparatuses, and political stakes where biologics and informatics cohabit and reproduce.” This is what the millennium alludes to, as this book was originally published in 1997 and there was all sorts of eschatological frenzies that were taking place within American popular religion. (My parents, being fundamentalist Christians, thought the rapture was going to happen lol and had a VHS tape about it.) Haraway is actually good at deploying theological language and I've heard her on numerous occasions talking to scholars of religion or theologians in a very interesting way. But she discusses millenarianism and millenialism throughout the book in a rather interesting way:
“Figuration is a complex practice with deep roots in the semiotics of Western Christian realism. I am especially interested in a specific sense of time built into Christian figuration. I think this kind of time is characteristic of the promises and threats of technoscience in the United. States, with its ebullient, secular, disavowed, Christian national stories and practices. Despite the extraordinary multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious populations in the United States, with quite various traditions of signifying time and community, U.S. scientific culture is replete with figures and stories that can only be called Christian. Figural realism infuses Christian discourse in all of that religious tradition’s contested and polyvocal variety, and this kind of figuration shapes much of the technoscientific sense of history and progress.That is why I locate my modest witness in the less than universal—to put it mildly—time zone of the end of the Second (Christian) Millennium. In the United States, at least, technoscience is a millenniarian discourse about beginnings and ends, first and last things, suffering and progress, figure and fulfillment. And the Onco- MouseTM on the back cover of Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium doesn’t have a crown of thorns on her head for no reason.
As Erich Auerbach explained in his great study of mimetic practice in Western literature, “Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. . . .They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life” (1953:64). The heart of figural real- ism is the Christian practice of reading the story of Christ into Jewish scripture. Although in Christian figuration both figure and fulfillment are materially real, history is fully contained in the eternal plan of Divine Providence, which alone can supply the key to historical meaning. Containing and fulfilling the whole, (Christian) salvation history is history. Auerbach insists that this kind of temporality is utterly alien to the conceptions of classical antiquity, both Jewish and Greek.
Auerbach examines Dante’s development of figural realism in The Divine Comedy. Dante’s innovation was to draw the end of man with such extra- ordinary vividness and variety “that the listener is all too occupied by the figure in the fulfillment. . . .The fullness of life which Dante incorporates into that interpretation is so rich and so strong that its manifestations force their way in to the listener’s soul independently of any interpretation.The image of man eclipses the image of God” (1953:176).The sense of history as a totality remains in this humanist order, and the overwhelming power of the images that promise fulfillment (or damnation) on earth infuses secular histories of progress and apocalypse. Secular salvation history depends on the power of images and the temporality of ultimate threats and promises to contain the heteroglossia and flux of events.This is the sense of time and of representation that I think in forms technoscience in the United States.The discourses of genetics and information sciences are especially replete with instances of barely secularized Christian figural realism at work.”
In addition to eschatological offerings, the first section (actually just composed of just one short chapter) explains her really weird book title / email address, which honestly is an awful title in my view lol. But I would have loved it in high school or as an early undergrad student (which is when I first encountered Haraway), because I was corny back then, even more than I am now. She also stakes out her claim as a Marxist but one that is accounting for more-than-human actors like animals:
“Something of an unreconstructed and dogged Marxist, I remain very interested in how social relationships get congealed into and taken for decontextualized things. But unlike Marx, and allied with a few prominent and deliberately crazy scholars in science studies, with armies of very powerful and paradigmatically sane scientists and engineers, and with a motley band of off-the-wall ecofeminists and science-fiction enthusiasts, I insist that social relationships include nonhumans as well as humans as socially (or, what is the same thing for this odd congeries, sociotechnically) active partners. All that is unhuman is not un-kind, outside kinship, outside the orders of signification, excluded from trading in signs and wonders.”
The second part of her book (Semantics) works through the Scientific Revolution and its figure of the ‘modest witness’ and Shapin and Schaffer’s categories material (experimental), literary (modest), and social (gentlemanly) technologies in the new practices of experimentation. She elaborates on Leviathan and the Air Pump by bringing in feminist theories such as boundary objects, situated knowledges, agential realism (Barad), and strong objectivity (Harding). The following chapter in this section interrogates the multi-species kinship between FemaleMan and OncoMouse covering economics, research practices, visual materials and projects to construct a more democratic science.
The third part of the book (Pragmatics) explores subjects such as the Human Genome Project, reproductive technologies across borders, emerging biological approaches to race at the turn of the century, cyborg kinship in ecology, medical technology, cinema, and evolutionary biology. She also takes a chapter to reflect on optical metaphors and instruments in Western philosophy and science, proposing diffraction (making material-semiotic difference within apparatuses) as an alternative to reflexivity (which she critiques as “a bad trope for escaping the false choice between realism and relativism in thinking about strong objectivity and situated knowledges.”
One other approach I appreciated in this book was its emphasis on interpreting visual cultures of science. Haraway, attentive to the modes by which capitalism operates within scientific knowledge production, interprets advertisements within scientific journals throughout the book, which I think is a great historical source for situating how ideology operates within science at different points in time.
Anyway, a very enjoyable read. I’ll finish with some of Haraway’s commentary on Marxist commodity fetishism, gene fetishism, and the more-than-human:
“I hope Marx would recognize his illegitimate daughters, who, in the ongoing comedy of epistemophilia, only mimic their putative father in a pursuit of undead things into their lively matrices. Marx, of course, taught us about the fetishism of commodities. Commodity fetishism is a specific kind of reification of historical human integrations with each other and with an unquiet multitude of nonhumans, which are called nature in Western conventions. In the circulation of commodities within capitalism, these interactions appear in the form of, and are mistaken for, things. Fetishism is about interesting “mistakes”—really denials—where a fixed thing substitutes for the doings of power-differentiated lively beings on which and on whom, in my view, everything actually depends. In commodity fetishism, inside the mythic and fiercely material zones of market relations, things are mistakenly perceived as the generators of value, while people appear as and even become ungenerative things, mere append- ages of machines, simply vehicles for replicators.Without question, contemporary genetic technology is imbricated with the classical commodity fetishism endemic to capitalist market relations.”
“The Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács defined this kind of reification as follows:“Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people” (1971:83). Marx defined commodity fetishism as “the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour” (1976:176). Corporealization, however, is not reducible to capitalization or commodification, although in capitalist societies the multiple reaction sites joining and separating the processes remain both crucial and badly understood, partly because of ideological preconceptions held by everybody, on all sides, who has studied (or refused to study) the linkages and partly because of the daunting complexity of the issues.
I am defining corporealization as the interactions of humans and nonhumans in the distributed, heterogeneous work processes of technoscience. The nonhumans are both those made by humans, for example, machines and other tools, and those occurring independently of human manufacture. The work processes result in specific material-semiotic bodies—or natural-technical objects of knowledge and practice—such as cells, molecules, genes, organisms, viruses, ecosystems, and the like. The work processes also make humans into particular kinds of subjects called scientists. The bodies are perfectly “real,” and nothing about corporealization is “merely” fiction. But corporealization is tropic and historically specific at every layer of its tissues.
Cells, organisms, and genes are not “discovered” in a vulgar realist sense, but they are not made up. Technoscientific bodies, such as the biomedical organism, are the nodes that congeal from interactions where all the actors are not human, not self-identical, not “us.” The world takes shape in specific ways and cannot take shape just any way; corporealization is deeply contingent, physical, semiotic, tropic, historical, located. Corporealization involves institutions, narratives, legal structures, power-differentiated human labor, technical practice, analytic apparatus, and much more.The processes “inside” bodies—such as the cascades of action that constitute an organism or that constitute the play of genes and other entities that go to make up a cell—are interactions, not frozen things.”
“A gene is not a thing, much less a “master molecule” or a self-contained code. Instead, the term gene signifies a node of durable action where many actors, human and nonhuman, meet.
Commodity fetishism was defined so that only humans were the real actors, whose social relationality was obscured in the reified commodity form. But “corporeal fetishism,” or more specifically gene fetishism, is about mistaking heterogenous relationality for a fixed, seemingly objective thing. Strong objectivity, in Sandra Harding’s terms, and situated knowledge, in my terms, are lost in the pseudo-objectivity of gene fetishism, or any kind of corporeal fetishism that denies the ongoing action and work that it takes to sustain technoscientific material-semiotic bodies in the world.The gene as fetish is a phantom object, like and unlike the commodity. Gene fetishism involves “forgetting” that bodies are nodes in webs of integrations, forgetting the tropic quality of all knowledge claims. Thus, my claim about situated knowledges and gene fetishism can itself become fixed and dogmatic and seem to stand for and by itself, outside of the articulations that make the claim sensible.That is, when the stuttering and swerving are left out, a process philosophy can be just as fetishistic as a reductionist one. Both scientists and nonscientists can be gene fetishists…”
May 31, 2020
Going through books I bought when I was interested in Technology, Society and Mass Communication. One of the intersections is the study of the history and philosophy of science. At the time, it was the beginning of the Science Wars.
It was time to look how science and technology was made. Some argument can be made that some of the critical thinking lead to a distrust of the value of the output of science. Maybe it leads to the situation we are in now.
Regardless of where you fall on that, this book is part of that lineage. More coherent than the book of essays that I read recently. It had more humour and stretched a bit more. Did that make me take it less seriously? I don't know.
It is always odd to see books that are current in the internet years after. Some of the predictions or the analysis that made sense at the time, just doesn't hold up. Science fiction isn't about the future but about the current situation. This book was also of its time. It does have some food for thought in terms of thinking about how the science sausage is made but I'm not sure there is enough for students or folks interested in where we are now.
Of course, for me, it is a look back at what the debates were back then and to reflect on how those debates changed or resolved. So, for me, this was nostalgic and fun.
It was time to look how science and technology was made. Some argument can be made that some of the critical thinking lead to a distrust of the value of the output of science. Maybe it leads to the situation we are in now.
Regardless of where you fall on that, this book is part of that lineage. More coherent than the book of essays that I read recently. It had more humour and stretched a bit more. Did that make me take it less seriously? I don't know.
It is always odd to see books that are current in the internet years after. Some of the predictions or the analysis that made sense at the time, just doesn't hold up. Science fiction isn't about the future but about the current situation. This book was also of its time. It does have some food for thought in terms of thinking about how the science sausage is made but I'm not sure there is enough for students or folks interested in where we are now.
Of course, for me, it is a look back at what the debates were back then and to reflect on how those debates changed or resolved. So, for me, this was nostalgic and fun.
May 16, 2009
I don't know why it took me so long to open this book, but once I opened it, it was so quick to read. Haraway's language is brave and welcoming, her comments are thoughtful, her subject matter is provocative. She combines reviews of sci-fi novels, visual representations of her subject matter, and well-informed discussions of academic texts, in a way that embraces the reader. Her relationship to her students is also amazing, as many of her citations are unpublished manuscripts that her students composed for different classes. I wished I had a teacher that took me so seriously.
February 13, 2012
“Witnessing the Culture of No Culture”
Haraway as an Oncomouse
While Haraway demonstrates a number of very important insights about technology in science, or technoscience, my overall reaction was a troubled feeling, a small curl of dread slipping through my stomach. Despite the transgression of agent-subject-self-object in this description, my disagreement was not, as Haraway had hoped, a result of the genetic technologies advertisements (Haraway 1997 151), the poverty of scientifically formulated milk in infant bodies (211), or the kinship ties of Plutonium to the “Even the Rat was White1” OncoMouse (55). My disagreement was the use of large macro-processes of religion, capitalism, science, and advertisement to unabashedly reflect the meaning of the world for the individual. This emotional-rational reflexivity, of course, puts me in danger of Haraway’s favorite critique; least I simply be repeating the structure of a male-patriarchal society without truly thinking assumptions that hold this view together (Haraway 1991; 121) (Haraway 1997; 35). I may also be critiquing the wrong elements of this work, leaving the ability to see the interconnections of the way Haraway is at times both objective and subjective in her work2 (Latour 2004). Yet I can not begin to talk of the good in this text without first warning the reader. While Haraway admits to being a shaped by Christian discourse as a scientist (2), her syntax (43) [or POV, whichever the reader may prefer 133] is striking similar to the Christian descriptions of God. Haraway’s relationship with the world she studies is at once everywhere and nowhere. She becomes a multi-cultured figure of the ocnocomouse in the perspective of science studies while inhabiting the condensed timescape of the second Christian millennium... she becomes the “Alpha and the Omega” from the book of revelations. While her project of tracing the power influences of technoscience discourse is admirable, her method creates more than she intends. There is a power in any method by accounting for every influence-history-thing at once. This is a romantic reading, and the books material format as a “thing in itself” resonates with the power of a previous narrative [of science and religion] where the insight into the acts of others places Haraway is a privileged position. This is dangerous- and I must beg Haraway not to become a culture of no culture in a science of science methodology… by simply bringing the “curious vertigo that I blame on the god like perspective” (133) back down earth- and people’s culturally informed practices- in ethnography.
This initial, and necessarily first, caveat set aside, I can now direct the reader to the strengths of Haraway’s work. Haraway identifies the main processes of technoscience: their relationship to pervasive figures and stories, their creation of materialized reconfigurations (64), and the ability of science to be cultural practice and practical culture (66), and the ability of technoscience to fold categories together (68). Once these relationships are fettered out in each of her examples, she quickly connects power and historical influences to technoscience in a number of ways. One of the most important is the notion of the copyright. Copyright, at its heart, is a particular cultural trope of ownership. The copyright links large tangible materials, like mice which have been engineered to be cancerous, simultaneously into capitalist markets and legal-moral responsibility for the power bearing knowledge. To highlight the importance of Haraway’s point, it may be useful to talk of one example she provides in the textbook: the OcnoMouse.
The OcnoMouse represents a condensing of categories in a number of ways. In this instance, ownership of the mouse’s genes transforms it from a ‘self,’ a living organism, into an invention (80). The mouse becomes a piece property. This roots the mouse as a tool, described as a weapon, with which scientists can use to fight cancer (82). Because of its cancer growths the mouse is also a model of humans (79).
Haraway demonstrates that this categorically mutated mouse does not lose its ability to be ‘objective,’ and to provide information about nature and cancer. Although OcnoMouse, and other trans[ient] beings, are created where natural processes stopped (51), their material properties allow them to be positioned in a new “natural” habitat… the laboratory (83). Inhabited by creations of technoscience, these tool-lives represent the material representation and operationaliztion of nature (102), and they reside in the worm-hole like space created in the lab. Scientists work as “the culture of no culture” (4) in these spaces, an outlook which is interpellated through new scientists in teaching and in governments through the commodiziation of technoscience products (109).
The commodization of technoscience products is important and this ties the OncoMouse the world making processes of mapping (135). The mouse’s genetic copyright maps the animal as a thing in legal discourse. This ownership map delineates the boundaries of scientific knowledge in many ways. The first delineates who gets access to the animal as a tool, which links the mouse with space as a form of politics, history and power (142). This also maps the accountability of the scientist to the knowledge his tool produces, linking not only the lab space into the right to create new commodities (152), but also linking the researcher to the results through accountability and responsibility (73). In all of these imploding categories, empty spaces, and history, the mouse becomes a “superfetish.” The mouse is a figure for commodity fetishism- we know not how his products were made (140), a figure for psychoanalytic fetishism in its modeling [substitution] of human life (144), and in philosophical fetishism of the fact in its lab habitat production of objective truth. In this way, the mapping of genes and mice create, and are created by, cultural practices, history, and knowledge (268)- which is what Haraway wants the reader never to miss.
NOTES:
1. My inclusion of a reference to 1998 book; “Even the Rat was White: a historical view of Psycholgoy” by Robert Guthrie, where he explores the relationship of metanarratives in laboratory sciences to larger discourses and functions of scientific racism in United States not only functions as a trope mirroring Haraway’s research-descriptive-historical methodology, but also a commentary on the resulting undulating language in her writing style as well.
2. For an example of this, refer to her critique genetic advertising where she admits emotional responses (amusement and fear) have influenced her investigation of the symbols in these adds.
Haraway, Donna J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The reinvention of Nature. New York, Routledge press.
Haraway, Donna J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Great Britain, Routledge Press.
Latour, Bruno. (2004). “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30. Pp. 225-248
Haraway as an Oncomouse
While Haraway demonstrates a number of very important insights about technology in science, or technoscience, my overall reaction was a troubled feeling, a small curl of dread slipping through my stomach. Despite the transgression of agent-subject-self-object in this description, my disagreement was not, as Haraway had hoped, a result of the genetic technologies advertisements (Haraway 1997 151), the poverty of scientifically formulated milk in infant bodies (211), or the kinship ties of Plutonium to the “Even the Rat was White1” OncoMouse (55). My disagreement was the use of large macro-processes of religion, capitalism, science, and advertisement to unabashedly reflect the meaning of the world for the individual. This emotional-rational reflexivity, of course, puts me in danger of Haraway’s favorite critique; least I simply be repeating the structure of a male-patriarchal society without truly thinking assumptions that hold this view together (Haraway 1991; 121) (Haraway 1997; 35). I may also be critiquing the wrong elements of this work, leaving the ability to see the interconnections of the way Haraway is at times both objective and subjective in her work2 (Latour 2004). Yet I can not begin to talk of the good in this text without first warning the reader. While Haraway admits to being a shaped by Christian discourse as a scientist (2), her syntax (43) [or POV, whichever the reader may prefer 133] is striking similar to the Christian descriptions of God. Haraway’s relationship with the world she studies is at once everywhere and nowhere. She becomes a multi-cultured figure of the ocnocomouse in the perspective of science studies while inhabiting the condensed timescape of the second Christian millennium... she becomes the “Alpha and the Omega” from the book of revelations. While her project of tracing the power influences of technoscience discourse is admirable, her method creates more than she intends. There is a power in any method by accounting for every influence-history-thing at once. This is a romantic reading, and the books material format as a “thing in itself” resonates with the power of a previous narrative [of science and religion] where the insight into the acts of others places Haraway is a privileged position. This is dangerous- and I must beg Haraway not to become a culture of no culture in a science of science methodology… by simply bringing the “curious vertigo that I blame on the god like perspective” (133) back down earth- and people’s culturally informed practices- in ethnography.
This initial, and necessarily first, caveat set aside, I can now direct the reader to the strengths of Haraway’s work. Haraway identifies the main processes of technoscience: their relationship to pervasive figures and stories, their creation of materialized reconfigurations (64), and the ability of science to be cultural practice and practical culture (66), and the ability of technoscience to fold categories together (68). Once these relationships are fettered out in each of her examples, she quickly connects power and historical influences to technoscience in a number of ways. One of the most important is the notion of the copyright. Copyright, at its heart, is a particular cultural trope of ownership. The copyright links large tangible materials, like mice which have been engineered to be cancerous, simultaneously into capitalist markets and legal-moral responsibility for the power bearing knowledge. To highlight the importance of Haraway’s point, it may be useful to talk of one example she provides in the textbook: the OcnoMouse.
The OcnoMouse represents a condensing of categories in a number of ways. In this instance, ownership of the mouse’s genes transforms it from a ‘self,’ a living organism, into an invention (80). The mouse becomes a piece property. This roots the mouse as a tool, described as a weapon, with which scientists can use to fight cancer (82). Because of its cancer growths the mouse is also a model of humans (79).
Haraway demonstrates that this categorically mutated mouse does not lose its ability to be ‘objective,’ and to provide information about nature and cancer. Although OcnoMouse, and other trans[ient] beings, are created where natural processes stopped (51), their material properties allow them to be positioned in a new “natural” habitat… the laboratory (83). Inhabited by creations of technoscience, these tool-lives represent the material representation and operationaliztion of nature (102), and they reside in the worm-hole like space created in the lab. Scientists work as “the culture of no culture” (4) in these spaces, an outlook which is interpellated through new scientists in teaching and in governments through the commodiziation of technoscience products (109).
The commodization of technoscience products is important and this ties the OncoMouse the world making processes of mapping (135). The mouse’s genetic copyright maps the animal as a thing in legal discourse. This ownership map delineates the boundaries of scientific knowledge in many ways. The first delineates who gets access to the animal as a tool, which links the mouse with space as a form of politics, history and power (142). This also maps the accountability of the scientist to the knowledge his tool produces, linking not only the lab space into the right to create new commodities (152), but also linking the researcher to the results through accountability and responsibility (73). In all of these imploding categories, empty spaces, and history, the mouse becomes a “superfetish.” The mouse is a figure for commodity fetishism- we know not how his products were made (140), a figure for psychoanalytic fetishism in its modeling [substitution] of human life (144), and in philosophical fetishism of the fact in its lab habitat production of objective truth. In this way, the mapping of genes and mice create, and are created by, cultural practices, history, and knowledge (268)- which is what Haraway wants the reader never to miss.
NOTES:
1. My inclusion of a reference to 1998 book; “Even the Rat was White: a historical view of Psycholgoy” by Robert Guthrie, where he explores the relationship of metanarratives in laboratory sciences to larger discourses and functions of scientific racism in United States not only functions as a trope mirroring Haraway’s research-descriptive-historical methodology, but also a commentary on the resulting undulating language in her writing style as well.
2. For an example of this, refer to her critique genetic advertising where she admits emotional responses (amusement and fear) have influenced her investigation of the symbols in these adds.
Haraway, Donna J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The reinvention of Nature. New York, Routledge press.
Haraway, Donna J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Great Britain, Routledge Press.
Latour, Bruno. (2004). “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30. Pp. 225-248
May 22, 2024
marvelous and inconsistent and you know whats next (“marvelously inconsistent”). haraway is hreat when shes feeling herself and overall just throws a lot at you to where you’re bound to find something. but this book is certainly not an exercise in completeness, it is hardly an exercise in coherence, but it is an exercise in pragmatics and examples, which i must respect.
notes:
written too much for the format of “you will have one of these chapters assigned to you in class”
so many commas in long lists
tragically 90s
media analysis is a lot of fun
pragmatics does such a better job of explaining the semantics section than the semantics section
fetus chapter is great
always love convos between theory and zones of specialization were told are “outside” of theory. its also fun to read knowing the next 30 years of web and biology
hypertext is a neat idea! sucks that crawlers killed ot!
so many commas in long lists
wow that conclusion is befuddling
notes:
written too much for the format of “you will have one of these chapters assigned to you in class”
so many commas in long lists
tragically 90s
media analysis is a lot of fun
pragmatics does such a better job of explaining the semantics section than the semantics section
fetus chapter is great
always love convos between theory and zones of specialization were told are “outside” of theory. its also fun to read knowing the next 30 years of web and biology
hypertext is a neat idea! sucks that crawlers killed ot!
so many commas in long lists
wow that conclusion is befuddling
September 30, 2023
There's something I have to say about Donna's early works: they make me realize how of a genius Donna is, how valuable her work and thinking is. And at the same time, they're so specific and so incredibly wide simultaneously, that I'm bored most of the time. There are incredible passages, or course, and the notion itself of a modest witness is worth a book, but in the end it just feels that she has read so much, that she needs to expose absolutely everything. Anyway, always a pleasure, to behold such a thought in making.
March 18, 2019
This book can be shortened by one-third.
November 25, 2019
Very dense to read, but a lot of the ideas are very interesting.
February 7, 2017
Required reading for my science and technology studies course this semester. Really good, though very dense read. Despite that it is 27 years old, and its dated-ness is pretty obvious in places, it is impressive that in many ways it is still a very relevant examination of what she refers to as "technoscience" (no hyphen).
August 7, 2007
Haraway is crazy like a fox. I'm never sure how much of her writing I should take seriously and how much she just throws out there to wake people's brains up. Regardless, she has some great ideas and some incredibly stupid ones, but her writing is never mediocre.
Want to read
February 28, 2007I've read the first . . . maybe 100 pages of this book, and I can't wait to read the rest of it.
June 15, 2007
Kicked off my feminist scifi stint through constant references to Joanna Russ' Female Man and Marge Piercy.
September 28, 2010
fantastic. haraway is one of the most interesting thinkers i've ever read. at times her language is unbelievably beautiful.
February 21, 2008
Most difficult book I've ever read in my entire life. Thought-provoking? Yes. Helping in actually living? Still up in the air.
Read
May 5, 2008Read for the second time, with new hope for a techno-science future. Sort of.
December 25, 2010
This went way over my head...
September 5, 2015
leant out to Stephanie
January 11, 2008
A great book to read if you want to understand White Teeth and its themes better.
October 27, 2008
If you are a cyberfeminist, you have to read this!
Currently reading
October 16, 2011I am only on the second chapter and completely on fire over Haraway's ideas on technoscience.
Read
February 27, 2019OncoMouse inhabits contradictions, and reflects how we come into the world from many inherited histories. Oncomouse does explain the contradictions in capital and the domination of the ruling powerful class, but also goes further and explains the inequalities in gender and race that are mobilized by capital and that capital also fails to consider. Using the vessel of OncoMouse, Haraway
understands how connectivity globalises. Places are characterised by identities (such as gender and race) which are bound to those spaces, however capital and class have had the ability to spatialize. Harraway argues this has led to us being able to understand how money globalises more than sexualised bodies for example.
understands how connectivity globalises. Places are characterised by identities (such as gender and race) which are bound to those spaces, however capital and class have had the ability to spatialize. Harraway argues this has led to us being able to understand how money globalises more than sexualised bodies for example.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews