[...]ce for life”

science: Global System, universal knowledge --> translation, convertibility, mobility
of meanings, and universality

money in capitalism ~= reductionism in science

...when we are talking about genes, social classes, elementary particles, genders, races, or texts

*vision: a sensory system that has been used leap out of the marked body ==> a gaze from nowhere
-“Vision is always a question of the power to see--and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices”
-also, the visual metaphor allows one to go beyond fixed appearances, which are only the end products. The metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production (including: the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.)

unmarked body: the power to see and not be seen
objectivity in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies

(she asks for:)
“So, I think my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”

Haraway asks for an embodied objectivity that is able of accommodating *paradoxes* --> ‘situated knowledges’
-what does she mean when she says “All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.”

(instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture:) disembodiment : to distance to know
the visualizing technologies (--> my amazon project)

a perverse vision that has produced ‘techno-monsters’ (what does she mean by that?)
--> second birthing? transcendence?
[the frankenstein's techno-monsters, is modeled after who? and who is modeled after it? wondrously, murderously walking around...]
(‘second-birthing’: one of the deadly stories of killing: in the first-birthing we have merely birth to the earthly soil from the woman, and then the achievement of the tragically self-realized purpose of tragic consiousness, concretized and distilled by Sartre) “dire myths of self-birthing”... --> we must resist the stories of guilt laden knowledge and consciousness

unrestricted vision
presented as utterly transparent

***particularity and embodiment (of all vision) [not necessarily organic]
usable and not innocent

“We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name.”

‘partial perspective’ (what does she mean?)
==> become answerable for what we learn how to see. (Helen Verran: accountability; Isabelle Stengers: milieu thinking; Latour: ground;)
(partial way of organizing world)
unlocatable =? irresponsible (knowledge claims)
partial --> possibility of webs of connections: solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology
-to unfold the problem of relativism: ‘the elephant parable’ promisses seeing equally and fully. “equality” of positioning: relativism (another “god trick”) (!=/= single-vision, totalization) =/= partial locatable] [mythic cartoon of pluralism] [myth of exact knowledges, dream of perfectly known, and politics of closure] --> positioning is at stake here

“all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing”

how to see ‘faithfully’... (what does she mean by that?)

appropriating the vision of the less powerful:
to see from the peripheries
to see from the depths

...this not unproblemat (why she uses double negation so often?)

“But how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the ‘highest’ technoscientific visualizations.”

“Science has been utopian and visionary from the start; that is one reason “we” need it.” (what does she mean?)
(“utopian,” “visionary,” other old metaphors in science)

“Passionate detachment” requires more than ‘acknowledged and self-critical’ partiality. (being acknowledged and self-critical is not enough!!! how deos she mean?)
-‘perspective’ can never be known in advance --> knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organized by axes/axis of domination
-One cannot “be” either a cell or molecule--or a woman, colonized person, laborer, and so on. ‘passionate detachment’ is about the impossibility of entertaining innocent “identity” politics : seeing from their perspective in order to see well.
-problem with “positionality”: {testimony from the position of ‘oneself'} We are not immediately present to ourselves and the self is assumed finished and whole simply there and original and its (grounding) knowledge is organized around the imagery of vision --✕--> Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies. ***Self-identity is a bad visual system*** --> ‘positionality’ (meaning: ‘acknowledged and self-critical’ partiality) [at best showing in which ways one is not unmarked] is therefore insufficient. {Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science!}
-instead we need a *split and contradictory self* (one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable) [~~/?-> shath شطح (=/= shar’ شرع, or even sharh شرح?), shathiat (شطحیات) in Tasavof (تصوف), rend رند, rendane رندانه]
-so, instead of “being” she proposes “splitting”: heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. --> The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, never whole, stitched together imperfectly [that is what she means by ‘split'] ==>  join with another (without claiming to ‘be’ another) {if i am allowed i can map Haraway's “partiality” onto Deleuze's “schizophrenia” --> Greek for “split brain”  (Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p.38) According to Beuler, “The selectivity which normal attention exercises among the sensory impressions can be reduced to zero, so that almost anything is recorded that reaches the senses.” One reason for the admiration which Deleuze and Guattari professed for the schizophrenic must lie in this complete lack of inhibition (khod-dari خودداری).} (a confusion of voice and sight, rather than clear and distinct ideas) ([to discriminate message types:] *to confuse literal and metaphorical*, the schizophrenic either does not know his responses are metaphorical or cannot say so --> the breakdown of his metacommunicative system : does not know what kind of message a message is --> the schizophrenic looks for hidden meanings everywhere (assuming everything is metaphorical) or tend to accept every message as literal) (Lacan: schizophrenia: breakdown in the signifying chain of language ==> experience of pure material signifiers [<-- personal identity is the effect of the temporal unification of past and future with one's present, and that such an active temporal unification is itself a function of language.])

subjectivity is multidimensional ==> vision is multidimensional

(an instruments of vision:) optics : politics of positioning --> one example of optical illusion: rationality (projected from nowhere comprehensivel)

(some perspective are more guilty : master point of view)
No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference. The god trick is self-identical, and we have mistaken that for creativity and knowledge, omniscience even. (self-identical [having self identity] =/=! creativity/knowledge)

Technology: skilled practices. (How to see? Where to see from? and so on.)

@Sana, ‘observation’ and ‘technologies of positioning’

how to see?
the science question in military
the science question in colonialism
the science question in capitalism
the science question in feminism
...

master theory =/= webbed accounts
(what does she mean when she dichotomises theory and account?)
instead of (creating and mastering) ‘theory’ she proposes webbing ‘accounts’***
-‘webs’ can have the property of being systematic
systematic: deep filaments and tenacious tendrils into time, space, and consciousness. systems are dimensions of world history.


she suggests to be accountable for (the intricacies of) visualization technologies in which we are embedded that we will find metaphors and means for understanding
and intervening in the *patterns of objectification* in the world.
--> politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating
partiality =/= universality
*partiality: view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, *structuring, and structured body* (what does she mean by ‘structuring and structured body’?)

--the sciences and politics of interpretation, translation, stuttering, and the partly understood.

*Feminism: critical vision ==(consequent upon)==> a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space.

location --> vulnerability ~~> (full of limits and contradictions)

“rational” knowledge : to be free from interpretation, to be free from being represented : to be fully self-contained (~ fully formalizable)
-no! let's make Rational Knowledge a process of ongoing critical interpretation among “fields” of interpreters and decoders --> a power-sensitive conversation
-accountability and responsibility for translations

. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals
(pinocchio and geppetto parable)

objectivity = positioned rationality
=/= images of escape and transcendence of limits (filled in Hollywood and sci)

faithfulness of our accounts to a “real world” (no matter how mediated for us and no matter how complex and contradictory these worlds may be)

Sex is “resourced” for its representation as gender, which “we” can control

Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent
-which version of “realism” is she argueing for?

“[...] we are not in charge of the world. We just live here and try to strike up noninnocent conversations by means of our prosthetic devices, including our visualization technologies.”

in the rich feminist practice in science (more than anywhere else) passive categories of objects of knowledge are “activated”

The biological female peopling : When female “sex” has been so thoroughly retheorized and revisualized that it emerges as practically indistinguishable from “mind,” --> the ‘difference’ is theorized biologically as situational, not intrinsic, (at every level from gene to foraging pattern, thereby fundamentally changing the biological politics of the body.)
-(example: Emily Martin)


points in SK:
1-finite partial perspectives
2-split and contradictory self
3-objectivity (--> positioned rationality, object of knowledge as an actor, mutual and usually *unequal* structuring, it is about taking risks)


how and why Haraway as a feminist fights for a better Primatology?


(Barad on) Situated Knowledges: are not merely about knowing/seeing from somewhere (as in having a perspective) but about taking account of how the specific prosthetic embodiment of the technologically enhanced visualizing apparatus matters to practices of knowing
-(Haraway's) move from *optics* [a politics of positioning, in Situated Knowledges] to *diffraction* [an optical metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world, in Modest_Witness]


Katie King: “apparatus of literary production”: a matrix from which “literature” is born.
...the “facticity” of biological discourse that is absent from literary discourse and its knowledge claims. ----> Are biological bodies “produced” or “generated” in the same strong sense as poems? (biological body ~= poem)
“material-semiotic actor”: the object of knowledge as an active, meaning-generating part of apparatus of bodily production

bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.
“objects” do not preexist as such --> Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices.


world =/= mother/matter/mutter
world ~= coyote (a figure of the always problematic, always potent tie between meaning and bodies. world as coding trickster.)

(feminism) movement rooted in specification and articulation (of [different kinds of] ‘elsewhere’) =/= (assumption of the right or ability to) identities and representation (of identities)


#workshop reading SK (for apass)
Which version of “realism” are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a ‘point of view’ is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading session we are going to study one of the most stubborn and pervasive phantasms in art and sciences, the figure of objectivity, with the Donna Haraway's 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations. We begin with her essay on the 2nd of February and talk about each of our practices in particular continuing on the 9th.


she wants to re-figure, not disavow, objectivity

“story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” =/= technophobia

technophilia is narcissistic : the notion that man invented himself and that man is involved in some kind of narrative of technological escalation whereby the objectification of human intentionality in the world has finally surpassed itself, and man has achieved self-objectification in a machine that will finally name him obsolescence as he is and destroy him in a technological apocalypse figured by the computer. (Haraway) [we need better dog stories =/= (Iron Man:) man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end tragic]
“...man making himself (by realizing his intentions in his tools) yet again in the Greatest Story Ever Told.” (your artwork doesn't need to be this kind of story!)
or the Darwinist tale of “Mitochondrial Eve in a neocolonial Out of Africa”
we need stories of companion species, the “very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes.” (Haraway, La Guin, Tessa Farmer,)

...................................

[Haraway on Ihde]

...technologies are not mediations--that is, something in between us and another bit of the world--rather, technologies are organs, full partners, in what Merleau-Ponty called “infoldings of the flesh.”

infolding =/= interface
•“What happens in the folds is what is important.”
•Interfaces are made out of interacting grappling devices.
•the infolding of others to each other is what makes up the knots we call beings or, perhaps better, following Bruno Latour, things.

“Technologies are always compound. They are composed of diverse agents of interpretation, agents of recording, and agents for directing and multiplying relational action. These agents can be human beings or parts of human beings, other organisms in part or whole, machines of many kinds, or other sorts of entrained things made to work in the technological compound of conjoined forces.”

*animal (in zoological terminology) : a composite of individual organisms, an enclosure of zoons, a company of critters infolded into a one.

compound = composite + enclosure
camera: the technological eye --> philosophical pretension and self-certainty (=/= Christian's camera)
-- camera as a black-box with which to register pictures of the outside world in a representational, mentalist semiotic economy

...................................

Vinciane Despret, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, ”_how they make their subjects interesting,_“
to tell the story of their work of “translation,” of invention.

refuse all loyalty to my homeland and its values

*heuristic: mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a problem solvable
-trading optimality, completeness, accuracy, or precision for speed
it may *approximate* the exact solution for the problem
-enabling discover o[...]