[...]mediately 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 focuse[...]