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On “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988), “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985), “A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies” (1994), and “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” (2015). Featuring Mark, Set, Dylan, and returning guest Lynda Olman.
What is scientific objectivity? We previously looked at Francis Bacon’s “four idols,” which are sources of bias that Bacon thought might block the natural light of truth from reaching us: things like prior philosophical commitments, thinking that “man is the measure of all things,” that what’s in nature will reflect the words we already use, and idiosyncrasies of individuals. Previous Marxist and feminist philosophers (Nietzsche too!) had turned this critique back on Baconian scientists, denying that there is any natural light of truth, any real objectivity that can shine through when biases are removed, because biases are inherent to the human condition: What we recognize to be true, what we count as evidence or as reasonable, will always be influenced by individual and cultural factors. Philosophers of science like Kuhn and Lakatos got specific about how a particular scientific effort is bound by its methodological assumptions, though unlike Marxists or feminists they didn’t identify these as the self-serving assumptions of the demographic group engaged in the research.
Haraway, in “Situated Knowledges,” is evaluating previous feminist attempts to undermine scientific pretensions to “a view from nowhere.” While she denies that Baconian objectivity (the “light of nature” reaching us without bias) is possible, she also resists post-modern skepticism about the possibility of knowledge. Surely we don’t want all claims to knowledge to be equal, so that there’s no distinction between the claims of physics and those of doomsday religious cults. Instead, Haraway is looking for a new sense of objectivity that acknowledges and in fact benefits from the situatedness of scientists.
So what does this “situatedness” entail? Haraway, like Latour (Lynda’s last episode with us), thinks that we can’t really separate science from politics. This builds on the Marxist idea that a thinker’s social position will influence their thinking, but rejects the idea that this only has to do with class. And despite this being a feminist text, she doesn’t really talk specifically about “feminine” science in particular either, which is something that previous feminist philosophers of science like Sandra Harding and Evelyn Fox Keller focused on. Yes, there is something reminiscent of “toxic masculinity” in how the methodology of science talks about predicting and controlling nature, about the pragmatism that leads science too often to try to then control people or weaponize its discoveries. But Haraway’s critique is more general: Knowledge is never disinterested in the way that Bacon would like. We always have to consider the likely consequences, particularly in how human lives may be degraded or controlled, of any line of research. Though there is always a theoretical tendency in science to unify disparate phenomena, to look for a unified theory of everything, we can more effectively perceive truth by communicating our necessarily partial perspectives that each see different webs of connections.
Haraway’s text is frustratingly free of examples. She insists that her way of looking at science yields surprising, innovative scientific insights, but I have no idea what any of these might be. The latter part of our discussion, then, consists largely of our resident physicist Dylan engaging with Lynda in how Haraway’s viewpoint (I hesitate to call it an epistemic theory) relates to the history and practice of this hardest of sciences. Sure, we should keep practical consequences in mind (a hard-won lesson by those theoretical physicists whose work was used to make the atomic bomb, as discussed in our Oppenheimer episode with Lynda), and it’s great to have people from a variety of backgrounds (nationalities, genders, classes) involved in both research itself and moreso policy decision-making allegedly based on science, but none of this seems to help clarify the debate in the philosophy of science that we explored by considering Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend. How exactly does situatedness change one’s analysis of a theory (including the evaluation of potential counter-evidence against that theory)?
One clue that Lynda brings up is Haraway’s Heisenberg-like claim that when in science you mark an object (pick it out) it also “marks you,” meaning that one insuperable barrier to objectivity as traditionally conceived is that the observer becomes part of what is to be observed. This means essentially that no two observations will be exactly the same, because they involve different observers in different conditions. But has any science ever demanded such identity of different observations? Can’t they just be similar in the relevant respect to establish a theory?
But again, if we can’t on Haraway’s account separate theory from practice, then there are bound to be miscommunications in what “theory” two observers are trying to collaboratively establish through their two different runs of the same experiment, given that the two will likely have different purposes in engaging in the science. This is likely where the traditionalist should just reject Haraway’s program: The whole point of a controlled experiment is that it doesn’t matter who’s running it or what their purpose might be. Except insofar as someone might violate the experiment by fudging the data obtained, two scientists really are engaging in an activity discrete from whatever the practical application of the research may eventually be, and thus their motives regarding this practical application do not matter. And except insofar as there are provable distortions in how data will be read based on one’s gender or race or whatnot, then these characteristics of the scientist do not matter either.
Haraway has a Ph.D. in biology and surely knows how laboratories work. Her articles to do not actually go into this, though. She seems more concerned with the overall scientific enterprise, including funding decisions, whose opinions are considered “authoritative,” and how scientific discoveries get interpreted and applied to public policy. She’s particularly concerned with how we define sex and gender, which as discussed in our Judith Butler episode are much more obviously subject to definition according to social norms than particles in physics. Haraway is also concerned with the overall way which we define ourselves in relation to technology, and thus her “Cyborg Manifesto” tries to adopt a perspective which both acknowledges the potential (inevitable?) dystopian horrors of modern technology but which also embraces the changes in perspectives that technology enables. Even (especially) in particle physics, the instruments we use to detect and describe quarks and such become part of our perceptual apparatus, i.e. they are tools, “ready to hand” in Heidegger’s sense rather than something we (while engaging in the scientific observation) make into its own object. Rather than (as Heidegger did) thus reject such technology as dehumanizing, Haraway (like Butler) thinks that we should embrace it as a means to clarify and overcome what we might otherwise consider “natural” humanity. (Interested listeners might want to check out our episode #91 on transhumanism. Lynda also mentions Sylvia Winter’s black feminist skepticism about this, if you’d like to look into that.) When we use tools, she says, they use us, and it’s not really an option to just throw away the tools. Cyborgs are Haraway’s version of what Latour called “hybrids”; they are the complexes created by any scientific or technological interaction.
The “surprising insights” Haraway thinks her viewpoint unlocks may have less to do with innovative scientific theories than new ways to see humanity in light of the cyborgs we create and the interlocking efforts of science and philosophy (i.e. cultural “science studies”), which in studying cyborgs create more of them. She refers to the interdisciplinary method for furthering such studies as a “cat’s cradle” in the third article we read. This metaphor ditches the image of “competing theories,” as seeing scientist (or politics) as a winner-take-all contest is another one of those masculinist points of view she wants to overcome. The cat’s cradle involves all these interwoven insights and is made to be passed back and forth between different theorists in a cooperative manner.
The 2015 article that we looked at was something that anticipated her latest book, 2016’s Staying with the Trouble, which you watch and hear her talking about if you’d like. For our purposes, the point is to use our current technological situation to look for a best course given what we can see, and not thinking in a utopian manner that she thinks will inevitably exclude and probably harm historically oppressed populations. Political solutions need to come from dialogues among actually effected people and not imposed top-down by philosopher-kings who disregard difference in calculating what they think is best for everyone.
Given that Lynda is a rhetorician, and her interest on all of the episodes she has helped us with has been how scientific ideas are discussed politically, this matter of a choice of metaphors in how we (as scientists, as citizens) see what we’re doing is crucial. Whether talking about cyborgs, or cat’s cradle, or what she in this last book calls the Chthuluscene era, she’s engaged in a very different project than traditional philosophers of science, pursuing critique as a form of activism, and these metaphors are rhetorical tools she uses in that effort. She’s also fighting against metaphors: the “god’s eye view” that expresses the traditional concept of objectivity, the “divine light of truth,” and of course the idea of scientific progress as a road taking us inevitable upward and forward. In keeping with her being against Heidegger, Rousseau, and other anti-tech thinkers, she’s also arguing against some kind of fall from Eden metaphor whereby our embrace of “unnatural” tech has dehumanized us. The situation is much more complex.
Read the articles online here, here, here, and here. An author that Lynda had originally mentioned as potentially being part of this episode is Karan Barad, who wrote specifically about quantum physics from a feminist point of view. Some of us also looked at the Stanford Encyclopedia article on feminist philosophy of science by our previous guest Elizabeth Anderson.
Image by Genevieve Arnold. Audio editing by Tyler Hislop.
Next Episode: We’re reading Quine’s “Epistemology Naturalized.” (1969).
Transcript
0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some folks who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 293 is something like what is objectivity in science? And we read some essays by Donna J. Haraway, including situated knowledge from 1988, a cyborg manifesto from 1991, a game of Cat's Cradle from 1994, and making kin from 2015. More information, information and links to these please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, Seeking the knowledge is ruled by phallogocentrism and disembodied vision.
0:41 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, regenerative, if not reproductive. In Austin, Texas, this is Dylan Casey
0:49 Dylan: inscribing new entries into the infidel heteroglossia in order to subvert totalizing theory and the demonology of technology. They embrace the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life in Madison, Wisconsin.
1:02 Lynda: And our special guest today is Lynda Walsh. I'm from the University of Nevada, Reno. I'm a rhetorician masquerading as a philosopher today.
1:10 Mark: Welcome, welcome.
1:11 Dylan: Welcome back.
1:12 Lynda: Thank you. It's great to be back with you guys. Yes, my favorite philosophers.
1:18 Mark: What were the episodes you were on before?
1:20 Lynda: I was on an episode with you guys when my book came out and we talked about the intersection between science and prophecy in public rhetoric. And then I was on another one with you guys where we talked about
1:31 Dylan: Bruno Latour, and it was interesting reading this and thinking about talking about Oppenheimer.
1:38 Lynda: Yeah, that's a great connection, Dylan.
1:40 Dylan: Science and technology.
1:42 Lynda: Yeah, for sure. Those two would have had a really interesting conversation. I think I would like to be a fly on the wall at a dinner party with Donna Haraway and Robert
1:51 Dylan: Oppenheimer, and it would be interesting to see how many minutes it took for them to actually have a conversation.
2:00 Lynda: Yeah.
2:02 Mark: So I had reached out to you based on those two past good experiences when we were doing our string of philosophy of science episodes, Lakatos, Feyerabend and wanted to do some feminist philosophy of science to see what the deal was with that. You should be well prepared for that. Having done Latour, having done Judith Butler, having done a bunch of things, you know, a lot of Simone de Beauvoir things in both spaces. But we never actually explicitly connected the two before, you know, except maybe a little bit in our social construction episodes as a side point.
But we had an actual episode at that point on social construction of race. And then I guess Judith Butler talks about gender, but she doesn't really talk about science specifically. So you had recommended Situated Knowledges. This is sort of the prime text. The Cyborg Manifesto is somewhat less relevant. It's more of a general feminism text. And it seemed to be the one that people discussed most online that I saw. So I'm glad to be familiar with it. You know, it's about our relation to technology, but not so much about, except maybe giving some examples of what a situated knowledge amounts to.
And then the other little ones we can fill in some of the details. You want to sort of give us your introduction, Lynda, of why we're reading this as opposed to Sandra Harding or one of the many other things that might be a more straightforward, non polemical
3:24 Lynda: Haraway is just a favorite of mine because I think while she's difficult on purpose as opposed to reading Evelyn Fox Keller, who's, you know, pretty straightforward critique about what she thinks the problems are with a science done largely by and for men. Donna Haraway's a little bit more. Takes more engagement to read her, but I feel like she cuts straight to the nexus of, I think what is interesting for most philosophers who are not specifically interested in science per se. I think she does best at cutting to the heart of the problem of this nexus between science and society.
And I think that Haraway does a good job of saying, like, hey, science is just one expression, one part, one phase of society. It's not something different. And we don't need to be thinking about how to integrate it with society. We need to be thinking about how to rethink society through science and rethink science through society because they're really all part of the same thing and what the consequences of that that are. So I feel like Haraway is more. She cuts straighter to that point than say Sandra Harding does, who has more sort of concerns with technology.
And then even Evelyn Fox Keller does, who is perhaps more of a historian. I feel like Donna Haraway gets more to that and therefore I thought she would be a little more interesting for pel listeners because she would connect to a wider range of interests that your listeners might have.
4:46 Seth: I thought the key takeaway for me, at least on the initial reading of the first essay, was the idea that that knowledge is about something from the perspective of someone or something. And that the idea that we have to take seriously a critique of this universalized, abstract, disinterested observer, the idea that knowledge is somehow disinterested, or that the universalization of knowledge somehow makes it Disinterested needs to be questioned. I thought was interesting.
5:23 Mark: And let's remind everyone that Dylan was a professional scientist, as was Haraway.
5:27 Lynda: She has a PhD in biology.
5:29 Dylan: She does have a PhD in biology. Yeah. I was about ready to make a really snarky physicist oriented comment about.
5:36 Lynda: Go ahead, Dylan.
5:37 Mark: No, no, no, do it.
5:39 Dylan: I'm a reformed snarky physicist.
5:41 Lynda: So is there any such thing?
5:45 Dylan: What Seth was referring to about the critique of universalism just runs right through this whole thing. And what I found myself being struck by was some of the ways in which she talks about it, but also the ways in which. I don't know what I was expecting when I hear something that's called feminist philosophy of science, because I don't know enough about feminism as a interpretive structure to say exactly what that is. But when I found myself feeling, well, there's a big thread through the entire history of philosophy. She criticizes the dichotomy of wholes and parts and stuff like that.
But even if you don't understand them as a strict dichotomy, the ways in which we have to put things together to talk about them, and the way any inclination towards trying to understand wholes universally but also account for individuals and individual entities on their own terms and the distinctions between those is something that's been a great tension for a very, very long time. And the kinds of things that she is pointing us to and even some of the ways of resolving it really reminded me of quite a few things that I've encountered. My inclination was to think, well, maybe it's something completely different than I've ever heard before.
Well, it's not, actually. It's something that's not all that different than a particular kind of critique of philosophy that strives to unify everything. And it made me really think about pragmatism a lot, honestly.
7:16 Mark: So what I had identified as the central question, what is objectivity? I thought maybe we could remind ourselves what Francis Bacon had to say about that. We had these four idols, the idols of the tribe. When we think man, sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things. The idols of the den, in other words, idiosyncratic things which can intercept and corrupt the light of nature. The idols formed by the reciprocal intercourse and society of man with man, AKA the idols of the market. So in other words, language can warp our thinking. Lastly, the idols that have crept into men's minds from various dogmas of peculiar systems of philosophy, he calls the idols of the theater.
The idea is we are striving for objective knowledge. And we need to just get out of our own way. We need to get these things that would warp the light of nature from reaching our eyes. And so what's wrong with that? Let's start with that. What's Haraway's response? Lynda, do you want to start us here?
8:13 Lynda: I kind of don't know what to say because whereas I think Robert Oppenheimer and Donna Haraway would have a really great dinner party, I think if you put Francis Bacon and Donna at the dinner table, they wouldn't have a lot to say to each other, to be honest. Except for maybe Donna might be like, Frances, spoiler alert. Science never really worked that way. So, you know, I don't. I don't think that anyone has thought that science works by the Baconian method since at least Darwin. So Haraway is talking in a world in which Bacon has already been like.
His ideas about how scientific objectivity work have already been left by the wayside. So I'm not sure there's a lot of points of contact there other than Haraway would be like, yeah, duh, you can't purge the idols. She's fond of pithy little bumper sticker sayings. So, you know, maybe that's what you would say, Francis, you can't purge the idols. You know, that would be it.
9:00 Dylan: Well, your response is interesting because it's not quite what I expected. I was expecting to grab ahold of the end of the thing that Bacon is talking about, that those idols get in the way of us experiencing the clear light of nature. And I think you're right that she would say, you can't purge the idols, but you have to sort of deal with the idols.
9:22 Mark: Right?
9:22 Dylan: You have to constantly revise the idols. You have to have a disposition with respect to them. But the thing that she would adamantly deny and that would inform that, I think, is denying the clear universal light of nature. Nature, which is really the. And for Bacon, the unifying thread. So there's still that great universalism in him. Right. And that what's corrupting our objectivity to getting to the object, which is one thing, are those idols. But what's still there is the possibility of objectivity just by removing the right impediments. And it's that thing, that possibility of experiencing in any way those lights. I guess that's exactly what you mean, is that you can't purge the idols.
10:05 Lynda: Yeah, we're in agreement. Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying. No, she's not like, oh, it's a shame we can't purge the idols. You know, she's like, there is nothing behind the idols.
10:13 Dylan: Yes.
10:13 Lynda: Idols all the way down.
10:14 Dylan: It's Idols all the way down. Yes. Maybe that's the bumper sticker. It's Idols all the way down.
10:19 Lynda: That's the bumper sticker. All right, I will. I'll email Haraway and let her know.
10:23 Mark: So I think even Bacon would admit that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of all these things. Right. We are all individual human beings making decisions. That's why we need collaborators. Right. Haraway agrees with that. That is part of her solution, is that we need to get these partial perspectives. So the title of her essay is Situated Knowledge is the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. And she wants us to actually embrace the fact that we do not have a God's eye objective view of things and yet obtain something she wants to call objectivity.
This is her big innovation. I think that this is not what you would expect, the postmodernist, relativist thing. You know, actually every time we read somebody that's associated with postmodernism, they're never relativists. They're always actually arguing against relativism. Yeah. So maybe that.
11:21 Lynda: Maybe that is a reconstructed Platonists every time.
11:25 Mark: Maybe that's just a straw man that is out there. But you might still ask, is Bacon's idea a good regulatory ideal? Right. Just like in ethics. I want to be a saint. Well, nobody can be a saint. You could make an argument that there is an appeal of that for Haraway.
11:41 Lynda: Right.
11:42 Mark: Because she wants to obtain some notion of objectivity, but it is not the light of nature. Everybody's shaking their heads furiously.
11:49 Lynda: No, she is. This is what's unusual about her. She is trying to reclaim objectivity. But it's not the old school objectivity. It's this other. It's a complete reworking of the word. Much closer to Latour's idea of what is real resists. Right. So a new objectivity. That means you have to deal with objects like you have skin. In the game, when you measure something, you mark it and it marks you. She's being very bold. She's not throwing this word out, which is the easy way out, like you said, Mark, she's trying to actually rehabilitate it and actually completely rework it.
12:21 Dylan: Her objectivity is not that idealized objectivity of the saint. That is the idealized thing that you're going to look for. It is actually particularized into dealing with actual objects.
12:33 Seth: It's an objectivity that recognizes the impact of the observation on the object. I mean, I really think that's in a very meaningful way. This notion of situated perspectives or situated knowledge is the idea that to be objective is to acknowledge the act of observation. She makes a big point about talking about visibility and the metaphors of vision and so forth. And how we have to take seriously the metaphors and this structure of observation as part of the scientific method. And to not simply pretend like there is no observer when we look at the observed results.
Because she talks about technologies of observation. You know, so there's the naked eye and the microscope and then the electron microscope and all these. And the way we talk about it is ever more specific refinements of this objective, disembodied, disassociated gaze. And what she's trying to say is, no, that's not the case. We have to recognize that these are technologies in the service of an observer who has limitations. And the way in which these technologies are deployed has a purpose. And you can't just simply ignore that purpose and talk about it in some objective manner.
Like we're getting closer and closer to the truth. Or we're seeing finer and finer refinements of the real world or what have you. And that strikes me as eminently plausible. I mean, it's just very straightforward.
14:04 Lynda: So, you know, the observer principle, like, we've known this for a while, right? To measure makes marks. But I think where Haraway maybe even takes us one step past that is the object also marks us in that process. This is where the cyborg becomes really helpful and where it actually does help us think through. Her design for the reinvention of scientific method is that when we use tools, they use us at the same time. So you don't just use your phone. It's using you at the same time. So once you have taken on that device, that technology, in order to interface with the world, you can't just put it down.
It becomes part of you in a way. So when a scientist makes a measurement in the lab of an object, that object has now changed the scientist through that measurement process. There's a reciprocity there that it leads to the creation of these cyborgs that are. So it's not the scientists separate from the tool or the scientists separate from the object that is being studied. The active observation creates cyborgs that are meshes of the observer and the tool and the object.
15:06 Dylan: This particular topic is very interesting and worth diving down into.
15:10 Mark: Yeah, get some quotes.
15:12 Dylan: Well, the Quote I have takes us back to objectivity, which is different than the cyborg question.
15:16 Lynda: I mean, we can come back to the cyborg at discipline.
15:19 Dylan: Yeah. I don't want to lose it.
15:20 Lynda: Because you can't lose the cyborg, Dylan. It's welded into you like your headphones right now. Don't worry about it.
15:26 Seth: The fact that I'm looking at the three of you through zoom right now means that we've created. Are you also simultaneously looking, Changing Me?
15:34 Lynda: Yep.
15:35 Seth: Okay.
15:36 Mark: Just to make a connected point, one of the things that Seth mentioned was the how you can't separate theory from practice. Right. This is one of the many results of the fact that we are affected by the researches that we enter into. And so this is maybe a naive scientist. This goes back to sort of the Oppenheimer point is you might think, oh, I'm just doing the science. If somebody's going to use that to build a bomb, that's not my concern. So this is one of the first hard, lost naivetes that she's reacting to here. I think at one point she insists that we stop talking about science and technology and talk instead about technoscience. Right. You cannot pull the two apart. I was seeing this as a connection point between the objectivity point and the cyborg point.
16:18 Lynda: Yeah, very much so. I mean, I think she would say, what's the point of pulling them apart? What do you gain by that? I think what she's more interested in the fields of you that are opened up. If you weld those two together, what can you see if you just accept them as a cyborg unity? And how does that expand our view of what science is, how it's done, how it integrates with society, et cetera. Then I think she's reacting against the tradition where those two things have been tried. Everything's been tried to pull apart. Like Dylan said, everything's been tried to parse into parts for hundreds of years. And she's like, let's stop doing that and see what we get instead. At the end of the day, she's a social constructionist, so she's not really interested in pulling things apart into their ideal philosophical components.
16:58 Dylan: One thing it reminds me of is I think it's sort of six of one, half dozen of the other. Science and technology versus technoscience. Especially since you have to explain what the heck you mean by technoscience, and it ends up being kind of a placeholder for, well, what I meant by science and technology and the fact that you really need to understand that technology isn't separate from science and that the whole process of, I mean it ends up being a placeholder for an idea. But thinking about those two things, it's well worth reminding yourself when you learn a lot of sciences, especially when you're beginning to learn.
And one of the ways in which you learn that is often through a kind of genealogy of that, that science and you know, science is often sort of recapitulating its own story, recapitulating how it got to where it is in order to explain how it understands the world. This is true in physics, this is true in biology, this is true in all kinds of sciences. And one of the things that often goes along with that and in particular happens in physics, but probably should happen more in other sciences, is also recognizing the ways in which our technologies for seeing and understanding the world were walking hand in hand with our revisions about how we understood the world.
So the generations of technologies made possible for the thinkings about the world that then became the next generation of scientific theory, whether it be the microscope, whether it be the battery, whether it be tools for making glass bottles, making glass tubes, and that ability to make vacuums so that you could then be looking at light tubes and effectively became the invention of the light bulb. That technology that led up to that over scores of years, decades, had dramatic impacts in the kinds of things that you could investigate and look at in the world.
And you wouldn't have even been thinking about electricity and magnetism and some of these things the way that you end up doing it without the technology involved.
19:00 Lynda: Did Haraway come across to you guys as a technophile? Because she is, she's not a technology hater. How did that come across to you?
19:06 Dylan: Well, especially by the end, she's like Jack me in sew the integrated chips into my brain kind of person.
19:12 Mark: We have to think the dystopian result and the possible new ways of queering the world, right, of seeing from a perspective outside pre existing language, you know, breaking the patterns set by society. We have to think both of those at the same time. So if you say we're not going to separate theory and practice, what does that mean? Because you don't actually know what the results of your. If I work on this science further, it will have some social effects. I don't really know what they are, but I can guess. We need to have those really top of mind and twist them to the good as much as possible or make the best of the inevitable stuff that's coming down.
Since we're not talking about centralized science agency deciding what to study and what not to study. Somebody's going to study probably just about anything. It's sort of like the inevitable forces of history that we're having to navigate among.
20:09 Lynda: This is really interesting, and I'm glad you used that phrase, thinking the utopian and dystopian effects of technology together, because the title of Haraway's most recent book is Staying with the Trouble. So her idea is like, when you create something, you have to accept the consequences of that and make yourself accountable to and responsible to the consequences of that and stay with it. Stay with your monsters, stay with your cyborgs. You know, stay with what you create and go from there and not always be like, oh, wait, that didn't turn out how we meant, right?
That didn't turn out how we intended. What she gets very suspicious of is this reference to these ideals. So it's like, oh, that's not what we wanted. Let's delete that and start over, right? That's not what we were aiming at. Let's correct that. She wants us to think very differently about the creation of technology, where it's like, okay, we created that. What does it do? Okay, where to from here? And guiding our life to where we want it to be, in situ, without reference to some sort of ideal utopian place that doesn't exist. Because in Haraway's world, that place, women never come out on the winning end of that.
So in those utopic spaces, women and people of color aren't included or are repressed, you know, in those spaces. And so she's very deeply suspicious of those sort of like, ideal utopias. And that's why she wants us to, especially in her more recent work, she wants us to stay with the trouble, look at the situation on the ground and say, do we like it? Yes. No. Where to from here?
21:34 Dylan: On page 583 of Situated Knowledges. Regarding this question of the kind of objectivity she's talking about, she says the moral is simple. Only partial perspectives promise objective vision. All Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies governing the relations of what we call mind and body, distance and responsibility. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see.
So that dovetails with what you were just saying, Lynda. Part of me was immediately reacting to the idea, well, if you're going to make a choice about where to go, you're going to have to have some idea about where you want to go. Right. You know, and so you're sailing the boat. If you're going to set the tiller in the sails, you have to at least choose something. But I hear the point being to really localize the direction so that you're going to say, I'm going to go from here to someplace close by and sort of limit the sphere of change, which in a way, to me, there would be a tension between.
Of status quoishness about things that's going to be in tension with the potential revisions of things and the ability to see what change looks like.
22:47 Lynda: No, you're 100% right. And I think Donna Haraway is really very much a rhetorician in this way that she thinks about local limited interventions and not global interventions. So she's become deeply suspicious, I think, of global interventions. They tend to be, I mean, just to be very literal, they tend to be things like, let's fix climate change by spraying 2 million metric tons of calcium carbonate into the ionosphere and see what happens. Right. And so it's those kinds of, like, global solutions to problems, whether they be social or physical or whatever, that she finds repressive. She is advocating for. Literally, you're on the ground, you're like, hey, it looks better over there. Let's sail over there. Right. And not popping up into a satellite. Yeah.
23:29 Dylan: Do you think that there's tension in that kind of incrementalism with other kinds of moral decision making? That would be part of her situated object? I mean, like, for instance, would she be effectively a Lincolnian incrementalist regarding slavery in 1865. Right. The challenge of oppressed groups. There's a strong argument against incrementalism except in sort of the global political landscape. Right.
23:58 Lynda: I'm not sure it's incrementalism per se that she's advocating for. It's more like situation. So it's just like, don't come up with a solution by imaginary recourse to a position that no human can actually inhabit. Right. Let's articulate our solutions on the ground with the people we can actually talk to and not make recourse to something that a positionality that's actually not inhabitable by humans. Right.
24:20 Dylan: So that's really important and really interesting. So it's not an incrementalism in terms of, I'll call it phase change or change of dynamics. It's saying that every change is taken from putting a stake in the ground and having a point of view about how and why you're Viewing that change. And she is one of her big pets. And this is the God trick she's really advocating for. Stop doing the God trick. In fact, don't even do the nation trick. Don't even do the state trick. Make it really, really much closer to your local community, which makes it the situatedness more understandable.
25:01 Lynda: Having said that, though, Dylan, you brought up an important point, which is that black feminist scholars and philosophers sometimes take issue with a kind of feminism that Haraway does with feminist philosophy of science, Marxist philosophies of science. Black feminist thinkers sometimes take issue with the feminisms that are come up with by white women like Donna Haraway who are working from a privileged position. And, you know, I kind of gave the defense, the best defense of Haraway there by saying she's not after incrementalism, she's after this idea of situation.
But I don't think that Haraway's work fully escapes the critique you brought up. I just want to say that because there are black feminist thinkers that I think would be arguing very much along the lines that you're arguing. It goes along with the lines. So Sylvia Wynter's response as a black feminist critic and philosopher, her response to post humanism and post humanist thinking, of which Donna Haraway certainly does and participates. The cyborg is very much a post humanist figure. Sylvia Wynter basically says, let's not become post human before some of us have even become human yet.
26:04 Dylan: Sure.
26:05 Mark: So I'm interpreting the let's stop doing the God thing is actually a reassertion of a revision of one of the idols. That this is actually an idol of theater, that this pretension to a global objectivity, right. Talking about the light of nature, that itself, as Bacon should have realized, but he was not in a historical position to do so, is the imposition of a philosophical theory. By insisting on a partial perspective on localized knowledge, you make yourself more modest. And this is, I think, in Haraway. She explicitly discusses this issue of black feminists with regard. In the cyborg's paper, with regard to Catherine MacKinnon in that you might think, you know, as a Marxist, right, critiquing techno science practices, that there's false consciousness going on, right. That the God move is something like the bourgeois, the person in the position of privilege being.
27:00 Seth: Why don't we say what the God move is, just in case.
27:02 Lynda: Oh, the God trick.
27:03 Seth: Yeah, yeah.
27:04 Mark: Well, go ahead, fill it in.
27:05 Lynda: Oh, the God trick is actually really simple. It's any synoptic perspectives, meaning that like any where you think you can see the whole situation at a glance. That's the God trick. So anytime you're looking at the Earth from a satellite, that's the God trick. Anytime you have, you're looking at a global map that shows the whole world or even shows all of the United States, that's the God trick. It's anytime you're viewing something from a position that no human can actually live in, inhabit in, and live in, that's the God trick.
27:30 Dylan: Interesting. I would have thought that it has to come with the theory ladeness because the kinds of perspective descriptions that you articulated to me bring up the question of scale. And so that I would have wanted to qualify what you're saying with. You have to have distinctions that are appropriate to the scale that you're envisioning and that you have within your view. I feel like there's just things that admit of that perspective that you can talk about, but things that you can't talk about from that perspective because it's too far away, like the motion of the earth. I mean, I can't talk about the motion of planets around the sun, for instance, without having a perspective that's from far enough away to talk about that. I guess I'd want to hear more about how that's the God trick from her perspective.
28:21 Mark: I guess I was seeing your examples, Lynda, as metaphors.
28:24 Dylan: Am I being too literal as a scientist?
28:26 Mark: That's what Lynda just said, that if the God trick is seeing the earth from a satellite from space, well, we do that and there are purposes to doing that. And I don't think any scientist doing that pretends that they actually see everything. It's got to be some psychological thing associated with that, drawing too many conclusions. But if you're just doing it to observe weather patterns as a very literal matter, of course those perspectives are valuable. It's just those are just as partial as anything else.
28:52 Seth: I thought the God trick was just pretending that the point of view that you have is the view from nowhere or the view from everywhere. That what it meant was to say, I'm telling you the view of this thing is the impartial view, which is a way of saying this is the way this thing is in its essence. It's the pretension to objectivity by negating the fact of observation, by creating this neutrality, universality, abstract, disassociated, disinterested point of view. So you say like, well, this is what it looks like from God's point of view, which is to say this is the way it actually is.
And to pretend that we can actually aspire or achieve that point of view, which is the pretension of the sciences to say like, oh well, we have an equation for gravity and this is the way it works. It's just, it doesn't have to do with us. It doesn't matter who I am. People could never live, there could be no people. And gravity would always have the same equation. And those kinds of. It's creating a position of privilege by abstracting the observer or extracting the observer out of the equation. That's how I interpreted it.
30:01 Lynda: Yeah, that's right. So I'm sorry, I gave some examples but I took them too long. No, no you didn't. And actually Harry was quite literal about it. So she spends a lot of time talking about global maps and how they're used to oppress people through colonization a lot of times. So you're not being too literal. But the key part of it is what Seth said about presenting it as a view from nowhere. So like removing the situation from it. So the key part I guess was, was is the, like a perspective from a place in which no human could live or inhabit. So we have satellite views of the earth that are useful and they're used to zoom in to certain places in the earth.
Those are actually constructed of tiles of different satellite images. Right. And I think what Haraway would say there is, if you want to be partial about that, acknowledge that that's part of the construction. Right? Say well, you know, we got this image by putting this piece together and this piece together and this piece together and we've created the whole this way and not as Seth said, presenting it as like, this is the Earth and this is how it looks and this is the way things really are. And I think the key part for Haraway too is this when you start talking about people from those perspectives that she gets really concerned about it.
So like I said, she's not a science hater, she's not a technology hater. She loves those satellite images of the Earth. But when she gets really concerned about it is when you start using these microscopic telescopic whatever views to start seeing how people, where people are, how they should interact with, with each other and who they are, then she starts getting really more concerned about it.
31:23 Seth: Right. Part of my reading of Haraway's concern and the text is we take the God position, but we say like, oh, this is the God position. We have an algorithm, we have an algorithm for recognizing faces. It's just this is the way of the world. And look, the machine figured it out and it's. But in reality, the funding that created the research lab that was able to define and develop the algorithm came out of government and private, you know, like public, private partnership for the purpose of accomplishing X, Y and Z. And it's about not acknowledging the very situated perspectives and motives of the development of these technologies that then are presented as the God position. That's really, really scary.
32:10 Dylan: I would add in the interpretation of AI that you gave as the problem of it having to do with the origins of what reason they wanted to create it as being the problem of it. And I think that's probably on her mind. But what also seems to be there is, and this would be part of like a God position as well, the presumption of your, in this case your algorithm as being identify all faces, for instance, and failing to acknowledge or giving your account of your algorithm the fact that it was trained on some other faces. And the fact is it's only going to recognize faces that it was trained on.
And this is actually something that is ever present right now in discussions about AI because there have been some major failures, high profile failures of AI technology because of the limitations of the training set that they were on. And in defense of people who think about AI, they would say, well, duh, it's of course the limitation of the technology about what it's trained on and always will be. And there's a way in which that technology sort of embodies the very point that Haraway is making, that there's a dependency on your technology of the perspective by which you created it.
In this case, you trained it, you tuned it.
33:27 Seth: An additional extension of what you're saying, Dylan is also the important thing is that she's talking about the deployment of these technologies. So it's like Facebook can say, oh well, that algorithm for facial recognition is ready for prime time. And suddenly it's unleashed upon the world. There's no governing body, there's no review process. It's just like suddenly all of a sudden this becomes part of the way in which we function. Because if we still have a phone and we're holding it to our face and looking at Facebook or whatever, do
33:56 Dylan: you hear her worrying about that at all? I don't hear her worrying about that at all. I hear her. I mean, if anything, a somewhat disconcerting lack of concern about where we end up, you know, if anything, she's like, bring it on baby, let's see what happens.
34:10 Seth: That is not the reading that I got.
34:12 Lynda: But okay, you guys should keep arguing this is a really interesting point. And then I have something to say.
34:16 Seth: Okay, so I thought actually that at least as part of the Cyborg Manifesto was it's the fact that we don't acknowledge how the intrusion of these technologies into our daily lives and our existence again, you pull up your phone, Facebook gives you a feed and you're like, holy shit, this is what's happening in the world. You don't say holy shit. This is the manufactured algorithmic presentation of information to me, specific to my situation as manufactured by this company. Whatever. In other words, it's the fact that you don't recognize the intrusion of technology into your daily life for what it is as opposed to a representation of what is actually happening that is the problem.
That's what I thought. Haraway. Now here's the thing. She wasn't saying Facebook shouldn't exist. She's just saying you should recognize what Facebook is doing to you and then somehow that will help you create a position of resistance, which is to say the off button. That's the position of resistance with respect to social media.
35:24 Dylan: I saw her definitely wanting to have that sort of self conscious understanding about. I'll just take your example. On the face of it, yes, I agree with that. But I did not yet see her except for the awareness being anything more than embracing of it, at least if you're in the context of being aware about it. And honestly I would want to ask the question about. Given the sense there's only so much awareness that you can have. She seems very, very, very embracing of technological change. I would put her way out on the tail of post humanist integration of technology with people with not just cyborgs, but I mean cyborgs like amplified beings that are multiples of other individual whole beings with machines. And I think there's a long tail that she's out on, but maybe that's true.
36:17 Lynda: And I think you guys are both right. So I think it's a both and situation. She absolutely, she's a technophile. There's this great quote that she's got in Cyborg Manifesto that I'll get to in just a second where she's pretty clear about that. To Seth's point too. I think the whole point of Cyborg Manifesto is we're already there. And by we she means women and people of color. Technology 3.0. Our digital technology revolution has already made life deeply shitty for people of color especially who are already surveilled. They're already repressed, surveilled, de skilled, globalized, forced into the Home economy by globalization and tech 3.0.
Like it's already happened. The things that we as white privileged people are worried about happening to us because of Facebook have already happened to, you know, the vast majority of people of color in this country and in other countries. And so Haraway's like, we're already at the bottom, right? So where to from here? She has a technophile. So she's like. So she says, and let me just read this quote. You know, in addition to using the phrase technoscience, which is an earlier term that she uses, she uses in Cyborg Manifesto the phrase social relations of science and technology.
So that she chooses a slightly different phrase here. So she says, but that phrase should also indicate that science and technology provide fresh sources of power and that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action. And then she says, some of the rearrangements of race, sex and class that are rooted in high tech facilitated social relations can make socialist feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics. So she does absolutely pinpoint and identify a hope for more sustainable, more, you know, healthy, more solidarity among people of color and women through some of these high tech social media relations.
She does see that. But it's from the perspective of being like, things are already deeply shitty for the people that she's talking about here, trying to find a way out of this. And she's saying, like, where to from here? And she does see hope for reinvention of some of those dynamics through some of the technologies that we have. Because what she doesn't like is to say, let's surveil that, let's police that, let's shut that down. Because every time that happens, it's from that sort of objective God trick perspective. And the people who come out on the losing end of that are the same people every time.
From her perspective as a feminist, she would say the people who come out on the losing end of our efforts to control and surveil things like Facebook disproportionately affect women and people of color.
38:44 Mark: So this perspective thing, when talking about situated knowledge is again the central theme here. To finish the thought that we stopped when we started talking about what the God perspective is, is. Of course, this God perspective had been identified by feminists and many theorists before Haraway. Her unique contribution seems to be the insistence that it is so. For instance, a Marxist would just say, okay, well, the God perspective is the bourgeois ruling class perspective. And there's going to be something then privileged about the perspective of the oppressed that they actually see the social effects of the technology or whatever that may be, the people actually doing it and pretending to be in a world of pure theory that they are blind to.
So it is a way of compensating. And so she says, you know, some of these feminists have posited, in fact, a third world black woman like that is the sort of the ideal because it, by intersecting, it wins, it's oppressed in all the possible ways. But she says, yes, there's a particular blindness that that perspective lacks, but it's still a perspective. It's a partial perspective. And in fact, she doesn't want us to be reductionist. So that what it comes down to is maybe that there is something not quite idiosyncratic, like every individual is going to have their own.
You know, that would be just out of control. Subjectivism about science, about values, about everything. Like, no, there are facts, there are objects, there are things to focus on. But we can't respond to the God trick to the traditional narratives by saying there's a counter narrative. So this is what she thinks that Catherine MacKinnon was doing as far as feminism was going, is saying that there is a, I don't know, a centralized, but a feminine reaction to this masculinist paradigm. And that was too global. That was exactly the kind of feminism that you were saying that feminists of color were saying, you're trying to represent me and lump me in with that.
Supposedly Haraway is. And maybe this is a synoptic thought on her part, but by saying no, it has to be truly situated, means that we can build coalitions between points of view that have common interests. Right. We can acknowledge it as a fact that someone is being oppressed or that pollution is occurring or any number of facts that we could then have value reactions to. This whole argument between is she super pro science? It seems to me that. But this particularism about points of view here would lead to a revised take on sort of what it is for you to have an opinion, even yourself.
I mean, of course there's political actions you want to take, but there's a reason that she uses irony, that she uses metaphor, that she doesn't want the metaphor to collapse into the literal. This might be just a postmodern thing, but there's something deeply ironic in her whole delivery and her rhetoric.
41:33 Lynda: Yeah, I'm glad you could circle this back to that, especially for listeners who may be like, where are we? Bring it back to kind of situated knowledges and specifically what Haraway's writing has in common with other feminist philosophers of science. And that is two parts to her critique. One is that science is different when different people do it. So you don't always get the same answers if it's not the same people doing the science. That's sort of the first part of it. Right. So perspective matters in terms of the results you get in science.
And then the second part is that the way we do science has disproportionate effects on bodies, especially feminized bodies. Right. Which she means. And she has a whole description. Right. A feminized body doesn't have to just be a like biologically female sex body. It's a body that has been objectified de skilled and oppressed. Right. So this is the two parts of her critique that are shared by many philosophers of science. So there's sort of these two problems. One of them is that science is treated as if it's the same always everywhere, no matter who does it.
And that's not true. And the other part is that science is treated as if it has the same effects on bodies everywhere. And that is also not true. There's this great quote in Cyborg Manifesto actually when she talks about what she would like to see instead, I won't read the whole thing, but basically she says we need more women doing science. Right. And that's part of, it's pretty much a no brainer. And that's, that's pretty straightforward. She says this issue is only one aspect of inquiry into the possibility of what a feminist science could look like, but it's an important one.
And then she lists some questions that a feminist science might answer, which are what kind of constitutive role in the production of knowledge, imagination and practice can new groups doing science have. How can those groups be allied with progressive social and political movements? What kind of political accountability can be constructed to tie women together across the scientific technical hierarchies separating us? And might there be ways of developing feminist science and technology politics in alliance with anti military science facility conversion action groups?
And she goes on to list a couple of examples of that from the Bay Area. So these are some ideas that she has about how science could actually be done differently under the conditions of a feminist science. I know we're wrapping up part one here pretty soon, but I guess I would be curious to hear from Dylan if he could just put on his Haraway cap for a minute. Imagine physics being done in a feminist way, like a feminist and cyborg way. I'd like to kind of like think through an example of like, hey, how would things actually be Done differently if we were to try to do them this way.
44:06 Mark: Yeah, we need examples. These readings were so frustrating to me in their complete lack of examples. I was salivating at the fact that in the last reading there was a footnote. It talked about overpopulation. Like, oh, a specific example that she's. But especially if you were bringing to mind physics, because it seems like, you know, she just purposefully, in situated knowledge, says, I'm not holding apart the physical sciences and the social sciences. And I think that might follow from this whole. I'm not going to separate theory from practice because even the physical sciences are going to have social effects. So in effect involve the social sciences in some way. But, yes, let's try to purify it as to, like what a laboratory physicist or a theoretical physicist. Like, what possible influence could this thinking have on them?
44:51 Dylan: So before I try to do that, which I think is actually going to be challenging, but the, the quote that you read, the very first thing that a lot of scientists would say is that those objectives that she talked about may be about ways of doing science, maybe about the social activity of science, but have very little to do with what science is trying to do in terms of its goals, its objects, even without having to be its objectivity. Its objects aren't those things. And I think you'd get a spectrum of voraciousness about that criticism. But, you know, everyone from saying, well, that has nothing to do with science to, well, it's really important in the way in which we do science.
So I want to get back to that. But if I think about what it would mean to say, have a cyborg scientist, this is where I'm not sure about the moral dimension that she has there or that it's doing what she thinks it's doing. Like one of those criteria is, well, we'll come up with a demilitarized world. We're going to aim our science at demilitarizing the world and resolving human conflict or that kind of thing. And it's not at all clear to me that a cyborg science would do that. Why would it aim towards that kind of good?
46:07 Lynda: Yeah, as a matter of fact, the Terminator movies would tend to argue for the opposite.
46:11 Dylan: Not that a Terminator movie is necessarily the way that you have to go either, but I don't see how a cyborg science, especially one that is embracing the notion of change and the fungibility of speciation and the. I don't know. I mean, I'm at a little bit of a loss about what kind of limitations that she seems to have. Some of them are kind of moral. I don't see where they're coming from in the standpoints of that perspective unless you lay onto it an accountability that includes some guiding principles for what it means to be answerable to what we see.
Like she includes in this notion that. Well, bottom of page 583 and situated. She says this essay is an argument for situated and embodied knowledges and an argument against various forms of unlocatable and so irresponsible knowledge claims. So she wants to, I think in a statement like that, unlocatable means irresponsible. By not situating my knowledge, I am also not accounting for my position, and I'm not taking responsibility for the effects that my position have.
47:18 Lynda: But you don't have to answer to anyone.
47:19 Dylan: You don't have to answer to anyone. But that accountability seems to me to be super added at the best. She seems to take for granted that accountability comes along with that, with, you know, individual accountability and kind of a moral or social sense comes along with giving an account. But why does. It doesn't necessarily at all.
47:41 Seth: Right, yeah.
47:42 Dylan: If I said my cyborg, I mean, why would I care about vivisection? Why wouldn't I say, look, I'm learning about the world? In fact, the best way for me to learn about how living things work is to cut them up while they're alive?
47:52 Lynda: And these are actually worries that I have, Dylan, too, about other forms of feminist science. Karen Barad has a whole theory of diffractive ethics, and I have these very same concerns that you do about it. But I think I can help a little bit just to make the question a little bit more concrete in terms of we'll back away from the cyborg a little bit and come at it from the feminist science perspective, thinking about how would it be different if the accountabilities were different and the people doing it were different? So I have a really specific question for you, you, which is, how do you think physics would be different today if the original goal in the United States had not been developing the atom bomb? How would the discipline of physics be different? Just imagine particle physics.
48:30 Dylan: How would particle physics be different?
48:32 Lynda: How would it be different if the atom bomb was out of the equation? If we didn't militarize all the funding and the goal of the research, we
48:40 Dylan: wouldn't have gotten nearly as far as we did. Because the fact of the matter is that the funding that was there after World War II was gigantic. Was it at a level that you would never in a million years have had.
48:56 Lynda: What do you think physics would have worked on instead? Like, which direction would it have gone? Instead of splitting the atom and naming all the particles and like diving deep into that, would it have gone a different direction?
49:05 Dylan: So quantum mechanics was around before that.
49:07 Lynda: Right, Right.
49:08 Dylan: Okay. And so maybe you still get the transistor, maybe you still get those investigations into solid state physics, material construction, stuff like that. And you don't get big science. You get Philip Anderson's huge, huge critic of the LHC and big science. And his thing was we would do a lot more science that would make a lot more difference for a lot more people if we stopped spending billions and billions of dollars trying to understand quarks because it's completely useless. But what we should do is we should be spending that money on solid state mechanics, on material science, on all these gigantic unanswerable questions that we don't know about fluid dynamics and high temperature conductors, things like that.
This sort of much messier, less God's eye view. You don't have the God particle anymore, Right. You're not worried about it. Maybe that's the answer. The answer is that you would have spent a lot more time and money on solid state mechanics, practical solutions to improve our world.
50:11 Lynda: That's really interesting. I want to live in this world that Dylan is describing here. So one thing about. Back to your question, Dylan, about like, you know, why wouldn't it just be Terminator? Like, you know, why not? Like, this is kind of terrifying. I would say that, like it's terrifying from our perspective because of all the funding. Haraway would say it's terrifying because of who's been in charge of it and who's funded it and for what reasons up to this point. That's why you're terrified right now. And what she's hoping is if there are people of color in these laboratories, if the funding sources are different, if it doesn't have a military goal, we don't know right now. We're terrified right now because we can only ever be in the situation that we're in. But we might have a different situation if we had a different apparatus doing physics.
50:56 Dylan: Yeah, see, I just don't believe that to be the case. So let me be clear. I'm not terrified of it. I think that she's putting a lot of weight on the notion that those individual circumstances will lead to better decisions naturally. It's like saying if you only put women in charge, there would be no war.
51:16 Lynda: Yeah, no, that's true. And Haraway is not saying that just to be clear. She's not saying that if we put women in charge we wouldn't have war.
51:21 Seth: I am saying.
51:23 Dylan: All I'm saying is that when she says unlocatable and equates it with irresponsible and therefore the converse she also clearly wants to say is that the locatable becomes responsible. That moral dimension. I don't see that responsible thing as naturally coming out of the locatable and situational that I don't see the evidence for. I mean, as an epistemological thing, you know, about understanding the way in which we know things, criticism of our ontologies and all that stuff that actually makes a lot of sense and about how the way in which science works. But the notion that you get out of it a more responsible, more just, less oppressive universe because you do that, that's not at all clear to me.
52:08 Lynda: Maybe it's not clear because we're locked into a structure right now in which science has been given the God seat, right? And so we immediately imagine anything that's discovered being sort of like teleported up to that level and applied on a global universal level. I think it's important to remember that Haraway is talking about sort of at some level dismantling that ability to, you know, beam science up into that sort of power political situation. She wants science and scientists to be situated means skin in the game. It means whatever happens to your community happens to you in terms of funding, in terms of pollution in your water, in terms of like.
Right. So she's imagining scientists as citizens and engaged in the issues that affect their communities. So when their communities hurt, they hurt. And not being able to have recourse to these laboratories in Los Alamos or these places in which they are substantially insulated from the effects of just living through daily politics with their community. The members of their community are insulated.
53:03 Mark: All right, well, a lot of threads for us to pull on. We're going to do that in part two.
53:06 Lynda: We're going to turn Dylan into a cyborg.
53:09 Dylan: Who says I'm not right now.
53:10 Seth: Too late.
53:11 Mark: Too late. Partially Examined Life supporters can do that. Just find a the next thing in your feed. Unless you are a support through Apple, then you gotta wait till next week. Thanks.
amazing that in the world of climate disaster and plague politics clusterfuck after clusterfuck that people are still talking as if politics “follows” the God-like mandates of Science but that aside still good to have Lynda back on the pod, if funding for science research and development had to pass through a truly democratic/representative political process (and not the industrial-military-govt. complex) there would never be consensus to fund anything of significant impact/scale.
You guys should check out the work of founding philosopher of technology and “post” phenomenologist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Ihde