Situated Knowledges

Donna Haraway has written one of the more influential papers in re­cent feminist writing on technoscience. It’s on situated knowledges. It does many things, this paper, but one of them is to investigate the optics of knowing, an optics performed in the natural—and no doubt in many of the social—sciences. This optics seeks to perform itself as disembodied, as removed from the body, indeed as having nothing to do with the body: ‘‘The eyes have been used,’’ writes Haraway, ‘‘to sig­nify a perverse capacity—honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism and male supremacy—to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power’’ (Haraway 1991d, 189).

Vision has been disembodied in what she calls the god-trick, ‘‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere’’ (Haraway 1991d, 189). But, she says, vision is never from nowhere. I talked about this in the last chapter: vision is always from somewhere, even if that some­where takes the form of a cartography that projects itself from no­where Euclidean in particular. To put it a little differently, vision always embodies specific optics, optics that vary from place to place and, for that matter, from species to species. Which suggests that (1) any reflective—or even pragmatic—optics that claims to stand back and see it all from a distance is a form of mythology; (2) to the extent it is built into a particular mammalian visual system, such an optics is in any case one that is highly specific; and (3) the notion, an alternative notion, of objectivity may be rescued if the body is, as it were, put back into the process of seeing. Donna Haraway again: ‘‘ob­jectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment, and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility. The moral is simple: only partial per­spective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that ini­tiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the gen – erativity of all visual practices’’ (Haraway 1991d, 190).

There are various components in this turnaround, this attempt to recolonize the notion of “objectivity” for something that is local and situated. Let’s mention just two. One is the recommendation-cer – tainly not Haraway’s alone-that a commitment to specificity implies a willingness to accept a kind of fractured vision. But putting it this way isn’t quite right because the term ‘‘fractured’’ implies the failed possibility of a whole. It is a discursive maneuver that firmly be­longs to the downside of the god-trick, to assumptions about the right and proper character of centered knowing and being, to the modern project and its desire for wholeness. So let’s say instead that it im­plies a commitment to sets of partialities, partial connections, and with this, viewpoints of the Other.5 Another component is the sug- gestion-indeed the urgent need-that we acknowledge and come to terms, somehow or other, with the specificity of our own knowl­edges, our situations. Or, to put this in the language of the last chapter, it requires that we explore our own more or less precarious coordi­nation (or otherwise) as knowing subjects. Which returns us to the place from where we started. The issue of the ‘‘personal’’ in academic writing.