Donna J. Haraway

It's especially hard to be disappointed by your idols. The sense of revelatory joy I felt after reading Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto left me desperate to read everything I could of hers. But where the Cyborg Manifesto succeeds, in deep, complex, critical engagement with her subject, this fails. Biased is perhaps the mildest way to put it. Haraway is bizarrely unable to examine her own perspective here, instead using her considerable intellect to justify her clearly pre-determined positions, show more positions on the value of dogs and particular kinds of relationships with them that just happen to closely mirror her own dogs and relationships with dogs. The comical reference to dog-training as "agility training", the uncritical abelism (humans) and "breed-ism" (dogs), and her default to the worst kind of superior liberal irony to disguise her unwillingness to change or even address her own complicity in these harmful systems are just some examples of how this falls short of its potential.

The last few chapters are especially hard to read, failing on every level of intersectional feminism and resorting to ethical contortions and rhetorical sleights-of-hand of the worst kind to attempt to maintain the veneer of radical leftism while in fact defending neo-liberal capitalism.

This whole tract is steeped in her uncritical wealthy white cis USAmerican privlege. She helpfully tells us that Puerto Rico is a colony-!!-in the chapter where she tries to point out how ethically complex it is to rescue street dogs after two chapters of uncritical celebration (and no mention of ethical complications) of breeding "pure" dogs. Work undertaken by working-class women of color from colonized cultures is disparaged and undermined by her rhetorical strategy, while the work of wealthy white women in Europe and the US mainland is wholeheartedly celebrated in the previous two chapters.

Infuriating would be an understatement. I was enraged by the end of this, mostly because I felt betrayed by her pretense to radical intersectional feminism. show less

Donna Haraway makes a peculiar choice in coining "Chthulucene" for use in this book. The difference in spelling from H.P. Lovecraft's notorious dreaming god is deliberate, and she insists that the etymology is from khthon-; but then why not "Chthonocene?" The fact is that she is deliberately evoking Cthulhu, who "shall soon rule where man rules now," as the Necronomicon admonishes. But her sympathies, unlike those of (the conscious) Lovecraft are not with the "rulers" coded out as Anthropos show more or Capital or Plantation Owner, or any future value of that function. Her principal slogan for advancing a Chthulucene agenda is "Make kin, not babies," and she proposes a "tentacular" program of what an Anthropocentric thinker might regard as species treason--not to mention its profound antagonism to Capital.

Haraway's program of "staying with the trouble" is an imagining of futures that resists utopianism and dismal forecasting. It reminds me more than a little of the anti-capitalist bolo'bolo (by P.M., 1983--whatever happened to my paperback copy?), which was much more sanguine. The chief difference in gravity probably stems from Haraway's attention to the damage already done to human and non-human biomes. The final chapter of the book is an SF narrative implementing these visions over the period 2025-2425. Throughout the various essays, Haraway construes SF multivalently as "speculative feminism," "string figures," "speculative fabulation," "science fantasy," and the more customary "science fiction," and asserts it as part of her resources and method. Previous SF works that receive her special attention include Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home (and others), Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, and Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

The species that participate in her Cthulucene imaginings notably include pigeons, squid, orchids, coral, horses, and butterflies. And SF reflections even recruit the Ood from Doctor Who (the subverted Cthulhu again). Some of these are models to overcome the paradigm of organisms, in favor of holobionts. Others illustrate extant and/or possible relationships among "critters" (Haraway's preferred term, embracing and exceeding all biotic kingdoms) including humans.

Staying with the Trouble is a chewy read, full of accounts of activist art and the results of late-breaking scientific inquiry (not capital-S "Science" Haraway hastens to add). The body text is about half of the total book, and many of the sixty pages of small-type end notes are worth investigating for their further discussion of sources and inspiration. There are black-and-white illustrations throughout. I made slow progress through it, but it was worth my effort, and although I read a borrowed copy, I would be willing to make space for it on my own shelves. show less

This volume collects revised versions of ten essays by Donna Haraway: most famous, of course, is the “Cyborg Manifesto," on which I have no doubt I could spend this entire review and only begin to scratch the surface. I, however, found “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” to be the most interesting of the essays here. Analysing scientific objectivity, Haraway begins by claiming that academics and feminists discussing show more objectivity “have used a lot of toxic ink and trees processed into paper decrying what they have meant and how it hurts us. The imagined ‘they’ constitute a kind of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories; and the imagined ‘we’ are the embodied others… a few thousand readers composed mostly of science haters” (183). (There’s definitely some resonance here with the Victorian critiques of science I study; see, for example, Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science.) Haraway goes on, however, to claim that when this perspective is “lurking underneath” her own work, it consists of “paranoid fantasies and academic resentments” (183).

After discussing various forms of feminist response to claims of scientific objectivity, Haraway posits, “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” (187). Science must acknowledge the existence of other knowledges that cannot be considered objectively while at the same time still being able to make claims about the functioning of the universe that apply to more than one person. Haraway wants her female successor to science to have “a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world” even if they do not lean on scientific means of understanding per se.

Haraway’s essay—almost a manifesto for feminist objectivity—provides a strong framework for analyzing gender in science. Haraway’s description of the gender dynamics of scientific vision says that women can possess scientific detachment, but only if the old fantasy of “disembodied vision” is discarded: “The eyes have been used 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” (188). This happens, Haraway claims, because the gaze possesses the “unmarked positions of Man and White” (188).

Her description of the disembodied eye is attention-grabbing: “Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters” (189). Though Haraway does not directly mention women as victims in this instance, the claim that the disembodied eye rapes the world certainly creates that impression

Finally Haraway’s analysis gives way to presenting an alternative form of feminine science. She claims that “our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision… and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent, doctrine of objectivity” (189). Haraway calls for a new form of vision where the theoretical is connected to the physical and embodied practices of sight. Her final vision is of “the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions, i.e., of views from somewhere” (196).

Of course I like Haraway, because I think she calls for what the best of the nineteenth-century scientist novels were calling for. Her distillation of the stereotypical feminist response to science reminds me of Heart and Science, and Heart and Science is terrible. But her own position reminds me of Middlemarch, and Middlemarch is magnificent. show less

Although it took a little getting used to, Haraway’s writing style was easier to read than I expected. This is the first book of hers I’ve tackled and quotations I’d come across in the past were generally oblique, to say the least. I can’t remember how I discovered the existence of ‘Staying with the Trouble’, but am usually up for commentary on the concept of the Anthropocene. Moreover, it has a distinctive cover and I’m not above being swayed by such things. The book is show more shorter than it looks, as a good 130 pages of the total are notes, bibliography, and index. The remaining 160-odd consist of meandering chapters on ideas of ecological regeneration through co-operative coexistence between people and other living beings. Haraway writes in a lyrical, elliptical style with a conversational tone, playing with words and frequently re-stating phrases. I neither loved nor hated this, so found my interest in the book waxed and waned with the content. The chapters are essentially structured around anecdotes, some of which I found more meaningful than others.

I most enjoyed the longest chapter, ‘Sympoesis’. The titular concept seems vaguely familiar from [b:Austral|33673959|Austral|Paul McAuley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1495059075s/33673959.jpg|54549061], an excellent sci-fi novel, and Haraway goes into sufficient detail that the anecdotes become case studies. They are examples of the tentacular, interconnected approach to ecological understanding and regeneration through solidarity and art that she espouses. I wanted to call this a philosophy, but she deliberately describes it more in terms of practice. If I had to situate it philosophically, though, I’d suggest object-oriented ontology as described by Timothy Morton in [b:The Ecological Thought|7722063|The Ecological Thought|Timothy Morton|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348985833s/7722063.jpg|10474582]. I didn’t find new insight into the Anthropocene as such. I liked Haraway’s comment that, ‘The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be like what came before. I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge.’ However I was not convinced by her term ‘chthulucene’, which refers both to the Greek name of a spider and to Lovecraft’s cthulu. I believe it is meant to reflect that we’re all part of the same compost heap. (Wasn’t that a line from Fight Club?)

Haraway’s slogan for this era is ‘Make Kin Not Babies’, which I have a certain amount of sympathy for. A couple of my close friends have recently had babies and I like the idea of being their kin. Although I don’t want any children of my own, I’d like to play with and read to the children of my friends. The slogan is also intended to encourage communication and solidarity between groups more generally, beyond nuclear families and narrow interests. I found the string figures concept harder to grasp the usefulness of. Chapter 5 on the unpleasant, often cruel practice of deriving human oestrogen supplements from horse urine was the least satisfactory part of the book for me. Probably because it really was just a personal anecdote and because I thought it was common knowledge. I remember hearing about the practice as a child from an animal rescue charity. Haraway recounts her much more recent discovery of it to highlight how easily information can be overlooked, but doesn’t draw much in the way of lessons from the experience. Her conclusion seems simply to be ‘the world is complicated’, which is true but hardly novel.

On the other hand, I liked the final chapter much more. This consisted of speculative fiction about five generations of people called Camille, all of whom had a symbiotic relationship with monarch butterflies. What a conceptually delightful idea. This fictionalisation also meant that the book concluded on a note of clarity, by depicting Haraway’s vision of a better future. I didn’t find ‘Staying with the Trouble’ revelatory and the length was awkward; it might have been better further compressed or considerably expanded. Nonetheless, there was some vivid and interesting material to be found and Haraway undoubtedly has a distinctive voice. show less