Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse

Feminism and Technoscience

Donna J. Haraway, Thyrza Goodeve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138303409
• eBook ISBN: 9781351399234
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Femminismo e teoria femminista

One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including the now-classic essay "The Cyborg Manifesto," she received the J.D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science.

Thyrza Nicholas Goodeve is a professor of Art History at the School of Visual Arts.

One

Syntactics

The Grammar of Feminism and Technoscience

Immeasurable Results. Lynn Randolph, oil on masonite. 9–1/2” x 10”, 1994

Immeasurable Results is patterned after an advertisement for Hitachi’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) medical device. The diagnostic film framed above the recumbent body of the draped woman records the assemblage of objects and dreams that fill family albums, clinical records, national imaginaries, and personal journals in technoscientific cultures at the end of the Second Christian Millennium. The material-semiotic event, for which the Hitachi machine is tool and trope, is an articulation of high-technology capital, diverse skills, interdisciplinary negotiations, bodily organic structures, marketing strategies, personal and public symbolic codes, medical doctrines, transnational economies, scientific industry’s labor systems, and patient-consumer hopes and fears. The woman with her head in the imaging apparatus is the artist, Lynn M. Randolph. This is a self-portrait of interior psychic and diagnostic spaces and of exterior human and mechanical bodily postures. The painting shows a measuring device; its computer-mediated scanning image; and, on the same film with calibration cues in the righthand margin, the projected dreams and nightmares that remain immeasurable within the machine’s information calculus. Immeasurable Results is a screen projection of conscious and unconscious layers proper to a biomedical world. Joining Randolph’s metaphorical realism and cyborg surrealism, Immeasurable Results is the recursive screen-within-a-screen record of a material-semiotic apparatus of bodily production and reproduction in the regime of technobiopower. Immeasurable Results records a slice of what feminists call the “lived experience” of that apparatus.

A fantasy mermaid with an open fish mouth; a parallel floating penis and testes of the same piscine shape as the doll’s; a pocketwatch without clock hands, armed instead with crab claws, whose nightmare timekeeping is out-side mechanical chronology; a red demon hammering at the skull, echoing the pounding heard by the woman inside the MRI machine, punctuating the staccato bits of information emitted from the brain-machine interface; a day-of-the-dead Mexican skeleton poised with a spear to announce the impending death lurking in the traitorous flesh; an alligator-predator; and, in the center of this ring of surrealist beings, the technical, medical frontal section, cut without knives, through the brain, sinus cavities, and throat: These images are produced by the semiosis of the machine, body, and psyche in hybrid communication. All of these images—certainly including the bloodless optical slice of the woman’s head and neck—are intensely personal. Technoscientific subjects and objects are gestating in the matrices of the MRI scan. The moment of reading and scanning, of being read and being scanned, is the moment of vulnerability through which new articulations are made. In Joseph Dumit’s provocative terms, the brain-imaging device is part of an apparatus of “objective self fashioning” (Dumit 1995: 56–86).

The specificity of the painting cannot be missed—its particular race-and gender-marked patient, her individual dreams and possible pathologies, the identifiable corporation selling computerized medical imaging devices, the web of beliefs and practices pertaining to health and disease, the economic configurations tying flesh and diagnostic film together. These signs make sense in the fiercely physical, semiotic world of technoscience, which is the real and imaginary field for Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. We read these signs by the syntactical rules of technoscience. We are inside its material grammar; we both embody and contest its rules. But we are also in a world of immeasurable results, a world that exceeds its representations and blasts syntax. This excessive world defies both denunciation and celebration while exacting care and accountability. We are in the family saga, where Female- Man^© meets her sibling species called OncoMouse™ in the nodes of the Net. That encounter is my self-portrait in the durable traditions of Western self-fashioning. That is where my book begins.

Syntactics

The Grammar of Feminism and Technoscience

“The ability to access information is power,” Nili said with her slight accent in her husky voice… .“The ability to read and write belonged to the Church except for heretics and Jews. We are people of the book. We have always considered getting knowledge part of being human.”

—Marge Piercy, He, She and It

Literacies

Nili bat Marah Golinken is the technologically enhanced, genetically engineered, matrilineal Jewish warrior woman in the postnuclear holocaust world of Marge Piercy’s He, She and It. The novel explores the many kinds of boundaries at stake when a seventeenth-century golem in Prague’s ghetto and a twenty-first- century cyborg in a Jewish freetown in North America are blasphemously brought into being to defend their endangered communities. Introducing herself at the home of the old woman, Malkah, who helped her colleague Avram to program the cyborg, Nili says of herself:

“I can tolerate levels of bombardment that would kill you. We live in the hills—inside them, that is. We are a joint community of the descendants of Israeli and Palestinian women who survived. We each keep our religion, observe each other’s holidays and fast days. We have no men. We clone and engineer genes. After birth we undergo additional alteration. We have created ourselves to endure, to survive, to hold our land. Soon we will begin rebuilding Yerushalaim… . We live in extreme isolation. We have a highly developed technology for our needs, but we don’t tie into the Net. I’m a spy and a scout… . I am sent like the dove or maybe the raven from Noah’s ark to find out if the world is ready for us, and also if there’s anything out here we might want.” (Piercy 1991:205–06)

Nili comes into the story in partnership with her lover, Riva, daughter of Malkah and an anarchist data pirate who has turned into a serious revolutionary against the transnational corporate order that webs the globe. Nili and Riva are committed to the principle that information must not be a commodity. In the vulnerabilities and potencies of their altered bodies, these technologically savvy women understand the bond of literacy and wealth that structures the chances of life and death in their world. Nili, Riva, Malkah, and the cyborg live without innocence in the regime of technobiopower, where literacy is about the joining of informatics, biologics, and economics—about the kinship of the chip, gene, seed, bomb, lineage, ecosystem, and database.

Nili remembers that in the European past, the Catholic Church controlled literacy, except for the potent exceptions of heretics, infidels, and Jews, who can claim the status of peoples of the book with an originary authority that strikes at the heart of the Church’s monopoly.¹ Tunneling under the wreckage of a violent history with the other Israeli and Palestinian survivors, Nili belongs to these oppositional traditions of reading and writing, with their generative accounts of what can count as human, as knowledge, as history, as insider and outsider. Dove, raven, and reconstructed assassin, Nili fights for rebuilding Yerushalaim outside the appropriations of Christian salvation history—and outside the patriarchal assumptions of all of the official peoples of the book, in both their religious and technoscientific incarnations. Her interrupted origin stories provide a platform for surfing the sacred-secular technoscientific web that infuses Modest_Witness@Second_ Millennium: “We have always considered getting knowledge part of being human.”

My book takes shape through cascading accounts of humans, nonhumans, technoscience, nation, feminism, democracy, property, race, history, and kinship. Beginning in the mythic times called the Scientific Revolution, my titular modest witness indulges in narratives about the imaginary configurations called the New World Order, Inc., and the Second Christian Millennium. I learned early that the imaginary and the real figure each other in concrete fact, and so I take the actual and the figural seriously as constitutive of lived material-semiotic worlds. Taught to read and write inside the stories of Christian salvation history and technoscientific progress, I am neither heretic, infidel, nor Jew, but I am a marked woman informed by those literacies as well as by those given to me by-birth and education. Shaped as an insider and an outsider to the hegemonic powers and discourses of my European and North American legacies, I remember that anti-Semitism and misogyny intensified in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution of early modern Europe, that racism and colonialism flourished in the traveling habits of the cosmopolitan Enlightenment, and that the intensified misery of billions of men and women seems organically rooted in the freedoms of transnational capitalism and technoscience. But I also remember the dreams and achievements of contingent freedoms, situated knowledges, and relief of suffering that are inextricable from this contaminated triple historical heritage. I remain a child of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and technoscience. My modest witness cannot ever be simply oppositional. Rather, s/he is suspicious, implicated, knowing, ignorant, worried, and hopeful. Inside the net of stories, agencies, and instruments that constitute technoscience, s/he is committed to learning how to avoid both the narratives and the realities of the Net that threaten her world at the end of the Second Christian Millennium. S/he is seeking to learn and practice the mixed literacies and differential consciousness that are more faithful to the way the world, including the world of technoscience, actually works.²

And so this book is sited as a node that leads to the Internet, which is synecdochic for the wealth of connections that constitute a specific, finite, material-semiotic universe called technoscience.

Modest_Witness@,Second_Millennium.FemaleMan^©_Meets_OncoMouse™ is an e-mail address. Let us see how its nodes and operators map out the tropes and topics of this book.

Keystrokes

My title contains three syntactical marks: @, ^©,™. Each little modifier signs us into history in particular ways. The @, ^©, and ™ are minimalist origin narratives in themselves. Part of a writing technology (King 1991; Derrida 1976; Latour and Woolgar 1979), the marks also map an argument; they indicate its proper grammar. Like the special signing apparatus for operations in symbolic logic, the marks in my title are operators within a particular sociotechnical discourse. This discourse takes shape from the material, social, and literary technologies that bind us together as entities within the region of historical hyperspace called technoscience.

Hyper means “over” or “beyond,” in the sense of “overshooting” or “extravagance.” Thus, technoscience indicates a time-space modality that is extravagant, that overshoots passages through naked or unmarked history. Technoscience extravagantly exceeds the distinction between science and technology as well as those between nature and society, subjects and objects, and the natural and the artifactual that structured the imaginary time called modernity. I use technoscience to signify a mutation in historical narrative, similar to the mutations that mark the difference between the sense of time in European medieval chronicles and the secular, cumulative salvation histories of modernity. Like all the other chimerical, condensed word forms that are cobbled together without-benefit-of-hyphen in the hyperspace of the New World Order, Inc., the word technoscience communicates the promiscuously fused and transgenic quality of its domains by a kind of visual onomatopoeia. Once upon a time, in another, closely related, ethnospecific narrative field called Western philosophy, such entities were thought to be subjects and objects, and they were reputed to be the finest and most stable actors and actants in the Greatest Story Ever Told—the one about modernity and man. In the imploded time-space anomalies of late-twentieth-century transnational capitalism and technoscience, subjects and objects, as well as the natural and the artificial, are transported through science fictional wormholes to emerge as something quite other. Even drenched with all the hype about revolution and technoscience that pervades contemporary discussion, the ferocity of the transformations lived in daily life throughout the world are undeniable.

The “@” and “.” are the title’s chief signifiers of the Net. An ordinary e-mail address specifies where the addressee is in a highly capitalized, transnationally sustained, machine language-mediated communications network that gives byte to the euphemisms of the “global village.” Dependent upon a densely distributed array of local and regional nodes, e-mail is one of a powerful set of recent technologies that materially produce what is so blithely called “global culture.” E-mail is one of the passage points—both distributed and obligatory—through which identities ebb and flow in the Net of technoscience. Despite all the hype, technoscience is not the Greatest Story Ever Told, but it is playing powerfully to large, widely distributed audiences.

Partly because the Internet was originally developed for defense research and communication, including communication among academic scientists, and then extended to more civilian users primarily in universities, the system is only now becoming densely commodified (Krol 1992:11–30).The Net still has many of the practices and ethics of a public commons, but one that is being rapidly enclosed. The civilian freedoms of the Net are indebted to a tax-supported commons tied initially to Cold War priorities and then to goals of national economic competitiveness and requiring a broad technoscientific research and communication apparatus. The Internet was midwifed in the 1970s as a U.S. Defense Department network called ARPAnet, which was an experimental network designed to support military research.³ The noncentralized structure of the communication system was related to the need for it to survive nuclear destruction of component parts.

As other U.S. (and Scandinavian) organizations built their own networks, they used the ARPAnet’s communications protocols. Connecting all these systems was, therefore, an attractive goal. In the late 1980s the National Science Foundation (NSF) established five supercomputer centers that made the capabilities of the world’s fastest computers available for general scholarly research. Using ARPAnet technology, the tax-supported NSF created a web of regional networks connected with each other through a supercomputer center. “The NSF promoted universal educational access by funding campus connection only if the campus had a plan to spread access around. So everyone attending a four-year college could become an Internet user” (1992:13). The NSFnet came to form the backbone of the Internet, and the impact throughout the social fabric has been tremendous. Then, following policy set by the president and congress in 1992, the NSF fully privatized its system in 1995. The large users remain unworried and expect the continuing growth of volume and advances in technology to lower their costs in the long run. In addition the new net system will support high-speed, wide-bandwidth uses such as videoconferencing and other visual processing applications that the old NSF net could not handle. Overall, immediate costs to users are expected to go up 10 percent to 100 percent, depending on distance from an access point. The losers are likely to be small colleges, institutions in more remote areas, and public libraries (Lawler 1995). Those parts of the public commons that cannot contribute to capital accumulation for private corporations, such as MCI, Bellcore, and Sprint, which reap the benefits of decades of tax-supported infrastructure, will naturally wither away in the free market. The rebirth of the nation seems to demand it.⁴

Furthermore, the Internet has been international for many years, but originally only U.S. allies and overseas military bases were connected. By the mid-1990s most countries in the world had attempted to connect as part of their national educational, commercial, and technology goals. More than 20 million users in over 60 countries were tied into the Internet by 1995. Inequality of access and the dominance of the Internet’s, and so the United States’, communications protocol standards—thereby isolating nets using other standards—have become serious international issues. As Marilyn Strathern put the matter in another context. “A world made to Euro-American specifications will already be connected up in determined ways” (1992:17).

Not even mentioning the World Wide Web. Mosaic, NetScape, and a host of other tools sustaining the information order at the end of the millennium. I am giving a very partial and abbreviated account of the Internet, much less of computer-mediated communications systems in general. But even this micro-soft version shows that the relations in the Internet—among military needs, academic research, commercial development, democracy, access to knowledge, standardization, globalization, and wealth—embody many of the themes of technoscience in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Unlike the situation for Nili’s community, which chose not to be part of the Net, there is no better place for my modest witness to lurk to be a spy and scout—and, to be sure, a user. Located in material-semiotic fact in the nodes of one of the world’s most powerful technoscientific research institutions, the University of California, my modest witness is n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Nothing Comes Without Its World: Donna J. Haraway in Conversation with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve—20th Anniversary of Modest_Witness
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Study Guide: Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
• Notes
• References
• Index