Donna Haraway

[Anonymous No.3691083]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUSOvVBsX8g

I recently watched this argument made by Donna Haraway. I am completely off guard. I say with utter honesty and sincerity that this has fantastically up-ended my worldview.

Can we discuss some of Haraway?

I feel like she might be the most dangerous thinker alive today in forcing us out of our schema and paradigms.

[Anonymous No.3691091]

This is fascinating, OP!

Have you read her text on Cyborgs as an analogy for 'worlding' of the self?

[Anonymous No.3691100]

>click link
>see murrican salad dodger
>throw up in mouth

[Anonymous No.3691110]

>>3691100
Get past her. Haraway is a self-respecting woman.

[Anonymous No.3691119]

Well /lit/?

[Anonymous No.3691120]

>Fifth Annual Feminist Theory Workshop
you nearly got me

[Anonymous No.3691129]

>>3691120
>Implying Feminist Theory isn't worth listening to.

So, you are willfully ignorant then? Good to know.

[Anonymous No.3691136]

>>3691120
>>>/pol/
>>3691129
>>

[Anonymous No.3691146]

>>3691083

Too bad she only writes about dogs. She was a dangerous thinker in the 80s...now she is a crazy animal lady.

[Anonymous No.3691147]

>>3691129
Feminist Theory is the Astrology of social sciences. Do you learn Astrology too or are you willfully ignorant?

[Anonymous No.3691154]

>If Donna Marie has problems with orgasms, try dogs!
>That ragged cackle
>My dog Cayenne and I share DNA in a way that her saliva exchanges are only the beginning

Honestly OP, I'm 16 minutes in and I have no idea what this woman is getting at besides not talking about her subject and wanting to fuck dogs. Why did you find this important?

[Anonymous No.3691156]

>>3691147

Feminist theory is not a social science what are you even doing

[Anonymous No.3691159]

>>3691154
>I share DNA in a way that her saliva exchanges are only the beginning

Ever hear about the microbiome? You are in a sense the bugs that live in and on your pets.

[Anonymous No.3691161]

>>3691083
10 minutes of scholarly introduction—skipped
>Run fast, bite hard
>Staying with the trouble, becoming worldly with companion species.

Some of my colleagues already do this work, it is worthwhile, I've got no time for listening to it though as I'm busy dealing with the immediacy of class repression of human beings.

If you want to do research training under people in this area, I can recommend.

[Anonymous No.3691245]

30 minutes in and she still hasn't progressed much upon her thesis. She clearly knows a lot but seems unable to resist pursuing tangents.

What is her argument OP? Why is it important?

[Anonymous No.3691264]

>>3691245
She does have an hour to present though, and it looks like she's presenting partial findings rather than a substantive conclusion.

[Anonymous No.3691304]

>woman
>dangerous thinker

if bad and muddled ideas are dangerous i guess

[Anonymous No.3691311]

>he thinks I'm seriously going to listen to some dry cunt ramble on for 90 minutes

is she feminist or anti-feminist, that's all i want to know

[Anonymous No.3691322]

>>3691245
>What is her argument OP? Why is it important?

This is what I want to know.

[Anonymous No.3691323]

>>3691311

Sample of her writing: From Situated Knowledges.

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. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of dis-embodiment. The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit; the eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, colour enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTS, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system. 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. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.

>What do you think?

[Anonymous No.3691329]

>>3691323

Goodness me, I need to go have a wash after that. What repugnant style

[Anonymous No.3691333]

>>3691323
>And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.

I think this is the /lit/ equivalent of the rage/wut thread.

[Anonymous No.3691345]

>>3691333

This is why Science Studies Seminars are always fun (and by always I mean not at all) There is always a purple headed overly tattooed dyke (referred to as Xim) in the room that wants to be Haraway...and check your extraterritorial masculinist privilege before you create a technomonster...

[Anonymous No.3691352]

>>3691323
>What do you think?

I think you picked your excerpt poorly, it seems like (correct me if I'm wrong) she is simply proposing that 1. The history of science has been filtered through a subjective human perspective, apparently leaning towards a masculine bias 2. We can enhance our perspective (perhaps closer towards objectivity) through technology.

I don't know what last two sentences mean. The terms"techno-monster" and "the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing" seem to be what she's actually getting at, but they're undefined in the context of the passage.
So what is her argument? Why is it important?

[Anonymous No.3691375]

>>3691323
T'was interesting until the very last sentence. The overabundance of fancy pejorative qualifiers strips the last sentence of any possible seriousness, it literally sounds like its own parody.

Fortunately some feminists are aware of this appeal for ridicoulously exalted rhetoric. I remember a book of Elisabeth Badinter in which she reviews some of the feminists thesis about maternity (some of them eventually coming out as rather repressive, ironically) and quote, jokingly, an hilarious page from a defender of the mysticity of the child-mother relationship through breastfeeding. It really sounding like very bad prose devolving into terrible prose poetry. Was worth a good laugh. Thanks Elisabeth.

[Anonymous No.3691380]

>"techno-monster" and "the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing"
>/a/

[Anonymous No.3691386]

>>3691375
Autoparody is a technique used by the bourgeoisie to try to reclaim ideology from its own failures. See Žižek on the purest.

[Anonymous No.3691390]

>>3691386

>zizek

[Anonymous No.3691394]

>>3691159

This x 1000. Why do you think Kafka wrote that he woke a verminous bug? Haraway is interesting because she takes joy in this rather than makes it a straightforward matter of abjection.

[Anonymous No.3691396]

>>3691390
I'm being quite serious here, post-modernism is the last gasp of bourgeois ideology's impossibility.

[Anonymous No.3691397]

>>3691352

I obviously picked it for the last two sentences. I was highlighting her hyperbole not her overall thought...which is unoriginal.

[Anonymous No.3691398]

>>3691394
You can always take joy in abjection, we're both posting on 4chan.

[Anonymous No.3691411]

>>3691397
Oh, I confused who you were replying to. I was flipping through her wikipedia.
>There are many places where an editorial hand appears absent altogether. Neologisms are continually coined, and sentences are paragraph-long and convoluted. Biography, history, propaganda, science, science fiction, and cinema are intertwined in the most confusing way. Perhaps the idea is to induce a slightly dissociated state, so that readers can be lulled into belief. If one did not already possess some background, this book would give no lucid history of anthropology or primatology.

Not surprised.

[Anonymous No.3691415]

>>3691397
Still, we need the following few sentences to see if she qualifies it, and the previous few for context. It seems like you intentionally rendered that excerpt absurd by cutting it off where you did.

[Anonymous No.3691419]

>>3691352
I'm not sure you're right. Claiming that science has somewhat be distorted by "subjective human perspective" would be pretty silly since science is a form of human practice. The emphasis in this extract is clearly on the perhaps too significant role played by vision in our use of science and technology. Vision is a way to assert power by separating yourself as subjet (of vision) from everything else that becomes object (of vision again). Vision physically enacts the ultimate dominion of the subject of its all-encompassing object -think about "mind over matter", how modern technology is a offspring of metaphysics- and as such provides a grounding to the capitalist conception of science and of the individual.

[Anonymous No.3691421]

>>3691419
Biopolitics is not a viable alternative to protestant-cogito-masculinism though; biopolitics is simply a bourgeoisification of catholic-mind embodiment.

You should be able to solve this.

[Anonymous No.3691426]

>>3691419
>Vision is a way to assert power by separating yourself as subjet (of vision) from everything else that becomes object (of vision again).

I lost you here, I don't understand what you mean by 'vision'. Anyways, I still don't know what her argument is or why it matters.

[Anonymous No.3691439]

>>3691426
The cogito structures the world through its masculinising gaze. The act of viewing is the act of producing the world as the object of your subjectivity.

[Anonymous No.3691450]

>>3691415

She does qualify it somewhat but her entire argument is a straw man...

The view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick. I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent, doctrine of objectivity. I want a feminist writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision again, because we need to reclaim that sense to find our way through all the visualizing tricks and powers Of modern sciences and technologies that have transformed the objectivity debates. We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate colour and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name. So, not so perversely, 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 generativity of all visual practices. Partial perspective can be held accountable for both its promising and its destructive monsters. All Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies of the relations of what we call mind and body, of distance and responsibility, embedded in the science question in feminism. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. In this way we might become answerable for what we learn how to see.

[Anonymous No.3691452]

>>3691450

As if scientists were unaware their visualization technologies were theory-laden...

[Anonymous No.3691456]

>>3691452
Is it time for /lit/'s meme on this?

Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos.

[Anonymous No.3691461]

>>3691456

I havent seen it. Post away.

[Anonymous No.3691464]

>>3691450
I have never wanted more to be a cyborg trained to rape her mouth, than when I read her essentialist biopolitics of feminism.

I want to rape some sense into her, and given that I can construct an anti-bourgeois security, if the class-party wills it, then I will be forced by ethical constraint, to be unable to not rape her into sense.

[Anonymous No.3691465]

>>3691461
Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos.

It is that simple. Most of the people criticising technoscience haven't bothered to read the masters of the history and philosophy of science and the sociology of science, such that their pathetic restatements of claims demonstrated in the 20th century run as if they're contributions to knowledge.

This is the sixth time we have critiqued science as an ideological practice, and we have become exceedingly inefficient at it.

[Anonymous No.3691470]

>>3691465

This is the meme? I was hoping for some a philosophy of science image macro...

[Anonymous No.3691472]

>>3691470
It has to be a text meme, because it is kind of a qed statement when people don't realise that science has an autocritical function through HPS / STS and is well aware of its constructed nature.

I mean sure, if you want to make a Kuhn meme or something, go ahead, I'd suggest something about incommensurability.

[Anonymous No.3691497]

>>3691421
>You should be able to solve this.
I'm not as intelligent as you think, anon (even if you're trolling me). I will accept the challenge nonetheless:

1/2
One could think that as a line of thought emphasizing on the biological and corporeal foundings of social relations, biopolitics could help dismantle the underlying claim of the masculine ideology, namely the essential superiority of mind over matter and the consequential rejection of flesh and material conditions that enable thinking. But this is actually not the case, biolopolitics is actually are mere step back, formulated in the framework of bourgeois ideology, to the catholic imbuing of flesh with spirituality and the project of ordering flesh by the assumed rules of higher spirituality that follows from it.

Sorry, my English is shit, and I actually managed to do worse than the original sentence.

Allow me a second and less pedantic try:

Biopolitics wants to introduce the matter of animality and the reality of the human body in the study of politics (you could think of this as trying to understand politics as the consequence of biological necessities, to read social relationships insofar as they are shaped by their biological conditions).
Since one of the major feature of patriarchal domination, in its intellectual sense, is to postulate the superiority of the immaterial (mind over matter, most pre-modern discourse about metaphysics). Patriarchal society wants to fancy itself as thinking, as being inherently better than its animal condition, hence the cogito-masculinism part (cogito ergo sum: being is as consequence of thinking, and not the other way around). In ancient Greece, women would often be associated with the lesser faculty of emotion, as opposed to superior male faculty of reason and abstract thinking.

[Anonymous No.3691503]

>>3691497
2/2
But now we could think of this masculist line of thought as being expressed with peculiar strenght in protestantism: while catholicism could cope with the soul/body dichotomy and managed to bend them together by ordering the flesh through a social norm inherited from spirituality, protestantism relies heavily on rejection of matter, of bodily circumstances. Thus the catholic/protestant fault line paralells the biological/logical rift. Catholicism is all about big family, worshipping local patrons, and overall making corporeal things matter by asserting them as the place where spirituality realizes itself. Catholicism dedramatizes the radical opposing between the soul and the world that is at stakes in the death of Jesus, by making it necessary, inavoidable: you are shaped by your flesh, thus you are a sinner, but just like to have to piss everyday, you will have to confess and make do with your sins anyway. Protestantism, on the contrary, overemphasizes it, flesh is not to be regularly dealt with, but to be dominated and overcome. There is a lot of pride of one's mind in protestantism, which asserts the possibility of a direct relationship with God.

But what do biolopolitics really say ? They expressed all circumstances of our politics as shaped by biology, which is the scientific rationalization of flesh. Biopolotics tells you that you will have to make do with your biological condition, as such, it reenacts the patronization of mind through the body that already played out in catholicism. Biopolitics is a catholic-inspired vision of the political mind, transformed to be congruent with atheism and modern bourgeois ideology (which relies on scientism and materialism).

Thus the opposition of biopolitics and masculinist rationalism is no more than a modern replay of the opposition between the catholic and protestant way of patronizing minds.

I can hardly do better than that for now. I hope I was clear enough.

[Anonymous No.3691517]

>>3691439
Thank you for expressing what I meant more clearly than myself.

[Anonymous No.3691519]

>>3691497
>and the project of ordering flesh by the assumed rules of higher spirituality that follows from it.

Yep, that's my critique of biopolitics, that it is a sacralisation of the flesh, a humanae vitae for the bourgeois feminist.

>>3691503
>But now we could think of this masculist line of thought as being expressed with peculiar strenght in protestantism: while catholicism could cope with the soul/body dichotomy and managed to bend them together by ordering the flesh through a social norm inherited from spirituality, protestantism relies heavily on rejection of matter, of bodily circumstances.

wonderful;

>Thus the catholic/protestant fault line paralells the biological/logical rift.
>But what do biolopolitics really say ? They expressed all circumstances of our politics as shaped by biology, which is the scientific rationalization of flesh. Biopolotics tells you that you will have to make do with your biological condition, as such, it reenacts the patronization of mind through the body that already played out in catholicism. Biopolitics is a catholic-inspired vision of the political mind, transformed to be congruent with atheism and modern bourgeois ideology (which relies on scientism and materialism).

Perfection.

>Thus the opposition of biopolitics and masculinist rationalism is no more than a modern replay of the opposition between the catholic and protestant way of patronizing minds.


Indeed, but now to be troublesome—what is the relationship between mind and body, between science and state, that is exemplified by the Orthodox mystic tradition? Is there an escape presaged by Christian teaching, or must we submit to Islam to escape the rationality of capitalism as Luther Blisset suggests in _Q_?

>I can hardly do better than that for now. I hope I was clear enough.

Your clarity was wonderful, you took the thesis and produced the argument. Good work. Especially if your primary language isn't English, as that was pretty much perfect acad English.

[Anonymous No.3691547]

1. does not biopolitics have nothing to do with animals but rather the way in which men are regulated in late modernity by the State?

2. why the fuck are we theorising the animal so much? can we not just begin and end with a Singer-type thesis and produce practical results regarding their benefit without all this bullshit jargon? or just read Coetzee/Kafka if we want insights into the animal?

3. i cannot understand a single fucking sentence she is saying and i have a BA in philosophy. might just be 2deep4me, but i find her style is ridiculously obfuscating. deleuze and heidegger or baudrillard are tolerable because there is some end to their difficult style, but what is the fucking end here? seems to go on in circles and reach nowhere.

[Anonymous No.3691565]

>>3691547
It is a dog chasing its tail.

[Anonymous No.3691567]

>>3691565

hwehehe

[Anonymous No.3691617]

>>3691386
>I, the bourgeoise was only pretending
>yfw journals publish this and trolling truly is serious business

[Anonymous No.3691653]

>>3691547
>i cannot understand a single fucking sentence she is saying

Yeah seconding this. A lot of it just sounds like babble. Why is speaking clearly so hard for professors?

[Anonymous No.3691657]

>>3691547
It's probably about the animality of humans (human being mamals and all that) rather than other animal species, I guess.

>>3691519
I guess you are trolling. But seriously, did my explanation made sense to you, or does it come off as pretentious bullshit ? I d'ont even agree with her, I simply tried to make sense of that line.

but now to be troublesome—what is the relationship between mind and body, between science and state, that is exemplified by the Orthodox mystic tradition? Is there an escape presaged by Christian teaching, or must we submit to Islam to escape the rationality of capitalism as Luther Blisset suggests in _Q_?

Interesting twist. I couldn't tell, I know nothing about Orthodox christianity. And mind that I was just answering to the sentence you suggested, I didn't have to provide it by myself. I couldn't produce a thing of the like on my own.
But broadly speaking I don't think Islam is a good "escape" from Christianity if that's what you're craving. Islam is after all an abrahamic religion that endorses patriarchy. There's no real way out. Try Buddhism or Taoism (inb4 Tao Lin) maybe.

[Anonymous No.3691663]

>>3691653
there's literally no advantage to them speaking clearly, whereas there are clearly reasons why it may be better for them not to be fully understood (or this may have been true for them before they became full professor or got tenure, and the habit is too engrained to change)

moral hazard of professionalized academia

[Anonymous No.3691738]

>>3691657

surely we all accepted our animality long ago and this is not even a problem worth considering? if anything, there is problem with the trend TOWARDS animality. everywhere today there is emphasis on the human as merely a biological organism in a deterministic system. from the fedora atheists to the frank yang weight lifters to pop science ted talk bullshitters to the philosophers of mind (and analytic philosophers generally) we get this world-view. i feel like a should be a Luddite, but instead of machines i would smash myself as an animal and show that i am not merely this. but this would be highly unpopular because one would instantly be accused of some kind of irrational mysticism or dualism.

[Anonymous No.3691743]

should I own a pet or not Donna?

Also where the fuck are muh neo-marxists fighting the good fight in the superstructure to free all of us non-animal animals

[Anonymous No.3691765]

>>3691738
The idea is probably that irrevocably separating men from animals by exalting reason is itself, ironically, irrational, that it brings us to an irrealistic and eventually unhealthy understanding of people (think Nietzschy here- the mind is merely a part of the body, and the body is not the slave of the mind).
I would say, you are an animal. The 'merely' you add here seems to be quite derogatory of animals, while there's no need for such thing. You can know you are an animal without despising yourself as a rational being.

Here we get to the core of the problem, I think: the traditional division of roles and values between species. We traditionally think of humanity as the more worthwhile species while all animals are cast in an abyss of base irrationality that is assumed to be worthy of contempt or ignorance ar best. In this setting, you would think that stating human are animals is a bad thing, that if it is ever to be true, it is then a harsh and quite despairing truth. You would think emphasizing on the animality of man would lead us to despise culture and rationality and to become somehow decadents.

But this is the case only in this Bible-inspired framework (because honestly the idea that we are the ultimate soul-bearing species comes straight to ol' Testy). If you have a rather neutral, even almost scientific and biological view of animals, then the animality of men becomes a mere matter of fact (but one that is to be acknolewdge, because some facts can't be ignored). Now that's not exactly what people like those we are discussing here say. That's merely my personal take on it.

Sciences Studies professor would probably add that the division between man and animal is typical of patriarchal society, that it is but one of the many hierarchies that enforce the patriarchal order. And they wouldn't necessarily be wrong about that.

[Anonymous No.3691831]

>>3691765

but it seems strange to be mute to the fact that while i can be seen on a continuum with other animals, i am also fundamentally different from these (literally) dumb creatures. they do not speak and do not have the same existential capacities as i do (heidegger had some nice categories on this which i have forgotten..). to acknowledge that does not necessarily degrade them but perhaps gives us responsibilities towards them.

i don't think upholding a division between man and animal is necessarily a failure to let go of archaic mythology or relinquish patriarchy. certainly there would be benefits to seeing animals and men as equals regarding animal welfare (Singer has a bunch of arguments about this). but what would the implications be for man thinking about himself in this way, as "animal" instead of "human"? or rather, to sublimate the category of humanity to that of animality? we would lose a wealth of substantive understandings of the self and probably resort to mechanistic, positivist understandings which emphasise the physical, biological, etc. this would probably lead to a strengthening of biopolitical control rather than an escape from it. problems could only be conceived as material, and thus answers would also only be material (a mirror to capitalist thinking?).

[Anonymous No.3691847]

Fuck animals that aren't people. They aren't even fucking people.

[Anonymous No.3693052]

>>3691657
Your explanation made sense.

[Anonymous No.3693163]

>>3691083
>argument

Are you sure? Because after 26 minutes of this video, so far I have only made out the statements 'I like animals' and 'I am an intellectual, hear me quote', and neither of these constitute an argument in the technical sense.

[Anonymous No.3693333]

I'll take Judy over Donna every damn day.

[Anonymous No.3695044]

>>3693333
Everyone loves Judy. Stop being so trite.

[Anonymous No.3695117]

'To beg a question': a type of circular reasoning disguised as inquiry. E.g. 'The Bible is Divine otherwise God would not have written it.'
Your argument doesn't prove feminism is astorlogy, it only proves your girlfriend is a jpeg.