Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
In her essay Sitauted Knowledge, Haraway critiques science’s claim to and desire for “objectivity”, “the science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned rationality” (590). Haraway urges feminists to work toward a better account of the world, “a postmodern insistence on irreducible difference and radical multiplicity of local knowledges”(579). She argues that knowledge is embodied, located, multiple, communal, positioned. Partial knowledge is most powerful when coming from a subjugated position, “the peripheries and the depths” (583). These perspectives are most likely to reject the totalizing God’s eye viewpoint, knowing it is not theirs, creating space for understanding knowledge as critical and interpretative. This “gaze from nowhere” (581) is disembodied, “the deadly fantasy” (580), “the power to see and not be seen”, “the unmarked positions of Man and White” (581). In contrast, partial knowledge, stitched together many times over through “webs of differentiated positioning” and “power-sensitive conversation”, builds toward a feminist objectivity. Knowledge is interpretive and always involves partial and critical translation, “feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges” (581).
To describe this standpoint, Haraway engages the metaphor of vision. Vision is always embodied and often technologically enhanced. In the modern world, “vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all seems not just mythically about the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice.” (581) In light of the tech developments of the last ~20 years, especially the creation and use of “objective” big data, this technological gluttony and the practice of seeing from nowhere is likely even more of an ordinary practice than when Haraway wrote this essay in 1988.
God-like vision, infinite vision, is an illusion; we must insist on the embodied nature of all vision and hence all knowledge, “allow[ing] us to construct a usable, but not an innocent, doctrine of objectivity” (582). We need to re-orient ourselves in relation to the “visualizing tricks and powers of modern sciences”. To do this we must “learn in our bodies” and “attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not” (582). From this perspective, objectivity becomes specific, particular, located and only this partial vision promises anything close to objectivity. We must learn to see and be accountable for what we learn to see. Vision and our eyes become “active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.” The ways of life we witness will demonstrate specificity and difference; we need to learn to see faithfully from another’s point of view, “understanding how these visual systems work technically, socially, and psychically, ought to be a way of embodying feminist objectivity” (583).
Transforming systems of knowledge and ways of seeing relies on a commitment to non-innocent engagement with identity politics and epistemologies, “’being is much more problematic and contingent” and we must be held accountable for our claims to our vantage points, “vision is always a question of the power to see…self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meaning and bodies.” (585). Self-identity will not produce science or an objective viewpoint. Rather critical positioning, understanding the self as partial will move towards this. Haraway contends that “splitting” is “the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge…heterogeneous multiplicities…salient and incapable of being squashed…knowing the self is partial in all its guises, never finished, never whole” (586). Through the recognition of the split and multiple self, we are “able to join with another to see together without claiming to be another.” According to Haraway, “here is the promise of objectivity: a scientific knower seeks the subject position, not of identity, but of objectivity, that is, partial connection.”
As a split, partial self, positioning becomes important for seeking and grounding knowledge. Positioning entails taking responsibility for what we see and acknowledging the politics and ethics connected to the knowledge projects we create and engage in, “struggles over what will count as rational accounts of the world are struggles over how to see” (587). The visual metaphor invites us to move beyond merely what we see in order to consider how we see, considering the “apparatuses of visual production…the intricacies of these visualization technologies in which we are embedded” (589). To consider the production of vision we may begin to see the “patterns of reality for which we must be accountable” (589).
Splitting, location, feminist embodiment, and webs of differential positioning resist simplification, fixation, and closure, “the goal is better accounts of the world, that is, ‘science’”. Science relies on creation of rational knowledge which Haraway defines as “a process of ongoing critical interpretation among ‘fields’ of interpreters and decoders…a power-sensitive conversation.” Science becomes “accountability and responsibility translations and solidarities linking the cacophonous visions and visionary voices that characterize the knowledge of the subjugated”. These subjugated positions are particularly important because of the “connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible” (590). These situated knowledges must treat the object of their knowledge as actors within their experiences, “accounts of the ‘real’ world do not then depend on a logic of ‘discovery’” since this would imply the world waits passively to be discovered, but rather “on a power-charged social relation of ‘conversation’…codes of the world are not still…the world encountered in knowledge projects is an active entity” (593). (Need more clarification on this—Latour?)
Other Quotes
“I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden.” (589)
“traditionally what can count as knowledge is policed by philosophers codifying cognitive canon law.”
“Science…is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one’s manufactured knowledge is route to a desired form of very objective power….rhetorical nature of truth” (577)
“We unmasked the doctrines of objectivity because they threatened our budding sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our “embodied” accounts of truth”
“Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; its not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything…’our’ problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subject, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘ semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real world’…a postmodern insistence on irreducible difference and radical multiplicity of local knowledges” (579)
On the mysterious they: “decrying what they have meant and how it hurt us. The imagined “they” constitute a kind of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists…the imagined we are the embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a body…I confess to these paranoid fantasies and academic resentments….”
