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.
