TECBlogging

Donna Harraway

Hey everyone, I know this probably doesn’t do much good now, but here is my Donna Harraway Precies

In this beautiful am amazing essay Donna Harraway expands many of her other most famous concepts, especially those mobilized by the cyborg and on the proliferation of hybrids.

She begins this with a discussion of “nature”`stating that it is a “commonplace and a powerfully discursive construction.” Harraway is attempting to work through a model and understanding of nature (and really existence, especially embodiment,) which is not caught in the unproductive crosshairs of Modernist or postmodernism, arguing (after Latour,) that we have “never been modern.”

She movingly describes bodies as material semiotic generative nodes” which materialize in social interaction among humans and non-humans, including machines and other instruments.

She introduces, and later in the article, fleshes out a model based on the human-immune system, writing: “So while the late-twentieth century immune system, for example, is a construct of an elaborate apparatus of bodily production, neither the immune system nor any other of biology’s world-changing bodies-like viruses or an ecosystem – is a ghostly fantasy.

Movingly, Harraway discusses the corporeality of theory, that it is necessarily material, bodily, and literal.

Using a semiotic grid of A. Real Space: Earth; B. Out Space: The Extraterrestrial; Not B. Inner Space: The Biomedical Body; and Not A. Virtual Space: SF, Harraway’s essay weaves through close readings of technological advertisements, t-shirt logos, and space chimp narratives to flesh out her thesis on nature, artificiality, embodiment and technology.

Whether it is a read contrasting the relationship of fetuses to mother’s bodies to Amazonian inhabitants to the Amazon jungle (who is speaking thus?) and the assumptions from which such arguments are made or an unpacking of the misogynist- racist-imperialist under girding of a photograph of Jane Goodall holding hands with a monkey (the chimp touches her, anointing her as science to speak for it, nature, wrapped un in complex (and very visible) histories of miscegenation.)

One of the most lovely stretches (beside its entirety) is Harraway’s personal tale about the intervention and controversy of Surrogate Other’s, their infiltration into a government testing site (using a floral-print polyester snake-worm with “lovely dragon eyes,”) and the unpacking of the semantics, and images of their name and shirts (describing the world as an amniotic sac and mother simultaneously, the kind of descriptive “monstrous” hybrids, the spaces of the margins, that Harraway works.

Finally at the end emerges her discussion of the cyborg reading in the Lynn Randolph painting Cyborg (1989) “the full circle of the noisey semiotic square, finding it a rainbow of political semiology for wily transnational techno science studies as cultural studies.”

I am interested an always very moved at her reads of visual imagery, like ads, and the extreme importance it carries for her theoretically and politically, what, as cultural produces do we make of her reads and its implications for our practice.

posted by Jarrett @ 9:01 AM