Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
“Whether I agree to her existence and use or not, s/he suffers, physically,
repeatedly, and profoundly, that I and my sisters may live.”
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In Haraway's elusive, endlessly beguiling way of writing, the method-
ological commitments of contemporary science studies and cultural
studies begin to generate a collection of moral sentiments—ones offered
as interpretive insights, but never fully argued as explicit ethical com-
mitments. Thus, her expressions of kinship with cyborgs and hybrids
stem from the view that “technoscience as cultural practice and practi-
cal culture, . . . requires attention to all the meanings, identities, materi-
alities, and accountabilities of the subjects and objects in play. That is
what kinship is about in my 'ethnographic' fugue.”
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An important con-
sequence of this approach is to discredit beliefs that things in nature have
distinctive integrity, wholeness of being, or harmony with their sur-
roundings that deserve emphasis in considerations about where techno-
science and global corporations can properly move. In Haraway's view,
beliefs of this kind predicate a world that no longer exists, if indeed it
ever did. What we must focus on now are the circumstances in which a
culturally created nature confronts us with things that are only partly
identifiable by origins and conditions that existed prior to the arrival of
modern civilization. She writes:
Located in the belly of the monster, I find discourses of natural harmony, the
nonalien and purity unsalvageable for understanding our genealogy in the New
World Order, Inc. Like it or not, I was born kin to PU239 and to transgenic,
transspecific, and transported creatures of all kinds; that is the family for which
and to whom my people are accountable. It will not help—emotionally, intel-
lectually, morally, or politically—to appeal to the natural and the pure.
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One can, however, appeal to the weird, the transgressive, and the
disharmonious. In her vision of the world, nature is reduced to a kind
of comic puzzle. The category that now merits our attention, indeed our
awe, is technoscience, the new buzzword of science studies, which she
continually reifies in all of its colorful, shape-shifting perversity.
One of Haraway's concerns, a legitimate one, is that the names and
the theories produced by science in the past have helped inspire and
justify racist policies and institutions in both the North and the South.
Using her methods to witness “implosions of nature and culture” and
undermine racist strategies and their rhetorics of “purity,” she feels she
must also dismiss contemporary arguments that applications of biotech-
