Simians, Cyborgs, and Women - Donna Haraway

Lenses through which we see and languages through which we speak, are each integrally constitutive of how and what we know. Of the world we create and thus inhabit. The (re)invention of nature will be composed of how we imagine the divide between ourselves and the world - thus how we envision ourselves. In this collection of essays, Donna Haraway seeks to replace the closed, coherent imagined self with a social and world-inhabiting and creating identity which is more thoroughly local, contingent, and provisional. Simians, cyborgs, and women all represent alternate not-quite-fully human identities which have been used to draw boundaries in the hegemonic, masculine, reductionist, economic western patriarchy. Haraway seeks an alternate epistemology which is specifically located and thus not parochial, but which is strengthened through its intimate familiarity of perspective. The view from nowhere, she suggests, is no view at all.

Haraway takes the perspective that all scientific texts are situated entities susceptible to critique. Taking the position of social-embeddedness to a logical conclusion, she asks how the modes of metaphor and seeing through which we experience the natural, say studies of primatology, will condition our ways of understanding the always partially uncertain world. Visions of dominance hierarchies which focus upon aggression within primate communities risk overlooking how mutualistic interactions may also play a central role in group functioning and maintenance. When we draw parallels between our primate relatives and the human social world - as though chimps were somehow archaic people 'unpolluted' by the cultural factor - suddenly 'human nature' is imagined to likewise be expressive of dominant-subordinate relationships. This perspective feeds-back: our perspective along these lines deepen, altering how we see the world.

Rather than juxtapose the human with the natural, Haraway suggests that we are all more emblematic of the cyborg. That is, our bodies have been, and will continue to be, hybrids, composed of the natural world and technologies. She rejects the question, but what, underneath it all, is truly the human? There is no 'underneath it all.' The relationships which we embody are constitutive of reality. Hope to separate the human from the world - as though we would each have an unpolluted essence - are always false hopes. We are positioned and thus privileged within that unique position to know and express one of many worlds. Reality is the ever-transforming meeting place between the mind and the world. Never closed, always partial.