I made it through Haraway last weekend and started on Katie King's Networked Reenactments. this change of my original order was motivated mainly by my needing to finish Networked Reenactments before I leave town, so I can return it to its owner. fittingly though, King references Haraway in ways I should've expected. I'll get to that in a next post very soon, I think.
for now, I need to finish regurgitating some thoughts on Modest Witness. they might seem pretty random at the moment-- consider this a quick sketch, to which I might return for polishing/revision.
genetic technology comes up again with the Human Genome Project and related media. on page 160 Haraway insists that "we need to learn how to engage in knowledge-making practices in genetics, as well as in other cultural domains, that produce critical and cross-cutting multidisciplinary, multispecies, and multicultural savvy." what Haraway wants involves more involvement. more representation. she wants this we to include more of everything. more nature and culture, more men and women, machines, more organisms, more humans and more non-humans... but how? there's a brilliantly inspiring description of Denmark's approach--inviting citizens to form a sort of jury for evaluating the technological advances of the country's academics and businesspeople(94-96)--and it sounds pretty awesome. but my main question in the face of this ideal is what if nobody cares that much? I don't see American citizens as willing as the Danes must have been to regularly participate in such a thing. maybe we'd have to approach it differently. maybe we could find our own ways of more effectively mixing public action and private industry, as Haraway describes. I wonder what it would take. where would we start?
I guess she imagines that stuffing so much more into our knowledge-making practices will implode the lines and divisions we put up between all those categories, in some awesome way. I kept thinking, as Haraway threw these implosions around, about the idea of oscillatio from Richard Lanham's The Economics of Attention. Haraway's vision centers in a bothness, and it seems similar to what Lanham talks about in terms of digital technologies forcing material stuff and intellectual non-stuff to switch places. for him, this keeps happening and happening, back and forth, and we can't really conceive of stuff as non-stuff or vice versa at the same time, so everything ends up oscillating. our brains have to balance both views very talentedly. does that mean the real dissolution of boundaries will never happen? the only real result of the implosions Haraway is using will be these delicate binary star systems of paradoxical opposites?
the way Haraway discusses writing technologies seems exemplary of some sort of implosion--since it isn't just one kind of writing she brings into her book. she is open to including fiction, science writing, ethnographies, anthropological research, government publications, images and comics, advertisements. almost anything can be connected, and this approach reinforces the author's argument for implosion of disciplinary (and other) boundaries.
as for my previous notes on queerness (and adjacent social technologies?) + gestation and transformation... I can touch on both thoughts with the section of this book that whacked me over the head most profoundly. in her accounts of how reproductive freedom comes up in various cultures and periods, Haraway references two terms/concepts from biology: K-selected species and r-selected species(204-205). the former are species (like humans) who devote more care and attention to fewer offspring; the latter do the reverse, expending less care on a much greater number of offspring (like fish, or insects). she makes an analogy here using K-selected species vs. r-selected, mapping the two terms pretty disturbingly to the way our class systems seem to be working. more affluent (white) families in first-world countries can give more money and privilege and opportunity to one or two children. many in the developing world can't, and the birthrates in such countries fit the pattern. that this analogy makes so much sense is mind-boggling and I do not know what to do about it.
next week I'll connect some of this up with Katie King, I hope. Networked Reenactments so far has some similar perspectives on communities and the meaning of participation within them... I'm finding the different levels of re/enactment extra-fascinating in terms of copyright/remix/etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment