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Stine Jensen
D O N N A H A R A W A Y
Modest_Witness@Second_
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New York London 1996 isbn 0 415 91245 8 English text 388 pp $ 18.95 |
I want my readers to understand that this book is a family romance, or scholarly soap opera, set in a kind of critical General Hospital or theoretical DallasŠ We read these promising words in the introduction to Donna Haraway¹s most recent book, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse, Feminism and Technoscience. The title looks like an email address. Modest Witness is the sender, an invisible, modest character who surfaces in almost every scientific study. FemaleMan refers to a science fiction novel by Joanna Russ and guarantees Haraway's radical feministic effort. The copyright symbol recalls people's urge to register both property and things original, a task which is becoming increasingly difficult these days. Oncomouse is the first patented, genetically manipulated mouse. The point in history in which all of these hybrid figures (who also play the leading roles in the book) come together is the Second Millennium. Haraway's choice of an email address reflects her book's approach. Whether we like it or not, we live in a technological information society. We are all cyborgs. Rather a cyborg than a goddess, wrote Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985). In this widelydiscussed essay, Haraway launched the notion of cyborg as a metaphor in her struggle against stubborn dichotomies like natureculture, manwoman and humanmachine. The cyborg is neither human nor machine, but rather a mixture of both. Haraway's work is full of similar hybrids, or 'implosions' as she calls them, for example technoscience (to criticize the distinction between technology and science), scientifact (the blending of fact and fiction), scienticulture (the entwining of the humanities and hard science), politicoscientific (to initiate a discussion on the supposed borders between politics and science), FemaleMan (the mixture of feminine and masculine). Modest Witness consists of three sections in which Haraway presents her 'language', namely, Syntactics, Semantics and Pragmatics. In the first section, she introduces the book's structure and separates the various narrative strands contained in her title. In the second section, she delves primarily into the biotechnical history of genetically manipulated animals, such as oncomouse. The third section's theme is a practical analysis of three influential twentiethcentury thought constructions: the gene, the fetus, and race. The most impressive chapter in this section, with a just as imposing title, is RACE. Universal donors in a vampire culture: It's all in the family. Biological kinship categories in the TwentiethCentury United States. In a table of more than ten pages in length, Haraway presents an overview of 'human beings ' biotechnical history. In this table she shows that technoscience is an historical variable as well as a cultural practice. The table is divided into three periods, 19001930s, 19401970s and 19751990s, with various headings such as Instructions how to act around Aliens. In this category, she names Well's novel War of the Worlds (1898), Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the Alien films (1979) as high points, representative of the three eras. Other categories include Popular Images of Apes and Key Objects of Knowledge. The table isn't really designed for a book, but it would function well as a hypertext, inviting the reader to make leaps from link to link to link. Hypertext is the overarching metaphor which holds Haraway's book together, a metaphor for making connections and creating possible new worlds. After Derrida's proposition that the world is a text, one could say that Haraway is proposing an interesting new suggestion to philosophers and scientific researchers, namely that the world is a hypertext. Haraway wants to trace down the desires and motivations behind the connections being made. She wants to put her finger right on the sore spots, such as the shutting out of certain groups, specifically women and people of color, in order to ultimately arrive at a more livable technoscience. For Haraway, hypertext also means a new technology of writing in which different forms of cultural expression stand side by side. Thus she discusses in her book not only scientific articles but also advertisements, science fiction and painting. Unique in this book is her collaboration with artist Lynn Randolph. Every chapter begins with an image of one of Randolph's paintings, paintings which she made using Haraway's ideas as inspiration. An interesting attempt at initiating a discourse between art and technoculture, but the way in which Haraway discusses the paintings makes every art lover's toes curl. While elsewhere she pleads for multiple meanings and ambiguity in regard to telling stories, here she leaves nothing to the imagination, supplying every image with a lengthy text and explanation. Art degenerates to a puzzle which has to be solved. Haraway's work is celebrated and decried. She is read by a broad audience, ranging from feminists and technophiles to academics and science fiction fans. Gross and Levitt, authors of the controversial book Higher Superstition, called Haraway a 'liar' and grouped her with the 'leftists,' the group of leftist intellectuals who, according to them, lean too heavily on the ideal of political correctness. Most of Haraway's critics, however, don't take note of her radical politics, but instead take aim at her complex narrative technique. Reading Haraway is never a smooth autobahn, said an American review. Yet Modest Witness is, compared with her earlier works, surprisingly accessible, although Haraway still displays a pronounced predilection for piling together adjectives. Consider this sentence: The technical, textual, organic, historical, formal, mythic, academic and political dimensions of entities, actions, and worlds implode in the gravity well of technoscience ‹ or perhaps of any world massive enough to bend our attention, warp our certainties, and sustain our lives (p. 68). The book is teeming with similar abstract litanies, and Haraway never gets tired of repeating them. As a reader, however, it becomes completely exhausting. This high level of abstraction allows Haraway to make major statements, yet while hardly always being clear about what the terms, which are staked on critical discourse, actually mean. But still, most of Haraway's fans won't be put off by that. What makes the book important is its ingenious multimedia and interdisciplinary experimentation, which has also resulted in a lovely design. Haraway's message is urgent. According to her, science is a 'dramatic story,' or even, as she suggests in the introduction, a theoretical soap opera. We are all witnesses to our information society, and are likewise responsible for the stories which are told about who we want to be. If we don't like the stories, we can try to intervene with new ones. Or we can borrow someone else's words, like Haraway does in using a Paul Simon lyric to express the contemporary zeitgeist: And billionaires and baby / These are the days of miracle and wonder / this is the longdistance call. A flirtation with politically correct pop, and a snazzy flight of postmodern fancy, you might think, with relativism lying in wait. Yet Haraway reminds us that these cheerful stories are never innocent; there is always someone who profits from a particular story, while someone else suffers. Cui bono? Who lives? Who dies? are the questions which form the foundation of Haraway's work. According to her, 'postmodern' is a term which can only be descriptive at best, and which does not offer any explanations about our complex society. Haraway herself is a witness to this society, a witness who strives to make 'modest interventions.' She succeeds in doing so, yet in my opinion she need not adopt such a modest attitude. Because for anyone who wants to find out anything about technological culture, there's no getting around Modest Witness. translation DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER
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