Friday, September 06, 2013

Happy Birthday to Donna J. Haraway: Reflections on Situated Knowledges

Today, in honor of the birth of biologist and feminist philosopher of science Donna J. Haraway, I am very briefly reflecting on her notion of partial perspective as laid out in her famous essay Situated Knowledges, in the context of colonialism and academic knowledge making.  I have been revisiting the writings of Franz Fanon in preparation for a course I am currently designing to be taught later this year, and Fanon has me thinking very intensely about colonialism as of late.  Admittedly, what follows is my own uptake of one general theme I sensed in the essay and I wanted to apply this theme to a general idea of colonialism and the notion of an ever lingering colonial gaze that continues to haunt much of traditional Western academic thought like some kind of imperial phantom.  I do not claim to offer a succinct 'revelation' of what Haraway was actually thinking or believing when she wrote the essay in 1988.  Nor do I advocate any kind of 'pure' standpoint or offer any close-ended exclusive assessment of Haraway as a certain 'type' of intellectual.  I am only speaking for myself about some of my own current reflections about what I gleaned from this deep, rich, and very thought-provoking essay.  Here I am thinking with Haraway's concept of Situated Knowledges in contexts of colonialism and accountability.

I am writing in the first person, not because I see myself as a colonizer, but because I recognize the pollution of the colonizer inside of me, and inside of much of the knowledge and knowledge practices that have surrounded and shaped me within institutional academia for so many years.  This is not the first time I have been conscious of this.  Historically, as academics and public professionals ritually subjugated by the Eurocolonial Western world, we have too often sought to escape history and subjectivity--indeed our own humanity--in the pursuit of certified knowledge.  We are literally trained to do this, as well as rewarded for it.  However, this feat is not only impossible but ethically irresponsible. We are limited and partial forever. The world is not ours.  Nobody gave it to us.  The universe is bigger than any human--or any human capacity for knowing--will ever be. We see everything through conditioned eyes, forever.  We are situated, we are located, we are materially and ontologically constrained as knowing subjects.  Our visions are not pure or absolute.  We are polluted, interested, and conflicted, and subject to waves of unquenchable desire, in spite of everything we know.  This applies not only to the colonial gaze but also to various subjects of the colonial gaze, including historical 'underdogs' that are often rendered unaccountably pure, innocent, primitive and/or naive simply because they represent that which is not the colonizer. The violence of subtraction and rarefaction in the colonial gaze is both real and multidimensional.  There is no truly innocent standpoint.  However, while there is no truly innocent standpoint, we can assume that the narratives of historically marginalized subjugated standpoints beneath "the brilliant space platforms of the powerful" (Haraway 1988) generally offer more grounded and ultimately transformative accounts of the world.  Recognizing the reality of situated knowledges does not in any way, shape, or form call for the obliteration of objectivity or the fetishizing of relativism.  On the contrary,  far from it.  Rather, it is about holding oneself and one's material practices of seeing and doing more accountable when making knowledge.   Indeed, it is a reason to make our objectivities stronger and more meaningful, and therefore less arbitrary, violent, and unaccountable.


                                      Diffraction

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