Haraway, Donna (1944—)
American feminist cultural critic renowned for her works on the intersections between humans and machines and humans and animals, powerfully summarized in her two manifestos on cyborgs and companion species. Her work covers an incredibly wide range of topics in the human and life sciences, but it is particularly focused on the interfaces between the studies of animal behaviour, on the one hand, and human behavior, on the other hand, and the various ways the former is used to explain the latter and vice versa. Haraway was born in Denver, Colorado. Her father was sportswriter (a fact she recalls fondly in When Species Meet (2008), which has a section entitled ‘Notes of a Sportswriter’s Daughter’) and her mother was Irish-Catholic. In the interviews collected in How Like a Leaf (2000) Haraway stresses the importance to her of her mother’s Catholicism and her own encounter with it. And even though she subsequently moved away from organized religion, she still cites Catholicism as an influence, particularly its doctrines of incarnation and transubstantiation, which she reads as an example of the fusing of the bodily (material) and the symbolic (semiotic), which is a constant theme in her work. Haraway studied zoology and philosophy at Colorado College and then completed a PhD at Yale. She initially worked on biology as an experimental practice, but she found she had little taste for laboratory work. So, she shifted the focus of her thesis to the role of metaphor in shaping research in developmental biology. Published as Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Development Biology (1976), Haraway’s thesis argued that all theoretical systems in biology depend upon an organizing metaphor. After she graduated, she taught women’s studies and general science at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins University before her appointment in 1980 to the History of Consciousness programme at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as America’s first professor of Feminist Theory. She has worked there ever since. Haraway’s work has gone through a number of distinct phases, but her abiding question, throughout, is what is at stake in creating and policing the boundary between what gets called ‘nature’ and what gets called ‘culture’. She is not interested in settling this question once and for all; indeed, it is doubtful she would say that it was even possible to do so. Rather, it is a question which she uses to trouble accepted dogmas in the human and life sciences, particularly those relating to sex and gender. Her approach is dialectic in the Marxism sense of the word. She is concerned to show the way categories like nature and culture subtly depend on and presuppose one another. Although this approach resonates very strongly with deconstruction, Haraway says she only came to French theory (by which she means drive and Spivak, Gayatri) late in her formation as a scholar (despite the fact that both Yale and Johns Hopkins were hotbeds of deconstruction in the period she was there). She acknowledges a debt to Deleuze, Gilles and authority for their concept of the assemblage, but emphatically rejects their concept of becoming as unworldly. More important to her were Whitehead, desire, and Heidegger, Martin. Her second book, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), showed that humans’ assumptions about themselves are reflected in their analyses of animals, which in theories of animal aggression, for example, mirror our own view of ourselves as creatures driven by instincts. Drawing on Said, Edward’s concept of Orientalism, Haraway coins the term ‘Simian Orientalism’ to characterize primatology’s propensity to project its views about humans onto primates and to see primates as earlier, less developed versions of humans. Haraway uses the history of primatology as a discipline as a lens through which to see and bring more fully into the light the racial and national discourses of colonialism and cosmopolitanism. Written in the same period as Primate Visions, but published a couple of years later, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991) contains the previously published essay for which Haraway is undoubtedly best known, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. It also contains the essay on situated knowledge, which can be read as a primer for how to think and work like Haraway. It emphasizes the paradoxical need to balance critical scepticism with empirical facts, to avoid facile indecision and easy generalizations. Haraway rejects both postmodernism and realism and instead argues for a position of unstable constellations of partial truths and partial connections. Interestingly, she also rejects the label *posthumanist, though she is often classified as one. Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ was written on assignment for the journal Socialist Review. The brief was to write a few pages envisioning what was possible from the perspective of that historical juncture, which we now think of as the start of the Reagan—Thatcher years and the birth of the new world order now known as globalization. (Jameson, Fredric’s essay on postmodernism written in the same period can be read as a companion piece. Interestingly, Jameson was on Haraway’s thesis committee at Yale and they were briefly colleagues at Santa Cruz.) Haraway says the manifesto is a product of its times, especially the militarization of information (informatics, as it was known) that became such a dominant way of thinking during the course of the Vietnam War. It was an attempt to think about the implications of the conversion into data of every aspect of life. Importantly, for Haraway, the cyborg should not be confused with the android; it belongs to its own moment in time. The ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ was remarkably prescient and has for this reason been widely read as a critique of the way ‘big data’ are used today. But Haraway did not want it to be read in purely negative terms; she was also interested in and keen to explore further the utopian potential embedded in this transformation. And it is undoubtedly this hopeful, tricksterish dimension (as she calls it) that has enabled it to endure beyond the confines of its immediate historical context. Its deep connection to the science fiction of writers like Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delany, as well as many others, gives the text a utopian richness often missing from science and technology studies. Haraway’s next book, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan© _Meets_OncoMouse™ (1997), continues the themes of her work on situated knowledge and cyborgs but does so in a way that spells out more of a cautionary tale. An important target for her is something she calls ‘genetic fetishism’, a concept that combines Marxism’s notion of commodity fetishism and Lukács, György’ concept of reification. Haraway’s concern is the way discussions about genes and genetic engineering ‘forgets’ that genes are phantom objects. They do not exist on their own, but are part and parcel of the complex network of interconnecting parts that constitute the body in all its senses. Isolating the gene from its links to the corporeal enables its commodification, making ‘it’ the source of value. For the past decade and a half, beginning with the The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and continuing with When Species Meet (2008), Haraway’s work has been focused on the limits and possibilities of human—animal relations in an ethical and political sense. These are overtly personal books, inspired by Haraway’s own encounters with what she lovingly refers to as ‘critters’. Both books are attempts to think through what it means to make a life with a non-human other, specifically a dog in Haraway’s own case, but by no means limited to dogs in their scope. The central hypothesis underpinning this body of work is the idea that beings do not pre-exist their relationship to one another. Dogs are not dogs outside their relationship with humans, but neither are humans the humans we think we are outside their relationship with dogs. Central to these books is the need to think about ontology in a contingent, non-dogmatic, non-transcendental fashion. Drawing on a wide body of work in anthropology, Haraway conceptualizes this contingent ontology as emergent and, in a sense, as a kind of dance. It calls on us to make kith not kin, to develop and foster relations with all significant others and not just those we produce ourselves. Her most recent work, Staying with Trouble (2016), takes this a step further. It is a utopian attempt to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. Rejecting the concept of the Anthropocene as both inadequate to the needs of our times and overly invested in the actions of humans, Haraway instead proposes to refer to the current epoch as the Chthulucene, which is derived from ‘chthōn’, the Greek word for earth. As with the previous books, it is premised on a complex ontology of sympoiesis, or ‘making-with’, rather than autopoiesis, or ‘self-making’. Overall, it argues for a grounded approach to thinking about the needs of the future. Further Reading: D. Haraway Manifestly Haraway (2016). J. Schneider Donna Haraway: Live Theory (2005).