‘Situated Knowledges’ and New Materialism(s): Rethinking a Politics of Location

Abstract

Playing a pivotal role in foregrounding a feminist politics of difference, a politics of location embodies what can be termed second-wave concerns that continue to inform contemporary feminist modes of inquiry and research. However, the attention to material specificity that locatability performs has emphasized the identity of the speaking subject at the same time as it has acknowledged materiality's entangled engagements as suggestive of the complicated production of any identity. In her 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges’, Donna Haraway both raises and responds to the challenge of a feminist politics of location in a way that anticipates a convoluted politics of the subject, in particular where she is not satisfied to relinquish universality and objectivity, or the ‘non-local’, in her provocative thinking through of situated knowledge production. The partial perspective she uncovers insists that the capacity for identity is addressed as a political gesture, with a reminder that any appeal to perspective is a non-innocent participation in what it helps to produce. In taking up Haraway's essay, the author engages with the problematic nature of a politics of location that is confounded by the direction of its critical interventions, and in such a way anticipates and performs new (feminist) materialist concerns. Questioning the nature of non-locatability and its political imperatives, the author suggests an ‘annunciative politics’ through which to consider some of the implications of Haraway's figuring of the partial perspective, to ask after feminism's political impetus with the tensions raised in Haraway's argument kept alive.

Keywords:

• Donna Haraway
• politics of location
• new materialism
• feminist politics
• non-locatability
• annunciative politics

Notes

1 Haraway's vision for feminist politics thwarts attempts to easily ‘locate’ this politics or her argument in either disciplinary or generational terms. Her instructive essay ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ provides one such example of this difficulty (Haraway 1985). Combining a science and technology studies background with the concerns of Marxist and socialist feminisms, here Haraway demonstrates a basic irreverence towards more emphatic forms of feminist identity politics, and introduces the cyborg as a postmodernist strategy for fragmented boundary identities and political orientations. However, the transgressive landscape that the cyborg represents does not appear to follow on from an existing Marxist or socialist legacy in which these feminisms constitute cohesive standpoints. As Haraway remarks, these second-wave feminist projects ‘have also undermined their/our own epistemological strategies’ (Haraway 1985: 75). Their categorizations are transversal: both internally and in disrupting other feminist positions. The challenge for Haraway is to imagine (cyborg) feminist politics that can embrace ‘partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves’ as forms of political affinity that do not presume to construct a ‘whole’ (for example, ‘woman’, ‘socialist feminist’, ‘class’), yet which ‘can still be faithful, effective—and ironically, socialist feminist’ (Haraway 1985: 75).

2 Originally coined by Adrienne Rich, a ‘politics of location’ carries general currency as a methodology for feminist political practice (Rich 1986). On this basis, I have engaged Haraway's argument for situated knowledge as an approach that resonates in and with a politics of location.

3 I take the term ‘non-locatability’ from Vicki Kirby (1997: 113).

4 See also Kirsten Campbell's essay, ‘The Promise of Feminist Reflexivities’, in which she identifies in Haraway's argument for situated knowledge a problematic qualification of feminist critical practice, an appeal to the authenticity (or the ‘truth’) of particular perspectives over others and a potential essentialism to be at work (Campbell 2004).

5 With no a-priori self-presence of the subject who speaks, ‘[e]ven a particular point of view is never a simple unity’, as Kirby points out. Perspective ‘is always and necessarily different from itself, dislocating and displacing the very property of one point of view’ (Kirby 1997: 161).

6 Earlier in her essay, Haraway clarifies that she considers the universality promised by science to be reducible when it enforces masculinist language as the standard for all translation (Haraway 1988: 580).

7 On this point with regard to feminist ethnography, see, for example, Kirby (1993).

8 Iris van der Tuin and Rick Dolphijn make this connection explicit in their comment that Haraway's understanding of material-semiotic agency (as the implicated production of materiality and signification) affirms Barad's ethico-onto-epistemology (van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2010: 166). Across her oeuvre, Barad also clearly indicates where Haraway's work has informed her own.

9 This confusion is also apparent in the example I gave earlier—namely, Haraway's suggestion of ‘joining partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position’, which is objective by virtue of its being a pastiche of voices, rather than a mode of rethinking objectivity through the singularity of the speaking subject, as she appears to be offering elsewhere in her essay (Haraway 1988: 590).

10 Kathrin Thiele makes a similar claim in this special issue through Irigaray's reading of sexual difference as a ‘primary differentiality’—a constitutive force that implicates how ‘we’ approach the world and ‘how we account for the effects of our differential becomings’ in and as (its) ethical dynamism.

11 Again, the parallels with Barad's argument are evident here, in particular in her understanding of the (experimental) apparatus where subject, object and concept are found to be mutually constitutive in their entangled production (Barad 2007).

12 Simultaneously, it does not presume to avoid this dialecticism, but rather to find its claims to a cohesive universalism and its teleological goals impossible to achieve. While I argue that this reading is made available in ‘Situated Knowledges’, whether or not Haraway would agree wholesale with my suggestion here is not altogether clear, given her eschewing of universalism in its masculinist and transcendent capacities at certain points in her essay. See also Kirby's analysis of Haraway's hope, expressed in another essay published in 1988, ‘that feminism can extricate itself from the violence of dialectical thinking’ (Kirby 1993: 128–9).

13 This can also be thought of in terms of the agential cut that Barad proposes—the cutting together and apart of identities, wherein what is excluded in the making of an identity also participates in that identity (Barad 2007, 2008: 133).

14 The suggestion this makes for a politics of location is not one of a ‘new paradigm’, but of a continued attention to perspective. With an understanding that universal vision is already a partial perspective, Haraway shows that any situated location is a tensile positioning. What and how one sees is inseparable from what (this) vision (co-)creates.