Haraway, Donna - How Like a Leaf

7/21/2019 Haraway, Donna - How Like a Leaf

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/haraway-donna-how-like-a-leaf 1/189







COTETS

Acknowledgments X

The House 1

ON

The Histor She Was Born Into 5

The Histor of Form 1 7ile Staying Connected 2 7California 4 1

Interdisciplinarit Is Risk 45

O

Organicism as Critical Theor 49Primatolog 5 3

R

Historical Good Luck 6 1Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 65

Disease Is a Relationship 73

FOUR

More Than Metaphor 8 1

A ene Is Not a Thing 89borg emporaltes 97

s a onsousness 11 re 19

ew 113



FIV

Cyborg Surrealisms 1 1 9Unfamiliar Unconscious 1 2 3

It Wasn't Born In a Garden, butIt Certainly Was Born In a History 1 2 7

How Like a Leaf 1 3 1Menagerie of Figurations 1 3 5

OncoMouseTM

1 3 9Vampire Culture 1 49Modest ess 1 5 5

Telepathic Teaching 16 3

CODA

Passion and Irony 1 7 1

Bibliography 173About the Authors 1 75

Index 181



KNWLGMNS

Tis book woud not ave been possibe witout te initia

guidance and support of Maria Nadotti, La TartarugaBadini& Castodi Internationa, Mian, Itay. tout er inteli-gence and determined entusiasm tis project woud not avecome togeter. Tanks are aso due to te editors ofFleshactor

(1997), Ars Electronica, Lut, Austria for te pubication ofte initia "How Like a Leaf interview, wic eventuaybecame tis book. I woud aso like to tank my students at te

itney Independent Study Program (1 99799), Seia Peusein te Histor of Consciousness oce, and a te uman andnonuman members of Donna Haraway's and my respectiveouseods o ther suport bot tecnica and non.Obvous, the eatest debt s to Donna aawa heseeema consnt, teache, end, and hmn.



US

Santa Cruz, California

Unimposing if not disheeledpaint peeling ike old skinfrom its exteriorthe smal Califoia bungalow peers outfrom a forest of owers, citrus trees, and botanical mares. ent where house an pantfe merge nto one uncann presence, t s c ee wee the aen en an hee e "e " ,



2 O W L K E A L E A F

Donna Haraway, a bit taken aback by my question. "We've pantedand nutred everting. Red booms, rrooking buses, greenpetas tat reac up and out in arge pricky fansone waks troug

tis ed of cutivated widness to enter te ouse. Inside a back catis cured snugy into a ba upon a iving room couc, nested on aeating banket, surrounded by dises of food and water. "Ms. Mosesgets room seice, Haraway tes me. "At tentone se's earned terigt to indugence. A we discuss te ancient at's abiit to ambeo te couc to te batroom to use te ier box, a bounding bondandwite sevenpound dog comes out of te kitcen to greet me.

"Tis is Roand. Wagging is docked tai in motions tat send isentire body into wecoming unduations, e approaces me wit caution. Poite but ste, Haraway advises, "Don't pet im rigt away. Heneeds to sme you before e' receive your touc. Too oen peopereac out rigt away and it startes im. Keeny aware of te needsand mores of te nonumans se sares er abitat wit, se speaksof tem in anuage sprinked wit terms ike "dominance beavior

and "aggressive impuse. Se ten recounts Roand's recent experience wit dog scoo "to get is good citiensip certicate (saidwit a cucke) at wic point te two of tem begin to demonstratesome of te beaviors e as eaed. "Down. Stay. In principe ecan't get up unti e gets te command. But e ikes anging out. Iave been ere ony minutes and aready te word I ave entered isone were botany meets fair tae and anima science ia ove.

Homey and ived in, tis ouse is yet ony part ome for Harawayand er partner Rusten ogness. It is teir residence wie Donna isin town serving as Professor of te Histor of Consciousness at teUniversit of Caifornia, Santa Cru. Perenniay on te move since1980 wen se was ired by Hayden ite to join te program,"ome for er and Rusten is actuay tree ours away, nort of Sanrancsco, n egendar Sonoma Count. Tere tey commute to

and rcased n 1977 wt er exusband ae Mer. Taxng as ts to ve a st estene, sh a doube homee s wat as aowedaawa to sstan he naten onentaton and deoton to



T E O U S E 3

teaching whie contributing major books and essas to eds of studranging from the histor of science to feminist theor, anthropolog,and of course cborg sdies, which she inented In other words

een though it is destabiizing to hae two homes three hours apartwith a job commitment to teaching that is ferocious (Santa Cruz is onthe quarter sstem rather than the semester so she has to prepare andteach three high condensed, backtoack bocks of graduate and

undergraduate courses each ear)compartmentaizing her time andattention in two paces is what aows Harawa to focus One pace isfor teaching, one for writingathough obious the to bur at

strikes me is how this situation is an exampe of the cborg existenceshe has articuated so inuentia since 1985 when "A Manifesto forCborgs was rst pubished:

From one perspective a corg world is aout the nal imposition of a grid of control on the planet, aout the nal astractionemoied in a Star ars apocalpse waged in the name of

defense, aout the nal appropriation of womens odies in amasculinist org of war From another perspective, a corgworld might e aout lived social and odil realities in whichpeople are not aaid of their joint inship with animals andmachines, not aaid of permanentl partial identities and contradictor standpoints he political struggle is to see from othperspectives at once ecause each reveals oth dominations andpossiilities unimaginale from the other vantage point Singlevision produces worse illusion than doule vision or man-headed monsters Corg unities are monstrous and illegitimate inour present political circumstances, we could hardl hope formore potent mhs for resistance and recoupling2

We moe to the kitchen to tak Donna unpacks some books "Ohgreat One of the books is here for the course Susan Harding and I

are goin to coteach a combine science an poiics and histor ofreiion course abou aien aucon



4 H O W L I K E A L E A F

EDOES

History of Consciousness is an interdisciplinary PhD program founded in

the 960s at the University of Caifornia Santa Cruz It wil also be referred

to as "Hist-Con

2 Donna J Haraway "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science Technology and

SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century in Simians, Cyborgs, and

men: The Reinvention of Nature ew York: Routledge 99: 54



I guess I rea grew up wanting to be an exporer.DOA J. ARAWAY

The HistoryShe Was Born Into

G Since things are bound to get more compicated, et'sbegin quite simpl with our biograph.

The histo one is born into is awas so naturaied untiou reect back on t an hen suden eethng s mean-e mue aers o sero n a ascae o soca



6 H W L I K E A L E A F

and cultural histories all of a sudden pops out. I was born in 19 inDener, Colorado. In other words I was born into a cit that is partof the western United States . But it is not Californian nor is it a mid

western agricultura state, nor the East Coast with a of its mutiplelayers of immigrations and cutures. The Anglo Rock MountainWest is produced in the late nineteenth centur, which means it isery recent . It is postCii War conquest territor. Specicay it isand that was deeoped economicay by the Ango settlers throughgold and siler mining, then ranching and internationa timber inter-ests, and energ.

G Did your famiy work in any of those industries?

No, my father was a sportswriter and his parents came toCoorado om Tennessee . They came to Coorado party because ofhis father's heath. He had tubercuosis so he came out to CooradoSprings because it was a tubercuar heath center in the nineteenth

and eary twentieth centur. y grandfather then setted in ColoradoSprings and worked as a grocer with a smal grocer chain caledPiggly ggy. He apparently made a bunch of bad business deas anddied in debt in the late 1930s aer seling Piggly Wiggy to Safeway,before I was born, so I hae arious family histories and don't quiteow which one represents what exacty happened. So that's myfather's s ide . My mother's side was workingcass Irish Cathoic.

G Are either of your parents stil aie?

My mother died when I was sixteen but my father is sti alie.He's eightone and a really good man. He aso had tubercuosis as achid and deeloped rigid hips and knees as a resut. So he spent a goodpart of his childhood in a length body cast in bed. He was tutored

at home until hgh school when he was able to get around in a wheel-char, an eentual got around on crutches. though he had thsre u ana e a nnee awa nteete n rt.



T H E S T R Y S H E W A S B R N N T 7

His father had been a sports organizer in one of the western andmidwestern industrial cities for the predecessor of an organizationcaled the Nationa Industria Basketbal League. This league hired

young white men out of colegeemphasis on whiteand ran com-pany teams. It was in part a predecessor to the professiona basketbalscene . These leagues are now denct but they were er popular atthe time. So my grandfather was a sports promoter for basketbal inDener and therefore my father kind of breathed sports om the timehe was a young child. He actually een won the Coorado TableTennis Championship because he had great reexes and coud just

stand in one pace.

G hat eect did professional sports hae on you?

Wel, my father's job as a sportswriter for The Denver Post waser important to me. I learned to score baseba reay young bygoing to about seent games a year with my father. I also payed bas-

ketbal with lots of passion, if mediocre taent, in grade schoo andhigh school.

are inteupted a tall sandhaired man who enters the itchen llo wath and ind iles. Rusten oess her parer since 75 and}ae Mille the man Donna maied while she was a aduate student iniolo at Yle were o men wou see accompaning arawa at con

erences and deparent nctions as a aduate stdent in ton in themid0s.

That a eat shirt " sa to Rusten as we hug hello. e weang apatteed cotton uttondown in colors o roal lue and emerald een. Didou get good inteiew mateal?" Donna ass him. s got o interviews r the pice o one. " as who he has een inteiewing. Biologisin Montere Ba r a radio seent on ag sh " he sas. " do natural

hto seen r the local anta Crz rado staton."

W dcuss natral hsto r a ew momen and en onn ntee. olnd sowedo betl " onna es m. ws re qe esed w s w



8 H W I K E E F

iness to show Tha what he od do The three o us tae a wmomen to exchange stories aot or resetive animal househol and thelaor o inteiewing unti sten eaves to wor in h studio

G So our father was a newspaper writer. Is that where ou gotour loe of words?

Absolutel. We would talk about words at dinner. He is a ergood writer and he likes his work and still does work at eightone.Up until this summer he was the ofcial scorer for the National

League baseball team in Dener. M mother was less educated andmuch less happ. Her life was more constrained and consumed bguilt.

G hat did her unhappiness came from?

It's er hard to sa. Her health wasn't good .

G But neither had our father's been.

Yes, but hers was lifethreatening as an adult . She died when I wassixteen of a heart attack and had had a lot of ill health before that. Shewas er committed to the famil and I tink she lied in too small aworld. But her Catholicism was er strong and a terribl important

part of m childhood and earl adulthood as well. I took it reall seri-ousl and went to the same high school as she went to. It was calledSt. Mar's Academ, and one of her iends, a nun, was the principalof the school.

G Were the nuns good to ou?

Oh, absoute. n fact the were such a strong nuence that spent a god par o m chdhoo wantng t be a nun wanted toe an an e a meca mna r a nun. ou



T H E H S T R Y S H E W A S B R N N T 9

know the idea of a colonial imagination is not an abstraction. I had acolonial imagination. I didn't know it but I certainl did. It was l-tered through m desire to be an independent woman. I wanted to be

either a priest or a doctor but since I couldn't be a priest m nextchoice was to be a Marknoll nun. The seemed like these realladenturesome, talented, smart, educated women who were off doinggood things in the wide world. You see it was a total colonial imagi-nation that was all about excitement and exploring. I guess I reallgrew up wanting to be an explorer.

G How long did that fantas last?

Onl through the seenth or eighth grade. But I seriousl con-sidered entering the conent until the end of high school . I was a ercommitted Catholic. It was a terribl important part of m intellec-tual and emotional life . But I had what I called "doubts against faithwhen I was around ten or eleen. M uncle (m mother's ounger

brother) was a Jesuit seminarian who had a friend who was a ercomplex man whom I formed a kind of intellectual friendship withwhen I was around eleen or twele ears old. And I would go andisit him and m uncle in the Jesuit seminar in Kansas, and I wouldtell him about all of these intellectual problems I was haing and hetook me seriousl.

G hat exactl were our doubts about?

The were related to doubts about the proof of the estence ofGod. And certainl in high school I started worring a lot about inter-pretations of eolution, although the Catholics in m world wereneer antieolutionists. But nonetheless I had trouble reconcilingdetails. I was er obsessie.

G ou were oous nter n cenc ar onwann o a ocor an o on



H W I K E A E A F

Yes, I was. I wanted to become a phsical therapist too.

G hat happened to the doctor fantas?

It was stil there, but had falen pre to gender oppressions to putit crudel. I een hae this etter I wrote against abortion rightsaLetter to the Editor in high school.

G Do ou still hae it?

I might sti hae it but nowhere where ou could see it ! Abortionwas being argued in Coorado in those ears and I was still opposedto it. I was er conentional in m notions of gender and authoritand had a double consciousness. I had been taught b er powerlwomen who were nuns, er intelectuall weltrained, interestingwomen. So on the one hand m ife was shaped b er powerl,

independent, unmarried women but within an ideoog of Cathoicpatriarch.

G How were these women perceied?

The were admired athough regarded to be odd ducks. Somepeope woud hae sexist ideas about them as sexual frustrated and

unlled and so on and so forth, but I was neer coninced becausewhat I saw were lhearted people who were real together andinteresting peope. Yet at the same time I had these complete con-entional ideas about marriage and children. I gured I'd hae tenchildren.

G Ten!!!! Well instead ou hae how man om HistCon?

Yeah right. an, man more. It was also around age thirteenthat started reading St. Thomas Aquinas on natural law because this



T E I S T R Y S E W A S B R N I N T

iend of my unce suggesed I sar reading i. Bu I realy had no ideawha I was reading.

G nd his was in he 1 95 0s?

Yes, I was hireen in 1957.

G So he 1960s were jus around he corner. I ike his image ofyou as a doubing hireenyearod Cahoic gir reading S. ThomasAquinas on he eve of your en ino he urbuence of adoescence

as we as of he 1 960s .

Yes, in hindsigh is quie an image. There I was reading S.Thomas Aquinas, jus enering ino high schoo, surrounded byCahoic pariarchy, he Cold War, and he resus of McCarhyism.d i s imporan o highigh ha I experienced McCarhyism omhe poin of view of an Irish Cahoic famiy ha was aniCommunis

and convinced by Cod War ideoog. I was a ver hough fami-ly bu noneheess very much a par of midde erica and a whiemiddecass formaion.

G For whom Communism was viewed as a viabe hrea?

Absouely. And I remember having disurbing fanasies of he

Communiss as a chid. For one hing we had a pries in our parishwho was responsibe for isening o he kids confessions. He hadbeen a Belgian missionary in he Peopes Repubic of China, whichwas of course caed Red China a he ime. Somehow he ended up inDenver, Coorado, a Chris he ng parish lisening o he confes-sions of hese decaden lile whie middecass 1950s afuen pos-war children. He used o scare he living he ou of us! Hed el us

we were going o ose he h aans ommunsm because ussanand hnese chren weren' near as ecaen as we were. hewere a ve ra an cme an we were n. was ve



2 H O W K E A LEAF

imprd! I was surrune, n hr word, by a who numbr ofvr convincing egues. u know I havn akd abou hi uin yars and fees n f mbarraing.

G

Wel I know ha h formaion hapd m vividy, bu I h childhood ha Iv admird hav bn h rbiou on.

G Y ho rbiou chidhood don ncsariy ad o h ind

of inigh ha you hav, which com om bing o acd by hidoogi you now criqu. I par of how you ar abl o b oamo innaymicuou in your anayi of cas and powr andgndr and rac. Bcau you wr compy drnchd and inu-ncd a a chid. You f hi u rahr han ju incuaiz i.

I hink you hav a poin bcau i clar ha wha moiva u

a adu in rm of poiic, ar, choary work, and aching ihapd by chidhoodby having ivd ou hs hiori . A you said,h hiori ha w ar rponding o a choar and achr arno abracions. Thy ar vr dp. So again, whn I a k abou hW, I am no aking abou h kind of abracion of "a h im,vrhrh Ws vru h Eaha happn o aiy inchoary anay . Im aking abou a paricular pac. On mbd-

dd in hiori of capia in Norh Amrica, in hiori of xpanion,of whi r cooni . I am aking abou paricuar kind of ra-ion o mdia, h nwpapr indur, o commrcia spors, o gndra wihin h conx of these sitations.

G Id ik o g back o omhing. Im fascinad by whn, andhw, yur break wh anCommunis idelg occurred .

y ay was a e g ay n a srts rtant waysut the sense the aer wr nteectuas, tt cae r (se



T H E I S T O R Y S E W A S B O R N I N T O 3

pauses) a larger worldi didn come from he family. Kennedy waseleced when I was sill in high school and ha was ver exciing. Iherefore became a kind of liberal democra of he Kennedy ype,

which was, obviously, sil deepy embedded in Cold War ani-Communism. Bu i was in high school ha inellecual life becameerribly imporan o mei gave me access o a word of seriousideas. And hen I became par of he Cahlic Le, and when I cameback from my Fulbrigh in France righ afer coege, I go realyinvoved in he aniwar movemen in Denver. Cerainly heenam War realy shaped me lae in coege, as did he Civil Righs

movemen. Ye any poliical work a he ime mean for me a rei-giously moivaed Caholic acivism. Acualy, I had waned vermuch o go o a Jesui universiy bu I didn ge enough money ogo ou of sae o he one I was ineresed in. And I didn wan o goo he Jesui college in D enveri jus fel oo close and I didn wano live a home. So when I go a scholarship for any college Iwaned o go o in Cooradoroom, board, books, and uiion

has how I ended up a Colorado Colege, which is where I saredo be more independen, moving away from Caholic inerpreaionsand he aniCommunism of my upbringing because I was opened upo a broader sense of poliics and reigion and scholarship.

G ha did you sudy?

I did a riple major in zoolog, phiosophy, and lieraure.

G Your mohers deah mus have overshadowed your ransiionom high school o college.

I was more raumaic laer.

G ou cear us use on u as ou are an aou coeeand mon awa o an antomuns an atoc worew, cant e ut woner ow te stance ro wat ou were rout



1 4 H OW L I K E A L E AF

p o li v i s a v somehow been brought about by your

mot her' s deat h.

e tme experienced te lo of my moter a a utting oand numbne tat wa wit me for a long time. t wa realy not until wa a middeaged woman tat experienced er deat emotionalya a lo of an unbelievabe kind. You ave to undertand tat at ix-teen wa getting a tremendou amount of recognition om te out-ide word. So tere wa a kind of momentum in my ife combinedwit tupiditemotiona tupidit. Ceary emotion wa not eaiyexpreed in my family. ' tree now and it wa only about f-teen year ago tat I realy began to dea emotionaly wit er deat.

G Did tat ave to do wit wen ]aye died?

Sure it didit abolutey did . But alo tarted to experience mymoter' lo before ]aye' deat. But i deat and i lover Bob'Fiomeno before im certainly brougt out te abolute irre-veribilit and nonnegotiability of tat kind of lo. d in a way lot ometing elete belief in being abe to do everyting or aveeverting. ot a kind of naive relation to progre. reaied wata ie tat i.

G And te ene tat a individual we ave aboute control?

gt contro a l of toe tingte experience of a ene ofmortaity tat goe down to te inner ber of yourelf. didn't conont my moter ' deat unti I wa amot te ame age e wa wene died. t wa at tat time tat experienced a kind of double moveof denial and identication. Denial of te impact er deat ad on meimultaneou wit te feeling wa living er life. n oer word

tere wa an abolute concton tat would de wen e died atortwo o a a atac tat m o wa er od. t dn' ee ac.



T H E H S T O R Y S H E W A S B O R N N T O

G So wat appened wen you were forttwo?

Actualy noting canged tat muc. But ince ten I ave

become a ot cearer about not being my moter muc e in deniaover er deat in term of te emotiona impact it ad on me. It'reay wen I reaied I wan't er tat I coud actuay grap tat I adlot er if tat make any ene.

G Sure ince te ony way to keep er a of toe year wa to"be er I gue.

Incuding aiming for deat in a prett itera way. And it' truetat I ave te ame medica condition in ome repect but o do alot of oter peope. And te notion of repetition i a pycoogicarater tan a bioogica proce . In oter word biolog i about end-le variation werea in pycoog tere i te notion of repetitioncompulion.

G Nonetele puing pat fortwourviving your motermut ave been quite a moment of reection.

Tere were ome rea turning point in my eary fortie epe-ciay around wat my work mean . I wa working at te time on tereviion of Primate sions.

G So at ti moment of eevated awarene of your own mortait you were on te treod of pubiing your rt major book aeryour diertation Prmate sions Gende Race and Nare in therld o Mode cience [ 1 989 ?

Ye.



co cge ofo s o sp

sot ve of trstoHENR BERGSON

The History of Form

G at i it about biolog tat a alway intereted you?

e now ow even om ig coo 've alway beeninttd in cel ou o wic a wol organim could begnad



8 H O W I K E A E A F

G Did you go to graduate cool to tudy te piloopy of bi-olog?

No I went to Yale to do biolog er ig cool I went to Parion a Fulbrigt and tudied evolutionary piloopy and teolog atte Fondation Teilard de Cardin Ten I went to Yale graduatecool in biolog at I wanted to do wa developmental biolog andYale ad a good program Alo in 1 968 I went to a marine bioog tation at Wood' Hoe Maacuett It wa a ver intene al nigtlong all day long a ummer log marine embrolog coure tudy-

ing fertiliation and redevelopment We ooked at an immene arrayof marine organim and obeed a uge amount and did ome mod-et experimental work I got realy intereted in tunicate wic onecould decribe a a kind of colonial biological organim Tey conitof tee ting called ooid oter word little animalid a kindof almotanimal wic are jut pocket tat are attaced by a circulator ytem in te form of tubule called tolon So you ave a ooid

and tolon and a ooid and o on Te common name for tee i ea-grape I'm ure you would recognie tem if you aw tem onwae and piling Tey are kind of imy and quite wonderl!

G And you can pop tem?

Ye you can pop tem becaue tey are eentialy emirigid But

wen you put tem under a diecting microcope you can ee te circating cel communicate from tolon to adjoining ooid Tey donot ave to reproduce exually o if you damage a ection you canwatc it regenerate I got intereted in te ocalled " totipotent temcell out of wic a woe organima wole ooidcould beregenerated So in graduate cool I got a little bit involved in omeof ti tunicate regeneration tu but it never went anywere You

ee wa e and e ay a tred to develo a dertation always did very w n biology a a cra an nteectua discoursebut my heart really wasn't n lab practice. or wa very good at it.



T E S T O R Y O F F O R M 9

But my eart wa denitely in biolog a a way of knowing te word.

G How did your diertation topic come about?

Tere wa a ummer aer my qualiing exam wen I wa jutmierable. My miery ad everting to do wit weter I wa goingto make it a a bioogit i.e. make it in te ab. Ti i about 1969and I realy didn't want to work in te lab. So I pent te ummerdepreed and in tear working in te ab and getting nowere andnot liking wat I wa doing. d ten I went to talk to a man named

Eveyn Hutcinon wo eventualy became my diertation advior.He wa an ecoogit in a totally dierent program in te biologdeparent for wic I ad done none of te preparation. He waBriti and ad come om a family ike te Darwin and te Huxleywit a lot of cultura capita . He ad made it a abit in i life to up-port women wo were mildly to extremely eterodox. I wa on temild ide (laughs). He wa a ind of Briti feminit of te old coo

baicay jut a prowoman peron epecially intelectual women. Hewa very mart and very famou wit a lot of power. It i in many wayte Hutcinon coo tat aped American ecoog particularlyteoretica ecolog. He liked me and e liked my work and o Imoved over to i lab and did a diertation tat wa a ybrid betweenitory of cience piloopy and bioog. It wa not a diertationbaed on experimentation but about te ue of metapor in aping

experiment in experimental biolog. It wa called stals Faricsand Fields Metaphors o Organici in Twentiethentu Developmental

Biolo. I read Toma Kun in about 1968 and wa realy interetedin te way e taked about incommenurabilit between dierentinterpretive paradigm. So stals Farics and Fields i a book writ-ten under te pell of Toma Kun written between 1 97 0 and 1 97 2altoug publied in 1976. a boo t wa my diertation only

ligtl reved.

recentl read Cstls, Fbrics, nd Fields in preparation for our



20 H W l K E A E A

converation and I am actually urpried it in't read more widely. Iad tougt it wa going to be too tecnical for me a a nonbiologit .But quite te contrar. Te dicuion of organicim a a developing

and ignicant organiing principle of twentietcentur biooganalternave to "vitalim and "mecanimwa made o clear and teconnecon between biolog and aetetic were facinating. Tewole book i ver ue for te nonpecialit in term of under-tanding tentietcentur trend in bioog tat are related to widerpiloopical debate.

I wa intereted in te organicit model of biolog developed byRo G. Harrion Joep Needam and Paul Wei a wel a look-ing at ow al teoretical ytem in biolog depend upon a centrametapor. I wa intereted in ow Harrion formulated i tudy oflimb regeneration in aamander. He and oter were alo interet-ed in te eary pattern formation of te fertilied egg in it divi-ion tat determine tee procee. at trigger tem and ow

doe a ce know wat to differentiate into? How doe a cel ow it'at te ead end intead of te tail end? at trigger tee differentiation event? For me wat wa of particular interet wa tetropic tructure by wic peope tougt troug tee problem.toug Harrion Needam and Ro all came to biolog fromvery dierent background tey eac approaced embryologtroug metapor of organicim uc a liquid crytal fabric

and ed. Suc an organicit model wa an alternative to te twopoe of "vitalim and "mecanim tat ad previouly dividedbioog.

G at wa your participation in literar criticim at tat time atYalete ig moment of erican decontruction wit DerridaHarold Bloom Peter Brook Paul de Man?

I new aot none o t. ot a word. ddn't ear aout an otat nt wa on te ac o on on ea ater. ten



T E S T O R Y O F F O R M 2

Derrida ad been lecturing at Hopn and a lot o f te Yale Scoolad moved down to Hopkin.

G Did you feel a ene of recognition wen you became familiarwit teir work?

No tey were on anoter planet a far a I wa concerned. I adnoting to do wit anyting tey were doing. d in a way I neverave altoug people ak me if I've read Derrida becaue wat I doeem imilar. I admire muc of i work but it' never been impor

tant to me. Gayatri Spivak' work a been more important to mebecaue of te way e incorporate decontruction into antiracitfeminit teory.

G How open wa te graduate department in biology at Yale toyour writing a diertation on metapor?

I wa tere at a me wen te polic of te place were uc tatI got to do it. Hutcinon wa a powerl man and I ad done verywell in exam and ting like tat o people truted me. dHutcinon' lab wa a very lively place for tinking. We read all ortof literar and piloopical and peculave work in te lab a part ofour lab group. He wa a ver broadranging intellectual and veryumane in te old ene of tat term. One of i avocaon wa te

tudy of medieval Italian illuminated manucript. But te iue i alotat I wa ten and till am now appalled by ow certain kind ofgenetic ideologie occupy all te pace in biolog. And ow tee ameideologie mirepreent complexit mirepreent proce and inteadfetiie x rei "complexi into " ting. ed Nort iteeada a great inuence on me a wa erican pragmatim epeciallyCarle Peice and proce piloopy paculaly Heidegger' Ben

nd Tme Tat i m neae no te enc pottucait. Teeae a lot o connecon ou iteea ouee. acua o ' ana.



22 H W L l K E A L E A F

G I am glad to ear you ay tat becaue I actually wanted to akyou about Heidegger. Tere eem to be a deep embedded inuence

tere tat I wa not aware of until recentlyreading Heidegger onmy own in relation to Avita Ronel ' work. I actualy brougt ti ec-tion om "at I Caled Tinking? tat a alway made me tinkof you your pedagog your egacy a a teacer and tinker. It' tiection were e unpack te ared root between te Od Englithencan "to tink and thancian "to tank and deveop ow teeared root between " tinking and "anking ave to do wit wat

tinking i in it deepet ene . For intance wen one i tinking onei ao tanking becaue a one tink one i alway deveoping ideaom te oter one a read or been inuenced by. So tinking aloa to do wit memor but away a a kind of remembering tat i"in memor of toe om wom one deveop one tinking. Butobviouy it i ao more tan ti and i about tinking troug alte connection between "tan memo and tinking. Here' a

quote tat eem particulary relevant to te two of u itting eredoing ti interview:

How can we give thanks to this endowment, the gi of eingale to think what is most thoghtprovoking, more ttinglthan giving thoght to the most

thoght-provoking he

spreme thanks, then, wold e thinking d the profondest

thanklessness, thoghtlessness eal thanks, then, never consistsin that we orselves come earing gis, and merel repa giwith gi re thanks is rather that we simpl thinkthink whatis reall and solel give , what there is to e thoght

I epecialy love ti idea tat upreme tanklene i tougtlene wic i really quite true.

I like tat a lot. I haven't read that recentl y , but it is very typicalof the way Heidegger does words But I must say I hate his TheQuestion Concerning Technoog." t's so ogmatic and has no sense



T H E H I S T R Y F F R M 23

of te kind of creativit of natural cientic inquiry. Hi complaintabout reourcing i on te wole a kind of dogmatic narrowne.

G tink te problem i tat Heidegger' concept and languagein "Te Quetion Concerning Tecnolog are o complicated tatit' eay to fall into reductive reading of i notion of te tecnological tat before read your work were eay to make in regard to edanger of e tecnological a a wole ytem of reating and tink-ing about te world a control and reource. f read in ti reductivemanner a many ave te tecnological for Heidegger appear on to

be intrumental.

d tink tat i fooli.

G But e wa tinking and quetioning te tecnological witin aquite pecic cultural and itorical context were war facim andtecnolog ad been quite intricately entwined. He apparently gave

te lecture tat became "Te Queion Concerning Tecnologaer te war in e early to mid1950.

e e your point but ere i a wole radiion of a kind of nega-tivit. n fact ere i a wole tradition of a kind of negaivity in rela-tion to cience and tecnologat it' e domain of e antiumantat i part of e problem of tring to be accountable for tee

kind of knowledge practice. Tat' wat' exciing about ciencetudie now a a body of puruit weter it' people like Leig Staror Saron Traweek or Bruno Latour or Micel Calln. All of teepeople undertand cientic practice a i tickemioically andmateriallyric itorical practice and none of tem are veimpreed by any of ee negative piloopie and negative poliical teorie about tecnological intrumentalit

G o what was t about developmental bology that nterested y ou? Or where dd you see t leadng?



24 H O W L I K E A L E A F

Well wa and am till very intereted in te itor of form andte procee of te genei and aping of form. t i in embryolog

and developmental biolog tat one tudie preciely ti. Teyrequire you to tink about te itor of form troug time in rela-tion to woe organim. Tey are not about tudyng a taticmoment but are about biologica proce over time and te genei ofape. And molecular biolog a provided too for tinking aboutte genetic of pattern formation ta ave been really extraordinarand didn't exit at te time wa a graduate tudent. Altoug wa

intereted in genetic and till am it i te wole organimte morecomplicated enti tat gene are part oftat 'm facinated by.Wole entitie aren't te reult of gene. Rater gene are a compley integrated part in ti pattern troug time. Gene are a namefor cutting into tat proce. A kind of iving o of a certain part ofte tructural proce tat i given te name "gene .

G 'm intereted in te moment wen biolog became more o f aninterpretive ytem for you tan a ab practice.

ave alway read biolog in a double waya about te way teworld work biologically but alo about te way te word workmetaporically. t ' te join between te gurative and te factual tat love. Ti i an example of my Catoic acramentalim. tink of

te intenely pyica entitie of biological penomena and tenfrom tem get tee large narrative tee comological itorie ifyou will.

G Do you remember a pecic moment in graduate cool wenti relationip became particularly evident to you?

t was eally befoe gaduate school, but emembe an aument with a fellow gaduate student about what a cell was was aguingthat, in a ve deep way, the cell was ou name fo pocesses that don't



T H E H I 5 T R Y F F R M 2

ave boundaries tat are independent of our interaction. In oterords te boundaries were te result of interaction and naming. Itasn't tat te orld was "made up tat tere weren't cells but tat

te descriptive term "cells is a name for an istorical kind of interaction not a name for a ting in and of itself.

G at did your coleague tink?

Tat I was cray. But I'm not talking about an abstraction. We cansee it rigt ere wit us. Tere's you tere's me tere's a tape

macine and tere's te interaction tat is producing te world in tisform at tis moment rater tan some oter. But et me also backtracka bit. Tere are two aspects to empasie en discussing biolog.Te rst is: live intimate as" and in " a iological world Tis mayseem obvious but I empasie it to reiterate te ordinariness or quo-tidian nature of wat we are talking about wen we talk about bioog.d te second aspect wic represents a major gestat switc om

te previous point is: Biolo is a discourse and not the world ie Sowile on te one and I live materiaysemiotically as an organand tat's an istorical kind of identit immersing meparticuarly inte last couple of undred yearsin very specic kinds of traditionspractices and circulations of money skils and institutions I am alsoinside biolog as it is intricatey caugt up in systems of labor systemsof ierarcica accumuation and distribution efciency and produc-

tivit. In contemporar ecolog tere ave been wellpublicied dis-cussions about valuing te "services tat ecosystems produce. Forinstance en te carbon dioxide production of industria cutures isabsorbed by plant materials te plants temseves become serviceproviders for te industrial economy. Suc a mode of tinking is moretan metaporical. It is a deep way of seeing ow te naturalculturalord is constituted.

G t's a n o stenn to.



26 H W l K E A L E A

And actng on wat you ear and ee. Living inide biology iabout living inde natreculture. It i about being inide itor awell a eing inide te wonder of te natural complexity. I admit to

nding te latter ver important. But te nal reult wen we peakabout biolog i tat we are peaking about a pecic way of engag-ing wit te world. At te ame time biolog i produced a a di-coure ver muc like political economy. Bot are dicoure of pro-ductivitie and eciencie.

G Modest_ess you dicu ow biolog a actually become

te "Humanitie of te twentiet century. "Biological narrative te-orie and tecnologie eem relevant to praccally ever apect ofuman experience at te end of te twentiet centur.And "Biologat it tecnical and cientic eart i a ubject in civic; biolog teac-e te great mimetic drama of ocial and natural world. In a emi-nar I took wit Stepen Heat wile in te Hitory of ConciouneProgram e poke about literature a te great repreenting macine

of te nineteent centur and lm a te great repreenting macineof te twentiet century. Biolog woven in and troug informationtecnologie and ytem along wit informaon tecnolog i one ofte great "repreenting macine of te late twentiet century.

Ye in te book I talk about Scott Gilbert' idea of biolog ate nctional equivalent of Wetern Civiliation on te U.S. campu

tee day. Biolog i not only te coure mot commonly taken bylarge number of college tudent it i relevant to a uge range ofcareerom te entertainment indutr to te ealt indutr toculture and food proceing intellectual propert law environmentallaw and management and o on. Tere i almot noting you can dotee day tat doe not require literacy in biolog.



Wle Stang Connected

G I want to return to te biograpica for a moment toNew Haven at te end of te 1960 were you were tudyingbioog a a way o eeing te word

ou ow on o tuen I aut n ta o waenr o a a I wa TA n oo



28 H l K E E F

and Societ remember e did a paper on te Q controvery on teJenon paper out of te aard Education Review. t wa a very rad-ical time witin te academy and and many oter biology tudent

were very active in te antiwar movement wa by tat point llyon te political Le altoug obviouly my education and participa-tion in te Le tarted wen wa in colege concretiing in Pari in196769 were witneed te war in ndcina om Frenc eyeNot to mention wa in Pari ortly aer gerian independencewa acieved d ten back in te United State at Yale om1 96870 ived in a commune One of te member of te commune

wa alo a member of te Back Panter Party in New Haven Tiwa ao around te time of te Bobby Seae tria Te commune wabot rican erican and wite Four of u were from te town andfour of u were Yale graduate tudent One woman wa German Sewa not a tudent but came to te U S to marry a U S army ergeantbut canged er mind Tere wa alo one cild Briant Keit woemoter wa a welfare rigt organier Se ad Briant Keit wen e

wa ixteen and ad been a welfare moter Tere wa alo an talianworkngcla kd named Gabe and i lover Barbara We were alvery muc involved in te wole cene of te late ixtieantiwarantracit welfare rigt etc Ti wa alo wen Jaye and becamelover in a eriou way He wa a graduate tudent in itory He wagay not really biexual but ad only jut begun to come out Ti wajut pot Stonewall n retropect tink wat we bot felt we were

doing wa a litte ike broteriter incet Not o muc ten butlater ad everal aair wit womentwo of wic were importantin term of longterm relationip Nonetele for variou reaonJ aye and bot fet we needed to be married

G at wa Jaye' background?

e rew u n aioria prmar n Sunnvae in wat i nownown a con mote an ater wer ot rom a o m o a tn t wt



W H I L E 5 T A Y N G C N N E C T E D 29

to work on te oil rig up and down te coat of Texa CaliforniaOregon Waington J aye and i broter were actually born wileon te roadin Texawile teir parent wee driving troug te

tate Tey went to ometing like or ixty elementary cooland nally ettled in Sunnyvale were Jaye tarted ig cool and ifater worked a an auto mecanic tere So e came very muc froma workingcla family

G d ended up doing graduate work in itory at Yale?

Tat' rigt He got a colarip to Stanford and a colaripto Yale But i relationip wit te academy wa alway very condi-tioned by cla origin He never really felt at ome

G One of te ting I found o intereting about im wa i trulyradical and experimental relationip to teacing and learning tateemed diven by a paion tat wa more tan jut wanting to teac

dierently but ad muc to do wit not feeling aligned wit te inti-tution In te coure we were bot teacer in e advocated for amore perfomative and experimental way of teacing

Tat' rigt He felt very trongly about tat and part of tat didcome from aving not really been welcomed by te academy He adbeen turned down for tenure wen we were bot at te Univerit of

Hawaii aer Yale in a very painl deciion tat certainly involvedomopobia becaue e ad publied a muc and a well a oterpeople wo were tenured at te time Te explicit omopobicremark and action of i colleague were cilling Tere wa noquetion tat i omoexuality made im feel inecure in te intitution Not in Santa Cru but in oter place He taugt atDominican Collegea Catolic liberal art college in Marin

Countydung te eod wen i over ob lomeno ed Teentre tme o wa an ng e w na tean v n n ommn w ont t




people e worked wit tat i lover wa dying. Tey believed it wai broter wo wa ick. nd o aer Bob died Jaye wa given no lee-way for grief nor for i own illne . It wa omopobia in te mot

cruel and oldfaioned ene. Hi colleague were abominable ande wa aaid to come out to tem and ay my partner i dying and I 'mnot well myelf. He felt tere wa jut no way e could do tat.

G nd ti wa jut outide of San Francico in te late 1 980 !

Exactly. It wa terrible. But ]aye pent a lot of time in te lat

year of i life acieving a kind of reolution of i anger and waable to leave tat all beind. But tere wa real rage in Jaye aboutwork ituation tat went rigt back to te Hawaii day. I mean ientire profeional life wa very muc aped by never belonging toan intitution at bot te level of cla and exuality. So ere' a "witemale om "Stanford and "Yale?!

G Rigt. Preciely wy polemical political correctne jut doen'twork. So back at Yale you bot were negotiating not only your ownrelationip but wat your exualitie were?

Rigt. We were trying to gure out wat in te world we were.

G ile taying connected.

Ye. We were married in 1 97 0. ]aye went to Hawaii for a job andI followed and wrote my diertation in asentia a a faculty wife. I wadepreed.

G at did you tink you were going to do?

I didn't reay know. t tat pont I wasnt ambtous n some othe ways I became. But I gred I was gong to nsh my dssertatonand get a job. I was twenty-sx and stayed n Hawa untl I wa thrt



W I L E S T A Y I N G C O N N E C T E D 3

teacing biolog and itor of cience in te General Sciencedepartment. I alo taugt at a place called New College wic wa anexperimental liberal art college were tudent and facult deigned

coure togeter. Jaye and I were reident faculty advier tere.

G at kind of relationip did your and Jaye' work ave at tatpoint?

Well I wrote one of te capter of i diertation and e wroteone of te capter of mine ! Not wole capter mind you but a ec-

tion. We were bot o ick of our own diertation we tougt wewould die. He wa writing about Catolic Marxim between te twowar and wa ired to teac world itor a an intellectual itorian.I did i lecture for te Cina ection of te World Civiliationcoure.

G Wa tat an area you ad expertie in?

I didn't know a ting about it laughs. But I read riouly. Hedidn't know anyting about it eiter but tere it wa WorldCiviliation in ti giant movie teater wit a very mixed group oftudentJapanee erican Hawaiian wite erican Pilippineerican Cinee erican. Even o my rt impreion uponarriving in Hawaii wa aving landed on te New Haven green. Te

New Haven Congregationalit miionarie literally miioniedHawaii and teir cildren were te big ugarplanting familie. Youknow you tink you're making individual coice but ere I realiedtat Yale ad fed Hawaii for generation.

G And yet you were om te crop of radical ixtie Yalie .

Ye but o were te orna monare n ter own wa aewa ao ver actve n eraton n awa t te tme.




G How did tat work in term of you two a a young marriedcouple?

We eparated in 1 97 3 and bot of u a oter lover during tatperiod . But te inner trut of te matter i tat I wa emotionaly andmonogamouly in love witJaye and yetJaye eriouly needed not tobe eteroexual or biexual. He really needed to work out i life witmen and tat wa not good for me. We nally ad to jut face it.

G It ound ve dicult.

It wa very difcult altoug we tayed very cloe . We were tert couple to get a divorce witout a awyer in Hawaii. It wa teperiod wen people were doing all ort of ting witout expertie .We got trown out of family court te rt time becaue we aded our form on te wrong nd of typewriter! Obviouly tatwa a rue. Te court and lawyer were jut very otile to ti

courtwitoutaawyer buine. But we did get divorced and tenJaye lot i tenure cae in 1974 in a deciion cloey related to igay activim. It wa very ugly. Te upot i we bo got really urtand diilluioned looked for job and left Hawaii. I went to JonHopkin in te Hitory of Science department. ]aye went to Texa .

G ere were you in your colarly career wen Jon Hopkin

ired you?

I wa ired a a beginning Aitant Profeor even toug myeducation in te ito of cience at tat point wa very tin. Teywere advertiing for a junior peron o it wan't expected tat I wouldave a book out. But tey liked te diertation; and one of my committee member at Yale wa arr olme wo wa a ver well

reecte toran o ioog and medicine wo wrote a ood lettero . n on w cv e ocae e vn me teoco co e o o cc m



W I L E S T A Y I N G C O N N E C T E D 33

coure to teac. d ten my diertation wa accepted a a book byYale Univerit Pre and oon aer I tarted working on te primatematerial.

G at wa Hopkin like for you epecially after being a facultywife to a gay activit in Hawaii?!

Hopkin wa a good place for me. It allowed me to begin work-ing on te material I really oved. It wa alo were I met Ruten wowa a graduate tudent in te Hitory of Science department. He at

in on my clae; and I wa ure e wa gaywic i wy I iked imel laugh. He wa itting in ti really provocative manner andten I dicovered e wan't gay wic wa even more wonderl. Bute wa open about ting gay. He and Jaye certainly made love a cou-ple of time but were never lover in term of a relationip.

G Wa Ruten your tudent?

No e wa jut auditing my clae but we talked everal timeand liked eac oter. I ad a party at my oue on Tankgiving forte department and we were bot a little drunk and tere wa obvi-ouly a little attraction but noting appened. Ten in February ead me over for dinner. d near a I can tell e got me drunk (edoen't agree wit ti verion of te tory) and a week later we

moved in wit one anoter. In retropect I can ardy believe wat wedid. Talk about unprofeional conduct more laughter! He niedi Mater' degree but oon it became clear to im tat a P.D . wanot wat e wanted becaue e didn't want to become an academic.

G And i background?

He came om an intellecally prvileged family, and it gave hima lot of self-condence He was the grandson of the man who was incharge of the physical chemistry division of the Manhattan Project



34 H O W L K E A L E A F

Hi fater wa te preident of te National Intitute of Medicine awell te preident of te Univerit of Waington earlier. I tink igrandmoter on i fater' ide wa even te iter of a tranlator of

Kierkegaard. He ad been a concientio objector [CO wo le college to do alternative ervice teacing in Mlim area of tePilippine in a tecnolog and erie college. Te ocial jtice andte work etic of i family ad been ve trong on bot ide of ifamily o i relaonip to politic and cience wa olid. Not to doocial ervice wa not to be an adlt. Hi moter i an important partof te tor too. Se wa a committed proabortion activit trog

Planned Parentood even tog e wa om a mall town inMontana and did not come om te kind of intellectal elite tat ifater ad. Bt e wa really committed to eedom. Se wa determined tat er cildren were not forced to do ometing tey didn'twant to do. Her moter ad been a religio mytic and ometing ofa town gure in iteore Plain Montana a town of abot vendred people. Se wa te town librarian and rigt ot of te

American religio tradition tat pawned Mary Baker Eddy. Forintance e wrote in mytical cript ad all kind of elaborate ym-bolic ytem and believed e woldn't die. We're talking a bit overte top! Rten' grandmoter ad revelaon tat i moter oldbecome a cemit. And o e did become a cemit nder er mot-er' initence altog it wa not ometing e wanted to pre. Itink later tat i wy e wa o initent tat er cildren ave ee

dom to coe teir own pat. Bt it wa wile working a a cemittat e met Rten' fater at te Univerit of Cicago medicalcool. Rten i ometing of a combination of i moter and fater.ile e wa in college e wa a religion major tdying biopyicbt wa alo intereted in etic and deeply intereted in Kierkegaard.Bt Rten wa a maverick in term of not pring academic cce.Altog e went to gradate cool e never nied college. He

et t wa unetca to ee a dent eerment drng te war. Ande woe acaemc awa wan't wat e wante to o.e wa e commtte o comunaran acm an are or



W L E S T A Y N G C N N E C T E D 3

oncientiou objector tatu in ont of te dra board in te tate ofaington. He wa actually te rt peron to get CO tatu onnonreligiou ground in tat tate. And certainly te cutura upport

tat e ad coming from i family gave im tool tat elped im todo tat. So e taugt in te outern Pilippine for two year witte Volunteer in ia program.

G at did e teac?

He taugt pyic matematic and piloopy. Ti wa at te

time of te Mulim eparatit movement. In fact mot of Ruten'tudent were dead a few year aer e taugt due to te Marcorepreion. erward e came back and lived for a year in PugetSound in Waington tate doing odd job and living by imelf in amall cabin.

G Wa your immerion in academia ever a tenion between you

two?

It wa never a tenion between Ruten and me but it certainywa wit] aye becaue in many wayJaye and I wanted te ame ting.We were bot very ambitiou in muc te ame way and in fact ] ayewa more o tan I. Yet I got accepted and noticed and rewarded atte ame time tat J aye wa punied. Tat wa a ource of real pain

for im rigt up unti ortly before e died. But it wa never a ourceof tenion between Ruten and me.

G It ound like Ruten i pretty clear and ecure.

He' alway been clear. He' an untortured peron wo i atpeace in te wor in ome imortant way. t wa in February of

1 97 5 tat Ruten an ot toeter and ten n te ummer o 1 97 5 too m vorce tr wt ae nce we never a onemoon wetoo a vorce tr ntea e went to eco wt o ren



36 H W I K E A L E A F

wo ad been in te commune wit u in New Haven. We ten wentto Honolulu were Ruten met up wit u. It wa at tat time ]ayeand Ruten met. Te following ummer we drove to Texa and picked

up Jaye drove to viit my family in Denver and ten drove toCalifornia to look for land togeter. We didn't ucceed in nding anyting in 1 97 6 but we looked again in 1 977 . Nick Paulina te manRuten preently work wit in computer programming joined u.He wa an old ig cool friend of]aye' and ad been my lover forone week ome year before. It wa a nice week but a week waenoug laughs So Nick and Jaye and Ruten and I bougt land

togeter in California outide of Healdburgtirt acre wit a collaped oue on it. And tat i te oue we rebuilt. ]aye gave up ijob in Texa were e wa mierable moved out to California andtaugt ig cool in S an Francico . And o wen te job in feminitteory came up in HitCon in 1 979 I abolutely wanted it.

G Had you been teacing feminit teory at tat point? Weren't

you teacing itory of cience at Jon Hopn?

Well we didn't call it feminit teory but a iend and I in Hawaiiad elped tart a woman' tudie program. At Hopkin I workedwit Nancy Hartock and we did a lot of women' tudie and watwe would now call feminit teory but or me witin te context ofte itory of cience.

G at kind of work were you aigning?

Mart feminim motly and reading very widely. We were partof te Feminit Union wic wa a Marxitfeminit organiationworking on violenceagaintwomen iue in Baltimore. Ti i teperiod wen Caterine McKinnon developed te teory of exua

aament. I wa ao readn ot o cence cton wt Nancoc. te w anc an I ae o ae te Hon ob c e eeo n e ee oe. e een ee



W H I L E S T A Y I N G C N N E C T E D 37

ntmacy at wor people aume t mut mean ntmacy in term ofa exual relatonip. But HitCon didnt want to conider our appli-ton jointly. And o Nancy decded not to apply. Se ended up tay-

ng in Baltmore in te political cience department ning erboo Mone Sex and Power. So I too te job and came out to be aprofeor n te itory of concioune. Obvouly it wa a dreamjob for me. It made it poible for Ruten and me to put our lvetogeter witJaye and i lover Bob and lve on our land.

G en you arrived n 1 980 wat wa HitCon lie?

It w jut two year aer Hayden te ad been ired to avete program. It wa eiter going to be detroyed or regularied.Hayden red Jim Clord and tey ired me. It wa te rt job inte country tat wa explicitly for feminit teory.

G I didnt know tat.

It want tat tere werent people doing feminit teory; it wajut te rt job pecically named a uc. In tat period femint te-ory wa undertood dfferently. It a come to mean a muc narrowertng tan t did in te 1970 wen femnit teory wa muc moreincluve. At tt time it abolutely included toe effort analyticallyto come to grip wit a wole a range of uewomen liberation

femnt movemet ocial cence. Femnt teory now mucmore crcumcribed. Te pycoanalytic lterary and lm teorydmenon ave n ome ene coopted te name "femnt teory.

G You were truly one of te pioneer of nterdiciplnarty beforet became a mode of academa n te 1 980 . d ere you were at temoment of te interdcplina moment of femnit teory wen it

w te tool tt allowe one to cro cipline.

n w n oe. on eec ce



38 W L l K E A L E A F

to do that because that's why I was hired. You see, I was up for promotion at ohns Hopkins om sistant to sociate Professor, whichis not a tenured position at Hopkins (they ony tenure professors) .

I got the job offer om Santa Cruz and a week ater got the etterom Hopkins saying they weren't going to promote meand it wasfor the same reasons. In other words, it was for the precise reasonsthat HistCon wanted me that Hopkins didn't promote me. Hopnshad even tod me to erase to of my pubications om my CVbecause they were too poitica and embarrassed my coeagues. (Thiswas precomputer so I had to use typewriter uid!)

G I can't beieve they woud iteray ask you to do this.

I can't beieve I actuay did it! ! !

G d so you arrive in HistCon in 1980.

I remember going out to dinner with Rusten in about 1 97 8 saying how do I keep my job, work on what I reay want to do, keepdoing the politica work that reay matters to me, and write aboutanimas.

G d you found it !

Yes, I found it.

G I imagine those threehour drives beteen Santa Cruz andHeadsburg must have been fertie moments for reection.

Yes, I woud aso isten to books on tape.

G Dd you ever tape deas whle drvn?

DH m a aas e a o a wn.



W H I E S T A Y I N G C N N E C T E D 39

Athough obviousy not at the computer at rst. In fact "A Manifestofor Cyborgs was the rst piece I wrote on a computer.

G at nd of a computer?

od Hewett Packard 86

G I ove these egenda stories about writing and technoog.Wiiam Gibson's rst encounter with a computer was postNeuromancer. He wrote Neuromancer on a tpewriter probaby around

the same time you were writing "A Manifesto for Cyborgs on theHP 86 He tes this hiarious sto about what happened the rsttime he started up the computer. He heard this whirring noise andthought it was broken so he caed up a technician who tod him,"That noise you hear is the hard drive. He had no idea how itworked and yet he's the godfather of cyberspace! Which remindsmete the story of how you wrote "A Manifesto for Cyborgs.

In 1 982 the editors of the Socialist Review gave me a n assignment:Write ve pages on what sociaistfeminist priorities are in theReagan years. So I started writing and what came out was "AManifesto for Cyborgs.

G So your cyborg's origins were in this modest proposa ?

Yes . I think the mora of the sto is, don't give me an assignment!



California

G at has "California meant to you?

Well, in some ways it's all uite personal since the life Ihave had and he nd of teachn and scholarshp I have donewould no have een ossle anhere else. or nsance hehosehold we l oeer's no a coln' ave a



42 H W L K E A L E A F

pened esewherebut it did happen here for us. From the beginning,there was aso a strong gay cuture in Caifornia that was important toour ives. And then I was hired in HistCon. But what I ikeor what

has been most inuentia to meis the contradictory, thick quaity ofwhat we mean when we say "Caifornia. It's technoogica, urban,natura, agricutura, aternative, straighta of these things. It's asoabout the dierence between San Francisco and Los Angeestheentertainment industry versus the biotech and computer industry.d the demography of Caifornia is extremey rich. It is not aboutback and white but aso made up of an intensey compex histo in

reation to Asia, South America, and Mexico. There is Caifornia and"Caifornios. Caifornia's compex immigration history is not thesame as the East Coast's by any means.

G I certainy earned that coming out here from the East.though my racia poitics concerning back cuture and poitics wasreasonaby informed, I knew nothing, and I mean nothing except car

toon and advertising stereotypes, about Mexican and Chicano cuture. I remember the humbing moment as a TA in a cass on "Art andPoitics when I decided I had to raise my hand in a room ofChicano students and ask what Chicano reay meant versus MexicanAmerican. at was its history as a term of identity? I didn't know. Itwas very disconcerting but aso a ve important moment as it awaysis when one has the nerve to say "I don't know and take responsibi

ity for the imits of, or racist origins of, one's racia, cass, and geographic knowedge base. Coming from the East Coast to Caiforniain this sense was ike traveing to a dierent country.

Yes . It's certainy informed my racia poitics dierenty than, say,if had remained at Hopkins. I remember when the rican Americanschoar Hortense Spiers was out here deciding whether to take a job

at Santa Cruz. She commented on how strane the racia poitics outee elt to er. e eeene onts, wi were al la an white,wee etalze. n t ntet t not n to me at nela



C A L F O R N A 43

Davis is a Caifornia gure for these ast thirt years. She was aniversity of Caifornia at San Diego graduate student with Herbertarcuse, was in prison under Governor Reagan, and now teaches

here with us in the History of Consciousness Program. She is aCaifornia product as we as a product of the U.S . South.



InterdisciplinaritIs Ris

G HistCon is an invention not just of Santa Cruz but ofCaliforniaparticularly Northern California. It really was thepioneer interdisciplinary raduate studies proram in thiscountry. ein a student here was so unusual because all of thestudents' projects and intellecual istries were so dieentm eac ter



46 H O W L K E A L E A F

Incuding yoursef. You had been through the itney Programand a Master's in cinema studies om

G Right and then a of a sudden I was in casses with awyers andcassica poitica theorists, and science ction bus and so on!

Exacty. Which is why HistCon is quite an amazing pace. Oneof the resuts of the way our universities are divided up is that peopeiteray don't see the very simiar anaytica apparatuses at work in

what are supposedy totay dierent domains. Here peope can ateast begin to work beyond those divisions.

G But HistCon is ony as good as the peope ike you who areabe to be responsive and responsibe to a number of eds of study,and you are pretty rare.

There is an amazing kind of aggression that has been turned

against interdiscipinarity and cutura studies recenty, in manyinstances for exceent reasons but ones that aways draw on the weakest aspect of such work. I think the way academia is structured positions peope to mistust atera connections rather than the mode ofmastery that earning one discipine suggests. Ceary one has to constanty be both a master and diettantit's a dierent kind of inteectua rigor.

d obviousy the point is we need to be doing both vertica deepstudies and atera, crossconnecting ones. Interdiscipinarit is riskbut how ese are new things going to be nutured?



I N T E R D I S C I I N A R I T Y I S R I S K Y 47

ENDNOES

1 . Hnri Brgson "Form and Bcoming in Creative Evolution (Minola N

York: Dovr Pblications 998 © 9 ) : 3 02

2 "Topotnt stm clls ar thos clls in an organism that rtain th capacity to

dirntiat into any kind of cll S Donna Haraay Modest

tnesSecond_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse Feminism and

chnoscience (N York: Rotldg 997): 29

3 Martin Hidggr at Is Called Thinking? Lctr III Part II (N York:

Harpr and Ro 968 © 954 W Heisst Denken? translation by Glnn

Gray: 4 3

4 Haraay 9 9 7 , 7 5 Ibid 0 3

6 Scott Gilbrt "Bodis of Koldg: Biology and th Intrcltral

Univrsity in Changing L in the New r D/Order ds P Taylor S

Halfon and P Edards (Minnapolis: Univrsity of Minnsota Prss 997)



rom an organismic perspecve, the cenal and navoidale

focs of iolog is form Form is more than shape, more thansatic position of components in a whole For iolog the pro

em of form implies a sd of genesis ow have the forms of theorganic world developed ow are shapes maintained in the con

inal of metaolism ow are the ondaries of the orga

nied events we call organisms estalished and maintained iological forms are grown not assemled piecemeal

I I

Organicism asCritical Theory

DONNA J. HARAWAY

G Les a ao o fo oos o e e o

of he rese ie to se e as neo ees o s

cover chapters in or ife a e ino e aig of eaoo a ha ae ot speial ecase there sees o eeient theatic connetions etween or rst an ostecent k-Cstls, Fbrcs, d Fel an ModesWtess-



50 H W I K E A E A F

and then between Primate sions and Simians, Cborgs, and men

since they were written in the 1 980s simutaneousy.

One of the ways I see these four books when they are a ined uptogether is to te an historica narrative. From the beginning and tothe present, my interest has been in what gets to count as nature andwho gets to inhabit natura categories. And rthermore, what's atstake in the judgment about nature and what's at stake in maintainingthe boundaries between what gets caed nature and what gets caedcuture in our society. d how do the vaues ip? How does this ve

important duaism in our cutura history and poitics work betweennature and society or nature and cuture?

G A four books are dierent takes on this duaism?

ghta four books are versions of this probem and aapproach it through bioogy. But whie bioogy is the centra orga

nizing principe, bioogy is aways tighty entwined with questions ofpoitics and semiotic practice as we as various crossdiscipinary connections into iterature, anthropoogy, and history. But the main issueis to maintain this very potent join between fact and ction, betweenthe itera and the gurative or tropic, between the scientic and theexpressve.

G A tropic anaysis was what you did in the rst book?

Right, the rst book, Cstals, Fabrics, and Fields Metaphors o

Organicism in TwentiethCentu Developmental Biolo, discussed threemetaphoric structures that have been used to interpret bioogica formin the twentieth centu, the conception for the shaping and controlin of biologica form. "Crstas, "fabrics, "and "eds are a non

reuctonist metapos, meann nonatomistic, nonparticulate a mapos a eal w omple woles an compleosss o os o a aal sa om



O G N I C I S M S C I T I C T H O Y 5 1

breang it down to their smalest parts and then adding relationshipsback.

G That is very important to your theory in general isn't it? Almosta way for peope to read your work.

Yes. en people miss the reations, the whoe, and focus onlyon separate bits, they come up with al sorts of misreadings of mywork. of my metaphors imply some nd of synergetic action at alevel of complety that is not approached through its smaest parts.

So they are al metaphors about complety. My work has always beenabout what counts as nature. In a way I fee I have written about arange of kinds of natures . I've written about artifactua natures in thevarious nds of cyborgian works I've written. One way to view thesebooks is that Primate sions Simians Cborgs and men andModestWitness treat three kinds of entitieseach of which investigates a set of historicities , a set of binaries, a set of interfaces, a set of

knowledge practices dierenty. ie they echo each other they arenot the same thing. ModesWitness is, in a way, the third book of atrilogy. The three volumes are made up of their own essays, each ofwhich has its own pubication history. There's lots of new stu in aof the books that was never published before, but al contain essaysthat have other occasions of writing and pubication. l three booksdo some of each other's work as we. For instance, in Simians

C borgs and men "A Cyborg Manifesto and "The Biopolitics ofPostmodern Bodies are two key essays, but then there are also theprimate essays and the gender essays. Similarly in Pmate Vionsthere are chapters that emphasize the cyborgian quaities of the primate research. And in Modest_Witness there are chapters that emphasize certain cyborgian themes but not the primate material. Yet a lotof situated knowledges issues reemerge in Modest_ness.



Primatolo

G How did you et interested in primate studies?

Primarily throuh a feminist window, especially becauseof the importance of evoltionary stories in the history of racean ender leanor eacoc's earl arstemnst writnall cm's 1975 crte the manhnte tss



54 O W L I K E A L E A F

caed "Woman the Gaherer Mae Bias in Anthropoog; AdrienneZihman and Nancy Tanner's eary paper, "Gathering and theHominid Adaptation om 1 97 8 .

G And then the primate materia became your area of researchthroughout the 1980s?

Actuay I went to Hopns in 1 974 and started to work on theprimate materia in 1976. And simutaneousy in the 1980s I wasdoing the cyborg work. I wrote "A Manifesto for Cyborgs in

1 98 384 and was writing primate papers a aong. So Pimate Vionsand Simians, Cborgs, and men were written simutaneousy. WhieI was at the Institute for Advnced Studies in Princeton in 1987, Iwrote "The Biopoitics of Postmodern Bodies, "Situated owedges, and nished the Primate Vions book a the same year.

G What drew you to primate studies?

There are mutipe ways of taking about that. One of them isthat I just reay ike monkeys and apes. I think they are reay fascinating animas. In the 1 960s, there was a whoe exposion of the studyof eeranging primatesof monkeys and apesthat took o.There's aso no question that I was part

·of the audience for the ane

Gooda stories. And at the same time, arguments from nature are

absoutey centra to race and gender debates, and cass debates forthat matter.

G you put it in Pmate sions, "[Primatoogy is about primastories, the origin and nature of man,' and about reformation stories,the reform and reconstruction of human nature.

Yes, and as I began to identi as a historan of bioog, which I for e me a on, I was moe an more neresed ine naaan an an amen. e wa o man



R I M T G Y 55

ssues in culture, histor, politics come to be narrated as biologicaland evolutionar stories d the reversein other words, the waybological and evolutionar stories are so thickly layered with the

tools of political economy

G You're referrin to what you call " Simian Orientalism?

Yes, I was interested in how primatolog can be read as yetanother system of Western representation that is about the Westernconstruction of the self via the terms "animal, "nature, "body,

"primitive, "female

G You say it concisely in the introduction, "The Persistence ofsion, that, "The primate body, as part of the body of nature, maybe read as a map of power Biolog and primatolog are inherentlypolitical discourses whose chief objects of knowledge, such as organ-sms and ecosystems, are icons (condensations) of the whole histor

and politics of the culture that constructed them for contemplationand manipulation The primate body is an intriguing kind of politicaldiscourse One certainly sees that in the whole history of primatemovies and ican Orientalist lms such as ng Kong [ 1 9 3 3 .

Yes Pmate sions is written in direct relation to the histor ofracialist discourse and primatolog in the socalled Third World The

major primate researchers have been om industrial northern nationsand the major place that the monkeys and apes live is in the formerlycolonized part of the world And this really matters So Primate sions

is om the getgo concerned with colonialism and postcolonialismand with the ways that the primates have been deeply enmeshed inracial and national discourse of many kinds So the book isn't justabout gender, although gender is a prominent concern I mean right

at the beginning near that uote ou read is the imae of the recin-ing nue on an rienta cart



56 H W l K

G That is such a hilarious painting.

But, boy, do things like this make the primatologists rious!

G y?

Because they feel attacked.

G But you didn't make up that picture. It's like blaming Freud forpatriarchy.

In a way. But if I were writing this book again there are twothings I would do dierently. One is I would spend a lot more time inthe eld with primatologists. Primate sions is mostly interiew-based and documentbased and I feel that the kind of book I was writ-ing required a much thicker engagement ethnographically than I gaveit. So that is a huge methodological aw in a book that I basically still

love. d the second thing, which is somewhat related, is that I wouldhave spent more time with my own rhetorical apparatus inviting pri-matologists into this bookreassuring them. Giving them more evience that I know and care about the way they think. It became a veryhard book for many primatologists. They felt attacked and excluded.

G They saw it as a kind of handsonyourhips negative critique

where you are just standing there shaking your nger, going "this is aracist, sexist, colonialist enterprise?

Exactly. d I don't think the book does argue that, but I under-stand emotionally and intellectually how that got across . And I wouldwork much harder to make that not happen.

G at ns of conversations have ou ha with various primatoosts sn t ubaton of t boo



R M T L G Y 57

The most interesting was actually a conference that was organized by Shirley Strum and Linda Fedigan under the auspices of theenner Grey Foundation in Brazil a couple of years ago. It was put

together specically to ask how it is that primate science has changedover the century. They invited science studies people, feminist studies people, and primatologists and other behavioral ecologists. Theyhad people like Gregg Mitman, who is an historian of biolog whodoes marvelous work on the representation of animals in Americanculture. Bruno Latour, me, Evel Keller, ison Wiley, who doeshistor of archeolog. Primatologists were there from Brazil, Japan,

the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. It was a total of about twenttwopeople who came for a week.

G Were there people there who you had written about in the book?

Yes. Several people I had interviewed in some depth. Some wholiked the book and some who did not like it at all. But it was a very

uitl and intense week. For a week we talked about how knowledgebuilding about primates works. For example, how in the 1 990s no primatologist worth her salt can think about her organism outside thepressing concerns of ecolog, forestr, and habitat structure. Thesethings really change the questions one ask about animals.

G Would you give me an example?

For instance, you can't touch New World primates in Brazilwithout thinking of forestr and habitat destruction, sustainability,and the international treaties and industries that aect such things.One is immediately in the middle of an intellectual scene and a political scene that shapes the questions you ask. So we were loong at theways the changed ideological and material crcumstances mattered.

The way the early nationalst ostconal moment n the 960s is dfferent from te osto confeence of te envonment an eveoment of te s.



58 H W l K

G It sounds like you were talking about many of the issues youwrote about in Primate Vions.

We were and I felt my book had some input, but there were obvi-ously many other factors The conference was not about the book, butthe book was one of the artifacts, if you will, that several of us sharedIt was a ver dicult week in a lot of ways Conversations were noteasy It was a very reective time for me personally

G at kind of impact has the book had on primatolog?

I don't think it's had any impact on primatolog Most people atthe conference hadn't read the book, but they new about it henthe book came out the reviews by primatologists were twothirds negative, with others vaguely hostile and a few positive Some of the mostprominent reviews were tremendously critical The most prominent

was simply maliciousver sciencewar inectedwritten in a indof bad faith that takes my breath away But that's my opinion AlisonJolly, who I write about in the book, has really grappled with it sub-sequently and has come out feeling quite interested in the book Butshe still worries that nally I am a relativist That science is the bestway and primatologists, unlike us cultur critics, are really interestedin the way the world "is

G But you are toocompletely! That's what you write about

And she knows that but constantly keeps woring about the lay-ers of interpretation I introduce

G How can one bridge that gap? In a sense, I think it's a question

of ow one eas wi teor no matter were one is For the rimatoogiss "te e maes eoretia oege tat mu arer,een o a eo as roems eain it "raie an isa



P R M T L G Y 59

versa because of a false notion of theory versus practice It breaksdown into a question of what is theoretical Oen people can't see thepractice of theory or see it as a practice I've learned this om you,

how theory and practice are one unit intertwined like a DN strandUnfortunately, some people jump into thinking a complex analysisacross a number of contradictory levels (contradictory being the operative word here) means relativism Sometimes I just think it's not theo versus practice but those who can sustain subtlety and contradic-tion versus those who must reduce and simpli complexty

ich doesn't mean there isn't a lot of relativism out there Ithink those who see radical epistemological relativism in my work justaren't reading But what's ustrating about Alison Jolly is that shehears and appreciates the poesis She 's very interested in the metaphorwork and yet she missesliterally doesn't seethe dense arumentation, the thick evidential structure in the book She forgets that thesepractices coexist in the book

G "Forget is a perfect word since it is oen an issue of not mak-ing or recollecting the connections you make but just rememberingonly one aspect It goes back to the discussion of the kind of organi-cism your work is structured by

Exactly lison even wrote a chapter of her own book recently in

which she remembered the discussion in "pes in Space of JaneGoodall and the National Geoaphic context but didn't remember anyof the discussions about the scientic debates about the unit of a chim-panzee society She didn't remember any of the argumentation aboutthe three major interpretive paradigmsthe motherinfant bond, theunit group the Japanese introduced, or the kinds of units behavioralecologists study She missed the kind of intellectual history and the

kind of institutonal istor suc units were seen as embedded in hemissed te wole fooote structure about te sto of te researcste, a te stu about te mortance of te can e assstance at



6 H O W K

Goodall's eld site, the publishing practices and the way they work inthe eld establishing a database collection om the Gombe site, thecomputerizing of it, the history of eld note taking at the site. She

remembered none of that!

G en you brought this up to her what happened?

She went back and did revisions. She sent it back and now it ismy turn to send back the revised chapter. In general, the women inPimate sions felt less attacked with the exception of Sarah Hrdy, in

part because of the way I wrote the last four chapters highlighting thework of four women whose work was vastly less sexist. I still thinktheir work is less sexist for good historical reasons and they did bet-ter biology as a result. On the other hand, Steve Glickman from theUniversity of California at Berkeley, who studies hyenas, is deeplyengaged by what Bruno Latour and I do. are Shirley Strum andLinda Fedigan . So the book has no direct impact on primatolog. But,

on the other hand, the ideas coming in om science studies are partof the conversations in primatolog.

NDNOS

Adrienne Zihlman and Nancy Tanner, "Gathering and the HominidAdaptation, in Female Hierarchies, eds Lionel Tiger and Heather Fowler

(Chicago: Beresford Press, 978): 394

2 Donna J Haraway, Pimate Vions: Gende Race and Nature in the d of

Mode Science (New York: Routledge, 989): 9

3 Ibid, 0

4 Tom Palmore, Reclining Nude, 97 6 he Philadelphia Museum



ss, n s n f s.

DONN J. RWY

I l l

Historical Good Luck

G Tr dos sm to b an incrdibl swll in your ambi-ion and produtii in lat 1970s and 80s

o m 80s was a pu p . ws pp. W w un os n Hasu. wasmmn ms wn n n f



62 H W l K L

construction work, planting gardens and such I adored ]aye's loverBob, Rusten and I had a really good relationship, and I loved my stu-dents here in HistCon But all of that ended abruptly in 1 98 5 when

Bob got sick with IDS and died in 1 986, which devastated J aye ndthen of course Jaye was also right on the edge physically His Tcellcount was already under two hundred when Bob died

G How long had Jaye been with him?

Bob was ]aye's lover from 1 98 0 to 1 98 6 when he died He was

a FilipinoChicano man from Watsonville whose father was animmigrant who owned a small grocery store His mother wasLatina Her family was from New Mexico for several generations,but she had migrated to California The racist history of Californialaw is part of their story She and Bob's father had to go back toNew Mexico to marry because of the antimiscegenation laws inCaliforia in the 1950s Bob's father died early because he was

much older than Bob's mother Filipino women were largelybarred from immigration quotas into the US, which is why manyof the Filipino men were married to younger women from othersocalled racial groups fter Bob's father died, the family was inserious economic trouble His mother worked in the canneries inWatsonville She also remarried and ad four other childrenRusten and I still keep in touch with them as a kind of extended

family Bob's mother was at our house when Bob died and in manyways that was the time she recognized that Bob and Jaye were lifepartners Before he got sick she really didn't take his relationshipseriously Even my father nally recognized the depth of their rela-tionship only when Bob got sick He hadn't understood how seri-ous gay relationships were , that they were just as committed as het-erosexual marriage It sounds crazy to say this but it's what he

touht ae was invited to be the odfather of the rst grandi as bn f mnts afte b ied bvius, Bb ave been te ate bt ae as invite in is ae



H I S T O R I C G O O U C K 63

We had a little party on the tenth anniversary of Bob's death andthe fth anniversary of ]aye 's . Several members of both familiescame. It was an important marking.

G You have an orchard that was important to ]aye, don't you? Iremember it om the memorial service. We each took a piece of fruithome.

Yes, we have an orchard. It was all of ourssome trees were]aye's, some Bob's. Those were peaches at the memorial seice.

G I remember how powerl it was to hold the fruit at the seiceand imagine the labor and love you all had put into it. I have to sayone of the things that was crucial to me as your student was nowingof your communitwith an exhusband, his male lover, your partnerall in one home. It made me see how you live the theory youwrite and teach. I saw it as this kind of utopian unit with you contin-

uing to be soul mates living with the man you had been married to,with his lover and your partner Rustenall of you forging your ownkind of particular bonds. I had a hard time not romanticizing it thenand even now. I know it was also why ]aye's death so aected me eventhough I only knew him slightly om teaching in a UC Santa Cruzcore [ curriculcum course . I think I just so longed for such tiesmyselfones that superseded the ideolog of couples and marriage

while embracing true iendship and love across a register of bonds ofintimacy. It made me trust you. By trust, I mean, allowed me to seethe extent of your beliefs in your life practice.

We were also able to do that because of a lot of historical goodluck. We inherited certain permissions om moments of cultural his-tory that shut down right before and aer. so, Jaye and I had a kind

of friendshi that neither of us new how to et go of. o nows,there are ways that we might have been better off if we coud have eteach other go But I am very glad we didn't d, ironically, since



]aye's and Bob's death Rusten and I have been a couple in a way wenever intended to be

G hat year did Jaye die?

He died in 1 99 1 The same year that Simians, C borgs, and men

came out



hs k shl e rea as a atnar tale at the el

tn f es, ls, an stresDONN J. RWY

Simians, Cborgs,and Women

G Les moe o to Simians, Cborgs, and men, oo

o e te eae s a atonar ae"

Rght foregron the rhetra strateges of nte

mh lng from the egnnng Bt t s mrtant to

rememer that Sms Cyborgs d me s a olletn f



66 O W K

essays written at various times in the 1970s and 1980s but not pub-lished as a book until 1 99 1 .

G Yes. The tension between the book as a wholenot a series ofessays as a series of discrete , individual essays written over peri-ods of time about everything from gender to women's studies, tocyborgs, primates, and immunologyis integral to your method andto the effect the book has had on scholarship as a theoretical object.It brings us back to your early work on metaphors of organicism aswell as to issues of stortelling. Like when you refer to yourself as,

"Once upon a time, in the 1970s, the author was a proper, U.S.socialistfeminist, white, female, hominid biologist, who became ahistorian of science to write about monkeys, apes, and women.That is very nny while also situating you within a context.

Well, I am as much of a discursive object as the things I study are.

G And you situate the object of analyses in the introduction as"trickster gures that might turn a stacked deck into a potent set ofwild cards for reguring possible worlds. And then in the last essayof the book, "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinationsof Self in Immune System Discourse , you redescribe the world itselfas a trickster gure, as "a witty agent an actor. And, "Perhaps ourhopes for accountability in the technobiopolitics in postmodern

ames turn on revisioning the world as coding trickster with whomwe must learn to converse. The trickster is both a literary, myhicdevice as well as a methodolog for understanding the world. Yet youemphasize that this is who we have to lea to converse with, whichmeans we have to learn how it speaks. We aren't just discovering anentity but learning its system, habitat, language. This is so crucial inall of your work.

DH es, te use f te tste s a b teme n a of te essas, ands as tee t atn s aanst antmsm. t s ad



s I M I N s I c y R G s I N D w M N 67

because even a word like "conversation conjures up speech as weknow it But the trickster gure is about the world that is also non-human, about all that is not us, with whom we are enmeshed, making

articulations all the time It is a serious mistake to anthropomorphizeyour partners!

G "The Biological Enterprise: Sex, Mind, and Prot om HumanEngineering to Sociobiolog seems like a seminal essay in terms ofdrawing together ideas about human engineering and capitalismacross the twentieth century

Well, that is the chapter about Robert Yerkes and E 0. lsonthat I reworked and rethought from Primate sions The rst partof the essay is about Yerkes's work at Yale in the 1920s and 30s andthen I take a jump and go to E 0. Wilson and sociobiology, to hiswork right aer World War II when he was a young researcher atHarvard

G The quote om the human engineer in 189 that opens "TheBiological Enterprise is prett astonishing It reads, "Life can bemolded into any conceivable form Draw up your specications for adog, or a man and if you will give me control of the environment,and time enough, I will clothe your dreams in esh and blood Asensible industrial system will seek to put men, as well as mber, stone,

and iron, in the places for which their natures t them for ecient service with at least as much care as is bestowed upon clocks, electricdynamos, or locomotives

Yes, this is a "human engineer talking om the late nineteenthcentury!

G s a human enginee in 89 simila to a sociobioloist in the198s an 99s



68 H O W I K

I set it up that way because of the shared machinic imaginationsbut also because of the mutations

G Please describe to me what a human engineer is

management scientist who helps scientists gure out how tomatch men and jobs

G So this has nothing to do with biolog

No, a human engineer is a management scientist This is exactlyan instance where the discourse of biology and management are bed-fellows Now, Yerkes was a great reformer, a biologist and psycholo-gist who in his early research included all these interesting studies ofdancing mice and other organisms and who for much of his life pas-sionately wanted to build a primate research laboratory as a model for"man at I called a "pilot plant for human engineering) He is

committed to social reform, committed to the amelioration of life andsuering and sees psycholog as a modern science that is the rationalsolution to human problems that religion could never solve But all ofthe chapters in the earlier part of the book are under the rubric of"Nature as a System of Production and Reproduction All three ofthese chapters are ways of illustrating wht we were talking about afew minutes agonature as a system of productivities and ecien-

cies, literally nature as engineering projects If you dene somethingas a machinelike a chimpanzeethen one of the implications of themachine is that it can be reengineered So, if the chimpanzee is knownas the serant of science in the context of human engineering, as itwas practiced in capitalist industry in this period of capital accumulation, you see how it is connected to what Frank Parsonsa humanmanagerial engineer at the turn of the centuryis discussing In these

instances, it is how life human labor, biological organisms) can bemo int an cncivable frm "raw u our scications fora , r a man, iv m cntr t nvirnmnt an tim



S M N S , C B O G S , N D W O M N 69

enough, [and I will clothe all of your dreams in esh and blood . The1990s version of the same quote isou give me conrol o the genes

and time enough wi code our dreams in esh and blood Actually, you

see this at work in sociobiolog in the 1 97 6 chard Dawkins's quoteI juxtapose with Parsons: "They are in you and me; they created us,body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale forour existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Nowthey go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines .

G ong other things you are writing about the intensication of

the interface between sociobiolog and advanced capitalism.

And of psychobiolog earlier, which then becomes anothermoment of capitalism.

G Yesand later, the whole industry of psychopharmacolog.

A paper like "Sex, Mind, and Prot is a more orthodox Marxistinterpretation of the later work. In many ways much of Simians,

C borgs, and men is about dierent notions of propert.

G well as of domination. "Sex, Mind, and Prot ends:

ut the contuction of a natural econom according to capital

it relation, and it appropriation for purpoe of reproducingdomination, i deep t i at the level of ndamental theor andpractice, not at the level of good gu and ad gu o theextent that thee practice inform our theorizing of nature, weare till ignorant and mut engage in the practice of cience t ia matter for truggle do not know what life cience would elike if the hitorical tucture of our live minimized domination do now tat te itor o iolo convince me tat aicknowledge would refect and reproduce the new world, just as ithas participated in maintaining an od one .5



70 H W K

This manner of ending is how you end so many of your essays andbooks, with a kind of evidentially based speculation. ich is whatmade me interested in moving om this early analysis to the late 80s

and your last essay, "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies , as a wayto frame Simians, C borgs, and men because I'm interested in therhetorical and political structure of analysis that is being developedacross your varied objects of study. In other words the way "Sex,Mind, and Prot revolves around this notion of domination endingwith how could we think a world without domination, while"Biopolitics is centrally concerned with the way "dierence is

mapped into the discourse of immunolog as antagonistic and whatwould happen if we could think dierence dierently.

Yes. It is why I turn to Octavia Butlera black science ctionwriterto t to imagine the immune system through somethingother than the Cold War rhetoric of the immune system as a battle-eld. hy not think of it not so much as a discourse of invaders as of

shared specicities in a semipermeable self that is able to engage withothers (human and nonhuman, inner and outer), as Butler's civilization of gene traders is able to? The hydraheaded Oankali do notbuild nonliving technologies to mediate their selfformations andreformations. Rather, they are completely webbed into a universe ofliving machines, all of which are partnersnot enemiesin theirapparas of bodily production, including the ship on which the

action of Dawn takes place.

G you put it, is there a way to turn the immune body discourseinto something liberator or alternative? "Is this postmodern body,this constuct of always vulnerable and contingent individualit, nec

essai an automated Star Wars battleeld . . . ?

Exactly

d in beteen these to essays fall to of your most celebrat-



S M N S , C Y B O R G S , N D W O M N 7 1

ed essays, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technolog, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Centur, which is about reconguring nonliberator models, and "Situated Knowledges: The Science

Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,which outlines a standpoint of situatedness that is a component ofeverhing you write

Yes But it is ver important to understand that "situatednessdoesn't necessarily mean place; so standpoint is perhaps the wrongmetaphor Sometimes people read "Situated Knowledges in a way

that seems to me a little at; ie, to mean merely what your identi-ing marks are and literally where you are "Situated in this sensemeans only to be in one place ereas what I mean to emphasize isthe siatedness of situated In other words it is a way to get at the mul-tiple modes of embedding that are about both place and space in themanner in which geographers draw that distinction Another way ofputting it is when I discuss feminist accountabilit within the context

of scientic objectivit as requiring a knowledge tuned to resonance,not to dichotomy



The menace of Disease is one of the components of health.GORGS CNQUI M

Disease Is a elationship

G Did you actually write "The Biopolitics of PostmodernBodies when Jaye's lover Bob was sick?

he essay was written aer e died in 1986, but e didsome f e eseac f me a e nivesi f aifnia,eee ia ee e e I aca e i ie I



74 O W K

was at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton in Januar of1988

G Do you think that paper would be dierent if you wrote i t now?

No, I don't It would be dierent on certain levels in terms ofhaving to give my audience more accessie, certain things I wouldexplain morebut basically it would say the same things You knowthere are several areas of biolog that have been richly mined formetaphors about politics, and immunolog is a big one Emily Martin

is obviously another person who has written hugely about it On theother hand, I wonder if both Emily and I don't give too much weightto particular metaphors in immune system popular discourse that arenot as ubiquitous or powerl as we make them seem

G How would you classi the dierences between the way shewrites about the immune system and your essay? Because what I am

so struck by is the way you describe the immune system as an appara-tus for selfrecognition and therefore for monitoring concepts of selfand nonself

I think she is less interested in that aspect But it is hard to answerthat because the "Biopolitics paper came before Emily did "The Endof the Body or Flexible Bodies, so it was part of what she had read and

we were in conversation about these kinds of things

G I have always been struck by the way you describe the immunesystem discourse in the opening epigrams that set up your analysesThe quote about nonself: "A term covering everhing which isdetectably dierent om an animal's own constituents Followed by,"The immune system must recoize self in some manner in order to

react to someting forein I ave tis artice om the ew rkTmes of ]une 17, 1997, caed Watching Host Ces Coaborate inBacteria Infection" by Phiip J Hits that ts into e mode you are



D I S S I S R T I N S H I P 75

discussing The artcle is about how the body must have an "intimacy with a bacterium in order to get sick In other words, in orderto be infected, "The cells being attacked must actually give aid, mis-

takenly biologists assume, to the advancing bacteria Or as a DrTheriot put it, "In virtually all cases, the damage that happens ininfectious disease is the body's fault, so to speak

I haven't seen that article but that is exactly right There are anumber of agendas that I had in "The Biopolitics of PosodernBodies One of them, as we touched on earlier, was to explore the

kind of political metaphors embedded in immunolog and in otherdiscourses in politcs and the human sciences Another was to explorewhat counts as a "onehow boundaries get established in some ofthe really interestng boundar discourses going on, especially inchard Dawkns 's The Extended Phenope, where, om the parasite'spoint of view, the host is part of the parasite's phenotpe In thosends of extended bodies, I was interested in the way self and other

are, in a sense, perspectval issues hat counts as self and whatcounts as other is a perspectival question or a question of purposesthin which context are which boundaries rm? So om the pointof view of the parasite the host looks like part of itself; from the pointof view of the host the parasite looks like an invader Or from the New

r Times article, om the point of view of the host there is a kind ofdeathly intimacy

G Yes, in that article it states that the host has to let the infectionin It has to .

cooperate There is no infection if they don't recognize eachother There's no relationship. Disease is a relationship

G Yes, disease is a reationsi You ay out ow the immune system, this crios bodily object," exists in a of these different placesand I qote: From embryonic life throgh adlthood, the immne



76 H O W K

system is sited in several relatively amorphous tissues and organs,including the thymus, bone marrow, spleen, and lymph nodes; but alarge action of its cells are in the blood and lymph circulator sys

tem and in body uids and spaces "9 d then you describe twoimmune cell lineages (the mphotes and the mononuear phagotes)

and a whole array of systems within which the immune system com-municates culminating with the point I am leading up to that, "Thesemolecules mediate communication among components of theimmune system, but also between the immune system and the ner-vous and endocrine system, thus linking the body's multiple control

and coordination sites and nctions The genetics of the immunesystem cells, with their high rate of somatic mutation and gene prod-uct splicings and rearrangings to make nished surface receptors andantibodies, makes a mocke of the notion of a constant genome evenwithin one' body That was when I really started to understandyour critique of the human genome project and how reductive it is,how it is misrepresenting the whole mutability of the gene

Or how representations of the genome project misrepresent it Itisn't necessarily what the genome project misrepresents as that represetatios of the genome project misrepresent what it is doing Thegenome project scientists and the database designers are extremelyinterested in variabilit

How would they be able to be accountable for variability andconstruct a database at the same time?

It's a technical problem and it's a money problem, but designingdatabase protocols to handle variable gene sequences is at the heart ofthe project

TNG: It alo ound lke an eptemologcal problem

DH It is at the level of oware deign How do ou actuall build the



D S S S R T O N S H I P 77

soware to store the data so you can compare some things to otherthings, so that you can store within a certain region all the variants ofthat region and then be able to search for rther interesting variants

So the genome project is absolutely not about building a simple stan-dard More than anyhing else, it's about building a kind of hypertextmap

I have been misunderstanding this then

Rightly so because the genome project is presented as this kind

of Standard of Man business d ideologically that may be somewhattrue There's no question that there is a strong ideological discourseof that kind And again this is another way that you can start lookingat practice, and this representational practice is only one piece of thepuzzle that is the genome project Yes, there is way too little samplingof human variability going on in the genome projects, compared towhat there ouht to be But the eorts to get that variabilit are cur-

tailed by a number of factors, including the resistance of certain pop-ulations to being sampled A resistance that exists for excellent rea-sons, but also for not very good reasons, by my lights But peopledoing genome project work understand the building of these data-bases , the pursuing of these genetic maps, these sequence maps as aneffort to get at the wealth of variabilit Yet there is too small a set ofspecies being studied, and it's all very expensive

It's really an impossible feat

Yes, it's the exhaustive catalogue problem, that fantasy of ll-ness and completion Yet I am constantly interested in the mytho-logical dimensions of these things And we must remember themythological and the ideological are not the same thing t is impor-

ant o ee the fanastic, e mtoloical, an the ideoloical asthree dierent registers o an iaginary relationship The antastichas to do with psychodynaic processes that play theselves out in



78 H W l K F

culture as well as individually. The ideological has to do with a ndof Marxist sense of ideolog and follows ideas of representation andmisrepresentation of social interests. t least that's one good den-

ition of ideolog. nd the mythological has to do with these deepimplications in narrative and storytelling practices and inhabitingstories. So the three have to do with each other but are notreducible to each other. They do different kinds of meaning work.nd genome projects have all three registers going on, as well as aninstrumental register and various kinds of technical registers relatedto the practices of molecular biolog.

One can see how "Biopolitics is a jumping o into the nextbook, ModesWiess.

That's rightit is. But in reference to the "Biopolitics argu-ment, I don't want people to think I am negating having to thinkabout such things as competition, war, and opposition. Not at all. The

essay doesn't domesticate the hard issues but rather insists on animagination of relationalit that doesn't reduce to cyclopean singleminded, singlesentence truths.

ich is again where I see Heidegger's relevance in that he isboth describing this thing called BEG while at the same me tngto invent a new lanage and understanding of it. Would you say you

are working in epistemolog or ontolog or is it about both? t mesI see you talking about epistemolog ("Situated owledges, "TeddyBear Paiarchy) and at others about a radical ontolog " CyborgManifesto, "The Biopolics of Posodern Bodies) , and yet all theseinstances are also about a breakdown of such categories.

I think it is mixed up. One of the things poststructuralism did was

to robematize te searation of ontolog and epistemolog as discourses an I nert tat breaown.



D I S S S R T I O N S I P 79

NDNOTS

1 Donna J Haraway Simians, Cyborgs, and men: The Reinvention of Nature

(New Yor: Routledge 99 ) :

2 Ibd

3 In Prmate sions it s called "A Pilot Pant for Human Engneerng: Robert

Yeres and the Yale Laboratores of Prmate Bolog 1 92442

4 From Simians, Cybor, and Women Chapter : "nmal Socolog and a Natral

Economy of the Body Polc: A Polcal Physolog of Domnance; Chapter

2 : "The Past Is a Contested Zone: Human Nature and Theores of Producon

and Reproducon in Prmate Behavour Studies ; Chapter 3 : "The Bologcal

Enterprse: Sex nd and Prot om Human Engneerng to Sociobolog5 Haraway 99 68 Ths s also the last lne of "Stuated Knowledges:

"Perhaps our hopes for accountablty for poltcs for eco-feminsm turn on

revsonng the world as codng trcster wth whom we must learn to con

verse Haraway 99 2 0

6 Ibd 22 02 1

7 For additonal reading see Emly Martn "The End of the Body? Amercan

Ethnologt 992: 240 and Flexible Bodies Tracking Immuni in

Amercan Culture om the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Boston: BeaconPress 994)

8 Philp J Hlts "Watchng Host Cells Collaborate in Bacteral Infecton

New Yrk Times, Tuesday June 7 997 C3

9 Haraway 99 1 2 7

1 0 Haraway 991 2 8



Conider, then, the text given u the exitence, in the hindgutof a modern South Autralian termite, of the creature namedxoc rdox, a mixed-up, paradoxcal, microcopic it of"hair (cos) hi little lamentou creature mae a moceof the notion of the ounded, defended ingular elf out to protect it genetic invetment.

DO NN J HRWY

C H A P T E R I

More han Metaphor

e a o ece eg a

ca cc. a epeca neee o

tainng a a ecuar an eveopenal olgt ainuenced, n ut the thee f ou , t verehdolo.



82 H W K

Words like "methodolog are ver scar you know! Rather than"methodolog I' prefer to say I have denite ways of working thathave become more conscious over the years nd most certainly my

training in biologin molecular, cellular, and developmental biologmatters to me Particularly the way that it allows me to be alertto, and take tremendous pleasure in, biological beings and biologicalwebs of relatedness I'm fascinated by the internal architecture of cellsand chromosomes nd there is no doubt that I equently think inbiological metaphors

There is a kind of biologism to how you write You take some-thingan object of knowledge or cultureand you move rther andrther inside of it, to what its structure is nd then you move insideof whatever webs of meaning you discover om that analysis and soon and so forth You also use optical metaphors a lot in your writingand your method really has a kind of microscopic zoomingin eectto it, without, of course, ever leaving behind the big picture

I'm fascinated by changes of scale I think biological worlds invitethinking at and about dierent kinds of scale t the same time, bio-logical worlds are ll of imaginations and beings developed omquite extraordinar biological architectures and mechanisms Biologis an inexhaustible source of troping It is certainly ll of metaphor,but it is more than metaphor

You used that phrase once before at do you mean by "it ismore than metaphor?

I mean not only the physiological and discursive metaphors thatcan be found in biolog but the stories For instance all the variousironic, amost nny, incongruies he sheer wiliness and complexit

of it a o that biolog is not mere a metaphor tat iuminates something else, but an inexhausble source of getting at the nonliteralnessof the worl. Also, want to call attenon to the simultaneit of fact



M O R T H M T P H O R 83

and con, materialit and semiocit, object and ope.

You mean the way these literal biological entities are also such

powerl metaphors for understanding "life; i.e., biological andontological systems . I think of your discussion of the microorganismMixotrcha paradoxa in "Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together inthe New World Order from The Cborg andboo. 1

Yes. I use Mixotricha paradoxa as an entit that interrogates indi-vidualit and collectivit at the same time. It is a microscopic single

celled organism that lives in the hind gut of the South ustralian ter-mite. at counts as "it is complicated because it lives in obliga-tor symbiosis with ve other kinds of entities . Each has a taxonomicname, and each is closely related to bacteria because they don't have acell nucleus. They have nucleic acid, they have DN, but it's notorganized into a nucleus. Each of these ve dierent kinds of thingslives in or on a dierent region of the cell. For example, one lives in

interdigitations on the exterior surface of the cell membrane. So youhave these little things that live in these folds of the cell membraneand others that live inside the cell . But they aren't in the ll sense partof the cell. On the other hand, they live in obligator symbiosis .Nobody can live independently here. This is codependency with avengeance! d so the question isis it one enti or is it six? But sixisn't right either because there are about a million of the ve non-

nucleated entities for ever one nucleated cell. There are multiplecopies. So when does one decide to become two? hen does thiswhole assemblage divide so that you now have two? nd what countsas Mixorcha Is it just the nucleated cell or is it the whole assem-blage? This is obviously a fabulous metaphor that is a real thing forinterrogating our notions of one and many.

TN It also sounds like it has a nd of multidimensional temporality to it I mean how does one nd it in the rst place and what didit look likewhat form did it taewhen it was discovered? At which



84 H O W I K

moment of its being was it discovered? And how did the researchersnd all of its complet and still see it as a whole rather then as aseries of dierent entities? I don't ow ver much about biolog, but

my sense is that there are all sorts of things like M paradoxa.

Rightthere are zillions of examples Biolog is an endlessresource That's why I have always preferred biolog to psychoanaly-sis because it throws up so many more possibilities for stories thatseem to get at some of our historical, psychological, political exis-tence Psychoanalysis pins things down too soonit may be part of

the truth but it's not the most interesting I also just love the nameMixocha paradoxa!

What does Mixocha mean?

Mixed threads

That's fabulous d Mixoicha is a boundar creature like thecyborg, the primate, and OncoMouse™?

Right, but with the cyborg and the genetically engineered crea-ture you have to think of the industrial artifactual, the human builtth Mixoicha, this is not true, although it does need an intimaterelationship with the laborator processes that bring it into our view

Our relationship with M paradoxa is produced by technoscienticrelations that include the laborator machiner, airplane travel, thewhole histor of zoolog and taxonomy, as well as of colonial sciencein Australia

You oen receive the same kinds of reductionist readings ofyour work that experimental narrativists and artists like Yvonne

aine o for man of te same reasons ome peope rese toenae i e n of ome u use of M aradoxa euires assae s an ams eeimenta aanaist to use an



M T H N M T P H 85

old term) antilinear, antiteleological aesthetic in your theory that islike Rainer's . Like you, she is constantly constructing analyses of race,gender, sexualit, desire via a complex relationalassociational aes-

thetic that demands one does not stop her lm at any one momentand say: This is Yvonne Rainer's statement. It's the same with yourwork, which, read unsympathetically turns your work into an anti-materialist, technophilicor technophobicsocial constructionistview of science. Such readings are representative of an inabili towork with subtlet.

It's a kind of literalmindedness. nd that's why gures are soimportant to me, because gures are immediately complex and non-literal, not to mention instances of real pleasure in language. An oddliteralism comes through when critics create positions that don't real-ly existlike recycling urban legends of people saying, "You bel ieve inN!?! How unsophisticated! This is sad, shocking, and takes awayom all the pleasure in language and bodies that animates so much of

the serious work on the cultural studies of science.

N Finding the ral in the literal, or concrete, is ve importantto you. Your recent book Modest_Witness@Second_Milennium.

FemaleMan©MeetsOncoMouse spends a great deal of time dis-cussing guration, not just in the discourses of biotechnology but inthe ve "esh of the gene itself. I'm interested in the way "esh has

always been important to younot just through your training as aolecular and developmental biologist, but in your deep commitent to the "esh of gender, race, species. "Flesh stands in as asynecdoche for the way material reality signies or is physically "tropic as you put it.

The rst thing 'd say is that words are intensely physical for me.

nd words an angage more clel related t es tan t ideas.

Rland arthe ha thi great entence, "anage i a n: I



86 H O W I K

rub my language against the other It is as if I had words instead ofngers, or ngers at the tip of my words In much the same way yourely on language's eshy metaphorical juiciness

Since I experience language as an intensely physical process, Icannot not think through metaphor It isn't as though I make a choiceto work with and through metaphor, it's that I experience myselfinside tese constantly swerving, intensely physical processes of semi-osis Biochemistry and language just don't feel that dierent to meThere's also a Catholic dimension to all of this My deep formation in

Catholic symbolism and sacramentalismdoctrines of incarnationand transubstantiationwere all intensely physical The relentlesssymbolization of Catholic life is not just attached to the physicalworld, it is the physical world Look at the religious art of the USSouthwest, the Mexican, Latino, Chicano art and you get an intenseexample of that Contrast that art to the more abstemious Protestantart and then imagine the inside of a church in Mexico Cit I grew up

within the art world of Mexico Cit, so to speak, even though I grewup in Denver, Colorado It was an Irish Catholic scene, nowhere asrich as the Latino cultural tradition, but I grew up very much insidean elaborate symbolic gural narrative world where notions of signand lesh were profoundly tied together I understood te world thisway by the time I was four years old

: Would you dene esh?

My instincts are always to do the same thing It's to insist on tejoin between materiality and semiosis Flesh is no more a thing thana gene is But the materialized semiosis of esh always includes tetones of intimacy, of body, of bleeding, of suering, of juiciness Fleshis always somehow wet It's clear one cannot use the word esh with

out understandin vulnerabilit and ain

TNG: There's this quote I saved om the 1985 "A anifsto for



M R T N M T P R 87

yborgs where you say, "y should our bodies end at the skin orinclude at best other beings encapsulated by sn

And other organisms as well as built objects There are all kindsof nonhumans with whom we are woven together

N well as ways that our esh is made up of arfactual esh I'mthinking of the way you use syntaccal marks"@, © "inMo_eSecond_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Mee_OncoMoe tolocate us It is an example of the way your tle successlly creates a new

kind of syntax and guraon The tle "Modest_ess@Second_MillennumFemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouse is its own technocul-tural poem You visualize and theorize through the words and stac-cal marks of the tle, situang us in late tenethcentur histor Thatis wonderl because these marks are he new brands

Especially with the double meaning of brand as te and mark of

ownership burned into the esh

N Ad rather than use the word posodernism, or any other kindof categor of modernit to mark the constitutional dierencebetween the late tentieth centur and earlier moments of modern-it, you say, "I give the reader an email address, if not a password, tosituate things in the net Email is familiar to almost eveone now

It is a crucial location for us in everday life and signies a mode ofcommunication particular to late twentiethcentur technoculture"@ instantiates al l the complex webs of relation (economic, ontolog-ical, social, historical, technological) that are key to postmodernismwithout having to engage once again in all the gnarly academicdebates around the term

And it's a oe too

TNG: Yes humor, as much as irony, is so crucial to your theoretical



88 H W K

style. How can we not laugh at the description you give of the transgenic tomatosh antieeze combination developed in Oakland,California, in 1991. Since I brought up postmodernism, I'm inter

ested in your denition of modernity.

My denition of modernity is that it is the period of the intensi-ed transportation of seeds and genes. For instance look at the inven-tion of the rst great industrial systemplantation agriculture (whichis not my idea but one I got om others)and follow the whole relo-cation of populations, plants, sugar, kasava to feed populations from

which male labor has been removed for colonial agricultural purposes. You can do the history of modernity as the history of the trans-portation of genes as well . In fact you can take each of the technoscientic stem cells I mention in brain, chip, gene,fetus, bomb, race, database, and ecosystem and do the history ofmodernity.



a intereted in the kind of fetihi proper to wor without trope, to literal world, to gene a autotelic entitie.

DONN J HRWY

A Gene Is Not a Thing

N goo e o o gen e

ente to o gno .

e rt oint i that the gene ala repreentedorirepreenteda thing.



9 H O W K

N Not just as a thing but as an urthing. I actually have an exam-ple om the New rk Dai News that happened to be in the paperthe day I le New York to come out here to meet with you.

(looking at it) Oh, this is about the noveltyseeing gene and I seeit's dopaminerelated and I see we even have a little receptor (looking

at the pictre) We even have an arrow pointing to where there is a"Release of dopamine at nerve terminal. d what does the articlecall it, "The Geehiz gene? Oh Lord, yes, exactly.

N And they say the baby who is born with this noveltyseekinggene is the more alert and exploratory. These are the babies who growup to climb mountains, race cars, or seek sensation.

Life in the fast stroller lane .

N Exactly, and my favorite"Some babies who had the novelt-

seeking gene but lacked a socalled neuroticism genebelieved bysome to inuence anxiety and harmavoidanceshowed evenstronger noveltseeking behavior. . . . In other words it is necessaryto have the neuroticism gene if one is endowed with a novel-seeking gene or else "you might not want to have someone who is asuper sensationseeker coupled with low neuroticism ying Boeingplanes and driving the Greyhound bus.

So you need an anxiet gene to damp down your novelt-seeking!

N Yes. It is now healthy to have a neuroticism gene otherwiseyou're out there recklessly sensationseeking.

I se that this stud "coud be used to detect ersonalit traits , s idn's soica dvomnt and vn dive careeris is is assd as sin I asd m find o



G N I S N O T T N G 9 1

Gilbert, who is a developmental biologist and historian of biology atSwarthmore, why geneticists don't get as up in arms against this kindof misrepresentation of science as they do with the supposedly rela

tivist postmodern stu, and he was not really sure All I now is thatthese hypergenetic ideologiesa gene for everyhingare verydestructive People shape their beliefs about their children's lives thisway Say a child experiences a problem and the parent's suddenly getsome idea that it's a genetic mental illness We now live at a timewhen the rst explanation for such things is a genetic explanation Myproblem is not in understanding the genetic roots of illness

hardlybut in the distortion of scientic research Then again, Ithink many biologists know this and don't like it either but there is ahuge ind of popular respect and fascination and a lot of goodies anda lot of money and a lot of authori out there for gene research andsuch simplications make it easier to get nding There's no doubtthat biotechnolog is a major area of contemporary business, of capital investment It's tied up in some of the most powerl industries

including the health industry, pharmaceuticals, and agribusiness Allare intimately dependent on molecular biology and genetic technolog If you take agriculture, medicine, a good bit of food productionincluding meat production, you've got some very important nancialinterests here that are deeply dependent on genetic technologies andwill only be more so in the ture

So the more that the popular imagination thinks that genes area "thing the easier it is for these industries to maintain support forsuch research and investment?

Yes It's what I call genetic fetishisma noncritical relationshipto genetic technologies, ll of mythologies and narratives, epitomized in the Jurassic Park version where a dinosaur is reconstructed

from prehistoric DNA resered in a um of amber is nd ofutter fetishization of te ene, were te ene is seen as te berintand maes eerin, is ba bioo



92 H O W K

N: Since biolog is described as a "life science, would you discussthe difference between "life as you use it in ModestWitness and Sarah

Franklin's term, "life itself You distinguish "life as a developmen-tal, organicist temporalit from "life itself, the temporalit embed-ded in communications enhancement and system redesign at isthe distinction?

There's a kind of relay from Foucault's notion of the develop-ment of "life itself to Sarah Franklin's picking it up within the con-

text of master molecule gene discourse, and then my picking it upfrom Sarah, making use of both Foucault's and Franklin's layers ofmeaning, and adding my own

N: So when I read "life itself what am I supposed to think?

I'm using it to refer to a kind of literalism, a kind of eort to turn

the processural relatedness of the natureculture world into a xedcode or a xed program Life contained and xed and turned into aparticular kind of fetish, the fourpart fetishism I outline inModestess9 where I emphasize the fetishism inherent to thestudy of "life relating to all of Marx's analysis of the commodityform, complete with all the uncanniness Fetishism is hardly a clear,xed, nonproductive process There are amazingly creative aspects to

commodity fetishism d in genetics, obviously commoditfetishism is involved But I am also interested in some other aspectsrelated to gene fetishism that aren't always about commoditfetishism One of them is what I call "cognitive fetishism, which Iworked out om ed North Whitehead using his notion of "mis-placed concreteness° Cognitive fetishism, like other kinds offetishism, involves a roductive mistake or a productive mislocation,

based in wat Witeead refers to as "simied editions of immedi-ate mattes of fat n te ase of ene disouse, wat taes ae iste msoaton of te abstat n te onete o nstane, wen



G I 5 T T I G 93

we're tlking about genetics, the idea of the human genome is onntroduced as the "program for human nature. The notion of the"program involves a cognitive fetishism where " the program is mis-

taken for the thing itse at is happening here is tat the layers ofabstraction and processing tat have gone into producing notions ofcode and program re then simpied and mistaken for the real.

It sounds like what Roland Barthes was getting at inMthologies1 1- kind of sipping of ayers of sign production fromconnotation into denotation, where te connotative sign becomes te

signier in a new system of articulationis mistaken as "fact or truth(as merey a pure or "ur signier)and becomes te signier of atruth in a new system. Hence the production of much informationtoday follows te model of Barthes's myth. Clearly you are takingabout a much more complex evolution of tis system of semiosis .

Yes, cognitive fetishism is the process of producing "productive

literalism; netorks of iteraisms tat I am tring to expose and beresponsive to.

Is tat what you mean in Part Three of ModesWiness

"Pragmatics: Hypertext in Technoscience wen you say "pragmaticss the physioog of semiotics? 1 2

Yes. It is this kind of literalism or concretizing of meaning intophysiologies of meaning that I want to brek up. I take the idea ofpragmatics om Charles Morris's Foundation of the Theo of Sis

when he says, "Considered om the point of view of pragmatics, alinguistic structure is a system of beavior.

Certainl such anases seem selfevident now when we go to

anaze a lm text or dvertsement ut the dfference here s ou aretan out n oe v man, o ac, t"snc c ,



94 H W l K

to be growng wthn the context of a kind of cultural petr dsh.Bascally you nclude the petr dsh withn your denition of a gene.

Yes. And in addton, I'm sezng on all sorts of deologcal stusome of t very borng and traditional but still very powerl.Straghtforward notons of master molecues and sngle parenthood,but that's pretty straghtforward, deologcal processng. But it s de-oogical processng that s rooted n the ndamental discursive pro-ductions of the gene n the form of "fe itself as a literazed form.

So "life tself becomes an exampe of htehead's misplacedconcreteness, what he cals a "simplied edition of the compexprocesses of abstracton.

Yes.

In terms of such a crtica consciousness how would ou dene

a gene . Or woud you?

gene s a knot in a eld of relatedness. It's a materialsemioticentity; a concretization that locates (n the mapping sense of ocaes)and substantializes inheritance.

en were genes discovered and when did genetics come into

beng?

There are a couple of ways to tell that story. The most straight-forward one is to start with Mendel , a mdnineteenthcentury monkworking with pea plants in the abbey garden. He developed ways totalk about the discrete nhertance of traits n the peasike wrnedor smooth, ta or shortand develoed a language to talk about dis-

cete nhetance ene's genes were then edscovered indepen h woke o 1900 an ecame a c nte h o h , m ned



G N I S N T T N G 95

to chromosomes. The microscopic anatomy in the genetic breedingaspects of inheritance developed om that period. In the teens andtenties the elaborate study of the genetics o certain model organ-

isms begins, in particuar the fruit y in Thomas Hunt Morgan's laborator at Columbia Universit. Fruit ies were bred for many years.Mutants were selected and individua genes described and studied.Molecuar genetics later grew out of a number of sources includingvirus groups and biochemistry. And then there is Watson and Crick'sfamous 1953 paper that describes the chemica structure of genes inthe doube helixthe DNA story. That's the early 1950s. So genetics

is a stor that goes back a hundred years now. In other words, the"thingness of a gene is something that is gradualy put togetherover the century.

So genecs really is a aming narrave of the tweneth centur?

Yes, one with many phases to it so that by the late tentieth cen-

tury we have a deep detaied understanding of the moecular basis ofhereditary. But those molecuesthe DNA molecuesare neverworking in isolation. They are aways working in interaction withother cel structures. The most common way of saying it is that thesmalest unit of ife is the cel, not the gene, but the gene is always ininteraction with these cellular histories. It is aways in process, yetand this is the issuewe talk about it as if it were merely a simpe,

concrete thig. "Gene was merey a name in 1900, a name for anobserved process, namely the independent segregation of such quali-ties as wrinkled or smooth seed coat, tal or short pant, red or blackeyes. In other words it was a name for traits. The biochemical basisfor heredit was not known unti much ater.



Cborg Temporalities

N Time is a ponounced categoy of anaysis in Modest_tness.

ts pat out of m own uite intensive an ain eeience o seeu e unveat o e seu e a wea ea s cuse a ve con eeence nw



98 W I K

N It's almost a given. Having one job is no longer the norm buthaving several. Or if you do have only one job you are expected to be

adept at multitasking of an extraordinar kind. I think this is trueacross the boardin business, the arts, academia. Last year AvitalRonell came to the Whitney program to speak, and there was amoment when she became quite frustrated with the discussionbecause certain people were just casually dropping philosophicanames and concepts. She stopped her talk and went into a discussionof the kind of violence that ust such a kind of accelerated relationship

to thinking produces . Her pedagogical style is to be ver carel withany reading and develop points om the text and not just throw inthinkers as though they are brand names. At this point in time stu-dents feel such an ease with theor and philosophy that, while thismay be good in many ways, this problem is also a symptom of accel-erated learning. She was connecting it to the technological in refer-ence to Heidegger's depiction in "The Question Concerning

Technolog. That essay is problematic in terms of your sense of thetechnological; but nonetheless her point was to be critical of thisspeededup, accelerated kind of learning, opting instead for a morecontemplative, caring nd of reading practice.

I agree with this.

N And what was so interesting was aerwards I overheard oneperson say, "Well that's her privilege as an academic to call for a con-templative life. though academics had some quiet, unfrenzied,sloweddown ife of contemplation !

But isn't that part of the emotional economy of envy that theother person alwas seems to be in a more favorable circumstance

against one's own suffering

xactly, because the academics I know such as yourself live



C Y B O R G T M P O R I T I S 99

under an unfathomabe burdenpubishing, teaching graduates andundergraduates, sitting on committees, on dissertations , on quaiingexams, attending conferences. Even in your downtime you are over-

whemed. But getting back to the cyborg and temporaity, you say inModesWitness that condensation, sion, and imposion are the tem-poraities of the cyborg. Is this in part what we are taking about?

Yes. Time is highy condensed and sed and imposion is aaround us. It is the average person's experience in ate capitaism. InModestWiess I discuss John Christie's 1993 essay "A Tragedy for

Cyborgs, where he discusses the "Cyborg Manifesto and the"areadywritten ture of genetics. I thin he was the one who rstmade me notice the shared temporaity between genomes and nan-cia instruments in contemporary technoscientic cuture. Forinstance the way debtschedules write the ture. If you are subjectedto a certain kind of debtrepayment schedue with a mortgage, or as adeveoping nation, the debtschedue ocks you into various kinds of

food production systems, tourist industries, miitary repression, mar-riage practices, etc. The ture is iteray ocked into the debt repay-ment obigation. It 's an areadywritten ture, with a bounded otionof temporaity aready buit into it .

Think of how credit cards, schoo oans, as we as mortgagedebts are so common now. d then when one connects this ordinary

experience with the increase in genetics in our everyday ives, timehas a boundedness to it that s quite dierent from the way it wasviewed and experienced in modernism, where temporaity's imit wasmore in relation to the potential inniteness, and uidity, of subjec-tivity. I'm thinking of Freud, Proust, Bergson, Woof, Joyce. Issues ofindividua, subjective, interior temporality (e.g. , stream of conscious-ness and individua memory) were so sinicant to many high mod-

ernists, laced with a sense of edom and expressveness. Tme wascontnent ut malleale and ud .



I K

And just as the debtrepayment schedules don't determine whatpeople are going to do with such a structure, the gene merely lays outtracks, so to speak, or matrixes within which "life itsef is going to

occur Yet the way genomes are institutionalized into distributeddatabases and then made use of in other knowledge practicesforinstance pharmaceutical developmentdoes set up matrixes for theture including forms of resistance and contestation

N: So there is a profound shi in temporality occuring now?

Yes, genetics, as it is deveoping today, is about a materialy dif-ferent kind of temporalit



iraction patterns record the histor of interaction, interference, reinforcement, and dierence.

DONN J. RWY

Diffraction asCritical Consciousness

N a a?

s i is ep, i irrg, res dnais nd potenc. Diactn paers re a eergeneos histr, t igias. Unie irror reections,diactios d nt dispace the sae elsewhere. Diraction is a



1 02 O W I K

metaphor for another kind of critical consciousness at the end of thisrather painl Christian millennium, one committed to making a dif-ference and not to repeating the Sacred Image of the Same I 'm inter-

ested in the way difaction patterns record the history of interaction,interference, reinforcement, dierence In this sense, "diraction isa narrative, graphic, psychological, spiritual, and political technologfor making consequential meanings For these reasons, I endModesWitness with Lynn Randolph's "graphic argumentherpainting, Daction ().

Since "diaction is an optical phenomenon, describe the dif-ference between it and reection

Well, to begin with there are a numbr of notsoprivate jokesinvolved in the use of the term "diaction within this context Onestream of American fminism deemphasizesreally anathematizeseyes and visual process and foregrounds the oral and the tactile The

specular is always under suspicion "Spectacle, "specular, "spectac-ular, "speculating are coded white, coded masculine, coded powerl, coded extraterrestrial, ll of domination, neh neh neh (cacks up)

I know what you mean om feminist lm theory

And then coded in terms of the problem of the copy and the orig

inal and the process of vision always entails misseeing what it sees Isit the same or is the same displaced elsewhere? Is the copy really acopy of the original? If you get a reection and the image is displacedelsewhere, is it really as good as the original? All such theologis ofrepresentation are deeply rooted in a tropic system that emphasizesvision Go back to Platonism, to John's gospel, to the Enlightenmentd feminists in part have been in reaction to that heritage whre

ht s heav patrarchalmoving from the dark woman's body to o ar o s no surprs tat a lot o eminist workmas rn roc ssms, sca ora, aura, and



D I R C T I N C R I T I C C N C I U N 1 03

the tactle Fne I have no problem wt that except when t becomesdogmatc, when the eyes are forbdden sual metaphors are qutenterestng I am not about to gve them up anymore than I am about

to gve up democracy, soveregnt, and agency and all such pollutednhertances I thnk the way I work s to take my own poluted nhertancecyborg s one of themand try to rework t Smary wthoptca metaphors, I take the tropc systems that I have nherted andt to do somethng wth them aganst the gran Its n some waysprett smpemnded

N Theres modest for you!

Realy, t s prett smpe But n general weve been mpovershedn the optcal metaphors weve usedtalking about reecton al hetme and reexvt Optcs s, aer al, a branch of physcs wth athck, nterestng hsto For nstance, t nvoves the study of enses,the study of the breakng up of rays of ght Thnk of Newtons

experments or Goethes experments wth dacton cstas So allI say s ets not talk about reecton and reexvt for a whe, letstalk about dfacton Physcaly, lets thnk about what dacton s

N And?

We when ght passes through sts, the ght rays that pass through

are broken up And f you have a screen at one end to regster what happens, what you get s a record of he passage of the lght rays onto thescreen Ths "record shows the hstor of ther passage hrough theslts So what you get s not a reecon; ts the record of a passage

N That gves me the chlls

a metaphor it drop the metaphyic o idetit ad the metaphyic o repreetatio ad ay optc i ll o a whole otherpotet way o th aot lht, whch aot htor. t ' ot



1 04 O W I K

about identit as taxonomy, but it's about registering process on therecording screen. So use it to talk about making a dierence in theworld as opposed to just being endlessly selfreective. Obviously,

am not against being selfreective, but am interested in foregrounding something else. And then there is another part of the joke,which is to say semiotics is this sciencethis human sciencethat hasthe following branches : syntactics, semantics, pragmatics, and difaction. just added diraction as another branch to semiotics. t's a jokereally, just a tiny part of the book, but a serious joke.

n describing diaction as you do, it's surprising that it hasn'tbeen used before.

t is odd.

And it certainly is an apt way to discuss your methodologseeing both the histor of how something came to "be as well as what

it is simultaneously.

Here 's an example that came out of teaching that shows some ofthe ways like to work. few years ago in my "Science and Politicsclass, there was this really smart, savy, politically engaged undergraduate who was a midwife here in Santa Cz. She was part of thehome birth movement and ver opposed to medically mediated child

birth. For legal reasons she was in a relatonship to licensed medicalpractitioners of some kind although much of the birthing movementof the early 1980s was involved in a gray area legally as well as medically. yway, she was very committed to the home birthing movement and wore diaper pins on her hat as a symbol of natural childbirth. She saw the diaper pin as a nonmedical object , an object omdaily use that signied women's relationship to their babies that was

unmediated b the utrasound machine, the secuum.

h saf pin? ! I don't gt it.



D I R C T I O N S C R I T I C C O N S C I O U S N S S 0

Well exactly So we took the pin back in terms of the history ofthe plastics industry, the steel industry, and the history of the pro

gressive reguaton of safety d pret soon we saw how the safetypin was immersed in all these state relatory apparatuses, and thehistory of the major industries within capital formation and so on Ihadnt removed it om the context in which she was wearing it, butmerely diacted it, so to speak, to show that it has many more meanings and contexts to it and that once youve noted them you cant justdrop them You have to register the "interference So I feel like that

is the way I work, and he way I enjoy working Its simply to makevisible al hose things that have been lost in an object; not in order tomake the other meanings disappear, but rather to make it impossiblefor the bottom ine to be one single statement

N Earier, whie you were describing his history of genetics andbiology, I kept hearing, again, the way you write and workhow you

go about analyzing culture through a kind of genetic analytica modeling of cultural anaysis rather than merely the reversea culturalanalysis of genetics I mean you have taken a scientic model andturned it into a mode of cura critique

Thats right I think anayses of what gets caed "nature andanalyses of what gets caed "culture cal on the same kinds of think-

ing since what Im interested in most of al are "natureculturesasone wordimplosions of the discursive realms of nare and culturethin this context I have writen about cyborgs on the one hand andanimals on the other, specically about primates d these primatesraise the question of humannature reationships dierently thancyborgs do In particular, evolutionary history emerges in sharp ways,issues of biological reductionism and the lived body, the eshy bod

and who we are related to Our n among the other organsms srased n otent ws n mt sto, much o so thn n thcorg sto or sto rss ustons out our n on



1 06 H O I K

the machinesour kin within the domain of communicationwhilethe primate stor raises questions about our kin in the domain of otherorganisms and raises the queson of the natureculture interface that

has been articulated in the human sciences, in particular in physicalanthropolog in relaon to evolutionar behavior and so on. d thenthere are the First Worldhird World connections to unpack becauseof the particular conditions of access to the other primates.

N You emphasize that your work is about the relation betweennatureculture, whereas I always describe your work a about what

gets to count as human and nonhuman or the almosthuman.

Yesthose two questions are dierent faces of the same question.It's like a gestalt switch. d in a way my act of faith is that nature-culre is one word but we've inherited it as a gapped realit for manyreasons . One is the notion of the brain in a vat. In this model the mindis this entit that is enslaved inside the brain, which is in the vat with

nutrient uids. nd so basically all it can do is represent and observeand do things instrumentally. There's this terrible separation betweenman and the world . There are gentler versions of this gapped realit,but my act of faith to counter such versions of realit has to do withthe idea of worldliness , an act of faith in worldliness where the eshybody and the human histories are always and everwhere enmeshedin the tissue of interrelationsip where all the relators aren't human.

We are always inside a eshy world, but we are never a brain in thevat. We never were and never will be. nd so my ndamental episte-mological starting points are om this enmeshment where the cate-gorical separation of nature and culture is already a kind of violence,an inherited violence anyway. That's why my philosophical sourcesare always those that emphasize a kind of worldly practice and a semi-otic qualit of that worldly practice . The meaninglness that is both

eshy and nustc but never only nustc.

en sa lingisc" I sense u are referring seca to



D I R C T I N S C R I T I C C N S C I U S N S S 7

semanc inguiscs and the noon of the diachronic evouon of a anguage sstem whee the process of how signicaon develops is studiedversus the snchronic where the words or anguage are approached as

"things, with no sense of their histor or incremental deveopment. Mqueson then has to do with the arbiariness of the inisc sign andhow this reates to the bioogic sign, which is movated b the materiait of the bod. hen, or how, does one draw the line so as not to fainto epistemoogica reasm? For instance if the immune sstem canbe read as a "stor or conscon, as it is in "The Biopoics ofPosode Bodies , where is the pracce of "science, of the facts of

the immune sstem that do not respond to interpretaon? Isn't there abottom ine? And if so, how do ou resove this?

Understanding the word is about iving inside stories . There's nopace to be in the word outside of stories. Ad these stories are iteralized in these objects. Or better, objects are ozen stories. Our ownbodies are a metaphor in the most itera sense. This is the ox

moronic quait of phsicalit that is the resut of the permanent coexistence of stories embedded in phsica semiotic esh bood existence. None of this is an abstraction. I have an extreme nonabstractconsciousness, prett near an aerg to abstraction, which alsocomes om Cathoicism. The content of m worldview is obviousquite dierentnone of it is Cathoic anmore in terms of the dogmas of that faithbut the sensibilit is sti there in m esh. And I

think that makes me unusua in the academ.

: I'l sa.

There's a histo of discrimination involved here because thereare relative few Catholics in the U. S. academ partl because of thehsto of antiCathoicism in this count. But just as the cborg is a

chd of mitarsm an Scence, I am a ch o athocsm anthe o ar



1 08 W l K

N I'm fascnated by your aerg to abstracton. Your wrtng andteachng are very evdentar. By that I mean you are rgorousy exam-ped. You never use theory that sn't produced through concrete

wordy exampes.

It's amost ke my exampes are the theores. Agan t's that mysense of metaphor s drawn om tera boogca exampes and mytheores are not abstractons. If anythng, they are redescrptons. Sof one were gong to charactere my way of theorng, t woud be toredescrbe, to redescrbe somethng so that t becomes thcker than t

rst seems.

N Do you thnk your tendency to aways see the connectedness ofthe tera and the gura accounts for some of the msnterpretaonsof your work? I mean some mnds aren't patent enough, or have notbeen raned to see, the theory n the redescrptons and therefore ustcan't see om a standpont that s smutaneousy tera and guratve.

You mght have a pont, because I thnk my contrbuton s pre-csey ths sensbt that peope are forced to nhabt by vrtue ofther encounter wth my wrtng or spakng. Actuay, a ot of peopeget my stu through the pubc performances rst and ony then ndthe wrtng more accessbe. I've had ths experence equentybecause n pubc speakng a knds of ssues are possbe to perform

physcay. It s such an ntermeda event where voce, gesure, sdes,enthusasm a shape the denst of the words. Oddy, I thnk peopecan hande the denst better n a performance than on the page.

N Interestng. There are tones and gradatons and nuances ava-abe that are not as ready avaabe n a wrtten text. I thnk of youruse of rony, whch s such a arge part of you as a person. Humor,

aughter, ong s a constant and t's a form of theorng for you. It'samo vdevan



. . . embracin something with al of its messiness and dirti-ness and imperfection.

DONN J HRWY

Worldl Practice

N en you say "wordy practice what do you mean?

I mean that impoded set of things where the physiologof one's body, the coursin o lood and hormones and theoerations o chemicasthe eshiness o he oranismntermesh with the whoe e o the oansm o at n a wa



1 1 0 H O W K

you can start talking about any dimension of what it means to beworldlythe commercial, the physiologica, the genetic, the political.

N It's a sgnicant word for you, isn't it?

Yes, "worldly is a big word for me. But al of these adj ecties areabout ways of beginning to talk, to work. They are ways of beginningto pul the stick threads where the technical, the commercial, themythical, the politica, the organic are imploded.

N Hae you eer used other words or do other people use wordsfor that same process? I'm curious why you chose "wordy.

I chose it as a way to sidestep the debate between realism and reaiism. I could hae said that "reality is the spit into natures andcultures and that I am working toward a kind of better realism, butthat gets me backed up into al of the wrong aruments. And I ge

accused of being a relaiist by those who willy misread, whichmakes me ery angry because I hae bent oer backwards to say tatthat particuar dichotomy is part of the problem. so since my commitments are to such things as mortality and nititude and eshinessand hisoricity and contingency, it seemed like "worldly was a goochoice. Wordly aso impies haing to pay attention to things ikepower and money.

N Rightand again, the reason I asked is because it reminds meof Heidegger and the way he was so committed to using language thawas of the world, that was ordinary or common. Worldy is anearthy word, a grounded word. It's anky unpretentious.

That's right. In a way "situated was a simiar effort to take an

ordina word and tr to make t do a number of things.

One of the most important things I have learned om ou s a



W O D Y P C T C 1 1 1

notion of criticalit that moves beyond mere "criticismbeyonddidactic, diagnostic criticalit. This is especially interesting to mebecause lately I've been realizing how what counts as critical theor is

more amenable to histor than I ever thought before. This mostlikely has to do with my position in the art world, where critical arthas taken on all sorts of dierent dimensions from generation to generation. But recently I've become less and less sure what people meanby "critical. Your notion of criticalit is stringly different om thetraditional notion of critical meaning breaking down arguments andseeing where power lies. Does "critical only mean having an argu-

ment? I'm thinking of art that by way of producing new meaningsoers a critical breaktroughopening up and producing. Criticalwork can be a productive not just a negative actvi. I read this wonderl distinction recently that said theor should und change notnd it. I had this problem in graduate school. I always read for what atext gives me rather than what it doesn't and so I was continuallytaken aback when "reading meant everyone descended on some

author yelling about all the things he or she le out. Looking only forthe aws or the absences seems like such a weird way to learn. In factit seems like the opposite oflearning.

I hate that model.

: And why do people think that is the only way of being critical?

Part of it is competition and the fear of looking dum if youhaven't made the criticism rst. I actually think some of the really badrace politics works out of the same principle where people are intenton calling other people racist rst lest they be judged. It's as thoughthey think racism is something you can expel easily by a few statements. You can't do away with racisms by various kinds of mantras or

b ointing out how this artice dn' ea with race in such a such awa and then s ac an hn oo ho 'm ee ecse noce.n ohe wos, ecase s m not tee t sn't on te eo



1 1 2 O I K

pe who have this reationship to racism. And I think some of this steof negative criticait in graduate schoo in relation not just to racismbut many other kinds of things is rooted in a fear of embracing some-

thing with al of its messiness and dirtiness and imperfection.



. . . the fantasy of transcending death is opposed to eveingI care about.

DO NN J. HRWY

Breakdown

N: Our discussion of a dierent kind of criticait remindsme of your discussion in Simians, Cbogs, and men of Terrnogrand and Fernando Flores's notion of "breakdownfrom Undestanding Comutes and Coition when the say"reakown as a enra roe n human unersann. Areaown n a neae san e aoe u a



1 4 H O W K

uation of nonobviousness, in which some aspect of the netork oftools that we are engaged in using is brought forth to visibilit. . . . Abreakdown reveals the nexus of relations necessar for us to accom-

plish our task. . . . In "B iopolitics of the Postmodern Body you usetheir notion to t to remap how we think about the immune system. you put it, "Immune system discourse i s about constraint and pos-sibilit for engaging in a word ll of dierence, ' replete with selfand nonself. Ad Winogrand and Flores's notion of "breakdown isa way "to contest for a notion of patholog, or breakdown, ' withoutmilitarizing the terrain of the body. There is a similar moment in

"Situated Knowledges when you discuss "the death of the subject. You put it this way:

he o in the human cience have called thi dout aoutelf-preence the "death of the uject, that ingle orderingpoint of will and concioune. hi judgment eem izarre tome. prefer to call thi generative dout the opening of non

iomorphic uject, agent, and territorie of torie unimaginale om the vantage point of the cclopean, elf-atied ee ofth e mater u Ject.

These instances are so crucial to your generative criticalit. It's whereone can really see the combination of speculative science ctiowriter and critical theorist in your work.

I love that point they make about breakdown. I really think it isa profound point. Terr nogrand is a computer scientist and he andFlores are drawing from phenomenolog. Terr nogrand and Istudied Heidegger together at Colorado College under the philosopher Glenn Gray. Terr was one of the early ticial Intelligenceresearchers when he was a young graduate student and now teaches at

tanford. hlosohcay he deeened hs phenomenologica crituew lore, who ws a political regee fro ende's hie. o thecoination of inforation technologie, henomenoo, an the



B R K D O W 1 1 5

realities of harsh lived political realities are al ver much a part oftheir perspective. For them breakdown is a word for those momentswhen denaturalization occurs, when what is taken for granted can no

longer be taken for granted precise because there is a glitch in thesstem.

That is such an important strateg of critica modernism andseems utterl crucial in our work.

It is crucia for all of us. Breakdown provokes a space of possibil-

it precisel because things dont work smoothl anmore.

I think that is one of the most important things I learned omou.

I like that!

Its real true.

And of course its a painl process.

Yes, but its exactl the moment where pain can turn into some-thing productivenot to sound Polannaish. Pain is amost a givenat moments, so ets see what we can do with it.

Yes, such considerations are awas about coming back into aconsciousness of nitude, of mortalit, of limitation not as a kind ofutopian glorication but a condition of possibiit. Of creativit in themost literal sense, as opposed to negation. d I feel this is somethingI learned om feminism too. That insistence on a kind of nonhostilerelationship to the mortal bod with its breakdowns.

G ou also experienced this in a very literal sense living with twopeople who died of DS. It mst have been hard not to become cyn-



1 1 6 H O W I K

ical and to t to work your way out of the negation the nitude theloss of such prima familial bonds in your life

That's right And "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies inparticular reects that From my point of view the afrmation ofdying seems absolutely ndamental rmation not in the sense ofgloriing death but in the senseto put it bluntlythat withoutmortality we're nothing In other words the fantasy of transcendingdeath is opposed to evething I care about

NDNOS

1 Donna J Haraway, Foreword to The Cborg Handbook, ed Chris Hables

Gray (ew York: Routledge, 1995): xviii

2 Yvonne Rainer, dancer, choreographer, artist, writer, lmmaker MURDER

and murder (1997) is her most recent lm For a discussion of her work, see

"Rainer Talking Pictures, Art in Amerca July 1997

3 See Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet Macintosh, "Biolog Under Attack, The

Nation, Vol 2 64, #22 , June 9, 1 997, 1 1 16

4 Roland Barthes, A Lover' Discourse (ew York: Hill and Wang, 1978 ©

1977) : 7 3

5 Donna J Haraway, Modest_tness®SecondMillennium.FemaleMan© _Mee_OncoMouse (ew York: Routledge, 1 997): 43

6 "Herbicide-resistant crops are probably the largest area of active plant

genetic engineering I nd myself especially drawn by such engaging new

beings as the tomato with a gene from a cold-seabottom-living ounder,

which codes for a protein that slows eezing, and the potato with a gene

om the giant silk moth, which increases disease resistance DA Plant

tecnology, Oakland, Caliornia, started testing te tomatosh antieeze

cobination in 1 Haraway, 17, 887 . e r a e cence atur aturay, May 30 8 "ot ri

r THE GEE-WIZ GENE" by an E. n, 20



B R K D O W N 1 1 7

8 Sara Franklin "Life Itself paper deliered at te Center for Cultural

Values Lancaster Uniersity June 9, 1993

9 "[G]ene fetisism is compounded of a political economic denia tat olds

commodities to be sources of teir on alue ile obscuring te socio

tecnical relations among umans and beteen umans and nonumans tat

generate bot objects and alue; a davowa, suggested by psycoanalytic

teory tat substitutes te master molecule for a more adequate representa

tion of units or nexuses of biological structure nction deelopment eo

lution and reproduction; and a philosopical-cognitie eor tat mistakes

potent abstractions for concrete enties ich temseles are ongoing

eents Fetisists are multiply inested in all tese sbstittions The irony

is tat gene fetisism inoles suc elaborate surrogacy sering and sbstitution hen te gene as te guarantor of life itself is supposed to signi

an autotelic ting in itself te code of codes Neer as aoidance of

acknoledging te relentless tropic nature of liing and signiing inoled

suc onderl guration ere the gene collects up the people in te

materialized dream of life itself See Haraay Modest_ness, 1997, 147

10 Aled Nort Witeead Science and the Mode rd (Ne York: Mentor

Books 1948 ©1 925) 52 "Of course substance and quality as ell as simple

location are te most natural ideas for te uman mind It is te ay in ice tink of tings and itout tese ays of tinng e could not get our

ideas saigt for daily use Tere is no doubt about tis Te only queson

is Ho concretely are e tining en e consider nature under tese con

nections? My point ill be that e are presenting ourseles it simplied

edions of immediate matters of fact Wen e examine e primary ele

ments of these simplied editions e sall nd that tey are in trut only to

be justied as being elaborate logical constrctions of a ig degree of

abstraction Tus I old tat substance and quality aord another instanceof te fallacy of misplaced concreteness

1 1 Roland Bartes Mthoogies (Ne York: Hill and Wang 1972 ©1 957)

12 Haraay 1997, 126

1 3 Ibid 1 2 5

14 Jon R R Cristie "A Tragedy for Cyborgs Congurations 1 1 993

171-96

Donna J Haraay Simians Cors and men: The Reinvention o ature

e or Routed 4 d



I demand that he who till ree . . to ee a hore gallopingon a tomato hould e looed upon a a cretin

NDR RTON

C H A P T E R V

Cborg Surrealisms

N: n a o ou o ou ou ou eene n au

ou ee o ique u ou o o omeing ee a ga

e ome ou o cience cion (o i h ou ie cience ction). ou peculate. ou peculae pecical hough mhuilding. Certainl thi i tue of "A Cog Manifeto and"he iopolitic of Poodern odie, and Modesess,



1 20 H W l K

hee you are not just doing one laye of analysissay of critique orunasking relationshipsbut you are also invoved in building alte-native ontologies, specically via the use of the iaginative.

Yes, that is true, and I think you are ight, it is why science ction is political theory for me.

N ich brings in the centrality of Octavia Butler's science c-tion for you. en you rst encountered her Xenogenesis series itmust have felt uncanny. I mean her wok is the perfect science c-

tona corolary to such essays as "The Bopolitics of PostmodernBodies.

I feel about Octavia Butler much the same way that I fee aboutLn Randolph. Octavia Buter does in prose science ction whatLynn does in painting and what I do in academic prose. three ofus live in a similar kind of menagerie and are nterested in processes

of xenogenesis, i .e . , of sons and unnatural origins. d al thee ofus are dependent on narrative. Ln is a highly narrative painter,Octava Butler is a narrator, and, as you mentoned, the use of certankinds of mythic and ctional narrative is one of my strategies .

N I'd ke to ask a question about for, particulary about themode of writng you choose. It seems that the mode of analytica writ-

ng you use to get at your ideas is also, in some ways, a deterrent. Inother words, you are constanty beng rened in by the linearity andcontiuities of sentencebysentence construction and arumentationwhen your whole point is to constantly ask us to keep a multirea -tiona, multidmensional, associational thick readinga hypertextmodalityas we go. Have you ever used another modality than aca-demic writing, or would you? A hypertext CDROM fo instance. Or

is that not the point?

DH I have tout about it, and it is certainy why I have as man



C B O G S U I S M S 1 2 1

sual elements n the book as I do. But I thnk, nally, what I amgood at s the words. But the collaboraton wth Lynn Randolph hasbeen ver mportant to me and n ModesWitness adds another

dmenson to the prose.

N How dd that collaboraton come about?

She s sxt years old, lves n Houston and was an antwaractvst for many years around Central Amercan ssues. But n thelate 1 980s she was at the Buntng Insttute at Radcle College where

she read " Cyborg Manfesto . She panted a cyborg as her responseto that essay and maled me a photograph. I wrote her back sayinghow excted I was by t. And then there was a farly long lapse untlwe just started malng one another agan. I would send her drafts, shewould send me sldes. There was no delberate connecton but Iwould see her pantngs and some of them would really nuence me.And smlarly my work was ncorporated nto her pantng. But t was

never a conscous decson for the two of us to collaborate on any onetheme. For nstance, the mage on the back of Modest_Witness-The

aboato, o the Passion of OncoMouse [ 1 994she obvously pantedn conversaton wth my OncoMouse argument, but aer I saw t Idd more wrtng. So the relationshp developed nto an nterchangebetween the two of us where we neer deberately collaborated but,n fact, were constantly collaboratng. I thnk of her visual contrbu-

tons to the book as arguments, not just llustratons.

N They are almost lke Catholc allegores.

Yes, we joked about my nd of "cyborg surrealsm and her"metaphorc realsm.

NG I actual had problems wt te pantnsan ths ma ustbe a matter o tastere eau o t n o ram ues. ma oa on oo a o me



1 22 H W l K

In the ne arts there are so many really strong passons aboutllustraton versus art, about ddactcsm versus pure art. Her pant

ngs are patently about somethng and therefore they are ddactc.They have an outont poltca qualt to tem. But even n pant-ngs that I don't lke as much as I lke Tansions and The Passion ofOncoMouse whch are my to favortes, I love the nds of juxtapos-tons she sets up, the use of Renassance space and references nter-woven wth DNA strands, galaxes, mcrochps, and so forth.

N Actually the probem I have wth her mages s related to thetenson I noted above beteen your teo and wrtngchoosng towrte n an analytc academc tradton although your deas and theo-res are drven by guratons and a knd of mutdmensonal move-ment of meanngor hypertext poetcsthat are not ntegra to themodaltes of academc wrtng. Randolph s locked nsde the samecontradctonusng a knd of garsh hyperrealsm to lteraze the

magery and "arguments she draws om your deas. And as I say ths,maybe te pont s to work nsde those contradctons and I am theone wo s beng too lteral!

I just don't agree wth your nterpretaton of Randolph's reasm.I thnk she s commtted to certan "realst conventons and narratvepctoral content n order to foreground te jonng of form and con

tent. She takes up a resstance to the mperatves of abstract formal-sm as the ony way to pant.

N hch s what she means by "metaphorc realsm?

Yes and for her, and me, ths metaphorc realsmor cyborg surreasm the excessve space of tecnoscencea word whose

ramma we ma e nse of bu where we ma, and can, bothemo an eee s eesenaons an as s snta.



It is time to theorize an "unfamiliar unconscious, a dierentprimal scene, where everhing does not stem from the dramasof identit and reproduction.

DONNA J. HARAWAY

Unfamiliar Unconscious

TN: At the end of Modest_tess you have this lovey, sug-gestive PostScript™tellingly trademarked and biotechno-sized to look like OncoMoseT In it you state, "I a sic todeath of onng throgh ship an 'th fai, an I ongfor odels of soiarit an han nit an ieece oote in frienshi, ork, pataly shae poss, tactable




collective pain, inescapable mortalit, and persistent hope You thencall for te theorizing of an "unfamiliar unconscious that drawsdeeper the connection to cyborg surrealism In other words, a

provocative, convulsive world produced within the "real of technoscience and information technologies evoking not an abolishment ofthe individual unconscious as theorized in psychoanalysis but a radi-cal reevaluation In the notion of an "unfamiliar unconscious isembedded your ambivalence to psychoanalysis your desire to dis-cover an unconscious proper to the psychic dynamism of the cyborgIs this idea of an unfamiliar unconscious in "a different primal scene

what you have been doing all along?

That's right It is far om being an antipsychoanalytic state-ment

N I always remember your critique of psychoanalysis was thatasyou jokingly put ityou would rather develop a theo of the uncon-

scious based on the reproductive practices of the fern rather than enuclear family Tat was a moment when yur ustration with theimits of psychoanalysisie, by denition it must accept and staywithin the boundaries of the model of te nuclear familymadesense to me

Rightbecause, if we extend our relationships to our non-

human relations, then there are so many more baroque possibilities

N So within this context what is your unfamiliar unconscious?

I think the notion of this theoretical entity called the unconsciousis a usel theoretical object We need to understand how we areblindsided from somewhere notions of rationalit and intentionalit

are wa too thn to et us very far in cultura analysis Smiarly, Ion't thn ratona an ratona noweebuin practces sucha cnc can auat are thout attenton to uncon



U N F A M L l A R U N C N 5 C U 5 125

scous processes. But obvously, I don't thnk that unconscous processs just an ndvdual process.

N You are callng for a new hstorczaton of the unconscous con-structed om our mergng wth the nonhuman. You say you are sckof ths famly and knshp structure and that the emphass on thesestructures s the whole problem of psychoanalyss because t startsfrom a ndamental belef n certan nds of humansms.

An "unfamlar unconscousness s to be taken lterally. It s one

that s not of the famly. Etymologcally speang, the whole noton ofthe famlar means the famly, and that's part of the problem. Agan,t's part of my sense of beng mmersed n a world that s not just madeup of a nuclear famly. And the world blndsdes you wth ts forgot-ten hstores, entties that aren't human, all these knds of relaton-alty that shape who we are and that we n turn shape. It seems to meyou need to thnk of that n terms of an unfamlar unconscous.

I don't know how else to say t.

N How would you dstngush t from Fredrc Jameson's poltcalunconscous?

I thnk t's probably a sblng to that.

N Except that to stress the unfamlar takes us mmedately nto awhole other terrtory of unconscous possblties.

It's n partcular not about Oedpal stores. That's the man pont.It's not that Oedpal stores aren't very nteresting and don't domportant work but that too much work has been done there. And notenough has been done attemtng, serously, to do cultural theoy and

psychoanalssboth ndvdual and culturalout o a new materal hose relatonates tat aen't rea tanslated nto an edaveon anta v t' t t .



1 26 H W L I K E A L E A F

N It's what is now being referred to as postOedpial.

Yes, postOedipal is one way of talking about it although what I

want to do is discard the Oedipal reference altogether. I don't thinkthere is anything ver complex in all of this. It's really kind of simple-minded. It says, I want models of solidarit and difference rooted iniendship. This grows out of my experience with Jaye and Rusten,especially Jaye where all of the "familiar models literally broke down.It also has to do with work, with relationships with students, formerstudents, colleagues. The liveliness and deathlinessthe depthsof

subjectshaping and reshaping that goes on through iendship. Itinriates me that our psychic determinations have to somehowalways be brought back to a familiar kind of family scene. My interestin iendship has grown out of the ways that my friendships are deval-ued and seen as signicant only if they are lover relationships. Theonly kind of intimacy that is seriously valuedis life determiningisthe intimacy of lovers. d that makes me rious because the inti

macies of friendship and of work and of playand of connections tononhumansare absolutely ndamental.

N at you are touching on is what I was struck by with you andJaye and Rusten and ]aye's lover Robert. The ideolog of the couplewas foreign to that dynamic. J aye was part of your life along withRusten.

Certainly my own life has been hugely shaped by couple dynam-ics. But it hasn't been the whole sto and it's been mixed up. I am myfriends and lovers in ndamental ways.



Cborgs are about particular sorts of breached boundaries thatconse a specic historical peoples stories about what counts asdistinct categories crucial to that cultures natural-technical evolutionar narratives.

DO NN A J . HARAWAY

It Wasn't Born In aGarden, but It CertainlWas Born In a History

TN: Lets e t te r t se t eep

rta sste a prn ne oratns an re

tnsps t f te probles and ntratinste " essi ness and rtnessof life as e inhabit it dail Obviouslthe borg h is our prie exaple A big isinterpretatio of the borg takes plae e people ot see its gener-



2 8 W L l K E A L E A

ative quality, that it is not just a negation of the old power structures(militarism, Big Science, patriarchy, et cetera) but an attempt to seethings dierently in your discussion of the gene, the cyborg is not

a thing or a nished topic but, by denition, constantly transformingand being rethought Or as you once put it, "Cyborgs do not staystill"2

Thats right, it is an open topic and the cyborg is in this curiousset of family relationships with sibling species of various kinds Its aguration that requires one to think of the humanmade communica-

tions systems aspects, the blending of the organic and the technicathat is inescapable in cyborg practices

N There is a tendency for the cyborg to be dehistoricied nowadays Yet it is crucial to understand that the cyborg itsef has a his-tory, is a child of a certain moment of history, and hence wil take ondifferent meanings and characteristics in relation to historical

procsses

Absolutelyit has layers of histories I am adamant that thecyborg, as I use that term, does not refer to all kinds of artifactual,machinic relationships with human beings Both the human and theartifactua have specic histories For one thing the cyborg is not thesame thing as the android The android actualy has a much longer

history The android comes out of eighteenthcentury mechanicaltoys and the eort to build machinic models, specicaly mimeticmodes of human motion Athough there is a certain kind of echochamber between the android and the cyborg, certain kinds of continuities and discontinuities, I am very concerned that the ter"cyborg be used specicaly to refer to those nds of entities thatbecame historicall possible around World War II and just aer The

corg s ntmatel involved in specc histories of mlitaration, ofsc resear roets wt tes to pschatr an communcatonso, avora rsar a soarmaooa resear, te



I T W A 5 N ' T B R N N A G A R D E N . 29

ories of information and information processing. It is essential thatthe cyborg is seen to emerge out of such a specic matrix. In otherwords, the cyborg is not "born but it does have a matrix (laughing)!

Or better, it doesn't have a mother, but it does hve a matrix! It wasn't born in a garden, but it certainly was born in a history. d thathistory has not been smooth and is approxmately a half a century oldnow.

Would the android be part of its prehistory?

Yes, but that's a narrative choice. You can buid a continuous history in which the cyborg is an inheritor, a successor of the android.

Coud you do a modernist, postmodernist distinction?

You could but again these are al narrative choices . It isn't that thehistory itself determines these narratives, but that the narratives shape

the history.

Wel put.

It's reated to what we spoke of before when peope atch on toony one aspect. For example, those who relegate the cyborg to anodd, attenuated kind of technophiic euphoria or glitzy love of al

things cyber, which is completey wrong. Or they think the cyborg ismerely a condemnatory gure, embedded as it is in miitarism. atinterests me most about the cyborg is that it does unexpected thingsand accounts for contradictory histories whie allowing for some kindof working in and ofthe word.



How Like a Leaf

N Experientiall speang, what is our most profoundmoment of encountering what is called "cborgolog in TheCyborg Handbook, or what we might call "cborgness?

DH e Lahe



1 32 H W L I K E A L E A F

TN: Or what are the moments when you remember it crystallizingfor you?

Well , one is certainly my sense of the intricacy, interest, and pleasureas well as the intensityof how I have imagined how like a leafI am For instance, I am fascinated with the moecular architecturethat plants and animas share, as well as with the kinds of instrumen-tation, interdisciplinarit, and knowledge practices that have goneinto the historical possibiities of understanding how I am like a leaf

TN: Now, when you were a chid did you experience such anepiphany, or is this only as an adut?

Cleary I'm speaking om an adult perspective, specicaly whenI became profoundy aware of moments of aestheticmoralphysicalunit that, for me, were deeply inuenced by bioscientic ways ofthinking In regards to connectedness, my child consciousness was

overwhelmingly reigious But I was fascinated by miniatures

N: Miniatures?

Everything from dolhouses to imagining elaborate miniaturepeople's worlds and paying with tiny gures in the grass Basicaly Ijust spent ots and lots of time in miniature worlds

: ich is what you're still doing via molecular, developmentabiology and the study of cultural systems down to their most minuteinstances hen did science enter into your consciousness?

It entered somewhat through high school biolog and chemistrBut really not until college, when I was a zoolog major simultane-

ousy with studying Engsh and hiosophy Al three aways felt likeart f the ame sect



H O W K E A E A F 133

N Your theor develops so "naturaly out of your nterest n bol-og. But many people n your eld are quite threatened by the wayyou thnk about bolog and scence, which s ironc snce you owe

your perspectve to the deepest understanding and embodment ofbologcal worlds . y s such an understanding then so threatenng?

Part of the discomfort comes from the fact that f you talk aboutthe reentless historcal contingen of experencng yoursef, or of cra-ng scentc knowedge, peope hear relatvsm or pure socia constructonsm, whch is not what I am saying at al. But that's the nd

of reducton that keeps getting made. d then there are the peopewho are threatened because they read such anayses as bologcadetermnism ! A kind of naturalsm that they don't want because theyare social constructvists and don't want to gve too much weght tothe boogca or the natural. I'm tryng to say both, and, neithe no

and then a lot of conson arses, and not a very productve kind ofconson. I'm takng about a mode of interactng wth the world that

s relentessly historcaly specic. Technoscence s a materaledsemioss . It s how we engage with and n the word. hch s not thesame thing as sayng knowledge s optional. It's saying there is a speci-c to t that you can't forget.

N One of my favorite quotes from the 1 98 5 "Manifesto s whereyou state that your argument s for the pleasure n the conson of

boundares and the reonsibili n ther constructon.

Yes. My work s st l concerned with nstances of that process.

N Responsbt s one of the most potent forcesand substancesn your work. In many ways t s at the centerf your work has a cen-ter. It's the hnge upon which all of your analyses hang. You teach us to

be rensive to a the compexes n late enethcen technoc-ture, an ten o a to eonvenes e reement oeon.



1 34 H W L K E A L E A F

Well, it is people who are ethical, not these nonhuman entities.

: You mean romanticizing the nonhuman?

ght, that is a nd of anthropomorphizing of the nonhumanactors that we must be wary of. Our relationality is not of the samekind of being. It is people who have the emotional, ethical, political,and cognitive responsibility inside these worlds. But nonhumans areactive, not passive, resources or products.



Both cmpanees and afc have po, so why shouldn't we?DONNA J. ARAWAY

Menagerie of Firaions

N: Sometmes I've wanted to come up wth another word toreplace "cyborg, one that doesn't sound so trendy orfetshed, or s that exactly what you are dong n your morerecent wor when you use other gures an mythc terms?

DH o o I I v a ma o rao



1 36 H L I K E L E

It's like I inhabit a criticaltheoretical zoo and the cyborg just happensto be the most famous member of that zo, although "zoo is not theright word because all my inhabitants are not animals.

N Yet is the cyborg the rst member?

Actually, as I intimated earier, primates and cyborgs hae a cogenesis for me.

N Rght, but the primates oen get eclipsed by the oerly amous

cyborg. Does the cyborg's celebrit eer bother you? Fame is so dis-tortingeen for a cyborg.

Yes, but I think the cyborg still has so much potential. Part ofhow I work is to not wak away when a term gets dirt and is used inall these appropriate and inappropriate ways because of its ceebrit.Instead such uses just make me want to push the realit of the cyborg

harder. Let's push it back to its "origins in the rat implanted with anosmotic pump in 1960 in Rockland State as part of the project tomake a completely selfregulating manmachine system. Let's push itback to Nobert Weiner and "Cybernetics and Societ where infor-mational science is used to explain both the organic and machinicprocesses , or push out to the way cyborg gures inhabit both technical and popuar culre. Let's really look into the ways we think of

ourseles as information processing deices or reading machines orsemiotic deices in a way that is inuenced by communications theo-ry, or look at the way cybernetic control systems shape military doc-trine or shape industrial labor process. "Cyborg is a way to get at allthe multiple layers of life and lieliness as well as deathliness withinwhich we lie each day. So instead of giing it up because it hasbecome too famous let's keep pushing it and lling it.

In a sense ou re sying lets keep ememerin it, i . e. , its ultiple points o genesis nd o tey re ll connected. I like to tink



M E N A G E I E F F I G U A T N S 1 37

of "cyborg as a material or a substancea being in a deeply philosophica sense. Speang of which, did you realizeyou must haverealizedthat the rst "cyborgthe mouse with the osmotic pump

developed and named Cyborg at Rockland State in 1 960, was invent-ed the same year that your mother died?

No, I hadn't put the two together in fact auses). That is trippy.A real and morta mother, not a matrix. You know I didn't even knowabout that 1960 cyborg until aer I had written A Manifesto forCyborgs. Chris Gray gave me the paper sometime in the mid to late

1 980s . But you know, the phrase I have ended up setting on since theast book, Modest_ess, for the process I am speaking about is"materialsemiotic entities, which emphasizes the absolute simu-taneit of materiait and semiosis. The inextricabiit of these twoeements as wel as the deeply historicaly contingent qualit of it al .So, I've written about cyborgs, which investigate gaps and interfacesom one particular set of issues where the machinic is always fore-

grounded. And not just any old kind of achine but an informationmachine . And not just any old kind of information machine but thosethat have to do with control systems. These are the issues that mustbe foregrounded when one thinks "cyborg. Now when one thinks"primate, one has to consider all the kinds of issues around the rela-tionship between human and anima, nature and cuture, anthropo-lo and biolo, First and Third Word. The historicit of the pri

mate is coextensive with modern Western expansion and the collect-ing expeditions of museums, which is different om the histo oneis accountable for with the cyborg. It's not that you can't tell ongeror shorter histories, but that you are invited to tell certain kinds ofhistories in one domain compared to another.

NG: here do the stem cells such as gene, brain, chip, database,

ecosstem, race, bomb, and fetus t into our menaerie

DH hey ae denitely pat of it. Each one is a ste cell of the



1 3 8 H L l K E L E F

technoscientic body. So, basically the technoscientic body itselfshould be incuded in the menagerie. These stem cells are like bonemarrow cels. Out of each one you can unpack an entire world.

Although I name eight n Modest_Wiess it is important to under-stand that the list is open. It just depends upon what you want to getat. Also, it is important to see how each one also leads to the other.

It sounds a lot like the ce and M paradoxa-they are al inter-dependent yet each one is separate.

It's a little bit like the Tarot card were you go in through dier-ent aspects. Not because you want to make some claim that this is thewhoe stor but because it's an entr point.



ncoouse is a gure in the stor eld of iotechnolog andgenec engineering, m snechdoche for all of technoscience . . . .[S/he] is m siling, and more properl, male or female, s/he is msister. . . . A ind of machine tool for manufacturing other nowledge-uilding insuments in techoscience, the usel little

rodent with the talent for mammar cancer is a scienc insu

ment for sale lie man other laorator devices . . . . Aove all,ncoouse is the rst patented animal i the world.

DONNA J. ARAWAY

TM

OncoMouse

TN I 'd to o o ao mna o .

o els s te t t co and t p?

ertainl OncoMoseT ives there. S/e is in t thirdaea that I sent a lot of ti tining aot and foregrounded in ModesWiess®Second_Millennium. ncoseT is a



1 40 H L I K E A E A F

ral rsarch organism that raly did gt a patnt out of th U.S.atnt and Tradmarks Oc, but it is also a guration. of myntitisprimat, cyborg, gntically nginrd patntd anima

all of thm ar "ral in th ordinar vryday sns of ra, but thyar also simutanousy gurations invovd in a kind of narrativintrplation into ways of iving in th word. OncoMous™ actuayforgrounds things that both cyborg and primats do, as w as othraras. OncoMous™ is an invntd anima that has bn patntd.Somthing has to b invntd in ordr to b patntd. It is thrforauthord, is th ospring, th proprt of somon or som corpora-

tion, and is thrfor y ainabl, y ownab. It partaks, in thissns , of a pury Lockan concpt of natur that is a mixtur of laborand natur that producs proprt. So you hav animahuman forprimat machinorganic for cyborg and natur and abor forOncoMous.

TN OncoMous is spcicaly th transgnic mous that dvops

tumors for rsarch in brast cancr?

ctualy, OncoMous is obsot at this point, s/h's way out ofdat. But th cyborg is out of dat too. I'm not worrid about bingout of dat (laughs) I man, as w said, th cyborg is invntd in 1 960with th spacrac mous, whil OncoMous is invntd in 1988.Ths ar a quit ancint historis in th world w inhabit now

whr tim is so condnsd and spdd up. Thr ar ots and otsof transgnic organisms bing dvlopd that ar not patntd.

TN y is OncoMous obsot?

Bcaus s/h didn't work vr wl. S/h got too many spontanous tumors.

G I rad an articl in th pap cntly about th vlopmnt ofa mos wt no ons n saw anor c on tvsn ust lst



O C O M O U S E 14 1

night about mice who have been bred to glow in the dark!

I haven't heard about these yet, but there certainly is the mouse

without an immune system used to study DS.

N In Moes Wiess you quote the president of GenPharm, Davidnter, saying custommade research mice are so common he calls itDialAMouse. Or the other GenPharm representative, Howard B.Rosen [Corporate Development Director who describes customtailored mice as the "canvas upon hich we do genetic transplanta-

tions.

Yes, this is why I use OncoMouse as a gure for the geneticallyengineered being who haunts many places . S/he is part of the DupontCorporation and Harvard University as well as the University ofCalifornia at San Francisco. OncoMouse is as much a part of AIDSresearch as of the animal supply industry for laboratories. The cyborg

and the transgenic being are examples of how I work by a kind of lit-eralizationor better, how I work between this aious relationshipbetween guration and literalization. d I swear to God I inheritedthis om sacramentalism. My inability to separate the gural and theliteral comes straight out of a Catholic relationship to the Eucharist.I told you I have a very Catholic sensibil ity as a theorist even thoughI am opposed to Catholicism and have lost my faith and developed

this elaborate criticism. The ndamental sensibility about the literalnature of metaphor and the physical quality of symbolizationall thiscomes from Catholicism. But the point is that this sensibilitythemeaning of this menagerie I live with and ingives me a menageriewhere the literal and the gurative, the factual and the narrative, thescientic and the religious and the literary, are always imploded. Eachof the pieces is not the same thng and reuires its own workng

through, but a of them, as rocesses, ave moded as n a backhoe.



1 42 H W l K E A E A F

N: OncoMouse is such a moving and upsetting stor. hat exactly is a transgenic organism?

A transgenic organism is the entity made when genes from oneorganism are transplanted into the genome of another live organism.hat resuts are transgenic creatures. Transgenic organisms grow upand breed progeny who continue to carry the transplanted gene. Inother words, the transpanted genes are conveyed, through the eggsand sperm, into subsequent generations. OncoMouse is the resut ofa transplanted, human tumorproducing genean oncogenethat

reiably produces breast cancer. That is why I say in the book thatwhether I agree to her existence and use or not, s/he suers, repeat-edly, and profoundly, so that I and my sisters may live. d rther-more, that if not in my own body, then surely in those of my iends,I will someday owe to OncoMouse' or her subsequently designedrodent kin, a large debt.

N: It's so interesting how much outrage and axiet have been letoose by Dolly the coned sheep when transgenic manufacturing ofnew kinds of ifeforms has been going on for some time now.

d transgenics is a much more radica technoog. It alowsmolecuar biologists to remove genes of interest from organisms thatmight be competely unrelated, for example something from a bac-

terium, and put it into a mamma.

N: It is an exampe of the "sca new networks of cyborg words

that you unpackworlds or beings that are neither simply utopian ordystopian.

Not to mention just plain ordina The issues that concern us

ae not alwas oun just n te ultmateutopan ideals versuston ntm mnons o tcnoscence areo om ut t t u o on tes ae at



O N C O M O U S E ™ 43

the cost of inenting new kinds of pain The fact is there are current-ly newor at least mutatedways in which technoscientic peoperelate to other animals and other organisms It means there has been

a deepening of how we turn oursees and other organisms intoinstruments for our own ends Een more contentious are the ques-tions of international intelectual propert law l organisms suchas OncoMouse be patentabe in the international ream and how?though the United States Patents and Trademark Oce has grant-ed patents on geneic organisms it is stil a ery contentious issueinernationay

a are he ines of debate?

In Europe pariculary in Germany hrough the inuence of heGreen Party and wihin he context of animal rights poiics there'sben a lo of resistance to the paenting of ransgenics and otherbiotechologica products Indigenous soereignt moements hae

also actiey opposed such patents This conic oer property rela-tions around biodiersit is a big heme in Moess.

Such as?

Contestations oer the Human Genome Diersity Project ha-ing to do with wheher arious groups of human beings wil or wil

not cooperate with the colecing of their genetic maerial for analy-sis There are as we all sorts of problems surrounding commercialuse ho wil prot om drugs deeoped om sudies that takeplace in arious geographic and cutural regions?

Once something is trademarked what happens?

am not tang about trademan rademarn s ust a waof assing te gooness of te object (this is aant la). atentla is abot potecting (as popet) te process of pocing tans-



1 44 H O W L I K E A L E A F

genc bengs, as we as patentng the beng tsef. In the case ofOncoMouse' the patent was ssued to two researchers who assgnedthe patent to the Harvard Corporaton, whch censed t to DuPont.

That means that nobody can use that process, or these anmas, wthout payng a fee for however many years the patent runs. So bascaypatenting ends up beng about payng fees for the use of specc technoogca processes and/or objects. In ths way, n theory, patentngboth stimuates and protects nnovation. The inventor s prompted bythe incentve of making a prot on the nvention, and socet recevesthe benets of the nventon. At east that's the phosophy.

A ot of these probems seem ke they woud st be there evenwithout patentng.

That's rght. Patents are just a pece of the ssue. But t's a particuary contentous part because of the materazed symboizatonthe extractng of materas om one area of the word and reaping the

prots esewhere. For exampe, n Inda there are controvesies overthe Neem tee havng to do wth extracting substances. These sub-stances have been used n heath practces for a ver ong time nIndia, but are being brought back to Frst Word aboratores,processed in vaous ways, and turned nto a marketabe product. Atthis pont, none of the commerca benet goes back to the soucenaton. But in a situation ike this, t s important to emphasze that it

s not just sources as n "esources that are taken, but knowedge.owedge s but nto such "natura matera at every stage of thegame.

Exacty.

So there are soveregnty ssues nvoved here. hose owedge

s on to count o s on to be regarded as coaborators orst as aw te a tee ae mateas that mght be of hart test a t ost o s won



O N C O M O U S E ™ 145

with a local heaer who knows the local plant life How will that per-son's expertise be recognized in this system? And then, what if thecommunit the person comes om does not ive by individualistic

premises? d what about the nation within which that group of peo-pe exists? at if they are a subordinated minority? If there is anationa agreement by the nationa government of Brazi or CostaRica, a major parmaceutical company might or might not work forthe benet of the group of people who actualy have the knowedgeand the materials in question So how are they going to be protected?Do they even want inclusion into the system or not?

hat, then, is cyborg ethics or subjectivit in the context ofOncoMouse? ere are "we and "it when subject and object areblurred? This becomes an etical question in relation to cyborgs andtransgenic organisms, like who gets to decide that a mouse is going tobe "invented that generates mammarian tumors

Yes The issue is that we must remember the "it in all of thesesentences is, of course, a living being And a living being upon whomthat crown of thorns in Lynn Randolph's painting The aborato, or

the Passio of OcoMouse is not there by accident

And OncoMouse coud run by and I woud not know it wasgeneticaly engineered

But that's an interesting point There might be mice who coudsurvive here in my ofce or home (laughs), but OncoMouse would-n't be one of them Because the natural habitat for OncoMouse isthe laborator That is an interesting part of the guration The sceneof its evolutionary history is the laboratory d the condition of itsbeing is not just sexual reproduction, the histor of the evoluton of

mice of mammas, but aso te stor of te deveopment of enetransfer tecnoo f cors t rerodce erfct "nara t on to contn to so as ncoc t t traar



1 46 H O W K E A E A F

that guarantees the goodness of the product. They have to constant-y be checked to make sure the gene is being propagated and is notbeing ost through cel divisionsa process that can ony be discov-

ered through aboratory pracices. So the maintenance of identit ofOncoMouse is aso predicated on ongoing sustained abor. thoutthat sustained aborthe reatory abor, the aboratory technicianabor, the gene bank abors that store the sequence information on thegenes so that you can check and see that they are sti the same onesthere is no OncoMouse. t's a itte bit ike checking he goodness ofa microprocessor chip. chip that is sod as a particuar micro-

processora Pentium chip or whateveris sod as a Pentium chipbecause it has certain characteristics. The ony way you know it hascertain characteristics is if there is a testing process to see if what it isputting out warrants the name and the trademark. SimiaryOncoMousetrademarkiteraydepends for its identit uponsustained abor processes in which the mouse itsef is an active part-ner. So it's not ike it's made up in a court of aw. OncoMouse is

geneticaly engineered, but is a rea anima, ike a monkey, that ivesin a rea habitat.

OncoMouse is aso an exampe of the Christian gura reaismthat is so ndamenta to the ideoog of technoscience you critique.In Modesess you say, "though her promise is decidedy secu-ar, s/he is a gure in the sense deveoped within Christian reaism:

S/he is our scapegoat; s/he bears our suering; s/he signies andenacts our mortait in a power, historicay specic way thatpromises a cuturay privieged ind of savationa cure for can-cer.' ich brings us back to the ethics of cyborg subjectivit.

And to esh. I thnk for me cyborg ethics is about the manner inwhich we are responsible for these words . But not in a smpistic " I'm

or t or aanst t. ou can't have some smpeminded poitcal hero-s aot resstae erss complct. at as to happen s tat lit-ras a t ra, as e as man ns o aenc. Bot



O N C O M O U S E ™ 47

literacy and agency aren't things you have, but things you do.

N So a responsible way of going about transgenics might be to use

these s ituations of crossgening as moments to earn about how theseorganisms behave, act, work, live, fee, et cetera, and therefore learnwhat might be the most responsibe way to create transgenic formsand worlds.

Yes, that might be an aspect of itfor exampe, asking questionsof who benets. Like does OncoMouseT truly reieve human suer-

ing om cancer, or is it yet another ightech excuse for not payingattention to where cancers are realy coming om? Or both? dwho's hungr in this world and is transgenics addressing that? I thinkthe issues of transgenics areto use Leigh Star's question"Cuibono? For whom?8 The suering of the organism is a part of thatquestion.

N ere do you stand on the question of using living beingstransgenic or otherwisefor laboratory research?

I'm not opposed to using animals in laboratory research. But Ithink such use has to be very carely limited. There is a legitimatemoral and emotiona issue herehow much suering is who bearingand how do I respond to that? I can't naly quanti such suering,

and an ethical judgment is not a quantitative calculation at root, butan acknowledgment of responsibilit for a relationship. I certainlyrespect people who oppose animal research even though I support it.imal research is another way of understanding how seriousy wearen't, and can't be, innocent.



For better and for worse, vampires are vectors of categor transformation in a racialized, historical, national unconscious.

DONNA J. HARAWAY

Vampire Culture

TN: s s r s,

r, s e n

e nstes nse, s oe reor

DH n Modesess, the vapire has to do specically ith



150 W L I K E A L E A F

ace n the context of bologcal theoes of ace. I use t to explanhow boundares and communites of race, naton, nature, language,and cultue transmtted by blood and kinship have neve dsappeared

from popula acialsm n the Unted States . thin ths context, I amnterested n the vampre as the one who pollutes lineages on the weddng nght; as the one who effects categor transformations by llegit-mate passages of substance. It s a gure that both promises andtheatens racal and sexua mxing. The vampie s the one who drinksand inses blood in a paradgmatic act of nfecting whatever poses aspure. Remember the vampire feeds o te normalzed human, and

nds such contaminated food to be nutritious. It s undead, unnatu-ral, and perversey incorruptble. In this sense, for better or for worse,vampres are vectors of categor transformation n a racialized, his-torcal, natonal unconscious. Once you've been drunk om by avampre you are not the same kind of enti. The vampire seems to beone of the most potent ures of our narrative practices because t isthe one who infects te cosmos, the cosed and organic communi.

N d vampric infecton is also a kind of reproducton.

Exacty. It's not just that the vampire draws te blood, but that itinfects the one it draws om and terefore creates oter vampiricbeings. these kinds of poluted sets are ntimately linked to raciaand racst ideas. toug unlike my other images, the vampire as a

guration doesn't come out of science and technolog, as you point-ed out, but out of popuar culture. With a slightly different switch ofperspectives, one can see the connection between vampre mageand the hstor of venereal disease and the way t got associated wthJews and then this awl raci�t circut about the J ewshness of syphilis .People tend to think of race as merely black/white, but n this contextI'm manly talking about Jewish identtes and racist deologes. The

oot acalzaton of the vampe s out of ental Euope. It is part ofthe hstan naatves that nhat technoscence.



V A M P R E C U L T U R E

N In Modest_Winess you create an extraordinar chart, which isactually its own world or system, periodizing key transformationsacross three time periods of the tentieth century 19001930s,

19401970s, 19751990s). You call it a kinship system.

at I was loong at in that chart are three kinds of discursiveobjects: race 19001930s); popuation II to mid1970s);genome mid1970s to now). These are three objects of knowledgethat arise out of biolog and biomedical discourse, anthropoogicaldiscorse, and evolutiona theory. The basic argument of that chap-

ter is that the job of biolog is to produce a certain kind of entityHomo sapiens as a species. In other words, the job of bioog is to dis-crsivey reproduce the species. d of course the species is com-posed of its dierences; so the arraying of simiarit and diversit inthe building of a taxonomic object is crucial to the construction ofthe objectspecies. So measuring practices such as bood groups,gene frequencies, craniometries are all invented at dierent times

across the centur. In te chart I've actualy done a ver convention-al kind of periodization, telling historical narratives as though theseperiods were really separate from each other. Obviousy, I under-stand the continuities that trave across these, but I choose to setthem up contentiousy. Race is cosey tied to notions of racial puri-t and type . For exampe, the charge of race suicide brought againstwhite women who didn't have enough babies in 1905 by Theodore

Roosevet. He made this statement to the countr in 1 90 5 in a speechwarning of the consequences to the race if white middeclass womandid not have enough children. Bunty, he saw it as race suicidebecause the race white) will be swamped by southern and easternimmigrants. I want to make the argument that genome discourse inthe late part of the twentieth centr is not the same thing as eugen-ics discourse of the 1910s and 1920s. I want to argue that the con-

temora ssues aroun dversit wthn Homo saens and the racia-aton of tose erences oesn't wor te same wa n te sas te n t s o oo t tm om t ot o w o



1 2 H W L l K E A L E A F

biolog and medicine. It's not the whole window on racial discoursebut it is an important one .

The earl twentieth centur is the era of massive immigrationin the U.S.

Right. The worr at that point on the East Coast was the inuxom southern and eastern EuropeJews, Italians, Catholics. On theWest Coast the worr was, of course, about the Chinese, Japanese,Fiipino populations. So U .S. raciaist discourse is not ndamentall

about back and Latino popuations in the "race suicide period. Andthe white race of that period is white AngoSaxon Protestantthesocaled native stockwhich of course did not include the Irish. Soat the turn of the centur, "native meant white, but more spec-icall WASP. The obigation was to the raceracia purit, raciape, racial health, pubic hgiene. There were certainl issues ofindividual genetic disease and eugenic choices made b individuals

the eugenic health of famiies, for instancebut it was a much morecorporatist, nonindividualist discourse. Almost an antiindividualistdiscourse. ereas genetic discourse of the 1 990s is much more indi-viduaist. It's much more about selfmaximization. It's much moreabout individual selfdetermination and ownership of our own genet-ic ineage and proper. M genes, m self, m investment, m ture.It's much more strictl capitaist.

Right. Therefore an liberal critique that enters in is aboutenhancing individua choice.

Yes, it's al about protections to the individua so ou won't bediscriminated against b insurance or whatever. It's exact the arraof considerations that appl to all liberal questions: access, protection

aganst nvason of privac, maxmizing choice so that the patient'sroem re aot coce and acces to nowledgenowingng nrm cco re "recogned ro



V A M P R E C U L T U R E 1 53

lems, the ones that make sense within discursive constraints

So how does one intervene and not return to a kind of genetic

population discourse?

Lots of ways For one thingon the most simple level, via a critiquepointing out how much genome discourse is investment discourse, particularly individual maximization discourse At the sametime, one worries about late 1 990s forms of eugenics, for instance thekind that might conduct gene therapy to correct short stature

Growth hormone is already used for that purpose But imagine aworld where we have a kind of bodytoorder This would be eugen-ics at the level of individual selfmaximization

A kind of eugenic plastic surgery based on the same kinds ofarguments about choice

Yes, eugenic plastic surgerythat is exactly what it would be ButI'm far om against genome research I think it's absolutely of greatbiological importance

It seems to be more a problem of the collusion and sion ofgenetic research with a capitalist economy

Right The capitalization of the genome in the most literal senseis that the genome becomes property within the regulator regimes ofadvanced capitalism

It is also an ontological problem in the sense of how does onenot think of the gene and the self as so entwined that by xing thegene I will x mysef

DH Right. We are no longer in the era of "y body, y self but "yene, y self ts not a proble to say that certain failies have a



4 H W l K E A L E A F

genetic predisposition for heart disease or acohoism or manicdepression I don 't see anything inherenty troubing about these sortsof judgments Certainy Huntington's, cystic brosis, or sicke ce

anemia are ver we characterized as genetic diseases The probemis in understanding genetic diseases within the overa context of howgenetic diseases deveop and are shaped Genes don't make anyhinga by themseves, they don't determine things a by themseves Itmay be that with a certain genetic makeup, there is no way not to havea particuar disease But what I am arguing for is a muidimensionaunderstanding of what it means to be in a word where geneic dis-

course is centra



itnessing is seeing; attesting; standing publicall accountable for, and pschicall ulnerable to, ones visions andrepresentations

DONNA J ARAWAY

Modest Witness

: Is such a multidimensional understanding where yournotion of a at's cradle comes in, i . e . , an antiracist, feminist,ltictr study of tecosciece?

hats oe of those ipossible outs!



56 H 0 W L l K A A F

TNG: hat I'm asking is whthr th at's cradl is anothr gur foryou, or is it a mthodolog?

Wl, sinc at's cradl is a gam I guss it's a mthodolog witha small " m. It's a way of working and a way of thinng about work,so that in this cas it is addrssd to scinc studis popl to drawmor thickly from fminist studis and cultural studis and vic vrsa .Cat's cradl can b playd on your own hands, but it's mor intrsting to pay it with somon ls. It's a gur for building rationaity that isn't agonistic.

NG: It's similiar to what you argu for in trms of immun systmdiscours in "Th Biopolitics of Postmodrn Bodis using OctaviaButr's Xenogenesis sris?

Ys. But it's important that at's cradl dosn't bcom th singu-lar mod. Thr ar a numbr of tchnoscintic practics whr w

would want to tak an oppositional and antagonistic stanc. Thmtaphors of harmony and collctivity arn't th whol story ithrsinc at tims comptition and ghting and vn military mtaphorsmight b what w nd. It's just that agonism has bn so ovrm-phasizd within much tchnoscinc. I was writing spcically againstaspcts of Bruno Latour's book, Science in Action which is so ovr-whlmingly dpndnt on mtaphors of agonism and combat. Th

gur of th at's crad is a dirct rspons to that. It is thrfor acontxtual mtaphor.

TNG: Dscrib your mod of fminist tchnoscinc. I mad a listhr om Modes Witess of what sm to b th ky traits: "tchno-scinc with dmocracy, "strong objctivit, on that is committd toprojcts of human quality, is "modst, univrsal, abundant, and

"comrisd o sctca nowg rojcts.

DH Yes f tecnoscence by or oent n stor s nstaeab



M D E S T W T N E S S 1 7

"nature for usand not just nature but natureculturethen under-standing technoscience is a way of understanding how natures andcultures have become one word. So the analysis of technoscience, the

understanding of what kind of world we are living in, is what we caltechnoscience studies. Feminist technoscience studies takes seriouslythat list of things you just read off. So it involves technoscientic libert, technoscientic democracy, understanding that democracy isabout the empowering of peope who are invoved in putting worldstogether and taking them apart, that technoscience processes aredealing with some worlds rather than ohers, ha democracy requires

people to be substantively invove and know themselves to beinvolved and are empowered to be accountable and colectiveyresponsible to each other. And feminist technoscience sdies keepslooping through the permanent and painl conradicions of gender.

"Selfcritical knowedge project does seem like something hatwould not be ver easy to incorporate into the way technoscience is

done now.

Feminist technoscience really means going beyond the kinds ofinstitutions we have now. Its lled with dierent kins of workprocesses and knowledgepractices, including reshaping ime andspace. For exampe, to interact eectively a work, to work wih peo-ple, realy involves rethinking time and careers and the speed of

research.

And this is not necessarily how technoscience is set up in thepresent?

Cerainly not. Technoscientic processes at the moment rely onvast dispartes of wealth, power, agenc, sovereignt, chances of life

and deat Te enltenment oects for eualt ave a ind ofmutat saience insie tecnoscnc now. I a c o te enitenent; tats at wha ModesWitness i a abt. I nt e-



1 8 W I K E A E A F

diating the inheritance of democracy and freedom and all of thosepolluted enlightenment inheritances. I see them in a kind of warpedway. I'm trying to rework them.

How does this relate to the gure of the "modest witness?

"Modest witness, along with OncoMouse and theFemaleMan©, are gures I use in the book to stand in for new waysof imagining and doing technoscience. 1 In reference to Modest_

tness®Second_Miennium the reader sees immediately that she is

the sener an receiver of messages in my email address. But I amalso relying on the complex history of "witnessing and being a "wit-ness within the stories of science studies in relation to Robert Boyle 'sdevelopment of the experimental method in the seventeenth centuryand the subsequent controversies over how facts are credibly estab-lishe. For instance, Thomas Hobbes repudiated the experimentalway of life precisely because its knowledge was dependent on a prac-

tice of wiessing by a special community, like that of the clerics andlawyers. I am interested in this precise kind of wiessing because it isabout seeing; attesting; standing publicly accountable for, and psychi-cally lnerable to, one's visions and representations. Witnessing is acollective, limite practice that depends on the constructed and nevernished credibilit of those who do it, all of whom are mortal, falli-ble, and aught with the consequences of unconscious and disowne

desires and fears. A child of Robert Boyle's Royal Society of theEnglish Restoration and of the experimental way of life, I remainattached to the gure of the modest witness. My modest witness isabout telling the truthgiving reliable testimonywhile eschewingthe addictive narcotic of transcendental foundations. It reures thesubjects, objects , and communicative commerce of technoscience intodierent kinds of knots .

"moest



M D E 5 T W T N E 5 5 9

"Modest like "wiess has a deep and complex history in science studies in relation to gender and Robert Boyle's experimentswith the air pump and development of the experimental way of life. I

take up Elizabeth Potter's analysis of the way gender was at stake inthe experimenta way of life of the period within the context ofdebates on the proliferation of genders in the practice of crossdressing. 2 I retain the guration of "modesty because what wilcount as modesty now is precisey what is at issue. There is the kindof modesty that makes you disappear and there is the kind thatenhances your credibii. Female modesty has been about being out

of the way whie masculine modest has been about being a credibewitness . d then there is the kind ofeminist modest that I am arguing for here (not feminine), which is about a kind of immersion in theworld of technoscience where you ask a hard intersection of questionsabout race, class, gender, sex with the goal of making a dierence inthe real, "materialsemiotic word.

at is your modest technoscientist then?

I never used that phrase exacty, but if I did it would have to dowith a kind of wiingness , and abiit; a honing of skis, of being aertto and opening your work to kinds of accountabii you might haveresisted before. For exampe, in the case of genetic researchers, asking them to open their work to the inuence of their patients .

Modesty in that context is about being aware of one's impact,one's power, one's limits.

It is not selfconsumed though. It's actualy a remarkable kind ofcondence . Feminist modest is not allergic to power!

G xact. odest people ae awas the ones I trust. I are trusto espect agant peope ecase aganc signis n ocs- "stpiity to me.



60 H O W L K E A E A F

I know what you mean And people also mistake modest forbeing a victim because of the double meaning of modestthe mod

est that is about disappearing, or covering up that gets misheard asincompetence True modest is about being able to say that you dohave certain skills In other words, being able to make strong knowl-edge claims Not giving in to stupid relativism, but to witness, toattest The kind of modest witness I am calling for is one that insistson situatedness, where ocation is itself a complex construction as wellas inheritance It is a gure that casts its ot with the projects and

needs of those who would not or could not inhabit the subject posi-tions of the "aboratories , of the credible, civil man of science Thepoint is, odest_Witness®Second Millennium needs a new experimen-tal way of life to l the milennia hope that life wil survive on thisplanet A witness is not a disengaged observer, is not a Martian Ithink of witnessing as implicated in the worldly practice we discussedbefore because a witness is also not a brain in a vat A witness is aways

at risk for attesting to some truth rather than others You bear winessPeope who go to Guatemala, Chiapas, Nicaragua, or El Salvador towitness are doing something that is absolutely about being engagedThey are aso invoved in the requirement to tell the truth, taking itupon themselves to witness and te l the truth Witnessing in this senseis antiideological in the sense of resisting the "ocial story Tthhere is not with a capital "T; ie, ruth that is transcendent or out

side histor It's resolutely historical; attesting to the conditions of ifeand death

N In your depiction of witnessing there is an inbuilt sense ofethics

Absolutely And scientic knowledge is about witnessing That is

hat the expeimental etho is aot, the fact of being there Andthe fact of knoing cetain things ecase one is thee changes onessense of accontabili S o fa o be ing iniffeent to the tth, the



M O D E S T W T N E S S 1 6 1

approach I am ting to work for is rigorously committed to testingand attesting. To engaging in and understanding that this is always aninterpretive engaged contingent fallible engagement. It is never a

disengaged account.

hich is the common impression of scientic objectivit.

Right but objectivit is always a loca achievement. It's alwaysabout hoding things together well enough so that peope can sharein that account powerly. "Local does not mean small or unable to

travel.

It reminds of me of "Situated owedges when you talk aboutlocation in a compicated sense and partia knowledge or perspectiveas the only way to attain "objectivit.

Yes. The modest witness is the one who can be engaged in situ-

ated knowledges.



[F]or me teaching is in man was the embodiment of the atscradle experience

DONNA J. ARAWAY

elepathic eaching

TN: B o e e o o e e

oo p o o o o

tis is soetn oe ol no ee o ro redi our or o fro hin bee one ofour stdets jst ho extroria or oitent topeago is



64 H O W I K E A E A F

You know I realize now I have students who, bioogically speak-ing, could be my grandchildren! Not quite . . . but my teaching real-

ly is dierent om, say, ten years ago when you were here . Or maybeits just that the dierences between me and my students have onlybecome sharper. l I know is that somewhere about ve years ago Iost my sense of sefcondence in the cassroom.

No way!

Im serious. In the sense that I would get a kind of cold fear of "Ireally dont now who these people are. I realy dont know the kindof questions that are important to them. I lost the spontaneity that ispart of teaching, or better I began to doubt my spontaneity.

How odd because you are such a gifted, telepathic teacher. Is itas simple as generationa dierences?

Perhaps, in a deep sense as I was forced to reaize we had notlived through any of the same things. Our formative years were builton entirely dierent experiences. I mean now I am teaching peoplebo in the late 1 970s . And thats a very strange experience. Im begin-ning to teach people who were born the year Reagan was elected!

ich is the same year you came to HistCon !

Exactly. So these students know nothing but Reagan andThatcher and the aermath politicaly.

And for them the Cold War seems like an abstraction, whileyour formative years were mprinted with it.

DH e n te woe set of eefs tat ame om rowng u at atme we te umto w tat te wo ou e etter ae



T E E P A T H C T E A C H I G 6

through social movements like the women's movement, the civilrights movement, the antiwar movement Those movements reallyshaped me as an adult d for our students this is not true They

have a very dierent sense of politics and a very dierent sense of pos-sibilit in politics

N a teacher it is so hard to manage these gaps eectively Everyteacher has to deal with these gaps as they get older but what you aregetting at in terms of political agency, or even political interest, ismuch more important One sees how the lived experience of having

gone through those movements and the social transformations theymade possible informs your work gency is crucial to your theor Itis not an abstraction nd this comes from having participated in veryactive, generative social movements

And having gone through these movements as a young person It'snot as though the students I teach are any less committed or less crit

ical and they are certainly no less motivated, but they have a very different political landscape to work in

N Would you describe that dierent landscape?

Let's take environmental studies folks I think they take for grant-ed much more than I did that they will have to work within complex

organizations They assume they will have to get professional degreesand work for corporations or in the media or governmental agencies hereas my consciousness was structured much more oppositionallynot just to corporate structures and the military but to professionallife in general Even becoming an academic or a professional felt likean act of betrayal to social movement ideolog I don't think my stuents today think that way They also don't grow up with a sense of

being taken care o economicall an healthwise te wa m eneraton ven tu e'e n eatve eonom u tmeuen t e uneee u ne en eu




N The sense of freedom that comes om assuming one wil betaken care of is aso what aows one to take risks Now critica theo-

r has taken the pace of much of that kind of action

Right, for the most part now they've got a critica theor anguage

N nd critica theor is no onger enough; it's no longer even crit-ica, necessariy

bsoutey It sometimes fees dogmatic amost in the religioussense, ike a received anuage that is not their own

N Right, it is not something earned, or achieved, which comesom discover Your generation and mine experienced the discoveryof new theoretica anguages, new forms and coaitions of poitics , dif

ferent paradigms emerged, new departments sprang up, interdiscipi-narita of that

I think what the dierence is is that students today have inherit-ed these structures and take them for granted But I must admit, sincewe are discussing this, that I have noticed recenty how uncomfort-abe I am when my students are creating their own anguages and per

spectives I reay have to stop mysef om being dismissive, and takethe time to reaize that their critica insights are coming out of quitedierent ives and historica moments and that I need to isten betterYou see, for me teaching is in many ways the embodiment of the at'scrade experience One is invoved in this interlocking series of knots

N Listening is so important Without it we aren't teaching

secay as te as n exerence and shared hstor wden Howexat o ou tean an wtn eate



T E E P A T H C T E A C H N G 67

The content of what I teach n my graduate semnars doesn'thave much to do wth my research. I never taught the materal forPrimate sions, or any of my books n fact.

: hch s astonshng snce the usual route for academcs s touse semnars for ther research. It's just another example of yourmndbogglng energ. You end up dong double work.

In a way but I use the teachng as a way of stayng current. I uset as a place to read.

: Exactlyyou know I actually do the same thng. Teachng s thebest way to read. You know that od chestnut s trueone fees onehas never even read somethng unt one teaches t. But t s also thatone goes paces n teachng that one wouldn't otherwse precselybecause one s part of a network a network that demands that oneaddress thngs that as a sotar ndvidua one mght not.

Yes . In the fall Nefert Tadar a coeague of mne n the Hstorof Conscousness Program and I taught hstorca and cutural studes of race and ethnct. Now that terature certanly nformed whatI wrte but I don't wrte about most of t drectly. And the only waythat I can stay current stay sharp s hrough ths knd of graduateleve teachng. And smlarly wth femnst theory. A ot of femnst

theor that I am deepy nformed by s never directy a part of mywork. Most of it comes through ndependent studes and graduatestudent work. Although the teachng I do nforms my wrtng hugely.But HstCon as an organzaton doesn't have students working onprojects closely reated to facut. Student projects don't grow out offacult research projectons.

TNG: et tere ave to be antes.

DH f cse. vas f s e tes f h clsely elat



1 68 H W K E A E A F

ed to our own work our students' work s. nd then there s alsoundergraduate teachng. I have taught n women's studes a lot, as wellas my bolog and poltcs and Scence and Poltcs courses, whch are

all the broad undergraduate consttuents. nd teachng general ntro-ducto courses and advsng women's studes, envronmental studes ,and mercan studes theses have all been mportant parts of theteachng too.

N Would you have been able to do the work you have done any-where else?

bsoutely not.

N So n many ways you are an nventon of HstCon?

Yes, I thnk that's absolutely true. Hstory of scence s by den-ton an nterdscplna eld, and there was a strong ltera theo

and humantes nuence at Johns Hopkns. They have theHumantes Center, whch s one of the only other graduate programslke HstCon n the Unted States. So t had many favorabe cond-tons, but I know I coudn't have wrtten at Johns Hopkns what I havewrtten here. I wouldn't have had the dverst of students. For onethng, I have had a lot of graduate students. Many more than wouldhave been possbe at Johns Hopkns. Today I was worng wth a

graduate student at Berkeey n envronmental plannng. I've alsoworked wth students n socolog studyng nuclear polluton n thesouthwest, as well as wth femnst theo students at UC San Dego.There s no way that could have happened at Hopkns.

N d you really read people's dssertaton, as I well know. Iremember when someone saw your comments on a chapter I was

worn on, te were amaed at ow much commenta and closerean t n. re te eceton, not te rue.



T E L E P A T I C T E A C I N G 69

I think man of m coleagues read student work ver carel.HistCon is a pace that has encouraged and rewarded the kind ofwork I have done , and Hopkins is a pace that was ndamenta sus

picious of that kind of work. Yet at the same timethe foundation atHopkins in the histor of bioog has aowed me to do the kind ofwork I've done here.

ENDNOTES

1 "Hypertext is a usel metaphor for the reading and writing practices I want

to emphasize in Pragmatics, Part III At its most literal and modest,

hypertext is a computer-mediated indexing apparatus that allows one to cra

and follow many bushes of connections among the variables internal to a cat

ego Hypertext is easy to use and easy to construct, and it can change com

mon sense about what is related to what See Donna J Haraway,

Modes_Wiess®Second_MienniumFemaleMan©_Mee_OncoMouse (New

York: Routledge, 1997) 12 5

2 "Cyborgs d o not stay still ready i n the few decades that they have exsted,

they have mutated, in fact and ction, into second-order entities like genom

ic and electronic databases and the other denizens of the zone called cyber

space See Donna Haraway, "Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in

the New World Order, in The Cyborg Handbook ed Chris Hables Gray

(New York: Routledge, 1995) xix3 See Chris Hables Gray, Steven Mentor, and Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera,

"Cyborgology: Constructing the knowledge of cybernetic organisms, in

The Cyborg Handbook

4 See Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline, "Cyborgs and Space, in The

Cyborg Handbook 293 3

5 Haraway, 1997, 98

6. Donna J Haraay, "A Cyborg Manifeso: cence, Technology, and

ocalst-Femnsm the ae Tweneth Century, n imians ors andmen e einvenion o are (ew York: Routledge, 1 9 9 1) : 1 6 1 .

7 . Haraway, 1997, 79.

8 . Susan Leigh Star, Power, Technolog, and Phenmenolog of Convention s



7 H W l K E A E A F

On Bein Alleric to Onions, in Sociolo of Monse: Powe chnolo and

he Mode rld ed J Law (Oxford: Basil Blacell): 34

9 Donna J Haraway, "Universal Donors in a Vampire Cltre: Twentieth

Centr US Bioloical Kinship Cateories, in Modes_Winess 2 1 9-29

10 Haraway, 199 1 , 2 2 7 "Some other order of dierence miht be possible in

Xenogenes in immnolo

1 1 In Modes_ Winess the modest witness represents the story of science stdies

as well as of science ction The FemaleMan© is the chief re of femi

nism OncoMoseTM is the re of biotechnolo and enetic enineerin,

a synecdoche for technosciemce

1 2 Elizabeth Potter, "Man Gender/Man Science: Gender Ideolo and

Boyle's Experimental Philosophy, in Making a Drence ed B Spanier(Bloominton: Indiana Universit Press, forthcomin)



Iron is about contradictions that do not resolve into largerwholes, even dialectall, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or al are necessar and true.Iron is about humor and serious pla.

DO NN A J . ARAWAY

C O D A

Passion and Iron

N: r e, I e er eec

e o ModsWiss: "e s er reeer

a we ih hve been otherwise, an iht et e . . . . "1 Ilove tht etence fragent becase it exses the cnstanttensios ad qestions bout our being tat y are continal interroatin. nd te ay ou stte it is iportat: "to



1 2 H W L I K E A E A F

learn "to remember, so it is not jst learning (an action in the present that bids the ture) bt remembering (sing the past). In otherwords, we mst be invoved in leaing and remembering the ways we

might have been otherwise. I love the syntax there. d this isn't jsta poetic thoght bt a technoscientic fact.

Yes, for all of the temporait of the "areadywritten ture, thetre and present are, in fact, not naly written. Bt this mst bethoght withot the he of technophilic topia.

N That is what is aways hardest for people to grab onto in yoranalysis. Yor "Jansfaced politica theory, to se yor phrase. Theboth, and, neithe nor stor yo are telling.

ght, bt I guess what I'd say naly is qite simple. l I amrealy asking for is permanent passion and irony, where passion is asimportant as irony.















































Haraway, Donna - How Like a Leaf

Documents