situated knowledges

I've been revisiting Donna Haraway "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" first published in Feminist Studies 1988. A link to a pdf can be found in my delicious. It is fascinating to pick this text up 20 years after its publication and I think for the first time understand many of the forecasts it offers. Haraway looks towards a practice that is not simply embodied but embedded within the systems of science and objectivity. She insists that being within "the belly of the monster" is the best vantage point. From within we can begin to develop knowledge practices that go beyond the apparently simplistic answers of various practices of Marxism and deconstruction popular in the late 80s. So this week I have read the article looking for clues as to how it has impacted on my teaching practice. It is more than an impact. I have found things in here that have become so much my own that I thought they were. It has become a lesson in learning.
Haraway worries that the imagery of the moment is that of “high-tech military fields”. (577). It is Virillio’s warning about the apparatus of vision, and the shifts power and control. Virillio asks for a acknowledgement of this, Haraway goes further asking for an informed investment in this equation. The starting point was in an understanding that every layer of knowledge and science is contestable, Haraway comments that “we unmasked the doctrines of objectivity” (578) but now need to go beyond showing bias … that there needs to be some kind of feminist version of objectivity. “Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything.” (579)
So what are the implications of this for my teaching practice. When hunting out a ‘theory’ of teaching I began with a profound sense of scepticism born from a belief in the connectedness of theory and practice and a distrust of the ‘application’ of theory. What I have found is embedded within Haraway’s practical theories of science and knowledge. In art schools teaching is about the formation of knowledge. Again and again in this essay I have found phrases/ concepts that have become part of my way of doing things.
- Thinking is active it builds things. (teaching is collaborative and communicative)
- all vision is embodied, specific, partial yet distancing. (sometimes we need to look at things that are unfamiliar, difficult and disturbing)
- knowledge is partial, locatable, and critical (you don’t need to agree with me but we must be able to say why) “struggles over what will count as rational accounts of the world are struggles over how to see.” (587)
- situated knowledges are webs of connections (webs/ networks are now literally our sources of knowledge and also the location of thought – hence the blog)
- vision is always a question of the power to see (ethics and aesthetics are intimately connected)
- positioning implies responsibility (within the space of the lab or classroom we are equally responsible for what occurs) “vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning” (586)
- the ‘object’ we study has agency and matter. Mattering is a relationship. “The world is an active subject” (593) this point is part of a bigger issue around the media we work with in electronic arts (and was key to my PhD – more on that later)

“All these pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability but of elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another’s point of view, even when the other is our own machine.”(583)

Haraway repeats that at each step of the way we must resist simplification. This is my great difficulty with this project. How do I examine my practices without simplifying them? I’m wondering if the above list is a starting point. Whether from it I can build a picture that is situated and locatable, yet remains critical and open-ended. This is in the end what Haraway advocates.