Some thoughts about Donna Haraway
Some thoughts about Donna Haraway and Situated Knowledges and maybe that the Norwegian word Reynd could be helpful here.
Donna Haraway has an epistemical theory that I find quite interesting with some fascinating ontological consequences. She wanted to rescue objectivity as a concept from the quite forceful critiques of traditional rationality that other feminists during her era (1970s and onwards) were making. Previously objectivity (and still to an extent today) was encapsulated as a dispassionate disembodied neutral god-eye inquiry. The prevailing sentiment within several sciences like physics, mathematics, biology, and so on, was that they were simply creating eternally true systematic models that were describing an underlying reality out there. Science and objectivity itself didn’t occupy a physical space, it described itself as a view from nowhere in particular. To put it bluntly, such a view upon rationality has proven to be unstable in the face of repeated and sustained critique.
From any intellectual position critical of hierarchical power-relations, such conceptions of objectivity have come under fire. To bring one example, science is done by something, there is a social process preceding the creation of theories. Produced theories also stand in relation with other theories in social networks, where couplings here and there can create involutions. The assumed god-eye view thus has problems explaining itself. Many alternatives have been proposed, one of which is standpoint theory.
You can read more about standpoint theory here: https://iep.utm.edu/fem-stan/, but important for this little innlegg is the following: Traditional standpoint theory states that we cannot have one overarching view of reality, we must investigate the perspective of others in order to illuminate society. Many standpoint theorists, excluding Haraway, would then go on to say that the perspective of those in power in a given society is inherently distorted, as they will produce a world-view that will serve to legitimise their own position within society. In order to get more accurate pictures you have to investigate the perspectives of those less fortunate within a society (relatedly, modern intersectional feminism often uses standpoint theory as its theoretical base).
Donna Haraway’s theory is similar, yet there are some important points that I’d like to point out here. She agrees with much of the traditional standpoint theory, and she is sometimes likened to standpoint theory herself, but she has problems with privileging any particular perspective. It is as much a skill to learn to see through the subjugated vision as it does through the domineering perspectives, and they’re both simply situated knowledges limited by what their visions can see. And on the topic of vision, that is the main metaphor that Haraway works with in her work. She likens vision simply to any sensation, and importantly does not limit this to human vision. She does not want to privilege the human perspective above anything, and she does nor privilege the organic either. It’s actually part of her wider project and not just her theory on situated knowledge that she tries to collapse the distinction between the artificial and the organic. She talks about how we can use apparatuses in space to gain sensory data about planets, which we can use to produce pictures of planets like Saturn or Uranus. In any scientific inquiry, you can use any embodied visions to gain situated knowledge, which she equates to objectivity. It’s an unusual theory of objectivity, yet her theory is attractive to me.
Yet one thing that I have to consider somewhat, and which I don’t have a clean answer for what Haraway herself would answer, is the following: what are the different standpoints observing? We are well in the space of speculative ontology and epistemology here, speculating about the most elemental points of being. It’s easy to assume that she would be talking about a real world out there that we gain mere glimpses of through our collective visions, yet I am not quite certain this is the view that Haraway herself would support. I am not quite familiar with it, but she is associated with the new materialist school of thought, a school that does not categorically endorse a world that is real and total. Yet, if Haraway supports such a position or not is not the thought I wanna play with here, I wanna play with a thought of how one could explain the phenomena in the visions of the apperatuses without collapsing into a debate of idealism vs realism.
I’ve already used the word phenomena, so for some it might be obvious what the point I’m about to make is, but what I am advocating for is to not think in terms of what lies beyond what we can sense, and instead focus on what we can sense instead. There might be or might not be an eternal unchanging and total world out there, yet something that is relatively certain is that our visions encounter several phenomena. This encounter is not straightforward, and is fraught with friction. Instead of using the word “vision” that Haraway uses, I want to borrow 3 words from Norwegian to explain this better, the verb “røyne”, the noun form of røyne which is “røyning”, and the noun ” Røynd”, which due to their etymological origin of the words in Old Norse I will call the verb “to reyn” and the two nouns “reyning” and “Reynd”.
In nynorsk, ordbokene.no states that to reyn is the following “måtte tole eller gjennomgå; få vite gjennom eiga oppleving; prøve, erfare, oppleve”. Translated this is to tolerate something or to go through something, to know something from your own “oppleving” (can itself be translated into experience, though it is not a perfect translation), to try, to “erfare” (another subtile word for to experience), to “oppleve” (again, norwegian has a lot of words for experience). This is a definition of experiencing that encapsulates the friction that vision brings, meetings the world and having to trench through it. Reynd on the other hand is much more easy to define as it is simply the totality of different reyns one can go through in life, this reynd can be said to be the totalitiy of phenomena that vision experiences or the totality of phenomena that going through reyn will bring you. Yet it is not a complete totality, as it is defined by its ever changing and updating constiutent elements, or constiutent reynings. Thus reynd is a lived reality, a reality that does not care for what is behind reality, it does not care for hypothetical noumenon that might lie behind what we experience that some traditional senses of science can make of. I wonder if simply equating “to reyn” with a verb for situated knowledge, and “reynd” for the totality of our our known situated knowledges is something that might be a useful tool. Reynd is something at least that does not have to deal with an absurd Kantian “thing-in-itself”. This has been my blog post for the day.