Donna Haraway
In her work, Haraway challenges dichotomies that structure contemporary thought (e.g. man/woman, western/non-western, human/machine, human/animal, etc). She argues that within these dichotomies there is always a hierarchy and one element is always used in opposition to the other (lesser) element. For example, human is better than machine and better than animal, western is better than non-western. These dichotomies often justify exploitation and oppression (and create racism, sexism, classism, and anthropocentric ideas, etc). In her theory, Haraway attempts to create “figurations” that embody concepts or metaphors. The “cyborg” is a powerful one that challenges the distinction between human and machine.
Haraway’s “posthumanism” is grounded in a call to feminists to leave the world of traditional feminism (as defined by Haraway as focused on identity politics, and more specifically, traditional notions of gender as a binary, and politics). Instead, she challenges feminists to embrace the shift from unified human subject to “the hybridized posthuman of technoscience, from “representation” to “simulation,” “bourgeois novel” to “science fiction,” “reproduction” to “replication,” and “white capitalist patriarchy” to “informatics of domination.”
In the essay Situated Knowledges [now a largely-accepted poststructuralist theory--at least in humanist and in critical social science circles], Haraway unpacks notions of “scientific objectivity...as an external, disembodied point of view” that promises to provide an absolute point of view on a specific issue. She argues that past definition of “objectivity” privilege “unmarked Bodies”—usually white men and members of the elite—whilst “marked bodies” are those belonging to the marginalized, those whose ideas can never be dissociated from who they are. Thus, for Haraway, objectivity, as an absolute point of view, as providing a specific answer, is only a privilege to rich white men in countries where colonial, capitalistic, and militarist thinking prevails.
As an alternative to objectivity, Haraway proposes “situated knowledge,” which she defines as knowledge placed in context (in economic, social, cultural, anthropological, place-based, etc).
Point of view in situated knowledge is more limited than the purported “disembodied” objectivity (looking down at the problem from above). However, Haraway would argue that this makes the knowledge richer, taking into account various pieces of information and practice that constitute awareness and knowledge from that point of view. Scaling this up, she argues is possible as human beings with limited points of view acknowledge--and honor--that situatedness but share their deep knowledge of specific context with other people, thus growing and allowing ideas to become larger and more comprehensive from the dispersed and disparate parts.
In recent years Haraway has distanced herself from the term “posthuman” because she sees at is partially coopted by conservatives who see post-humanism as part of human mastery over nature (e.g. using machines to advance human control over nature and fuel capitalistic gain). And in her more recent work she has explored human relationships with animals, challenging the dichotomy between the two and arguing that humans’ treatment of “animals” as somehow lesser than humans--and our subsequent treatment of some human as closer to animals, especially in relationship to questions of biocapitalism--justifies stripping these groups of political life.
Because much of modern humanist thought is grounded in dichotomies, Haraway also has to reject or challenge much that is bound up within them and thus she spends some time conceptualizing a new ethical framing. Pieces of this could be relevant for a next system model; however, there are a few possible tensions. For instance, Haraway is critical of “rights frameworks,” suggesting that they create spaces in which the voices of the marginalized are displaced by activists. This line of argument began in her 1992 essay “The Promises of Monsters,” but also exists in her more recent work about the rights of animals (see “Species Matters”) As she writes, “Advocacy is an act, a very particular kind of act. An advocate pleads the cause of another,” arguing that this is a paternalistic relationship that we should reject and avoid.
Critics of her politics suggest that her work “runs the risk of stultifying potential for political action.” Since, her critique of representation might foreclose on activism and advocacy that challenges exploitation. Haraway may agree that in activist praxis this problem of representation has been resolved through direct democracy and decentralized decision-making.