를 끝낸 지금 시각, 새벽 2시 36분입니다 - . -
저 밤 잘 못 새는 거 아시죠? 그런 제가! Proof reading하랴, revising하랴 정신이 없어서, 새벽 2신지도 몰랐답니다. 허허.
시간 투자한 게 아까워서리.
여기에다라도 한번 올려야 겠어요. 흐흐.
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleManⓒ_Meets_OncoMouse™. Donna J. Haraway. London: Routledge, 1997
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleManⓒ_Meets_OncoMouse™ is not a book that you can easily read – very interesting, but somewhat difficult to follow. The author forces readers to become an active reader by leaping between the links within the book. It further asks readers to follow in the chaos full of wordplay, irony, conundrum, and metaphor. It also frequently jumps from Science advertisements to cartoons and magazine covers. Besides, the title, unlike the heading of the news article, doesn’t seem to tell much about the book.
In the first chapter, however, Haraway introduces readers to her intention in the title. “Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleManⓒ_Meets_OncoMouse™ is an e-mail address” (p.3). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium is a sender, mutated modest witness especially in the second Christian millennium. FemaleManⓒ is the salient figure in the story of feminism, also mutated from femaleman - a character in a science fiction novel by Joanna Russ. Lastly, OncoMouse™ is the first patented, genetically engineered mouse for breast cancer research by Du Pont. The title also gives us a hint of where and when the book is situated: the second Christian Millennium and the United States with feminism, technoscience, and also culture.
These radical thoughts by a postmodern-feminist seem to be a bit complex and unusual because they are not the established or conventional ideas which we are used to or familiar with: Haraway continuously de-naturalises and re-figures what we have taken for granted. She shows that binary notion has been embedded in feminism, science studies, and cultural studies writing as well as in science, history, and politics.
The book consists of three different chapters: Syntactics, Semantics, and Pragmatics. In the first chapter, Haraway reveals to the readers ‘the grammar of feminism and technoscience’ – how the book is constructed, what the title means with signs and symbols such as “@”, “.”, “ⓒ”, and “™”, and how figurative as well as literal all language is: words like chip, gene, fetus, and race. In the second chapter, by examining the history of techno/bio-science, she tries to “confuse the boundaries” between object/subject, culture/nature, female/male, and animal/human (Haraway, 1991). In the last chapter, Haraway moves to the issues of Gene, Fetus, and Race analysing their usage and relevance in the 20th century.
Though each chapter is a separate essay –a lot of things going on at once, Haraway points out that they can also be read as a kind of 'Pilgrims Progress'. Throughout the book, Haraway de-naturalises, or ‘queers’ in Haraway’s term, “the self-evidence of witnessing, of experiencing, of the conventionally upheld and obvious distinction between subject/object: especially between living/dead, machine/organisms, human/nonhuman, self and other as well as between feminist/mainstream, progressive/oppressive, local/global” (p.267) She further problematizes naturalized ways of approaching and the process of knowledge-making which might have defined our world with a hidden propaganda. Even the seemingly ‘innocent’ corporatization of biology, according to Haraway, is a critical problem resulting in “the disappearance of social criticism by elite, independent, and commercially unaffiliated scientists” (p.94).
Amongst Haraway’s many ideas and thoughts, ‘Race’ caught my eye. She delineates how closely connected race and blood have been in Europe, and the U.S. from the end of the 19th century, and shows how “The Sacred Image of the Same” (p. 242) reproduces racist images. Even today, in Time magazine’s cover image on immigration (Fall 1993 issue), she argues that this image of a morphed portrait of ‘SimEve’ is another antiracism myth. She decries it, saying “all the bloody history caught by the ugly word miscegenation is missing in the ‘sanitized’ term morphing” (p.264). What she suggests here is models of solidarity and human unity. In other words, kinship, which is not tied with blood, or “affinity”, politically created communities, not identity. (Haraway, 1991)
Another idea that I liked was ‘cat’s cradle’, a game in which a string looped in a pattern like a cradle on the fingers of one person's hands is transferred to the hands of another so as to form a different figure . Haraway proposes “figures with the varying threads of science studies, antiracist feminist theory, and cultural studies” (p.268). There’s no winning in the game. It leads to more open-ended and intriguing results. “Cat’s cradle is both local and global, distributed and knotted together” (p.268). If mutated modern witness plays cat’s cradle games, then he/she can’t be self-invisible, Haraway suggests. ‘Reflexivity’ (a term used by Sandra Harding to describe strong objectivity) is not enough, Haraway argues. “Strong objectivity demands a practice of diffraction, not just reflection” (p.268).
Of course, there are many things that I didn’t really get. I’m sure I didn’t understand all of the jokes, puns, conundrums and ironies that Haraway makes. She doesn’t show what all the terminologies really mean. It lacks clarity, and is written in somewhat inaccessible style. There are also some contradictions throughout the book. However, I think she meant it that way – as in situated knowledge, double vision, and especially ‘cat’s cradle’. There is more than one specific way or perspective: partial sight and limited voice (Haraway, 1988). In this way, it leaves us unexpected openings for situated knowledge, more room for other thoughts, and future possibilities. Given her distrust for ‘one real truth’ about anything as illusion, however, there remains an unsolved question. Why does Haraway give readers too much detail on Lynn Randolph’s paintings? Though those paintings introduce and map out the topics of each chapter: She doesn’t give us room for other interpretations, or other thoughts. Rather, she directly explains what she intends to depict by paintings. However, the use of these paintings, with Haraway’s method of deconstructions and explanations does not ultimately distract the reader from the core message of the book: the possibility of other ways of knowing.
Bibliography
Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ in Keller E., & Longino, H. (eds.) (1996) Feminism and Science, Oxford, OUP:249-263.
Haraway. D. (1991) ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, New York: Routledge:149-181.
“Cat’s Cradle.” Def. 1. Miriam Webster online. 2002. 22 Oct. 2002 <http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary>