Feb 29, 2020
Donna Haraway
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Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway
Feminism loves another science: the sciences and politics of interpretation, translation, stuttering, and the partly understood. Feminism is about the sciences of the multiple subject with (at least) double vision. Feminism is about a critical vision consequent upon a critical positioning in unhomogenous gendered social space. Translation is always interpretative, critical, and partial. Here is a ground for conversation, rationality, and objectivity–which is power-sensitive, not pluralist, ‘conversation’ [...] So location is about vulnerability; location resists the politics of closure, finality, or to borrow from Althusser, feminist objectivity resist ‘simplification in the last instance’.
Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14:3 (Autumn 1988), pp. 589-90
Response to Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges”
This essay - more loosely related to the subject matter of the course than other readings - makes some abstract but applicable observations on the concentration of knowledge in systems of production. For almost all of human history, the producer and inventor of an object were intrinsically linked. When a person created a tool, they both designed and physically crafted it. Even when making a building, most of the time the pre-architect was also the builder. However, since the advent of more complex societies - especially with the industrial and information revolutions - this link has been abstracted, if not broken entirely. Haraway examines this in a somewhat more sociological, feminist view, but it also applicable to the information in this course. When machines do the making, what effect does that have on the design process? Is it opened up to new options, or hindered to mechanical limits? And even more interesting, when machines do the designing, this opens up an entirely new field of questions. If this producer-inventor link is restored with machines on both ends, architecture - and any other field - will have some new ideas to contend with.