Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway

Abstract

Andrew Ross: Many people from different audiences and disciplines came to your work through A Manifesto for which has become a cult text since its appearance in Socialist Review in 1985. For those readers, who include ourselves, the recent publication of Primate Visions and the forthcoming Simians, Cyborgs, and Women provides the opportunity to see how your work as a historian of science was always more or less directly concerned with many of the questions about nature, culture and technology that you gave an especially inspirational spin to in the Cyborg Manifesto. So we'd like to begin with a more general discussion of your radical critiques of the institutions of science. Although you often now speak of having been a historian of science, almost in the past tense, as it were, it's also clear that you have many more than vestigial loyalties to the goals of scientific rationality among which being the need, as you put it, in a phrase that goes out of its way to flirt with empiricism, the need for a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of reality. Surely there is more involved here than a lingering devotion to the ideals of your professional training? Donna Haraway: You've got your finger right on the heart of the anxiety some of the anxiety and some of the pleasure in the kind of political writing that I'm trying to do. It seems to me that the practices of the sciences the sciences as cultural production force one to accept two simultaneous, apparently incompatible truths. One is the historical contingency of what counts as nature for us: the thoroughgoing artifactuality of a scientific object of knowledge, that which makes it inescapably and radically contingent. You peel away all the layers of the onion and there's nothing in the center. And simultaneously, scientific discourses, without ever ceasing to be radically and historically specific, do still make claims on you, ethically, physically. The objects of these discourses, the discourses themselves, have a kind of materiality; they have a sort of reality to them that is inescapable. No scientific account escapes being story-laden, but it is equally true that stories are not all equal here. Radical relativism just won't do as a way of finding your way across and through these terrains. There are political consequences to scientific accounts of the world, and I remain, in some ways, an old-fashioned Russian nihilist. My heroes are