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Playing cat's cradle with Donna Haraway

On page 268 of "Modest_Witness", Donna Haraway compares the practice of doing feminist technoscience studies to playing a game of cat's cradle - an idea covered in an essay from 1994.
In the article, Haraway uses the game of cat's cradle as what I would like to call a troping device - a term or figure capable of attracting different ideas and meanings that then can be narrated through this figure. I like the image of cat's cradle, and I like what it becomes through Haraway's narration. Also, I think that the figure resembles other of her analytical figures, like her usage of Greimas' semiotic square (mentioned in my previous post).

In the essay, Haraway introduces two strands that structure all the figures. The first strand deals with feminist (multicultural, antiracist) technoscience as an interdisciplinary practice which doesn't aknowledge the boundaries separating knowledge into discrete disciplines. Many feminist scholars have paid close attention to those boundaries, many inspired by another figure of Haraway - the cyborg. Ironically enough, this famous and productive figure has also had the effect that instead of looking at the rich content of each of these artificial categories and allow for remoldings of these materials, a great deal of effort has been spent trying to unmake boundaries which never existed in any real sense in the first place. Thus, Haraway warns:

[But] boundary crossing in itself is not very interesting for feminist, multicultural,antiracist technoscience projects. Technoscience provokes an interest in zones of implosion, more than in boundaries, crossed or not. The most interesting question is, What forms of life survive and flourish in those dense, imploded zones? (page 62)

The second strand of thoughts structuring the cat's cradle is a recognizion that textual rereading is never enough, that reading is too weak a trope. The effect of a re-reading can only be a reproduction of the same, displaced, a phenomenon which Haraway is extremely aware of. Sadly and ironically enough, it seems like one of the most spoiled of her figurative children, the cyborg, has fallen victim of many such reproductions of sameness. The cyborg has been carried on and on, as the same displaced, through a web of research publications. Fortunately, the cyborg takes irony for granted. I believe that this is one of the commonly missed features of this illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism.

Furthermore, in the sentence following the one I paraphrased just before, Haraway reminds us that illegitimate offspring is often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. So hopes are still high that these displaced images of the same will some day start rioting against their ancestors, just as the original Harawayan Cyborg. At least, it reminds me of another teaching of Haraway (I don't remember the source right now) about awareness of categories that we take for granted. And here lies the danger of re-readings. It is very tempting to just adopt the set of taken-for-granted categories brought into attention around the cyborg: nature/culture, gender, organism/machine, human/animal, physical/non-physical, theory/practice... - but as the illegitimate offspring of Donna Haraway and those others whom I was educated into thinking with, I have this tendency of unfaithfulness to my origins. However, unfaithfulness never results in complete separation, my unfaithfulness towards Haraway is blasphemous (see first paragraph of the cyborg manifesto) rather than denying.

Thanks to my scholarly parents, of whom I can't even mention all, the categories that was taken for granted by them and theirs, are in fact contested and diffuse to me. I have learned that nature is such a messed up category that I can hardly find it in my heart to use it, even when it seems fit. The cyborg has been very active in reaching this goal, but as an effect it has itself achieved the status of one such category that is taken for granted. I guess that is why I find it of such importance to weave into the fibers of the cat's cradle the figures of Haraway, meaning also that the game of Harawayan Cat's Cradle will implode and leave a dense, imploded zone. The question then is, as Haraway stated in the citation above, what forms of life will survive and flourish from there.

As often before, I said out to do one thing and ended up doing something else. My intention with this entry was to present the main issues of A Game of Cat's Cradle, but it seemed like I got carried away with the troping of reading and re-reading and ended up with an implosion jamming together the cat's cradle with the cyborg and other tissues from Haraway and her technoscience studying colleagues. To confuse things further, as I was writing about the cyborg as a now taken-for-granted category, the term 'protean' kept popping up in my mind.

To explain the term, the WordNet database of Princeton University draws on a novel by Jack London - the Sea Wolf in which a shipwrecked man is picked up by a ship heading for Japan to hunt seal. Ironically, troping with 'protean' - this quality of being never the same, brought me back in touch with the idea of my previous post, of boarding The Vessel of Knowledge in order to allow for its construction. It did decide, before writing this entry, that I would end up suggesting the cat's cradle as one of the navigational technologies of The Vessel of Knowledge. I wanted to do so because of the metaphor's ability to direct thought. In ended up introducing this idea through a different routes as originally intended. An effect of that is that should I decide to install into The Vessel of Knowledge the game of cat's cradle, it won't be the one that originated in my thoughts. This game of cat's cradle didn't go solely through Haraway's essay; it troped off through the cyborg, the idea of unfaithfulness towards one's origins while at the same time insisting on community - the blasphemous move - and then some thoughts about taken-for-granted categories caused the implosion into a dense zone in which I encountered the Protean and followed it (through various Google technologies) into the story of Wolf Larsen and his protean eyes which were never twice the same.

Am I to install the cat's cradle as a navigational device in The Vessel of Knowledge, at least I will now know that this device - and presumably the entire vessel itself, will inherit the Protean qualities - as an attribute inherited from some other parent than the original Harawayan Cat's Cradle. I may be troping in the wilds, but it somehow makes sense that such a child object capable of inheriting behavior from more than one parent (and thus entered another category which has been disturbing me for quite some time, from the strand of object oriented programming and system design which is one of my almost invisible, but rather dear scholarly parents) will resist being merely the same, displaced.

I decided upon beginning this work day that my first task would be to write this entry, then to turn towards my Academic and Creative Writing paper. I started 13 hours ago, and only now am I ready to complete this first task. And that seems to be one of my recurring dilemmas - when I finally get something done and am ready to continue with what seems to be the main task, I am too exhausted to continue. I admit that I prefer brainstorming over producing ready made text. But deadline is Monday, and that sets the stage.

The Vessel of Knowledge

I am currently working on an idea of introducing my dissertation through The Vessel of Knowledge. The idea derives from a speech given by the vice dean of my faculty at the welcome meeting when I started my PhD-program. He used a metaphor for the research process we were about to begin as the construction of a ship which we had to board and let go already upon starting to build it.

I would like to attach this image to the idea of moving within and through a relentless artifactualism, which forbids any direct si(gh)tings of nature (Donna Haraway), as well as to the theory of The Dream Society (Rolf Jensen), in which he introduces his visions of the society following the information society and an economy (Google definition) based upon the marketing of stories and emotions.

I will follow the idea of The Vessel of Knowledge through the emotional markets of the dream society. I will use it as a technology capable of producing enough noise and friction to allow for an analysis of hidden actors within the material practices of stabilizing meanings and thus producing knowledge (see Haraway 2004, 335, 63, 77). At page 77 of The Haraway Reader, Donna Haraway introduces the idea of a travel machine functioning also as a map. Her choice falls on A. J. Greimas' semiotic square, picked for its ability to generate meanings very noisily. Likewise, The Vessel of Knowledge is my means of traveling through, while mapping, artifactualism to the emotional markets of Dream Society (Jensen 1999, 51).

Through its journey, The Vessel of Knowledge will collect materials used to elaborate the figure, as of now I have thought of using the figure to enter empirical fields enabling us to navigate back and forth between Information Society and Dream Society.

Chapter two of The Dream Society presents six emotional market profiles:

1. Adventures for Sale
2. The Market for Togetherness, Friendship, and Love
3. The Market for Care
4. The Who-Am-I Market
5. The Market for Peace of Mind
6. The Market for Convictions

I am only beginning to explore what my ensemble of empirical fields will consist of. The previously mentioned The Passion of The Christ (TM) Tear Bottle will be tested as an entrance into the Market for Peace of Mind. Likewise, I think of testing the coupling of people who sell stories about science (like Peter Lund Madsen) with The Market for Convictions, the prostitute Susanne with The Market for Togetherness, Friendship, and Love, the Web 2.0 phenomenon with The Who-Am-I Market, and I would like to introduce the study in the light of Clipper Odyssey and its journey into the Pacific Ocean and several trips into exotically staged islands. I still haven't ideas for The Market for Care, but I wonder if a private hospice would serve the purpose here.

I hope that these ideas will be useful for telling a story providing rich and varied insights about human existence, sociotechnical actornetworks, as well as situated studies of easily overseen privileged locations (Google Scholar suggestions on 'politics of location'). I guess that I now need only to learn the magic words allowing this, or something similar or better, to happen.