Situated+Knowledges+(Hubbell)


 * Situated Knowledges**

Situated knowledges are a (feminist) response to scientific objectivity similar to Standpoint Theory. The theory of situated knowledges posits that knowledge be positioned in communities (not individuals) and be limited while maintaining a rational empiricism. Situated knowledges are subjective empirical knowledges than can be drawn together into a “collective subject position” that can present a partial empirical view.
 * Overview**

Haraway’s situated knowledges negotiate a path between two dichotomous straw men.
 * Explication**

One of these straw men is social construction and the relativism that it entails. Relativism is then placed into the field of rhetoric in which Haraway claims knowledge exists in an agonistic power field and semiotics undermines scientific truth: “In any case, social constructionists might maintain that the ideological doctrine of scientific method and all the philosophical verbiage about epistemology were cooked up to distract our attention from getting to know the world //effectively// by practicing the sciences. From this point of view, science-the real game in town is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.” (p. 577) “All knowledge is a condensed node in an agonistic power field. The strong program in the sociology of knowledge joins with the lovely and nasty tools of semiology and deconstruction to insist on the rhetorical nature of truth, including scientific truth.” (p. 577).

The “agonistic power field” of rhetoric arrives ultimately at a Burkean disease of cooperation, i.e., war (Burke, 1969b, p. 22). Specifically, this war is the science war, which becomes one of the problems that Haraway’s situated knowledges aims to correct: “The imagery of force fields, of moves in a fully textualized and coded world, which is the working metaphor in many arguments about socially negotiated reality for the postmodern subject, is, just for starters, an imagery of high-tech military fields, of automated academic battlefields, where blips of light called players disintegrate (what a metaphor!) each other in order to stay in the knowledge and power game. Technoscience and science fiction collapse into the sun of their radiant (ir)reality-war.” (p. 577)

Situated knowledges uses the metaphor of vision to logically build an argument for the situatedness from which knowledge is accrued or discovered. Vision becomes a technological mediation between empirical objectivism and knowledge. In order to acknowledge a feminist subjectivity in objective scientific knowledge, situatedness through the limitations of vision’s technological mediation allows an objective understanding of the world to exist; however, this objectivity is removed from knowledge by the mediation, making for a partial knowledge of the real world: “I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the unmarked positions of Man and White, one of the many nasty tones of the word "objectivity" to feminist ears in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies, that is, here, in the belly of the monster, in the United States in the late 1980s. I would like a doctrine of embodied objectivity that accommodates paradoxical and critical feminist science projects: Feminist objectivity means quite simply //situated knowledges//…The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity-honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy-to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of disembodiment. The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit…Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all seems not just mythically about the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters.” (p. 581)

The partial knowledge is limited but not limiting. In this sense, it defies transcendence upward to remain a transcendence downward (Burke, 1984, p. 337-8): “Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object.” (p. 583)

Situated knowledges follow Popper’s falsifiability principle to determine ethical scientific knowledge claims. Falsifiability works as a double edged sword of ethics for Haraway, who uses it against science as objective knowledge and against the feminist, subjective straw man science: “Building on that suspicion, this essay is an argument for situated and embodied knowledges and an argument against various forms of unlocatable, and so irresponsible, knowledge claims. Irresponsible means unable to be called into account. There is a premium on establishing the capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths. But here there also lies a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions.” (p. 583-4)

Haraway’s situated knowledges speak to Burke’s dramatistic pentad although she neither cites nor makes direct or indirect references to Burke. The dramatistic pentad is a method for discovering a philosophical bias that limits, or positions, an individual’s, collective’s, or text’s perspective. Burke identifies the five points on the pentad with five general schools of thought in philosophy although many individual works within these schools of thought break out of the identifications generally applied to them. These five points and their corresponding schools are scene (e.g., materialism), agent (e.g., idealism), agency (e.g., pragmatism), purpose (e.g., mysticism), and act (e.g., realism). Haraway’s claim that situated knowledges “require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource” recalls Burke’s pentad. It is a call for science to be seen realistically (i.e., in a political and ethical environment, or a rhetorical environment should a non-slanderous understanding of rhetoric be applied to Haraway’s article) and idealistically (i.e., mentally situated). This is in opposition to science’s traditional preference for the scene (materialism). “Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship of ‘objective’ knowledge.” (p. 592)
 * Discussion**

The dramatistic pentad, a pentad forged in Rhetoric to battle the evils of “relativism” and “totalization,” to bring them together and in the critical light bind them, sets Haraway in the realm of vicious relativism. From a dramatistic point of view, situated knowledge is not a correction to objective knowledge and totalization—it is a competitive response to objective knowledge and totalization. Situated knowledges change the focus from one point of the pentad to focus on a ration between two other points of the pentad, and, as this happens, situated knowledges lose the ability to cooperate with objective science. Situated knowledge is a dialectical opponent to objective science—it recreates the agonism that Haraway loathes in rhetorical field of speech acts and cannot have a “shared conversation in epistemology.” Bizarrely then, situated knowledges arrive at a new perspective by making a relativistic move around the Burkean pentad. “But the alternative to relativism is not totalization and single vision, which is always finally the unmarked category whose power depends on systematic narrowing and obscuring. The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology. Relativism is a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally. The ‘equality’ of positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical inquiry. Relativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalization in the ideologies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective; both make it impossible to see well. Relativism and totalization are both ‘god tricks’ promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully, common myths in rhetorics surrounding Science.” (p. 584) (Also, can the statement, “the alternative to relativism is not totalization,” logically function while “relativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalization”?)

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. //Feminist Studies 14//(3): pp. 575-599. Burke, K. (1969a). //A Grammar of Motives//. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Burke, K. (1969b). //A Rhetoric of Motives//. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Burke, K. (1984). //Attitudes Toward History//. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
 * References**

Butler, J. (1993). //Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”//. New York, NY: Routledge. [An important text in feminist theory, tangentially related to Haraway’s discussion] Harding, Sandra. (2004). A socially relevant philosophy of science? Resources from standpoint theory’s controversiality. //Hypatia 19//(1): pp. 25-47. [An article briefly discussing standpoint theory.] McCloskey, D. (1998). How to do a rhetorical analysis of economics, and why. pp. 3 – 19. //The Rhetoric of Economics.// Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. [A feminist reading of economics undermining the perception of economics as a hard social science; a good companion reading to Haraway’s response to the sciences] Fahnestock, J. (1999). //Rhetorical Figures in Science//. New York, NY: Oxford UP. [The primary book in the subdiscipline of the rhetoric of science. Listed here in the event that anyone actually believes Haraway gives an appropriate treatment of the word and discipline “rhetoric” in her article]
 * Further Reading**

Standpoint Theory (Weiss) Standpoint Theory Situated Knowledges (Schaffer) Social Constructionism (Banks) Social Constructionism (Boisvert) GIS and Truth (Jalbert)
 * See Also:**