These excerpts from "Beyond the Cyborg" explore the complexities and continued relevance of Donna Haraway's work, particularly in relation to feminist theory, science and technology studies, and broader political philosophies. The authors argue for a "desedimentation" of the cyborg figure, pushing it beyond its initial interpretations to engage with current feminist and liberatory concerns. They highlight the problematic positioning of Haraway within academia as a "star" theorist, emphasizing the tension between institutional recognition and the messy, interdisciplinary genealogies of her work. A central theme is the interrogation of traditional dualisms, particularly nature/culture and sex/gender, and the authors demonstrate how Haraway, alongside other feminist scholars, offers alternative conceptualizations rooted in material-semiotic processes and multispecies relationality. The role of science fiction as both a source of inspiration and a method for critical engagement with technoscience and world-building is also explored, emphasizing its importance for imagining alternative futures and challenging dominant narratives. Finally, the authors engage with the political implications of Haraway's work, particularly her concept of "situated knowledges" and her challenge to universalizing epistemologies, arguing for a "multispecies body politic" grounded in the ethics of "response-ability" and recognizing the semiotic agency of nonhuman others. **Main Themes and Key Ideas:** **1. Beyond the Cyborg as Desedimentation:** - The book's title signifies not a rejection of the cyborg, but a call to move _beyond_ its common interpretations and re-engage with its potential for contemporary relevance. - The authors aim for a "**desedimentation**" of the cyborg figure, actively putting it to work in relation to current feminist and broader concerns, counteracting its potential to become a reified and institutionalized concept. - This process involves revisiting and re-reading the cyborg, offering "alternative scholarly architectures" to understand its ongoing significance. - **Quote:** "Our task is precisely not to check the benefits (or lack thereof) that result from this sedimentation, but instead to argue for and hopefully effect a desedimentation of this figure, putting it to “work” in ways that are more central to current feminist (and not only) concerns." **2. The "Beyond" of Feminist Concerns:** - The book explores the relevance of Haraway's work for "political philosophies and liberatory projects beyond those that are clearly identifiable as feminist." - This engagement with non-feminist contexts raises the problem of boundaries between feminist and non-feminist liberatory projects, particularly within academia, and challenges the potential for feminism to be marginalized or sidelined. - The authors question who defines these boundaries and what is gained or lost by operating within or outside them. - **Quote:** "One of our tasks is to outline ways in which Haraway’s recent work is important for political philosophies and liberatory projects beyond those that are clearly identifiable as feminist... This particular beyond... raises the problem of boundaries between feminist and nonfeminist liberatory projects, of their political belonging and functioning, especially in academia." **3. Haraway as a Thinker of "Beyonds" and "Elsewheres":** - Haraway is presented as a central figure for thinking "beyonds" and "elsewheres," concepts that motivate thought and action. - Her work is actively engaged with discourses like queer theory and science fiction, which are committed to imagining possibilities beyond existing realities of bodies, technologies, sexualities, and communities. - "Elsewhere" is presented as a technical term and an ethic in Haraway's work. - Crucially, this focus on the "elsewhere" is intertwined with a commitment to the "here and now," to material situation and historical contingency. - **Quote:** "She is arguably one of the central thinkers of the beyond of our times. What is the meaning of going beyond feminism if, in the Harawayan schema, feminism is itself the ultimate thinking of beyonds and elsewheres... What is the meaning of going beyond the cyborg if the latter is a figure of possibility and nonutopian, productive crisis?" **4. Situatedness and the Global:** - Haraway's concept of situatedness is not a simple notion of place or identity, but rather about the "multiple modes of embedding that are about both space and place." - Situatedness is epistemologically and metaphysically related to the "elsewhere," offering a counterpoint to simplistic notions of the local. - The cyborg's "global" is presented as distinct from the philosopher's "universal." The global is a "semiotic-material production" tied to specific forms of life and historical technoscience, allowing for the thinking of situatedness, unlike the universal. - Commitment to "other-worldliness" is seen as possible under conditions of "globalization-as-situatedness." - **Quote:** "It is important to understand that situatedness doesn’t necessarily mean place; so standpoint is perhaps the wrong metaphor... Whereas what I mean to emphasize is the situatedness of the situated. In other words it is a way to get at the multiple modes of embedding that are about both space and place." - **Quote:** "The cyborg’s “global” is not the philosopher’s “universal.” The latter offers no possibility of thinking situatedness, while the global is precisely space/place/time/situation." **5. Haraway's Problematic Position as a "Theorist":** - Haraway has become a prominent "name" in academia, despite her work existing at "problematic intersections of various theory/practice communities." - While she has achieved significant status as a contemporary theorist, particularly due to the uptake of the cyborg figure outside feminist theory (often divorced from its feminist intent), her influence is complicated. - Institutional markers of influence (monographs, citation data) do not fully capture the breadth of her impact, particularly in peer and pedagogical influence through widespread republication of her work. - The relative lack of monographs solely focused on Haraway, compared to other prominent feminist or male theorists, suggests a difficulty in "labeling Haraway's work and theory-making practices." - Haraway is characterized not as a "star" of critical genealogies but as a "deliberate infiltrator, guerrilla theorist, and troublemaker" within canonized stories. - **Quote:** "Haraway has, quite remarkably (and in many ways in direct contradiction to her own practices) become such a “name,” despite the fact that she has worked in problematic intersections of various theory/practice communities that would seem to have precluded such notice." - **Quote:** "She is precisely not the “star” of various critical genealogies, but a deliberate infiltrator, guerrilla theorist, and troublemaker within numerous canonized stories." **6. Challenging Traditional Genealogies and the "Malestream":** - Haraway's own perspective challenges the canonized versions of science studies history, which often foreground male figures and overlook the contributions of feminist science studies originating from different political and academic contexts. - She identifies primarily as a feminist, with a lineage rooted in movements like Science for the People and the Boston Women's Health Collective, a history often not recognized by the academic mainstream of science studies. - The authors advocate for acknowledging "much messier, complex patterns of citation, acknowledgment, and influence," deliberately hard to pin down to singular origins. - **Quote:** "As she explains, I have a kind of annoyed relationship with some of the canonized versions of the history of science studies which go like this: “well, there was this in Edinburgh, there was that in Paris, and whatever.” You know, in that narrative of science studies people like me and my buddies are always hard to incorporate. Because we are not part of that other story in that way of telling it, and they do not know our story." **7. Critiquing the "New Materialism" and Re-Engaging with Biology:** - The chapter on "Natures" examines how stories about nature ("naturecultures") are central to Haraway's work and how the cyborg figure aimed to reanimate feminist encounters with science and stake a claim in constructions of nature. - Haraway's work is read against the recent trend of a "new materialism" in feminist theory, questioning whether it genuinely breaks with past feminist engagements with the material and biological. - The authors, drawing on Haraway and others like Sara Ahmed, Vicki Kirby, and Myra Hird, express concern that some formulations of the new materialism fall back into old binaries (nature/culture, biology/culture) and "forget" the history of feminist science studies. - There is a perceived or real "schism" or "chilliness" between feminist work in the sciences and humanities. - The authors argue that simply rejecting the biological is inadequate and that a nuanced examination of "what feminisms and biologies we are talking about here" is needed. - They critique the "two cultures problem" and argue that feminist engagements with science are more complex than simply critiquing its "sins." - **Quote:** "Ahmed comments, in contrast to Haraway’s material-semiotic, certain formulations of the new materialism “seem[s] to return to old binaries—between nature/materiality/biology and culture in the very argument that ‘matter’ is what is missing from feminist work”." - **Quote:** "Whether perceived or real, this disjuncture colors the claims to feminist antibiologism that Ahmed finds worrying: “it remains inadequate (both theoretically and politically) for feminism simply to reject the biological”." **8. Navigating Realism and Relativism:** - Haraway's work is deeply engaged with the "science wars" and the danger of being labeled "antinatural" or denying "reality." - She explicitly states her position as "neither a naturalist, nor a social constructionist. Neither-nor." - Her concept of "naturecultures" and figures like the cyborg are means to "insist on the join between materiality and semiosis" and to "sidestep the debate between realism and relativism." - These epistemological concerns are also intensely ontological, involved in "contests for the world and how we—and others—get to live." - **Quote:** "I am neither a naturalist, nor a social constructionist. Neither-nor. This is not social constructionism, and it is not technoscientific, or biological determinism. It is not nature. It is not culture. It is truly about a serious historical effort to get elsewhere." - **Quote:** "These questions are pressing for Haraway because they are involved in contests for the world and how we—and others—get to live. That is, these are intensely ontological as well as epistemological concerns." **9. Deconstructing Dualisms: Sex/Gender and Human/Animal:** - The separation of nature and culture has consequences for other dualisms, particularly sex/gender and human/nonhuman. - Haraway and others challenge the sex/gender divide as a tool that depends on "terribly contaminated roots" and risks "misplaced concreteness." - They argue that "neither sex nor nature is the truth underlying gender and culture.... Nature and sex are as crafted as their dominant ‘other’." - Drawing on non-linear biology, some critics suggest that "sex" is not dichotomous and that the cultural focus on two sexes is "biologically speaking, arbitrary." - Destabilizing sex/gender disrupts narratives of production and reproduction and challenges hierarchical human relations with other natural subjects. - This ties into the human/nonhuman dualism, which is secured through concepts like "animal sociology" or "simian orientalism." - **Quote:** "Nature/culture and sex/gender are no loosely related pairs of terms; their specific form of relation is hierarchical appropriation … symbolically, nature and culture, as well as sex and gender, mutually (but not equally) construct each other." - **Quote:** "That is, “sex” does not ground the mutable discourses of gender; both are bound in an interimplicated history of relation." - **Quote:** "'sex' is not dichotomous. It makes as much sense, biologically speaking, to talk about zero sexes (we are much more similar than we are different) or a thousand tiny sexes.… That culture focuses on two sexes is, biologically speaking, arbitrary.”" **10. The Animal Political and Multispecies Relationality:** - Haraway's political philosophy depends on recognizing humans and other animals as "semiotic agents in the production of naturecultures." - Non-reproductive sexual play in animals is used to undermine the notion that animals are solely programmed by nature. - The concept of "queer animality" explodes the universalizing category of nature as homogeneous and predictable and opens up a new relationship between nature and the political. - The "animal political" is a contested site of reinterrogation and dissent, rooted in the understanding of companion species as "co-constitutive." - This contrasts with a notion of empathy that seeks to reduce difference or establish communities of "like minds." - **Quote:** "Haraway’s political philosophy depends on the claim that humans and dogs (and many other animals) are semiotic agents in the production of naturecultures." - **Quote:** "In the work of these theorists the animal understood as a sexual agent becomes the figure of radical possibility and openness, and it is here that talk of a multispecies body politic becomes audible." **11. Situated Knowledges and the Problem of Universalism:** - Haraway's "situated knowledges" are presented as an alternative to standpoint theory's focus on "stable grounds" of knowledge production. - Situated knowledges emphasize "real, particular locations with limited views, necessarily from somewhere." - Scientific communities are called to be "socially responsible" by speaking from their limited locations rather than claiming universality. - The authors critique the tendency in some feminist science studies narratives to argue for scientific accuracy based on "democracy-advancing values," warning against conflating political pragmatics and epistemic success and the potential to assimilate feminist thought into canonical traditions. - "Location is also partial in the sense of being for some worlds and not others," a "polluting criterion for strong objectivity." - **Quote:** "Haraway has stated that her relationship with feminist standpoint theory is troubled... Her project, in contrast, searches for “non-stable grounds” of knowledge production." - **Quote:** "Scientific communities become socially responsible when they realize this and self-consciously speak from their limited, structured locations rather than from the vantage point of universality." - **Quote:** "Location is also partial in the sense of being for some worlds and not others. There is no way around this polluting criterion for strong objectivity." **12. Dissensus and the Political Nature of Science:** - The authors, drawing on Lyotard's concept of paralogy and dissensus, argue that feminist science studies emphasizes dissensus as an alternative to epistemological models relying on consensus. - They contend that feminist scientists, by arguing for the irreducibility of differences in stakes, should embrace the idea that feminist and non-feminist scientists have different interests. - Critique, in this view, is a "contested zone" where groups with different stakes interact and conflict. - This perspective challenges the idea of science as politically neutral and argues that making science political can reduce its independent authority in the political arena. - **Quote:** "If feminist scientists argue for the irreducibility of the differences between stakes, then they ought to embrace the idea that feminist and non-feminist scientists have different stakes and defend different interests." - **Quote:** "If we insist on the irreducibility of the normative, on its essential role in all scientific discourse, then we must take seriously Haraway’s vision of scientific knowledge production as a contested zone in which groups with different stakes and sometimes mutually exclusive interests interact and occasionally conflict." **13. Embodied Knowledge and Vision as Metaphor:** - Drawing on Lyotard's ideas about thought as analogous to vision and arising from a "bottomless desire" and vulnerability, the authors connect this to Haraway's emphasis on embodied knowledge. - Haraway reworks the metaphor of vision in "Situated Knowledges," moving away from the "god-trick of seeing everywhere from nowhere" towards a vision that is "particular and embodiment of all vision." - This embodied vision is what keeps knowledge situated, partial, and limited, and thus "responsible." - Owning one's location is not about identity but the capacity to see from "heterogeneous multiplicities" and "inappropriate/d otherness." - **Quote:** "In “Situated Knowledges,” Haraway’s quest to “construct a usable, but not an innocent, doctrine of objectivity”... reworks the metaphor of vision to this end—one that insists “on the particularity and embodiment of all vision”..." - **Quote:** "To enjoy objectivity is thus to realize precisely that one is never impartial, to own the particular situation of one’s knowledge and thus to take responsibility for this knowledge..." **14. Multispecies Communities and the Ethical Paradox:** - The possibility of multispecies communities raises an ethical paradox: how to recognize irreducible difference while engaging empathetically. - The authors, referencing Lorraine Daston, suggest formulating questions about understanding other minds not as "what is it like to be an x?" but in a way that recognizes alterity. - Haraway's notion of "seeing from" demands this approach, making radical difference a necessary condition for interspecies engagement. - The lack of human ability to "talk to the animals" in a conventional sense highlights the necessity of empathetic engagement. - **Quote:** "It is paradoxical that empathy and sympathy, the glue of communities, should be invoked to contract communities to like minds...: to extend a neighborly gesture of recognition across centuries or species is to be suspected of overlooking the otherness of other subjectivities." - **Quote:** "Recognizing otherness as radical and irreducible difference means not that we must give up on what Haraway calls “multispecies semiotic progress.” On the contrary, it becomes a necessary condition for interspecies engagement." **15. Nonhuman Knowers and Relational Personhood:** - The authors explore the idea of nonhuman "knowers" as a natural extension of standpoint theory's problematic of reconciling epistemology with differences among knowing subjects. - They argue that nonhuman knowers are already present in "naturecultures" and that epistemology needs to catch up to cultural practices that recognize animal knowledge. - Drawing on Juan Carlos Gómez's work on apes, they discuss the idea of personhood as "irreducibly relational" and pragmatic, learned from the ways animals inhabit the world intersubjectively ("mutual-awareness"). - Haraway's observation that dogs are better at "alertness to others-in-relation" than humans suggests animal intersubjectivity as a model for relating. - The question of animal agency in the production of meaning is central to exploring the ethical status of nonhumans and the possibility of coexistence. - **Quote:** "We are not one and being depends on getting on together.… Dogs’ survival in species and individual time regularly depends on their reading humans well. Would that we were as sure that most humans respond at better than chance levels to what dogs tell them." - **Quote:** "In other words, the paradigm shift from reading animals as objects of knowledge to reading them as knowers has already taken place in practice, and it is theory that is trying to catch up to culture." **16. Science Fiction as Method and Inspiration:** - Science fiction (SF), particularly feminist SF, is presented as an integral thread in Haraway's methods and meaning-making. - Feminist SF provides a source of "productive monsters, metaphors, and tropes" and offers an "elsewhere" from which to imagine alternative naturecultures and challenge dominant narratives about science, species, race, class, and sex. - Haraway draws on feminist SF authors like Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, and others who challenged traditional SF narratives and social discourses. - SF invites a particular kind of "re/reading science-fictionally," a "generous and suspicious" approach that is sensitive to the construction of possible worlds and challenges fixed words and concepts. - Haraway's "diffraction" method is compared to reading SF, where juxtaposing different frameworks creates new meanings. - The authors argue that Haraway's ideal reader is an SF reader. - Rewriting and revisioning are key practices learned from SF, aiming not to make stories "right" but to make them "move differently" and unsettle "closed logics." - **Quote:** "SF is not just a source of productive monsters, metaphors, and tropes, but an integral thread in Haraway’s methods and meaning making." - **Quote:** "Because SF makes identification with a principal character, comfort within the patently constructed world, or a relaxed attitude toward language, especially risky reading strategies, the reader is likely to be more generous and more suspicious—both generous and suspicious, exactly the receptive posture I seek in political semiosis generally." - **Quote:** "The point of the differential/oppositional rewriting is not to make the story come out ‘right’ … The point is to rearticulate the figure of Lisa Foo to unsettle the closed logics of a deadly racist misogyny." **17. Challenging the Heroic Narrative and Embracing Carrier Bags:** - Drawing on Ursula K. Le Guin's "carrier bag theory of fiction," Haraway and the authors contrast the "heroic" or "sharp" story of the lone, conquering male protagonist with narratives that are "capacious bags for collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living." - The heroic story is seen as one of domination and overcoming, often ignoring the contributions of "lowly things" and other actors. - Carrier bag narratives are "richer, quirkier, fuller, unfitting, ongoing stories" that have room for conflict but are not solely focused on the hero. - This concept applies to both fiction and to the understanding of "naturalcultural history." - **Quote:** "Her theories, her stories, are capacious bags for collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living." - **Quote:** "How did a sling, a pot, a bottle suddenly get in the story? How do such lowly things keep the story going? Or, maybe even worse for the hero, how do those concave, hollowed out things, those holes in Being from the get-go, generate richer, quirkier, fuller, unfitting, ongoing stories..." **18. The Future as the Issue and Sowing Worlds:** - The point of imagining "elsewheres" through SF and other means is a commitment to the notion that "the future is the issue." - Borrowing from Haraway's later work and Le Guin, the authors introduce the idea of "sowing worlds" as a way to reseed our souls and home worlds for flourishing on a vulnerable planet. - This requires "multispecies alliance" and working "across the killing divisions of nature, culture, and technology and of organism, language, and machine." - "Sowing worlds" is about opening up stories of companion species to their "relentless diversity and urgent trouble." - The concept of "sympoesis" (becoming with) displaces "autopoesis" (self-forming) as a model for ongoingness and inheriting the "damages and achievements of colonial and postcolonial naturalcultural histories." - Fantasy is crucial for imagining ourselves and others "otherwise" and challenges the contingent limits of "reality." - **Quote:** "For, finally, the point of imagining these elsewheres is a commitment to the notion that—in theory as in our imagination—“the future is the issue”." - **Quote:** "We need not just reseeding but also reinoculating with all the fermenting, fomenting, and nutrient-fixing associates seeds need to thrive. Recuperation is still possible, but only in multispecies alliance, across the killing divisions of nature, culture, and technology and of organism, language, and machine." **19. Response and Regard in Multispecies Encounters:** - Drawing on Levinas and Derrida, the authors explore the ethical implications of the animal gaze and the "absolute alterity of the neighbor." - Haraway's focus on "concrete, embodied, responsible encounters with animal others," like the training relationship, creates a space where the "actual human is bare" and the "actual animal has been stripped of its (anthropogenic) animality." - This "open" space is a "projection into an animality we have not yet begun to think," resisting the "anthropological machine" that creates a division between human and animal. - Animal rights positions, when based solely on anthropomorphic projections, participate in the logic of the anthropological machine. - The concept of "animal political" as a contested site of reinterrogation and dissent is preferred over notions of empathy that seek consensus. - "Regard" ("to hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem") becomes pressing in situations of dissensus. - **Quote:** "For Haraway, concrete, embodied, responsible encounters with animal others, of which her favorite example is the training relationship, create precisely such a space." - **Quote:** "The open is not a “return” to our animal “natures,” but a projection into an animality we have not yet begun to think, nonanthropogenic and irreducibly plural animalities, ways of being (which for Haraway is always being-with) that resist the anthropological machine." **20. Challenging Anthropocentric Semiotic Agency:** - The problematic of "semiotic agency" is central to ethics after humanism. - The authors question whether the focus on nonhuman semiosis still harbors humanist roots, potentially overlooking forms of life and subjectivity not centered on language. - Drawing on Butler, they acknowledge the influence of social norms on intelligibility but argue that the "deproduction of the human" can still be rooted in humanism. - Haraway challenges the question "can animals speak?" as the "wrong question." - The "right question" is "what diverse kinds of semiosis are at work between species and what is their ethical significance?" - They align Haraway with Derrida in challenging the idea of language as a homogeneous field and a straightforward notion of semiotic agency. - Latour's work is cited for its emphasis on giving voice to nonhuman actors and positioning them actively in politics. - **Quote:** "From Haraway’s perspective... the ancient and theoretically over-saturated question can animals speak? appears as a curious anachronism. It is, deeply, the wrong question." - **Quote:** "The right question would be something like what diverse kinds of semiosis are at work between species and what is their ethical significance?" - **Quote:** "To limit the [political] discussion to humans, their interests, their subjectivities, and their rights, will appear as strange a few years from now as having denied the right to vote of slaves, poor people, or women." **21. Contact Zones and Unpredictable Encounters:** - When species meet, they enter "contact zones," communicative spaces where species can "entangle each other." - Science fiction is a source of understanding these contact zones and the unexpectedness of interspecies encounters. - Communication in contact zones is "inherently about desire" and cannot happen without "interference," leaving participants changed. - The outcome of these encounters is not predetermined, and "the rules of conduct do not transcend the participants or the event of their meeting." - Contact zones render participants "necessarily not entirely 'themselves'." - An ethics of companionship is grounded not in difference or sameness, but in "the impossibility of deciding between difference and sameness prior to the event of material, particular contact." - **Quote:** "When species have encounters, they never merely meet, but enter contact zones, communicative spaces where species can “entangle each other”." - **Quote:** "It would be a mistake to assume much about species in advance of encounter." - **Quote:** "Contact zones render their participants not entirely human, in fact, necessarily not entirely “themselves.”" **Conclusion:** The excerpts from "Beyond the Cyborg" present a compelling argument for a critical and creative engagement with Donna Haraway's work, moving beyond simplistic interpretations of the cyborg and embracing the complexities of her interdisciplinary thought. The authors demonstrate how Haraway's concepts challenge fundamental dualisms, offer alternative epistemologies rooted in situatedness and dissensus, and provide frameworks for imagining and enacting multispecies relationality and political possibilities in a technoscientific world. The emphasis on science fiction as a critical tool and a source of inspiration underscores the importance of narrative and imagination in navigating the urgent trouble of our present and sowing worlds for a more survivable future. The briefing highlights the authors' commitment to doing theory _with_ Haraway, engaging with her ideas in a way that is "messier, complex," and resists easy categorization, much like Haraway's own approach.