Situated Knowledges - Donna Haraway

"I would like to proceed by placing metaphorical reliance on a much maligned sensory system in feminist discourse: vision. Vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions. 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 market body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the market bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. (...) 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 interest of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of disembodiment. The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit; the eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, color enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTs (...). Vision in this technological feats becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. (...) But of course that view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick. (...) So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment, and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsability. The moral is simple: only partial perspective promise objective vision".

Situated Knowledges (1988) - Donna Haraway  

Image  - Pamela Moore Dionne (Tattoo)