Steven Meyer

Washington University

In Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium, Donna Haraway writes that, "[f]ollowing an ethical and methodological principle for science studies" which she "adopted many years ago," she "critically analyze[s], or 'deconstruct[s],' only that which I love and only that in which I am deeply implicated." Consequently, in "approach[ing] the universal through a particular discourse, the science of biology," Haraway commits herself to what she calls "mucking about in the biological," with biology understood as a Janus-faced category combining "the historically specific, congealed embodiments in the world" and "the technoscientific discourse [that] posit[s] such bodies." An uncompromising insistence on the equal reality of each of these facets, as well as on the depths and multiplicity of their interrelations, distinguishes Haraway's critical practice. "[C]ells, organisms, and genes," for instance, are neither "'discovered' in a vulgar realist sense" nor are they "made up." Instead, such "[t]echnoscientific bodies . . . are the nodes that congeal from interactions where all the actors are not human." What congeals, then, are interactions, "ways of interacting," not smaller bodies forming larger ones. Relationality, for Haraway, is "the one fundamental thing about the world," neither "discovered" nor a subjective and, as it were, relativist construction. This makes her an adherent of the perspective which, a hundred years ago, William James dubbed radical empiricism, the view that "any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as 'real' as anything else." James distinguished this view both from "ordinary empiricism" (which, as he put it, "has always shown a tendency to do away with the connections of things . . . in spite of the fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations present themselves as being fully coordinate parts of experience") and from the perspective traditionally opposed to empiricism, the rationalism of such figures as Berkeley and Kant and their successors. In "do[ing] full justice" to conjunctive relations, as James counseled, Haraway avoids "treating [such relations] as rationalism always tends to treat them," that is, "as being true in some supernal way, as if the unity of things [the product of conjunctive relations] and their variety [due to disjunctive relations] belonged to different orders of truth and vitality altogether." To assert that "the one fundamental thing about the world is relationality," as Haraway does, is, by implication, to deny that the world is really two things (unity and variety) or that it is one real and one illusory thing (objectivity and subjectivity).

Haraway may not directly allude to James, yet she aligns herself with the British philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, probably the leading twentieth-century theorist of radical empiricism and, as she acknowledges in Modest_Witness, central to her "understanding of biology at least since reading him with the ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson in the 1960s in graduate school at Yale." Indeed, her first book, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (1976), is riddled with references to Whitehead, and one of the three figures she focuses on in that work, the biochemist and historian of science Joseph Needham, even contributed "a biologist's view" to a 1941 symposium on Whitehead's "philosophy of organism." In Modest_Witness, Haraway prominently invokes Whitehead, observing for instance that "his notion of objectifications" is "very close" to her own. In Whitehead's terms, the "relatedness" of a particular "nexus" or "set of actual entities" is "constituted by their prehensions [that is, their cognitive and noncognitive apprehensions] of each other, or–what is the same thing conversely expressed– . . . by their objectifications in each other," the manner in which "the potentiality of one actual entity is realized in another." If, as Haraway adds, "such articulations, such reachings into each other in the tissues of the world, constituted the most basic processes for Whitehead," they do so for her as well.

Neither Whitehead nor James had much to say about the articulations of discourse, however; and Haraway differentiates herself from her radical empiricist precursors chiefly in applying their perspective to the analysis of discursive practices, and in particular those of biotechnology. At the same time, she demonstrates the central role which the figurations of biology have played all along in the discourse of radical empiricism, no less in James's and Whitehead's investigations than in her own, with their shared emphasis on all manner of "reachings into each other in the tissues of the world." To assert, with Haraway, that biology "is a discourse with a contingent history" does not imply that "its accounts are matters of 'opinion' or merely 'stories'"; "[i]t does mean that the material-semiotic tissues are inextricably intermeshed." This is due to the fact that "discourses are not just 'words'; they are material-semiotic practices through which objects of attention and knowing subjects are both constituted." Or, as James put it in 1904: Since "a given undivided portion of experience" has "no such inner duplicity" as that between content and consciousness, between "thing known" and "state of mind," it stands to reason that such divisions result from "the addition, to a concrete piece of [experience], of other sets of experience"–the material-semiotic practices, in other words, through which content and consciousness come to be distinguished. What difference does it make, then, for Haraway to speak of the relevant practices as "material-semiotic," and constitutive of "discourses," where James invokes the "addition" of "sets of experience," or, in an alternative formulation, the interaction of a single "piece" of experience with various "context[s] of associates"?

For Haraway, "lived experience" is at once semiotic and material. It is only due to "the relentless material-semiotic articulations of biological [including biotechnological] reality" that any "portion of experience" is "sensible" in both senses of the term: meaningful and perceptible by some mechanism of sensation. James may have posited "undivided" pieces of experience, but Haraway suggests that this way of putting things–as if a "piece" or "portion" of experience were something singular, something existing "in itself"–merely serves to reinforce the very literalization of experience's "constitutive tropic nature" which, as a radical empiricist, James was calling into question. In this respect, if only in this respect, he reinforces the "fetishism," as Haraway terms it, of the "thing-in-itself." Here James's figurations betray him, precisely because of their literalizing effects. In itself, he is saying, an experience signifies nothing; it just is what it is and only becomes significant to someone, signifying something, when juxtaposed with another experience. By contrast, Haraway argues that there is no such thing as an experience without significance, because no experience is experienced in itself. Any portion of experience is just that, a portion of experience, not something which "stand[s] for and by itself, outside of the articulations that make [it] sensible." In speaking of "material-semiotic practices" rather than the addition or contextualization of pieces of experience, Haraway sidesteps the dual temptation that dogged James's formulation of radical empiricism: on the one hand, the reification of experience; on the other, the substitution of sedimented words for ever-tropic, ever-lively discourse. "In my story," she comments, "whole means inside articulations, never reducing to a thing-in-itself." At bottom, this was James's story too, which was never actually about pieces of experience as such but about the practices that make it possible to conceive of experience as occurring in the form of discrete pieces as well as in terms of subjects and objects.

That James may on occasion have proven susceptible to literalization is hardly surprising. As Haraway herself acknowledges in Modest_Witness, steady alertness to what Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" entails hard work: "In its most basic sense," she writes, "this book is my exercise regime and self-help manual for how not to be literal minded," how to avoid mistaking "objectifications" for objects. In extending the range of articulation from bare statement to the exuberantly tropic "work processes," the "stuttering and swerving," that make knowledge claims sensible, Haraway effectively argues that discursive practices serve as "technologies of observation" no less than do any of the other "inscription devices to which people have materially delegated observation," such as "the gaggle of computerized instruments without which all the workers in [a molecular biology] lab might as well take their DNA to the beach."

Hence the fact that Haraway's book is about, as she puts it, "the figurations, tools, tropes, and articulations of technoscience" need not imply that she is determined to reduce technoscience to discourse in the limited, that is to say, literal sense of the term. Literalization may be the default mode of much scientific, as well as extrascientific, culture, yet it is precisely Haraway's aim as a "mutated modest witness" to demonstrate that such self-denying figurations are neither inevitable nor, in the end, lively enough to account for the truly mindboggling achievements of twentieth-century technoscience. Take OncoMouse™, for example. As "a tool-weapon for 'stalking cancer'" (in the words of a Du Pont advertisement), this "bioengineered mouse" bears witness to "the normal state of the entities in technoscientific cultures, including ourselves," functioning "simultaneously [as] a metaphor, a technology, and a beast." What makes Haraway's account radical, and radical empiricist, is her insistence that none of these aspects can adequately be understood without reference to the other two, nor can any aspect be reduced to another. In fact, when at one point she acknowledges that she doesn't find "using mice as research organisms morally impossible" despite their status as "sentient beings who have all the biological equipment, from neuronal organization to hormones, that suggest rodent feelings and mousy cognition," she is careful to add, in the same sentence, that "we must take noninnocent responsibility for using living beings in these ways and not to talk, write, and act as if OncoMouse™, or other kinds of laboratory animals, were simply test systems, tools, means to brainier mammals' ends, and commodities." This is not reflexive political correctness; instead Haraway is criticizing the parallel forms of literalization involved in reducing sentient beings alternately to subjects and to objects.

OncoMouse™ is a "technoscientific body," a node–to repeat the definition already cited–"that congeal[s] from interactions where all the actors are not human." As such, Haraway argues, it belongs to the same family as "objects like the fetus, chip/computer, gene, race, ecosystem, brain, database, and bomb," all of which are "stem cells of [that larger] technoscientific body," the "amodern" world of contemporary technoscience, comprising the "feroci[ous] . . . transformations lived in daily life throughout the world." At the outset of the third, and longest, section of Modest_Witness, titled "Pragmatics: Technoscience and Hypertext," Haraway observes that hypertext (understood in its "most literal and modest" sense, as "a computer-mediated indexing apparatus that allows one to craft and follow many bushes of connections among the variables internal to a category") is "a useful metaphor for the reading and writing practices" that constitute the "meaning-making processes of technoscientific world-building." Yet, even as "the metaphor of hypertext insists on making connections as practice, the trope does not suggest which connections make sense for which purposes and which patches we might want to follow or avoid." Consequently, "in order to sketch an effective pragmatics," a "physiology of meaning-making" capable of operating in "the New World Order" in which "informatics hybridizes with biologics," she must "splice" her "hypertext trope to a figure derived from biology," to wit, totipotent stem cells. These are the "cells in an organism that retain the capacity to differentiate into any kind of cell," hence to "regenerate the whole array of cell types possible for that life form." Such "unfixed, undetermined, multitalented" cells "are the nodes in which the potential of entire worlds is concentrated"–in addition to being integral, as Haraway neglects to remark, to the production of transgenic mice.

Even in a work as densely textured as Modest_Witness Haraway cannot trace all "the articulations among, and within" the stem cells she lists, "much less" those of "the larger set that would be needed," as she puts it, "for the excessive acount of technoscience that I crave." Nevertheless, in "try[ing] to work out at least some of the knots that constitute genes, databases, chips/computers, seeds, cyborgs, races, and fetuses," certainly no mean accomplishment, she also suggests the form that a synthesis of science studies across the disciplines must take if it is not, in the name of comprehensiveness, to squeeze out anything that doesn’t conform to it. Like her own "excessive account," such an interdisciplinary synthesis would have to be figured along the lines of the model she works with in Modest_Witness, of hypertext and stem cells (or their equivalents) spliced together.

For Haraway, a substantial part of the usefulness of hypertext as a "metaphor for the reading and writing practices" she investigates derives from its patent inadequacies in accounting for "the physiological systems, the operating mechanisms," which comprise "the pragmatics of meaning-making." "Physically hypersensitive," as she described herself recently, to "the historically specific, materially/semiotically dense practices that constitute science-made, as well as science-in-the-making," she "adopt[s] the . . . metaphor to put pressure on the sore spots in my soul that [it] inflames," most obviously with respect to its "limitations . . . for figuring social [and one might add, any] action." Michael Joyce, the pioneering hypertext novelist and theorist, expresses a similar sense in his recent collection on "hypertext pedagogy and poetics," Of Two Minds, only with the significant difference that the ambivalence registered in his title is misleading, since he doesn't adopt his physiological metaphors, such as "proprioceptive soundings" and "the interstitial murmurs of texture and [evolving] contour," in order to put pressure on the sore spots in his soul but rather to ease the pressure. As a proselytizer, even prophet, of hypertextuality, he cannot afford to be too critical of the medium; yet he knows its limitations better–that is to say, more intimately–than anyone. There is genuine ambivalence here ("hypertension," to use Paul Edwards term), only it is a lot deeper than Haraway's, with the consequence that his use of the mixed hypertextual/physiological metaphor is considerably less lively and persuasive. This may really be no more than a way of stating the obvious: After all, he is talking literally, rather than figuratively, about hypertext as well as about the physiological operations of his body. If hypertext proves useful for Haraway due to its patent inadequacies, then perhaps one can say the same of Joyce's literalizations. Certainly, he is not wrong in seeking to connect hypertext and physiology. The problem is that instead of connecting them, or more exactly, tracing the tropic articulations "among, and within," these nodes, as Haraway does, he ends up fetishizing them.

This difference between Haraway's radical empiricism and Joyce's practice of misplaced concreteness may be summed up by means of a sort of trianguation, that is, by comparing them with a figure to whom they each compare themselves, Gertrude Stein. More exactly, I'll be contrasting Joyce with Stein, equating Haraway and Stein, and therefore implicitly contrasting Joyce with Haraway. In her influential essay, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Haraway remarks on the "residual disciplinary chauvinism" she occasionally displays as due in part to having spent "too much time . . . with a microscope in early adulthood in a kind of disciplinary pre-oedipal and modernist poetic moment when cells seemed to be cells and organisms, organisms." "Pace, Gertrude Stein," she adds. I take it that Haraway is identifying with Stein here, on the basis of the years Stein also spent "with a microscope in early adulthood," mapping the neuroanatomy of the brain stem in the first decade that the cell theory was definitively applied to the nervous system. Of course, Stein woke from the modernist sleep long before Haraway fell into it, when, starting roughly with Tender Buttons in 1912, she began to apply what James called the "generalized conclusion" of radical empiricism, namely, that "the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves part of experience," to the activity at hand, writing. As a result she developed a more radical empiricism than James was able to, owing to her greater concentration on her compositional practices. This is not the same thing as Haraway's concentration on discursive practices, but they are certainly related; and when Haraway writes, in a rejoinder to the Sokal exposé in Social Text, that she is "in love with words themselves, as thick, living, physical objects that do unexpected things, . . . trip[ping] us, mak[ing] us swerve, turn[ing] us around," she is articulating Stein’s own sense of "lively words." Conversely, in moving from neuroanatomical investigations to studies of verbal interinanimation, Stein no more denied the reality of neurons than Haraway does, as the title of Tender Buttons amply demonstrates. Only, as Haraway phrased the matter in another context, Stein sought to "tear down the Berlin Wall between the world of objects and the world of subjects," half a century or so before the Berlin Wall went up.

In Part III of Of Two Minds, titled "Contours: Hypertext Poetics," Joyce contrasts "the medium of the ideogram" as it was handled by Ezra Pound and James Joyce (a medium in which "[h]idden meanings avail themselves to whomsoever is clever at peeling away surface from surface") with Stein's "method of mingling, the dance of history in which hidden meanings of the self veil themselves as tender buttons of sign and desire." "Collage," he adds, describing what he takes to be Stein's method of composition, "means on the whole as our eyes move over it but what makes its meaning in particular is not available." Stein has in fact been read, and read persuasively, in both manners, as writing in code and holistically; but neither manner does justice to her actual practice. Her dissociative writing renders conventional reading practices self-evidently inadequate to the task at hand, for instead of reductively decoding the writing, word for word or phrase for phrase, the reader is obliged to reproduce the recursive act of reading which was part and parcel of the original process of writing. In this manner, the reader acquires a sense of a composition as (to use Stein's own terms) an "object," with "weight and volume," thereby experiencing it as it has already been experienced by the writer.

I'll close with two examples, or perhaps more exactly, allegories of the reading practices, "hybridiz[ing] informatics . . . with biologics," which Stein demands. In early 1922, Sherwood Anderson sent her an introduction he had written for her collection Geography and Plays. Not only did he seem genuinely to grasp the way she "work[ed] with words," but for the first time in her career a major writer had come forth who was willing to sing her praises in public. For this reason she was quite ready to put up with the fact that his remarks inevitably would serve as a misleading example for the reader, since Anderson's good sense about her writing was flatly contradicted by the way he said it, marshalling his words to get the point across. In a superb passage at the end of the same letter in which she acknowledged to Anderson that the introduction was "just what it should be," Stein demonstrated the very different attention her work actually required. She did so, however, not by telling him but by showing him, thereby leaving him free to make the connection or not. In his last letter she had come across some words that were quite as opaque as any of hers. "I am sending this to your permanent address," she wrote, "which is very nearly permanently illisible as the French say with this kind of an address [that is, illegible]. . . I did a solid concentration and the light came, I hope it came rightly." Anderson's hastily scribbled address offered Stein a perfect example of what she was after in her writing. The difference between his scribbled address ("Permanent address/ Critchfield & Company/ Brooks Bldg./ Chicago") and her own scrambled writing was, of course, that the effect of opacity was wholly intentional on her part, whereas Anderson would have wanted nothing less than to have the address reach her as garbled nonsense. He sent it to facilitate communication between them; what delighted Stein was that, as written, it made communication all but impossible. Yet not entirely impossible–the "meaning in particular" is certainly available if one "concentrat[es] solid[ly]" enough.

The same spring that Stein made this remark to Anderson, she also sat for Jo Davidson's sculpture of her, a cast of which now stands, if that's the right word, outside the New York Public Library. While he sculpted her, she composed a portrait of him, meditating on the sculptor's own meditative activity as well as on her own seated activity. The portrait, which was published later that year in Vanity Fair along with a photograph of Davidson looking both at Stein and at the sculpture he is in the process of modeling, includes the following lines: "Many many tickle you for them. Many many tickle you for him./ Do you recognise this hymn./ It was written on the stairs./ Who cares that it was written on the wall and it was their wall and that's all." This was not the first time that Stein had played with the "writing on the wall" in the Book of Daniel, Mene mene tekel upharsin. Almost a decade earlier, in a composition entitled "Simons a Bouquet," she had written, "Many tickle some one thin, many tickle many tickle with a fellow fat, fat with a pecked old bank stake which means a house. Many tickle some one in. Many tickle some in. Some in bouquet, bouquet of Simons, some in Simons, some in Simons." Daniel, one might note, was Stein's father's name; Simon, the name of a brother, who, mildly retarded and considerably overweight, had become a trolley car driver in San Francisco and recently had died.

In the Book of Daniel, the account of the writing on the wall occurs in three acts: First there "came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote." Subsquently, "all the king's wise men . . . could not read the writing, nor make known to the king the interpretation thereof." Finally, Daniel successfully interprets the writing. As one commentator has observed, "Each of the mysterious words is given a meaning suggested by philological affinity," which is perhaps no more than a fancy way of saying that the unknown words sound like certain known words. However, by diffracting the sound (to use Haraway’s term for her own semantic practices) or what several pages earlier in "Simons a Bouquet" Stein calls "pleasanting the language," the author of these vibratory lines interferes with their communicative function and returns some of the effect of the original act of writing to her recreation. By concentrating on those features of writing which do not contribute to the aim of communication, and often seem at odds with it, Stein aims instead to recreate those aspects of human experience which ordinarily cannot be communicated or described by means of language. It is precisely these features of writing which the metaphor of hypertext leaves out, and which Haraway's biological figure reintroduces. If the model, then, of hypertext-spliced-to-stem-cells promises the sort of "excessive account" Haraway desires of the "reading and writing practices" which constitute the "meaning-making processes of technoscientific world-building," is this perhaps because, as Stein suggests, writing is itself an externalization of the nervous system and not just the mind's hypertextual tool?