Donna Haraway's
Primate Visions (1989)
9 is widely seen as having set a standard for subsequent work in science studies. This, and her concept of
‘situated science’ (see below), have also made her perhaps the most frequent reference in ecotheory.
Primate Visions is the book that launched Haraway's reputation. In it she contrasts differing ways in which cultures and scientists have
regarded and studied
non-human primates such as baboons, chimpanzees and gorillas. Given that humans are themselves primates, disputes in primatology
are soon inevitably laden with questions or assumptions about human nature and origins, especially gender roles. Arguing that
‘[t]he detached eye of
objective science is an ideological fiction’ (13), Haraway shows in great detail how would-be ‘scientific’ accounts of primate
behaviour too often draw upon modern human norms and assumptions. She studies the rhetoric and language of scientific studies
with a view to foregrounding all kinds of decisive presuppositions and projections. What is really going on when a scientific
observer interprets primate behaviour through the language of ‘family’, ‘courtship’, ‘home’ and so on, or modes of
personhood based on competitive
individualism? Haraway writes:
Nonhuman primates’ status both as surrogates and as rehabilitants rested on their semiotic residence on the borderland between
western contestations of nature and culture. Many heading for laboratory
colonies, some for forests, simians were literally in a busy two-way traffic between these two domains because they lived
in an epistemological buffer zone.
132
Let us turn now to a specific case study, Jeanne Altmann's work on baboons in the 1970s. As a result of her field studies Altmann, who is also a feminist, came to challenge the then dominant understanding of evolutionary adaptation in primate studies. This saw males
as the primary source of genetic diversity in a species: that is, because one male can mate with many females, producing numerous
offspring, it might seem initially that male competition for sex would be the crucial factor in genetic inheritance. Altmann,
however, showed that female baboons were far more than mere prizes in rivalry between males, that they were agents and strategists
in their own right, and in often decisive ways.
Altmann emphasised in interviews her view that a feminist would be discredited by directly putting ‘politics’, that is, her
own gendered social identity, into ‘science’.
10 To transgress in that way the
fact–value distinction would be seen as contaminating the status of her work as ‘scientific’, even in the scientist's own
eyes. To merely offer an explicitly feminist account against the male bias in studies of baboons would not help:
because she is simultaneously annoyed as a woman and a scientist by the primate literature's overtly sexist accounts of categories
called leadership and control, the one thing she specifically should not do is substitute the mirror-image reverse account
or method, except perhaps as caricature to show the sad status as science of the original masculinist version.
Primate Visions, 309–10
This is the kind of dilemma that recurs again and again in the material Haraway studies. How to show up the way in which supposedly
objective studies of animal behaviour actually incorporate and project a human cultural politics, without at the same time
reducing scientific work to nothing more than the play of competing human values, or to claims that ‘all is relative’, that
there is no such thing as external reality and so on – to cite some familiar caricatures of science studies.
Haraway's method is to read primatology through a kind of multiple
literacy – scientific, political, rhetorical, literary and philosophical. The aim is to become sensitive to the way in which
something achieves the status of a
scientific fact through, for instance, the complex mediations of technology and laboratory equipment, the publishing and review
mechanisms that enable
a paper to be published, and the whole history of the field of science at issue, its social make-up and sociopolitical standing:
It is impossible to account for…developments without appealing to personal friendship and conflict, webs of people planning
books and conferences, disciplinary developments in several fields (including practices of narration, theoretical modeling,
and hypothesis testing with quantitative data), the history of economics and political theory, and recent feminism among particular
national, racial, and class groups. The concept of situatedness, not bias, is crucial.
The effect of considering all these dimensions together is not to ‘relativise’ a ‘fact’ out of existence, but to demonstrate
the plurality of its conditions of being accepted as a ‘fact’, to blur the boundaries between what is literal and what may
be social/symbolic in the scientific papers or narratives.
Haraway's multiple literacy is illustrated by her account of modern studies of
chimpanzees. After the 1960s, as with studies of baboons, primatologists came to question the earlier focus on male competition
as the crucial factor for genetic inheritance in chimpanzee groups. As with
Altmann and
baboons, new observations of female chimps in the field led to a sense of the subtle strategies they seemed to use to maximize
their own reproductive success, thus, as they say, passing on more of their own genes to the next generation. However, Haraway
would not be content to stay with this new result as a newly discovered scientific fact. While such a focus on female chimps
contrasts strongly with earlier attention to male aggression and competition, it still remains, in Haraway's view, necessarily
as
‘situated’ as the other approaches, that is, conditioned by a whole context of changing factors, some of which may induce
more questions. For instance, the new observations on female chimps were in line with the new
sociobiological focus on the strategies and ruses that individual animals use to maximize their reproductive success, and
this focus, Haraway argues, involves its own projections and presuppositions. It tends, for instance, to project certain unexamined,
liberal assumptions about
personhood, seeing each chimp itself as a kind of separate calculating
individualist, seeking always to maximize individual reproductive advantage: ‘In socio-biological narrative, the female becomes
the calculating, maximizing machine that males had long been.’
12 However, ‘Such [assumptions are] unthinkable in
naturalcultural worlds that do not
think action in terms of bounded possessive individuals.’ Illustrating this point, Haraway contrasts the different situatedness
of
Japanese primatologists, for whom
groups were the seemingly self-evident issue of any study, not the individual.
13As this example shows, to read scientific work with a multiple and
interdisciplinary literacy is to refuse the distorting effects of hard
boundaries between intellectual disciplines:
My mode of attention causes me to mix things up that sometimes others have high stakes in keeping separate, and I might often
be wrong-headed. But my way of working will also, sometimes, usefully avoid reductive notions of what is ‘inside’ or ‘outside’
scientific primatology, what is popular and professional, and what is ‘cultural’ or ‘political’ and what is ‘scientific’ about
our notions of
primates.
14
Haraway anticipates a new kind of provocative, open science, one that would be more scrupulous and rigorous than much modern
practice in that its work would always be attentive to the multiple frames and contexts whereby something is accorded, perhaps
only for a time, the status of a recognised fact or an accepted observation. Dogmatic divisions between science and cultural
politics would be refused, in favour of thinking through multiple, intersecting grey areas, each yet defined as precisely
as possible and made explicit in its stakes. For instance, the ‘facts’ about female chimps’ reproductive strategies remain,
but as part of an overall picture that must include a comprehensive account of the context that helped bestow them with the
status of ‘facts’, the changing social scene (1970s feminism, for instance), the nature of the scientific institution at the time, the choice of study method in the field (e.g.,
the use of ‘time and motion’ and management efficiency studies originally taken from industry), and liberal assumptions about personhood. There are always more questions to ask, more contexts to unravel.
Haraway rarely uses the concept of
nature unqualified. She prefers the compound term
natureculture, highlighting the falsity of separating the one from the other. When the issue, however, is to affirm the natural world as
an
agent in its otherness from human conceptions, Haraway may use the name
coyote, the wily actor or trickster spirit of some Native American cultures. Like her earlier coinage of
cyborg, highlighting the way human beings in themselves transgress the
natural–mechanical distinction,
coyote is a kind of provisional ‘fiction’, situated in the space between the ideas we have of things and what things actually are
or do. To call nature ‘coyote’ as opposed to, say, ‘mother’, is to project some expectations rather than others. ‘Tropes matter,
literally’.
15 ‘Coyote’, for example, is arguably preferable as a trope for a crucial agency in living processes to
Dawkins's trope of the ‘
selfish gene’. Dawkins defended his personification as a ‘fruitful
metaphor’,
16 yet it led to widespread misunderstandings he has had to clarify ever since. To call nature ‘coyote’ helpfully affirms nature's
agency as that of a wily trickster with which we are learning to
interact, as opposed to ‘nature’ seen solely as an object of human constructions or representations.
To write, like Haraway, with a multiple
literacy, is one way of engaging nature as a capricious and unstable agency in its own right. Extrapolating some implications
and possibilities for literary ecocriticism,
Christa Grewe-Volpp writes:
Climate, wilderness conditions, technologically altered landscapes, topographies and many other environmental elements – never
as pristine nature, never as mere text – function as a powerful force that human beings have to – and do – react to. Some
writers represent this force by giving nature a ‘voice’ which, rightly understood, has nothing to do with
anthropomorphising the non-human world. It does not mean projecting human feelings to a realm other than human, but is instead
a paradoxical effort to realise and to appreciate nature's own laws, to at least come close to its fundamental difference.
17
To acknowledge the agency of nature clearly accords already with all kinds of strategies of literary representation – mythic, magical realist,
animist and fantastic. The problem for future ecocriticism may be not the plurality of ways of voicing the agencies of nature
that already exist in the literatures of the world. It is in developing kinds of critical articulacy able to do justice to
such agency and not, for instance, reading all figurations of the non-human and so on solely as a function, a ‘construct’ (see below), of human cultural contexts.
These issues also reflect themselves in the plurality of Haraway's own writing.
Joseph Schneider observes of
Primate Visions: ‘Closure, totalization, self-certainty and self-righteousness, essentialism, and claimed or desired detachment or “objectivity”,
all are pointedly avoided.’
18 Primate Visions ‘is replete with representations of representations, deliberately mixing
genres and contexts to play with scientific and popular accounts’.
19 Haraway's coined terms express the complexity of the issues and their resistance to inherited kinds of
language:
‘natureculture’ and ‘subjectobject’. (The coinage
‘factvalue’ might in turn express both new freedoms and new difficulties.) The bizarre form of such expressions shows, once
again, how quickly environmental and related issues collide with the
demarcations between inherited concepts and disciplines.
Like science studies, environmental thought and writing places itself in the difficult, unstable but potentially radical space
opened up by fissures in competing conceptions and justifications of science.
Latour even argues that the importance of
radical environmentalist arguments (what he calls ‘political ecology’) lies not in their own terms, those of the protection
or reaffirmation of the natural, but in the way environmental issues destabilise in practice basic
distinctions between science and politics, nature and culture,
fact and value.
20 Environmentalist debate is about competing conceptions of
natureculture. Thus the natural sciences may find themselves accused of complicity in technological imperialism, while an
ecocritic may attempt a stance that would defend, say, the deeper rationality of phrases such as the ‘language or message
of
rocks’ or the wisdom of prescientific cultures.
Environmental issues are creating the need for new types of interdisciplinarity, greater interchange between the natural and social sciences and the humanities and even a questioning of the rationale of the division between them. Ecocriticism, however falteringly,
is part of the difficult emergence of new kinds of literacy.
Ninth quandary: constructivism and doing justice to non-human agency
In ‘Darwin's War-horse: Beetle-Collecting in 19th-Century England’ the naturalist
Peter Marren quotes
A. A. Gill's speculations on why making collections of beetles was such a common pursuit among the Victorians:
Beetles embody all the talents of the middle classes. They are not aristocratic, vain esoterics, like butterflies or moths,
or communists, like ants and bees. They’re not filthy, opportunistic carpetbaggers, like flies. They are professional, with
a skill. They’re built for a job, and get down to it without boastfulness or hysterics. And there is nowhere that doesn’t,
sooner or later, call in a beetle to set up shop and get things done.
21
Thus, humorously, the interests of innumerable amateur naturalists become seen as a kind of cultural narcissism. It is as
if Gill were lampooning that powerful paradigm in cultural and literary studies according to which whenever a writer or scientist
considers the universe, through a telescope or microscope, some version of race, class or gender politics is always reflected
back. A first generation of green literary critics argued that the environmental crisis was not just being ignored by mainstream
literary criticism, but that its dominant assumptions were complicit with that crisis. Thus beetles are assumed to hold no
interest in themselves: their fascination was only, to use the current terminology, a ‘construct’ of intra-human cultural
politics.
To stress the extent to which something is a ‘construct’ or a ‘social construct’ has been a widespread gesture of demystification
in the modern humanities. Its target is precisely a concept of ‘nature’. It refuses the prejudice inherent, for instance, in notions of
women as ‘naturally’ x or y or of any human group as ‘naturally’ inferior or superior in some sense. These conceptions are
rather social ‘constructs’ whose artificiality can now be seen and dismantled. Hence the passionate controversies that can
arise when some scientist claims to find natural differences between genders or ethnicities, as in the vehement disputes around
sociobiology.
Although the rejection of cultural constructivism was an important gesture in earlier ecocriticism, the turn towards issues
of ecojustice in the late 1990s led to a qualified use of constructivist arguments, not to assert that ‘nature’ is only a cultural construct, but to study the ways in which different cultural conceptions and notions of identity project different
versions of nature. Such arguments have been productive of useful insights. They have opened again, for instance, those dominant
masculinist conceptions of identity in the American pioneer tradition, of self-definition through the mastery and domestication
of wilderness.
At the same time, the constructivist gesture is a two-edged weapon. It may slide in practice towards being a more dogmatic
‘culturalism’, to modes of thinking for which the cultural is taken as all there is, or at least all that is studied, instead
of its making up, as it surely does, an evanescent and fragile bubble suspended vulnerably in a web of material conditions.
Again, the choice of determining
metaphors is crucial.
Eileen Crist scrutinises some disconcerting assumptions at work in those usually
‘productionist’ or even ‘industrial’ terms that do so much work in some contemporary accounts of cultural processes:
Metaphors of human labor regarding the creation of knowledge abound – familiar examples are building, constructing, assembling,
manufacturing, inventing, or producing knowledge. Such vocabulary trades heavily on received distinctions between
nature/natural and culture/artifactual, and through its semantics pushes the constructivist envelope – viz., that knowledge
is primarily man-made, not imparted by nature.
22
Scott Hess, for instance, contrasting three versions of nature projected in texts by
William Wordsworth (see pp. 108–110 above), by
Clare and by
Dorothy Wordsworth relates various kinds of human self-conception to differing ‘constructs’ of nature. Dorothy, unlike William,
is seen as ‘
constructing a communal, relational and participatory version of the environment’.
23 Such language not only uncomfortably suggests a model of the psyche as a kind of mini-industrialist, but, whatever construct
of ‘nature‘ is at issue here, however participatory, reciprocal and so on, it is still being figured as passively built by
a human agent. The natural world could never, within the terms of such an anthropocentric politics of ‘identity’, be acknowledged
as an
agent in its
own right.
24 By contrast,
Haraway defends the use of figurative and mythic language to express the agency of the non-human in its own right (nature
as
‘coyote’) as well as offering a means for articulating issues that transgress given
disciplinary
boundaries.