Ici THK

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Entanglements

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There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing - practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each - intra-action, so that we might use our ability to - respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe - life into ever new possibilities for living justly. The - world and its possibilities for becoming are remade in - each meeting. How then shall we understand our role in - helping constitute who and what come to matter? How to - understand what is entailed in the practice of meeting - that might help keep the possibility of justice alive in - a world that seems to thrive on death? How to be alive - to each being's suffering, including those who have died - and those not yet born? How to disrupt patterns of - thinking that see the past as finished and the future as - not ours or only ours? How to understand the matter of - mattering, the nature of matter, space, and time? These - questions and concerns are not a luxury made of esoteric - musings. Mattering and its possibilities and - impossibilities for justice are integral parts of the - universe in its becoming; an invitation to live justly - is written into the very matter of being. How to - respond to that invitation is as much a question about - the nature of response and responsibility as it about - the nature of matter. The yearning for justice, a - yearning larger than any individual or sets of - individuals, is the driving force behind this work, - which is therefore necessarily about our connections and - responsibilities to one another-that is, entanglements.

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Location

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Haraway does not take location to be about fixed - position (though unfortunately many readers who cite - Haraway conflate her notion of "situated" with the - specification of one's social location along a set of - axes referencing one's identity). She reiterates this - point in different ways throughout her work. For - example, in "Situated Knowledges" she writes: "Feminist - embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a - reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in - fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility - for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning. - Embodiment is significant prosthesis; objectivity cannot - be about fixed visions when what counts as an object is - precisely what world history turns out to be about." - Situated knowledge is not merely about knowing or seeing - from somewhere (as in having a perspective) but about - taking account of how the specific prosthetic embodiment - of the technologically enhanced visualizing apparatus - matters to practices of knowing. And if her use of the - "@" sign in Modest_Witness can be understood as a mark - of the specificity of location, then we can conclude - that location is not equivalent to the local, but - neither does the globality of the Net imply universality - but rather points to its distributed and layered nature - (1997, 121): "The '@' and '.' are the title's chief - signifiers of the Net. An ordinary e-mail address - specifies where the addressee is in a highly - capitalized, transnationally sustained, machine - language-mediated communications network that gives byte - to the euphemisms of the 'global village.' Dependent - upon a densely distributed array of local and regional - nodes, e-mail is one of a powerful set of recent - technologies that materially produce what is so blithely - called 'global culture.' E-mail is one of the passage - points — both distributed and obligatory — - through which identities ebb and flow in the Net of - technoscience" (Haraway 1997, 4; italics mine). - Location, for Haraway, may be about the specification - ofwhere the addressee is in the Net, but the Net is not - fixed, and neither are identities or spacetime. Though - Haraway doesn't seem to go as far in making the - ontological points I want to emphasize here, in both - accounts it seems that while location cannot be about - occupying a fixed position, it may be usefully - (con)figured as specific connectivity. See chapter 4 on - the agential realist conception of objectivity not as a - view from somewhere but as a matter of accountability to - marks on bodies. Objectivity is not solely an - epistemological matter (a matter of seeing, albeit - specifically embodied sight) but an ontological - (ontoepistemological) one.

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Karen BARAD

Intra-action & Entanglements

Entanglements

Location