Entanglements
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.
Location
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.