Reading Notes: Haraway, "Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic"

[rax]

This week's TST readings were all about the body politic and the way this idea (specifically, Hobbes's Leviathan) did or did not work out in practice, using examples like trans surgeries, self-demand impairment, blood banking, organ sales, mayhem law, and so on. It was pretty awesome, but because of being behind schedule, I didn't take detailed notes. Sorry. If you have interest in any of those topics, poke me and at some point I can suggest some readings for you. (Also, Foucault's lectures are downright readable!) These detailed notes are on the paper I'm presenting on in class, and are on a work by an author I realllllllly need to read more of. [0]


Greeks saw "the citizen, the city, and the cosmos to be built according to the same principles." Anthropocentrism! Haraway reminds us that this concept, even if we're later going to talk about it as flawed, is really useful, and is responsible for a lot of our understanding. (However, are those understandings useful?)

"The degree to which the principle of domination is deeply embedded in our natural sciences, especially in those disciplines that seek to explain social groups and behavior, must not be underestimated." She's positioning herself as interested in "work[ing] effectively for societies free from domination" although she never actually defines what she means by domination. She asserts that it can be set in contrast to liberation, and I mean I basically understand what she means, but many people use the word differently and I wish there were a definition.

Nature/culture and subject/object binaries as positioning science apart from lived experience, "in such a way that natural knowledge is reincorporated covertly into techniques of social control instead of being transformed into sciences of liberation." 

"We have perversely worshipped science as a reified fetish in two complementary ways:"

• in producing feminist theory, we have largely ignored science
• positioning nature as the enemy in order to enter the body politic (and thus become commodified, as in Marx)

Sex becomes danger and thus is a major part of the nature that must be controlled: Freud, Foucault. Attempts to get out of this include Norman Brown's Love's Body, which, though Haraway doesn't use this language, sounds very masculine back-to-naturey, suggesting the only escape is "through fantasy and ecstasy." Because of his grounding in Freudian ideas, she says, he "turned nature into a fetish worshipped by a total return to it (polymorphous perversity)." Firestone, in Dialectic of Sex, still accepts "physiological reduction of the body politic to sex," and thus makes the same mistake as Brown in some sense. "Firestone located the flaw in women's position in the body politic in our own bodies, in our subservience to the organic demands of reproduction." She "accepted that there are natural objects (bodies) separate from social relations." In general we've been hammering on "body/mind duality bad!" in class this semester and Haraway is helping me see better than a lot of the other authors how that theoretical basis might lead to poor decisions and understandings in practice.

"What we experience and theorize as nature and as culture are transformed by our work." This brings me first to the whole "What can a body do?" question, and then of course to "how do the agential cuts we make intra-act with the world around us?" She brings this to Marxism, everything is done through labor.

Animal sociology has been reproductive of domination, "both in supplying legitimating ideologies and in enhancing material power." (The first hearkens back to Myra Hird.) In particular it reduces "the body politic to sexual psychology" by using animal behavior to justify patriarchy. This allows "a critique" that can "expose the fallacies of the claim to objectivity... We cannot dismiss the layers of domination in the science of animal groups as a film of unfortunate bias or ideology that can be peeled off the healthy objective strata of knowledge below. Neither can we think just anything we please about animals and their meaning for us."

Yerkes, who worked with rhesus monkeys, "designed primates as scientific objects in relation to his ideal of human progress through human engineering." This kind of work, especially when used to say things about humans, makes me really nervous; even if this whole "natural" thing were worthwhile, which I'm dubious about and Haraway is even more dubious about if I'm reading her correctly, it's not like the situations posed in animal experiments are actually natural. [1] Anyway, Yerkes was obsessed with intelligence testing and the connection of sexuality to intelligence. His work, I would argue, and definitely the funding organization he worked with "was structured on several levels according to the primacy of sex in organic and social processes." Monkeys and apes were used as natural proof of this even though they weren't "natural" at all.

Carpenter did methodologically excellent field work. He "did not work within the doctrine of autonony of natural and social sciences. Neither did he permit direct reduction of social to physiological or human to animal." But... a lot of the same stuff is going on here, in particular in removing the "head" alpha males from a group of rhesus monkeys in order to examine the body as a whole. (This links up, of course, to all of our other readings about the head of the body politic, &c.) "Carpenter conceived social space to be like the organic space of the developing organism." "The political principle of domination has been transformed here into the legitimating scientific principle of dominance as a natural property with a physical-chemical base."

OK, Haraway, so what do we do? Well, she has an answer, or at least the beginnings of one:

• "A deeper look at the animals themselves" as themselves and not as stand-ins for humans
• Look at but also past dominance structures as an organizing principle
• Reject "all forms of ... ideological claims for pure objectivity"

Actually, that sounds pretty good to me!










[0] This reminder paragraph is also for me, so that when three years from now I troll all my notes for "mayhem law" I at least know to go to my transsomatechnics PDF archive and look at week 9.

[1] At least, most animal sociological experiments. I can't say much about low-level bio experiments. Also, this gives me more to chew on when it comes to domestic foxes.

Comments

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

faintly related - tomorrow i run my class on the biology of sex determination and the history/current state/controversy surrounding gender testing for elite athletes. The students have to analyze a composited/fictional case study of a female athlete who is appealing a decision in which an award she had won was revoked due to her having "failed" a gender test. the students have to analyze the lab results (the individual turns out to have an XX karyotype but an aberrant recombination event has resulted in an SRY gene having been inserted onto one of the X chromosomes) and then they have to write a statement explaining the results to a panel considering the appeal and make a recommendation as to whether the athlete's medal should be re-instated.
it's an awesome class because it really makes the point that science alone is a completely inadequate way to understand sex/gender issues.

wish me luck! :-)