Waltraud Ernst

ACTIVISM BY OTHER MEANS

I n her new book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway turns on both “apocalyptic or salvific futures.” She departs with a declared antiutopian project, “a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (1). Already in her 1989 book Primate Visions, Haraway had challenged established feminist as well as androcentric views of nature. Since then, she has made much effort to show in what way nature has been the site for scholars and laypersons who promote their visions of culture while pretending to reveal nature’s secrets. She has pointed out that nature has been wrongly conceptualized as the other of culture. In her 1991 book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women she analysed how “nature has been systematically constituted in terms of the capitalist machine and market” (59). To escape this, Haraway has promoted an understanding of nature as a trickster. In my view, this figure represents the ground for the author’s reconceptualization of interspecies relationality. In her new book she continues this project of developing a new consciousness of interspecies relationality as companion species in processes of “becoming-with” as she had done in her “Companion Species Manifesto” and in her book When Species Meet. This project is deeply related to “speculative feminisms,” as the author puts it herself. Envisioning ecojustice, she teaches a new way of relating to other organisms. She also suggests various very special possibilities of deeper bonding with the Other. More than ever before, Donna Haraway, pioneer of feminist critique in biology and technoscience studies, is aware in her new book that the world is not at its best – to say the least. The author delineates what she calls “vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy” (1) in great detail and gives examples where potent actors such as “Big Pharma,” “Big Agribusiness,” and “Big Science” succeed in making life very difficult for many human and non-human organisms or “critters” (169 n. 1). But this is not the aim of the book, neither its content. It is just the starting point for her encompassing endeavour to rethink life on Earth.

In Connection: Feminist Epistemology for the Twenty-first Century

The paper offers a historical outline of the main positions and protagonists of feminist epistemology as a specific field in philosophy at the end of the twentieth century, in the context of a feminist critique of knowledge in academia in general as part of international feminist movements. The main question discussed is whether there is a specific feminist concept of philosophical and scientific knowledge. If so, what is its innovative aspect? What are the philosophical problems in arguing for feminist knowledge? Is there a specific insight or methodological approach? A further question is what role, if any, feminist epistemology plays in the interdisciplinary field of Gender Studies. The discussion will centre on how feminist epistemology relates to non-scientific practices. In particular, the role of the concept of objectivity in feminist epistemology will be elaborated. This will illuminate the connection between the feminist knowledge project with other emancipatory projects and outline how feminist constructivism might play a prominent role in this context in the twenty-first century.

Feministische Effekte. Erkenntnisprozesse für Veränderungen der Wirklichkeit

Die Veranderungen wissenschaftlichen Wissens gelten seit jeher sowohl als faszinierendste als auch als problematischste Aspekte fur die Wissenschaftsphilosophie. Dies kommt zu einem guten Teil daher, dass die Veranderung dessen, was als wissenschaftliche Beschreibung und Erklarung von Wirklichkeit gilt, eine gewisse Verganglichkeit wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis evoziert und damit die Verbindlichkeit wissenschaftlicher Theorien in Frage zu stellen scheint. Neuere Arbeiten transdisziplinarer Wissenschaftsforschung haben gezeigt, dass es nicht moglich ist, die Bereiche Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft entkoppelt zu betrachten, sondern dass wir den ganzen wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisprozess als sozialen Prozess untersuchen mussen (vgl. Felt/ Nowotny/Taschwer 1995). Das heist, wir mussen die realitatsstiftenden Effekte von Wissenschaft in der Gesellschaft reflektieren. Dies bezieht sich nicht nur auf die Vermittlung des „fertigen“ technologischen Produkts, sondern auf den ganzen soziookonomischen und soziopolitischen techno-wissenschaftlichen Prozess, von der Definition eines Forschungsanliegens uber die Beantragung von Finanzmitteln, Ausstattung von Labors, Produktion von Geraten und Maschinen zur Durchfuhrung von Forschungen bis hin zur Datensammlung und Dateninterpretation. Karin Knorr-Cetina nennt diesen sozialen Prozess der Herstellung von Forschungsergebnissen im naturwissenschaftlichen Labor die „Fabrikation von Erkenntnis“ (Knorr-Cetina 1991). Ihre „Laborstudien“ sowie die inzwischen vielzahligen, die darauf folgten, ermoglichen es, den naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisprozess als Prozess der sozialen Konstruktion wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis zu betrachten. Donna Haraway hat sich aus einer feministischen Perspektive kritisch mit diesen konstruktivistischen Ansatzen in der Wissenschaftsforschung auseinander gesetzt und kommt zu der Einsicht, dass es dabei nicht darum gehen kann, jegliche Glaubwurdigkeit wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse grundsatzlich in Frage zu stellen, sondern vielmehr die soziale Situiertheit wissenschaftlichen Wissens anzuerkennen: “Feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others‘ practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions. In traditional philosophical categories, the issue is ethics and politics perhaps more than epistemology.” (Haraway 1991: 187)