Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour: quid urban studies ?
(2004) Technonatures: Environments, Technologies and Spaces in the 21st Century, l’Institute of British Geographers, Oxford University — Location: Oxford (24.June.2004)
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- If we were to take seriously Haraway’s project rather than glancing through her work borrowing thought-triggering ideas and provocative actors of hers, there would be no ‘cyborg’ city nor ‘hybrid’ city or any other of our direct equations that come short of grasping her point. We would not import one notion such as the cyborg and its non Cartesian definitions. But neither would we be content to take from her a set of notions, a way of apprehending collective life such as the one set out in The Companion Species Manifesto for instance, where ‘ontological choreographies’, ‘significant others’ and the concept of ‘prehensions’ would lead us to study an urban biotope of biological beings, a set of mutual embodiments in the flesh. Although this might be an interesting take on Haraway, that is not what I mean by taking her project seriously. Instead I want to look at Haraway’s problem, her issue, and the way she has moved about it since she first started to write. Because I believe that in the long run this might open more radically new projects in our own field than the ones proposed so far in Haraway’s name. Partial connection, affinity, affection and kinship can be said to be a leitmotiv in Haraway’s work. And her typical operation can be said to be the act of figuration: Haraway makes tropes, i.e. figurative, metaphorical beings, out of selected already existing entities, that become allies on the scene of feminism, technoscience and science studies.
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Zitouni, B. (2004). Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour: quid urban studies ? Technonatures: Environments, Technologies and Spaces in the 21st Century, l’Institute of British Geographers, Oxford University, Oxford. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/170150