Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse by Donna J. Haraway Thyrza Goodeve

Author:Donna J. Haraway,Thyrza Goodeve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

5

Fetus

The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order

Lynn Randolph, Annunciation of the Second Coming, oil on canvas, 58” × 64”, 1996

In its ability to embody the union of science and nature, the embryo might be described as a cyborg kinship entity.

—Sarah Franklin, “Making Representations”

These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long-distance call

—Paul Simon, “The Boy in the Bubble”1

The fetus and the planet Earth are sibling seed worlds in technoscience. If NASA photographs of the blue, cloud-swathed whole Earth are icons for the emergence of global, national, and local struggles over a recent natural-technical object of knowledge called the environment, then the ubiquitous images of glowing, free-floating human fetuses condense and intensify struggles over an equally new and disruptive technoscientific object of knowledge, namely “life itself.” Life as a system to be managed—a field of operations constituted by scientists, artists, cartoonists, community activists, mothers, anthropologists, fathers, publishers, engineers, legislators, ethicists, industrialists, bankers, doctors, genetic counselors, judges, insurers, priests, and all their relatives—has a very recent pedigree.2 The fetus and the whole Earth concentrate the elixir of life as a complex system, that is, of life itself. Each image is about the origin of life in a postmodern world.

Both the whole earth and the fetus owe their existence as public objects to visualizing technologies. These technologies include computers, video cameras, satellites, sonography machines, optical fiber technology, television, microcinematography, and much more. The global fetus and the spherical whole Earth both exist because of, and inside of, technoscientific visual culture. Yet, I think, both signify touch. Both provoke yearning for the physical sensuousness of a wet and blue-green Earth and a soft, fleshy child. That is why these images are so ideologically powerful. They signify the immediately natural and embodied, over and against the constructed and disembodied. These latter qualities are charged against the supposedly violating, distancing, scopic eye of science and theory. The audiences who find the glowing fetal and terran spheres to be powerful signifiers of touch are themselves partially constituted as subjects in the material- semiotic process of viewing. The system of ideological oppositions between signifiers of touch and vision remains stubbornly essential to political and scientific debate in modern Western culture. This system is a field of meanings that elaborates the ideological tension between body and machine, nature and culture, female and male, tropical and northern, colored and white, traditional and modern, and lived experience and dominating objectification.

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