The Siren’s Song and the Lens of the Microscope

Donna Haraway Between Critique and Post-Critique

Abstract

In his influential article “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Bruno Latour, the French philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist, argued that critique as an analytical method had reached a dead end. Pointing at the conspiracy-ridden discourse around global heating as one dangerous contemporary outcome of critique’s drive to question the objective status of scientific knowledge, he called for a truce between humanists, social scientists and scientists in view of the climate crisis. Heather Love, queer studies and literary scholar, responds to this perspective whereby criticism as an intellectual and analytic tradition is considered to have acquired dogmatic and destructive characteristics. As part of this effort, Love looks back at Donna Haraway’s early writings on scientific objectivity, identifying a productive tension between a critical and post-critical position. Love shows how Haraway attacks the ideological notion of scientific objectivity by describing it as a fantasy of external, non-engaged, observation which has no room for either body, class, ethnicity or gender. At the same time, she casts a light on Haraway’s insistence on the construction of empathy, intimacy, and coexistence as values intrinsic to scientific observation. This article looks at the way Love presents Haraway’s work as a neglected, pioneering, model of cultural, textual analysis that incorporates both care and critique. In the intellectual portrait Love sketches, Haraway identified and formulated a variety of discordant meanings of scientific objectivity and knowledge by looking at competing perspectives on scientific analysis and knowledge production. Haraway enables us to think analogically about the complex and evolving nature of critique as both an intellectual tradition and a hermeneutic tool.