The Haraway Reader, Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway
I learned to read and write inside worlds at war. I was born near the end ofWorld War II, grew up in the Cold War, attended graduate school during the Viet Nam War, and I am preparing this Reader for publication during my country's invasion oflraq. And that's the short list. These wars are personal. They make me who I am; they throw me into inherited obligations, whether I like it or not. These worlds at war are the belly of the monster from which I have tried to write into a more vivid reality a kin group of feminist figures. My hope is that these marked figures might guide us to a more livable place, one that in the spirit of science fiction I have called "elsewhere."
Figures collect up hopes and fears and show possibilities and dangers. Both imaginary and material, figures root peoples in stories and link them to histories. Stories are always more generous, more capacious, than ideologies; in that fact is one of my strongest hopes. I want to know how to inhabit histories and stories rather than deny them. I want to know how critically to live both inherited and novel kinships, in a spirit neither of condemnation nor celebration. I want to know how to help build ongoing stories rather than histories that end. In that sense, my kinships are about keeping the lineages going, even while defamiliarizing their members and turning lines into webs, trees into esplanades, and pedigrees into affinity groups.
My kinships are made up of the florid machinic, organic, and textual entities with which we share the earth and our flesh. These entities are fullofbumptious }ife, and it would be a serious mistake to figure them mainly anthropomorphically or anthropocentrically. All of the agencies, all of the actors, are not human, to say the least. Indeed, if in his potent little book Bruno Latour convinced me that We Have Never Been Modern, I firmly believe that we have never been human, much less man. That's one reason I like to explore figurations that do not resolve into the lineaments of man, even when they seem born to do so.