Donna Haraway_The Promises of Monsters DONNA HARAWAYThe Promises of Monsters: A RegenerativePolitics for Inappropriate/d OthersLawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, eds., CulturalStudies (New York; Routledge, 1992) , pp. 295-337. If primates have a sense of humor, there is no reason why intellectualsmay not share in it. (Plank, 1989) A Biopolitics of Artifactual Reproduction "The Promises of Monsters" will be a mapping exercise andtravelogue through mind-scapes and landscapes of what may count as naturein certain local/global struggles. These contests are situated in a strange,allochronic time-the time of myself and my readers in the last decade ofthe second Christian millenium-and in a foreign, allotopic place-the wombof a pregnant monster, here, where we are reading and writing. The purposeof this excursion is to write theory, i.e., to produce a patterned visionof how to move and what to fear in the topography of an impossible butall-too-real present, in order to find an absent, but perhaps possible,other present. I do not seek the address of some full presence; reluctantly,I know better. Like Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, however, I am committedto skirting the slough of despond and the parasite-infested swamps of nowhereto reach more salubrious environs.7 The theory is meant to orient, to providethe roughest sketch for travel, by means of moving within and through arelentless artifactualism, which forbids any direct si(gh)tings of nature,to a science fictional, speculative factual, SF place called, simply, elsewhere.At least for those whom this essay addresses, "nature" outsideartifactualism is not so much elsewhere as nowhere, a different matteraltogether. Indeed, a reflexive artifactualism offers serious politicaland analytical hope. This essay's theory is modest. Not a systematic overview,it is a little siting device in a long line of such craft tools. Such sightingdevices have been known to reposition worlds for their devotees-and fortheir opponents. Optical instruments are subject-shifters. Goddess knows,the subject is being changed relentlessly in the late twentieth century. My diminutive theory's optical features are set to produce not effectsof distance, but effects of connection, of embodiment, and of responsibilityfor an imagined elsewhere that we may yet learn to see and build here.I have high stakes in reclaiming vision From the technopornographers, thosetheorists of minds, bodies, and planets who insist effectively--i.e., in practice--that sight is the sense made to realizethe fantasies of the phallocrats.2 I think sight can be remade for theactivists and advocates engaged in fitting political filters to see theworld in the hues of red, green, and ultraviolet, i.e., from the295 296DONNA HARAWAYperspectives of a still possible socialism, feminist and anti-racistenvironmentalism, and science for the people. I take as a self-evidentpremise that "science is culture."3 Rooted in that premise, thisessay is a contribution to the heterogeneous and very lively contemporarydiscourse of science studies as cultural studies. Of course, what science,culture, or nature-and their "studies"-might mean is far lessself-evident. Nature is for me, and I venture for many of us who are planetary fetusesgestating in the amniotic efffluvia of terminal industrialism,4 one ofthose impossible things characterized by Gayatri Spivak as that which wecannot not desire. Excruciatingly conscious of nature's discursive constitutionas "other" in the histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, andclass domination of many kinds, we nonetheless find in this problematic,ethno-specific, long-lived, and mobile concept something we cannot do without,but can never "have." We must find another relationship to naturebesides reification and possession. Perhaps to give confidence in its essentialreality, immense resources have been expended to stabilize and materializenature, to police its/her boundaries. Such expenditures have had disappointingresults. Efforts to travel into "nature" become tourist excursionsthat remind the voyager of the price of such displacements-one pays tosee fun-house reflections of oneself. Efforts to preserve "nature"in parks remain fatally troubled by the ineradicable mark of the foundingexplusion of those who used to live there, not as innocents in a garden,but as people for whom the categories of nature and culture were not thesalient ones. Expensive projects to collect "nature's" diversityand bank it seem to produce debased coin, impoverished seed, and dustyrelics. As the banks hypertrophy, the nature that feeds the storehouses"disappears." The World Bank's record on environmental destructionis exemplary in this regard. Finally, the projects for representing andenforcing human "nature" are famous for their imperializing essences,most recently reincarnated in the Human Genome Project. So, nature is not a physical place to which one can go, nor a treasureto fence in or bank, nor as essence to be saved or violated. Nature isnot hidden and so does not need to be unveiled. Nature is not a text tobe read in the codes of mathematics and biomedicine. It is not the "other"who offers origin, replenishment, and service. Neither mother, nurse, norslave, nature is not matrix, resource, or tool for the reproduction ofman. Nature is, however, a topos, a place, in the sense of a rhetorician'splace or topic for consideration of common themes; nature is, strictly,a commonplace. We turn to this topic to order our discourse, to composeour memory. As a topic in this sense, nature also reminds us that in seventeenth-centuryEnglish the "topick gods" were the local gods, the gods specificto places and peoples. We need these spirits, rhetorically if we can'thave them any other way. We need them in order to reinhabit, precisely,common places-locations that are widely shared, inescapably local, worldly,enspirited; i.e., topical. In this sense, nature is the place to rebuildpublic culture.5 Nature is also a tropos, a trope. It is figure, construction,artifact, movement, displacement. Nature cannot pre-exist its construction.This construction is based on a particular kind of move- a tropos or "turn."Faithful to the Greek, as tro'pos nature is about turning. Troping, weturn to nature as if to the earth, to the primal stuff-geotropic, physiotropic.Topically, we travel toward the earth, a commonplace. In discoursing onnature, we turn from Plato and his heliotropic son's blinding star to seesomething else, another kind of figure. I do not turn from vision, butI do seek something other than enlightenment in these sightings of sciencestudies as cultural studies. Nature is a topic of public discourse on whichmuch turns, even the earth. In this essay's journey toward elsewhere, I have promised to trope naturethrough a relentless artifactualism, but what does artifactualism meanhere? First, it means that THE PROMISES OF MONSTERS297 nature for us is made, as both fiction and fact. If organisms are naturalobjects, it is crucial to remember that organisms are not born; they aremade in world-changing technoscientific practices by particular collectiveactors in particular times and places. In the belly of the local/globalmonster in which I am gestating, often called the postmodern world,6 globaltechnology appears to denature everything, to make everything a malleablematter of strategic decisions and mobile production and reproduction processes(Hayles, 1990). Technological decontextualization is ordinary experiencefor hundreds of millions if not billions of human beings, as well as otherorganisms. I suggest that this is not a denaturing so much as a particularproduction of nature. The preoccupation with productionism that has characterizedso much parochial Western discourse and practice seems to have hypertrophiedinto something quite marvelous: the whole world is remade in the imageof commodity production.' How, in the face of this marvel, can I seriously insist that to seenature as artifactual is an oppositional, or better, a differential siting?8Is the insistence that nature is artifactual not more evidence of the extremityof the violation of a nature outside and other to the arrogant ravagesof our technophilic civilization, which, after all, we were taught beganwith the heliotropisms of enlightment projects to dominate nature withblinding light focused by optical technology?9 Haven't eco-feminists andother multicultural and intercultural radicals begun to convince us thatnature is precisely not to be seen in the guise of the Eurocentric productionismand anthropocentrism that have threatened to reproduce, literally, allthe world in the deadly image of the Same? I think the answer to this serious political and analytical questionlies in two related turns: 1) unblinding ourselves from the sun-worshipingstories about the history of science and technology as paradigms of rationalism;and 2) refiguring the actors in the construction of the ethno-specificcategories of nature and culture. The actors are not all "us."If the world exists for us as "nature," this designates a kindof relationship, an achievement among many actors, not all of them human,not all of them organic, not all of them technological.10 In its scientificembodiments as well as in other forms nature is made, but not entirelyby humans; it is a co-construction among humans and non-humans. This isa very different vision from the postmodernist observation that all theworld is denatured and reproduced in images or replicated in copies. Thatspecific kind of violent and reductive artifactualism, in the form of ahyper-productionism actually practiced widely throughout the planet, becomescontestable in theory and other kinds of praxis, without recourse to aresurgent transcendental naturalism. Hyper-productionism refuses the wittyagency of all the actors but One; that is a dangerous strategy-for everybody.But transcendental naturalism also refuses a world full of cacophonousagencies and settles for a mirror image sameness that only pretends todifference. The commonplace nature I seek, a public culture, has many houseswith many inhabitants which/who can refigure the earth. Perhaps those otheractors/actants, the ones who are not human, are our topick gods, organicand inorganic.]' It is this barely admissible recognition of the odd sorts of agentsand actors which/ whom we must admit to the narrative of collective life,including nature, that simultaneously, first, turns us decisively awayfrom enlightenment-derived modern and postmodern premises about natureand culture, the social and technical, science and society ~nd, second,saves us from the deadly point of view of productionism. Productionismand its corollary, humanism, come down to the story line that "manmakes everything, including himself, out of the world that can only beresource and potency to his project and active agency."l2 This productionismis about man the tool-maker and -user, whose highest technical productionis himself; i.e., the story line of phallogocentrism. He gains access tothis wondrous technology with a subject-constituting, self-deferring, andself 298DONNA HARAWAY splitting entry into language, light, and law. Blinded by the sun, inthrall to the father, reproduced in the sacred image of the same, his rewardis that he is self- born, an autotelic copy. That is the mythos of enlightenmenttranscendence. Let us return briefly to my remark above that organisms are not born,but they are made. Besides troping on Simone de Beauvoir's observationthat one is not born a woman, what work is this statement doing in thisessay's effort to articulate a relentless differential/oppositional artifactualism?I wrote that organisms are made as objects of knowledge in world-changingpractices of scientific discourse by particular and always collective actorsin specific times and places. Let us look more closely at this claim withthe aid of the concept of the apparatus of bodily production.!, Organismsare hiological embodiments; as natural-technical entities, they are notpre-existing plants, animals, protistes, etc., with boundaries alreadyestablished and awaiting the right kind of instrument to note them correctly.Organisms emerge from a discursive process. Biology is a discourse, notthe living world itself. But humans are not the only actors in the constructionof the entities of any scientific discourse; machines (delegates that canproduce surprises) and other partners (not "pre- or extra-discursiveobjects," but partners) are active constructors of natural scientificobjects. Like other scientific bodies, organisms are not ideological constructions.The whole point about discursive construction has been that it is not aboutideology. Always radically historically specific, always lively, bodieshave a different kind of specificity and effectivity; and so they invitea different kind of engagement and intervention. Elsewhere, I have used the term "material-semiotic actor"to highlight the object of knowledge as an active part of the apparatusof bodily production, without ever implying immediate presence of suchobjects or, what is the same thing, their final or unique determinationof what can count as objective knowledge of a biological body at a particularhistorical juncture. Like Katie King's objects called "poems,"sites of literary production where language also is an actor, bodies asobjects of knowledge are materialsemiotic generative nodes. Their boundariesmaterialize in social interaction among humans and non- humans, includingthe machines and other instruments that mediate exchanges at crucial interfacesand that function as delegates for other actors' functions and purposes."Objects" like bodies do not pre-exist as such. Similarly, "nature"cannot pre-exist as such, but neither is its existence ideological. Natureis a commonplace and a powerful discursive construction, effected in theinteractions among material-semiotic actors, human and not. The siting/sightingof such entities is not about disengaged discovery, but about mutual andusually unequal structuring, about taking risks, about delegating competences.14 The various contending biological bodies emerge at the intersectionof biological research, writing, and publishing; medical and other businesspractices; cultural productions of all kinds, including available metaphorsand narratives; and technology, such as the visualization technologiesthat bring color-enhanced killer T cells and intimate photographs of thedeveloping fetus into high-gloss art books, as well as scientific reports.But also invited into that node of intersection is the analogue to thelively languages that actively intertwine in the production of literaryvalue: the coyote and protean embodiments of a world as witty agent andactor. Perhaps our hopes for accountability for techno-biopolitics in thebelly of the monster turn on revisioning the world as coding tricksterwith whom we must learn to converse. So while the late twentieth-centuryimmune system, for example, is a construct of an elaborate apparatus ofbodily production, neither the immune system nor any other of biology'sworld-changing bodies-like a virus or an ecosystem-is a ghostly fantasy.Coyote is not a ghost, merely a protean trickster. THE PROMISES OF MONSTERS299 This sketch of the artifactuality of nature and the apparatus of bodilyproduction helps us toward another important point: the corporeality oftheory. Overwhelmingly, theory is bodily, and theory is literal. Theoryis not about matters distant from the lived body; quite the opposite. Theoryis anything but disembodied. The fanciest statements about radical decontextualizationas the historical form of nature in late capitalism are tropes for theembodiment, the production, the literalization of experience in that specifi'mode. This is not a question of reflection or correspondences, but of technology,where the social and the technical implode into each other. Experienceis a semiotic process- a semiosis (de Lauretis, 1984). Lives are built;so we had best become good craftspeople with the other worldly actantsin the story. There is a great deal of rebuilding to do, beginning witha little more surveying with the aid of optical devices fitted with red,green, and ultraviolet filters. Repeatedly, this essay turns on figures of pregnancy and gestation.Zoe Sofia (1984) taught me that every technology is a reproductive technology.She and I have meant that literally; ways of life are at stake in the cultureof science. I would, however, like to displace the terminology of reproductionwith that of generation. Very rarely does anything really get reproduced;what's going on is much more polymorphous than that. Certainly people don~treproduce, unless they get themselves cloned, which will always be veryexpensive and risky, not to mention boring. Even technoscience must bemade into the paradigmatic model not of closure, but of that which is contestableand contested. That involves knowing how the world's agents and actantswork; how they/we/it come into the world, and how they/we/it are reformed.Science becomes the myth not of what escapes agency and responsibilityin a realm above the fray, but rather of accountability and responsibilityfor translations and solidarities linking the cacophonous visions and visionaryvoices that characterize the knowledges of the marked bodies of history.Actors, as well as actants, come in many and wonderful forms. And bestof all, `'reproduction"-or less inaccurately, the generation of novelforms-need not be imagined in the stodgy bipolar terms of hominids.15 If the stories of hyper-productionism and enlightenment have been aboutthe reproduction of the sacred image of the same, of the one true copy,mediated by the luminous technologies of compulsory heterosexuality andmasculinist self-birthing, then the differential artifactualism I am tryingto envision might issue in something else. Artifactualism is askew of productionism;the rays from my optical device diffract rather than reflect. These diffractingrays compose interference patterns, not reflecting images. The "issue"from this generative technology, the result of a monstrous,16 pregnancy,might be kin to Vietnamese-American filmmaker and feminist theorist TrinhMinhha's (1986/7b; 1989) "inappropriate/d others."17 Designatingthe networks of multicultural, ethnic, racial, national, and sexual actorsemerging since World War II, Trinh's phrase referred to the historicalpositioning of those who cannot adopt the mask of either "self"or "other" offered by previously dominant, modern Western narrativesof identity and politics. To be `'inappropriate/d', does not mean "notto be in relation with"-i.e., to be in a special reservation, withthe status of the authentic, the untouched, in the allochronic and allotopiccondition of innocence. Rather to be an "inappropriate/ d other"means to be in critical, deconstructive relationality, in a diffractingrather than reflecting (ratio)nality-as the means of making potent connectionthat exceeds domination. To be inappropriate/d is not to fit in the taxon,to be dislocated from the available maps specifying kinds of actors andkinds of narratives, not to be originally fixed by difference. To be inappropriate/dis to be neither modern nor postmodern, but to insist on the amodern. Trinhwas looking for a way to figure "difference'' as a "criticaldifference within," and not as special taxonomic marks grounding differenceas apartheid. 300DONNA HARAWAY She was writing about people; I wonder if the same observations mightapply to humans and to both organic and technological non-humans. The term "inappropriate/d others" can provoke rethinking socialrelationality within artifactual nature-which is, arguably, global naturein the 1990s. Trinh Minhha's metaphors suggest another geometry and opticsfor considering the relations of difference among people and among humans,other organims, and machines than hierarchical domination, incorporationof parts into wholes, paternalistic and colonialist protection, symbioticfusion, antagonistic opposition, or instrumental production from resource.Her metaphors also suggest the hard intellectual, cultural, and politicalwork these new geometries will require. If Western patriarchal narrativeshave told that the physical body issued from the first birth, while manwas the product of the heliotropic second birth, perhaps a differential,diffracted feminist allegory might have the "inappropriate/d others"emerge from a third birth into an SF world called elsewhere-a place composedfrom interference patterns. Diffraction does not produce "the same"displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping ofinterference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffractionpattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where theeffects of difference appear. Tropically, for the promises of monsters,the first invites the illusion of essential, fixed position, while thesecond trains us to more subtle vision. Science fiction is genericallyconcerned with the interpenetration of boundaries between problematic selvesand unexpected others and with the exploration of possible worlds in acontext structured by transnational technoscience. The emerging socialsubjects called "inappropriate/d others" inhabit such worlds.SF-science fiction, speculative futures, science fantasy, speculative fiction-isan especially apt sign under which to conduct an inquiry into the artifactualas a reproductive technology that might issue in something other than thesacred image of the same, something inappropriate, unfitting, and so, maybe,inappropriated. Within the belly of the monster, even inappropriate/d others seem tobe interpellated-called through interruption-into a particular locationthat I have learned to call a cyborg subject position.18 Let me continuethis travelogue and inquiry into artifactualism with an illustrated lectureon the nature of cyborgs as they appear in recent advertisements in Science,the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.These ad figures remind us of the corporeality, the mundane materiality,and literality of theory. These commercial cyborg figures tell us whatmay count as nature in technoscience worlds. Above all, they show us theimplosion of the technical, textual, organic, mythic, and political inthe gravity wells of science in action. These figures are our companionmonsters in the Pilgrim's Progress of this essay's travelogue. Consider Figure 1, "A Few Words about Reproduction from a Leaderin the Field," the advertising slogan for Logic General Corporation'ssoftware duplication system. The immediate visual and verbal impact insistson the absurdity of separating the technical, organic, mythic, textual,and political threads in the semiotic fabric of the ad and of the worldin which this ad makes sense. Under the unliving, orange-to-yellow rainbowcolors of the earth-sun logo of Logic General, the biological white rabbithas its (her? yet, sex and gender are not so settled in this reproductivesystem) back to us. It has its paws on a keyboard, that inertial, old-fashionedresidue of the typewriter that lets our computers feel natural to us, user-friendly,as it were.19 But the keyboard is misleading; no letters are transferredby a mechnical key to a waiting solid surface. The computeruser interfaceworks differently. Even if she doesn't understand the implications of herlying keyboard, the white rabbit is in her natural home; she is fully artifactualin the most literal sense. Like fruit flies, yeast, transgenic mice, andthe humble nematode worm, Cacuorhabditis elegans,20 this rabbit's evolutionarystory transpires in the lab; the THE PROMISES OF MONSTERS301 lab is its proper niche, its true habitat. Both material system andsymbol for the measure of fecundity, this kind of rabbit occurs in no othernature than the lab, that preeminent scene of replication practices. With Logic General, plainly, we are not in a biological laboratory.The organic rabbit peers at its image, but the image is not her reflection,indeed, especially not her reflection. This is not Lacan's world of mirrors;primary identification and maturing metaphoric substitution will be producedwith other techniques, other writing technologies.21 The white rabbit willbe translated, her potencies and competences relocated radically. The gutsof the computer produce another kind of visual product than distorted,self-birthing reflections. The simulated bunny peers out at us face first.It is she who locks her/its gaze with us. She, also, has her paws on agrid, one just barely reminiscent of a typewriter, but even more reminiscentof an older icon of technoscience-the Cartesian coordinate system thatlocates the world in the imaginary spaces of rational modernity. In hernatural habitat, the virtual rabbit is on a grid that insists on the worldas a game played on a chess-like board. This rabbit insists that the trulyrational actors will replicate themselves in a virtual world where thebest players will not be Man, though he may linger like the horse-drawncarriage that gave its form to the railroad car or the typewriter thatgave its illusory shape to the computer interface. The functional privilegedsign)fier in this system will not be so easily mistaken for any primatemale's urinary and copulative organ. Metaphoric substitution and othercirculations in the very material symbolic domain will be more likely tobe effected by a competent mouse. The if-y femaleness of both of the rabbits,of course, gives no confidence that the new players other to Man will bewomen. More likely, the rabbit that is interpellated into the world inthis non-mirror stage, this diffracting moment of subject constitution,will be literate in a quite different grammar of gender. Both the rabbitshere are cyborgs-compounds of the organic, technical, mythic, textual,and political-and they call us into a world in which we may not wish totake shape, but through whose "Miry Slough" we might have totravel to get elsewhere. Logic General is into a very particular kind ofecriture. The reproductive stakes in this text are future life forms andways of life for humans and unhumans. "Call toll free" for "afew words about reproduction from an acknowledged leader in the field.,' Ortho-mune*'s monoclonal antibodies expand our understanding of a cyborgsubject's relation to the inscription technology that is the laboratory(Figure 2). In only two years, these fine monoclonals generated more than100 published papers-higher than any rate of literary production by myselfor any of my human colleagues in the human sciences. But this alarmingrate of publication was achieved in 1982, and has surely been wholly surpassedby new generations of biotech mediators of literary replication. Neverhas theory been more literal, more bodily, more technically adept. Neverhas the collapse of the "modern" distinctions between the mythic,organic, technical, political, and textual into the gravity well, wherethe unlamented enlightenment transcendentals of Nature and Society alsodisappeared, been more evident. LKB Electrophoresis Division has an evolutionary story to tell, a better,more complete one than has yet been told by physical anthropologists, paleontologists,or naturalists about the entities/actors/actants that structure niche spacein an extra-laboratory world: "There are no missing links in MacroGeneWorkstation" (Figure 3). Full of promises, breaching the first ofthe ever-multiplying final frontiers, the prehistoric monster Ichthyostegacrawls from the amniotic ocean into the future, onto the dangerous butenticing dry land. Our no-longer-fish, not-yet-salamander will end up fullyidentified and separated, as man-in-space, finally disembodied, as didthe hero of J. D. Bernal's fantasy in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.But for now, occupying the zone between 302DONNA HARAWAY  FIGURE1 FIGURE2.  FIGURE3. THE PROMISES OF MONSTERS303 fishes and amphibians, Ichthyostega is firmly on the margins, thosepotent places where theory is best cultured. It behooves us, then, to jointhis heroic reconstructed beast with LKB, in order to trace out the transferencesof competences-the metaphoric-material chain of substitutions-in this quiteliteral apparatus of bodily production. We are presented with a travelstory, a Pilgrim's Progress, where there are no gaps, no "missinglinks." From the first non- original actor-the reconstructed Ichthyostega-tothe final printout of the DNA homology search mediated by LKB's softwareand the many separating and writing machines pictured on the right sideof the advertisement, the text promises to meet the fundamental desireof phallologocentrism for fullness and presence. From the crawling bodyin the Miry Sloughs of the narrative to the printed code, we are assuredof full success-the compression of time into instantaneous and full access"to the complete GenBank ... on one laser disk." Like Christian,we have conquered time and space, moving from entrapment in body to furfillmentin spirit, all in the everyday workspaces of the Electrophoresis Division,whose Hong Kong, Moscow, Antwerp, and Washington phone numbers are allprovided. Electrophoresis: pherein-to bear or carry us relentlessly on. Bio-Response, innovators in many facets of life's culture, interpellatesthe cyborg subject into the barely secularized, evangelical, ProtestantChristianity that pervades American techno-culture: "Realize the potentialof your cell line" (Figure 4). This ad addresses us directly. We arecalled into a salvation narrative, into history, into biotechnology, intoour true natures: our cell line, ourselves, our successful product. Wewill testify to the efficacy of this culture system. Colored in the blues,purples, and ultraviolets of the sterilizing commercial rainbow-in whichart, science, and business arch in lucrative grace-the virus- like crystallineshape mirrors the luminous crystals of New Age promises. Religion, science,and mysticism join easily in the facets of modern and postmodern commercialbig-response. The simultaneously promising and threatening crystal/virusunwinds its tail to reveal the language-like icon of the Central Dogma,the code structures of DNA that underlie all possible bodily response,all semiosis, all culture. Gem-like, the frozen, spiraling crystals ofBio- Response promise life itself. This is a jewel of great price-availablefrom the Production Services office in Hayward, California. The imbricationsof layered sign)fiers and sign)fieds forming cascading hierarchies of signsguide us through this mythic, organic, textual, technical, political icon.22 Finally, the advertisement from Vega Biotechnologies graphically showsus the final promise, "the link between science and tomorrow: Guaranteed.Pure" (Figure 5). The graph reiterates the ubiquitous grid systemthat is the signature and matrix, father and mother, of the modern world.The sharp peak is the climax of the search for certainty and utter clarity.But the diffracting apparatus of a monstrous artifactualism can perhapsinterfere in this little family drama, reminding us that the modern worldnever existed and its fantastic guarantees are void. Both the organic andcomputer rabbits of Logic General might re-enter at this point to challengeall the passive voices of productionism. The oddly duplicated bunnies mightresist their logical interpellation and instead hint at a neo-natalogyof inappropriate/d others, where the child will not be in the sacred imageof the same. Shape-shifting, these interfering cyborgs might craft a diffractedlogic of sameness and difference and utter a different word about reproduction,about the link between science and tomorrow, from collective actors inthe field. II. The Four-Square Cyborg: ThroughArtifactualism to Elsewhere It is time to travel, therefore, with a particular subset of shiftedsubjects, Cyborgs for Earthly Survival,23 into the mindscapes and landscapesindicated at the beginning of this  FIGURES 4 &5essay. To get through the artifactual to elsewhere, it would help tohave a little travel machne that also functions as a map. Consequently,the rest of the"Promises of Monsters" wil rely on an artificialdevice that generates meanings very noisily: A.J. Greimas's infamous semioticsquare. The regions mapped by this clackety, structuralist meaning-makingmachine could never be mistaken for the transcendental realms of Natureor Society. Allied with Bruno Latour, I will put my structualist engineto amodern purposes: this will not be a tale of the rational progress ofscience, in potential league with progressive politics, patiently unveilinga grounding nature, nor will it be a demonstration of the social constructionof science and nature that locates all agency firmly n the side of humanity.Nor will the odern be superceded or infiltrated by the postmodern, becausebelief in something called the modern has itself been a mistake. Instead,the amodern referes to a view of the history of science as culture thatinsists on the absence of beginnings, enlightenments, and endings: theworld has always been in the middle of things in unruly and practical conversatin,full of action and structured by a startling array of actants and of networkingand unequal collectives. The much-criticized inability of structuralisdevices to provide the narrative of diachronic history, of progress throughtime, will be my semiotic square's greatest virture. The shape of my amodernhistory will have a different geometry,not of progress but of permanentand multi-patterned interaction through whihc lives and worlds get built,human and unhuman. This Pilgrim's Progress is taking a monstrous turn.I like my analytical technologies whihc are unruly partners in discursiveconstruction, delegates who have gotten into doing things on their own,to make a lot of noise, so that I don't forget all the circuits of competences,inherited conversations, and coa-305THE PROMISES OF MONSTERSlitions of human and unhuman actors that go into any semiotic excursions.The semiotic square, so subtle in the hands of a FredricJameson, will berather more rigid and literal here (Greimas, 1966); Jameson, 1972). I onlywant it to keep four spaces in differential, relational separation, whileI explore how certin local/global struggles for meanings and embodimentsof nature are occurring within them. Almost a joke on "elementarystructures of signification" (Guaranteed. Pure."), the semioticsquare in this essay nonetheless allows a contestable collecive world totake shape for us out of structures of difference. The four regions throughwhich we will move are A, Real Space or earth; B, Outer Space or the Extraterrestrial;not-B, Inner Space of the Body; and finally, not-A., Virtual Space or theSF world oblique to the domains of the imaginary, the symbolic, and thereal (Figure 6).Somewhat unconventionally, we will move through the square clockwiseto see what kinds of figures inhabit this exercise in science studies ascultural studies. In each of the first three quadrants of the square, Iwill begin with a popular image of nature and science that inititiallyappears both compelling and friendly, but quickly becomes a sign of deepstructures of domination. Then I will switch to a differential/oppositional FIGURE 6306DONNA HARAWAYimage and practice that might promise something else. In the final quadrant,in virtual space at the end of the journey, we will meet a disturbing guidefigure who promises information about psychic, historical, and bodily formationsthat issue, perhaps, from some other semiotic processes than the psychoanalyticin modern and postmodern guise. Directed by John Varley's (1986) storyof that name, all we will have to do to follow this disquieting, amodernBeatrice will be to "Press Enter." Her job will be to instructus in the neo-natology of inappropriate/d others. The goal of this journeyis to show in each quadrant, and in the passage through the machine thatgenerates them, metamorphoses and boundary shifts that give grounds fora scholarship and politics of hope in truly monstrous times. The pleasurespromised here are not those libertarian masculinist fantasmics of the infinitelyregressive practice of boundary violation and the accompanying frissonof brotherhood, but just maybe the pleasure of regerneration in less deadly,chiasmatic borderlands.24 Without grounding origins and without history'silluminating and progressive tropisms, how might we map some semiotic possibilitiesfor other topick gods and common places?A. Real Space: EarthIn 1984, to marke nine years of underwriting the National GeographicSociety's television specials, the Gulf Oil Corporation ran an advertisemententitled "Understanding is Everything" (Figure 7). The ad referredto some of the most watched programs in the history of public television--thenature specials about Jane Goodall and the wild chimpanzees in Tanzania'sGombe National Park. Initially, the gently clasped hands of the ape andthe young white woman seem to auger what the text proclaims--communication,trust, responsibility, and understnding across the gaps that have definedhuman existence  FIGURE7THE PROMISES OF MONSTERS307 in Nature and Society in "modern" Western narratives. Madeready by a scientific practice coded in terms of "years of patience,"through a "spontaneous gesture of trust,, initiated by the animal,Goodall metamorphoses in the ad copy from "Jane" to "Dr.Goodall." Here is a natural science, coded unmistakenly feminine,to counter the instrumentalist excesses of a military-industrial- technosciencecomplex, where the code of science is stereotypically anthropocentric andmasculine. The ad invites the viewer to forget Gulf's status as one ofthe Seven Sisters of big oil, ranking eighth among the Forbes 500 in 1980(but acquired by Chevron by the end of the decade's transnational capitalistrestructuring). In response to the financial and political challenges mountedin the early 1970s by the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC)and by ecological activism around the globe, by the late 1970s the scandal-riddengiant oil corporations had developed advertising strategies that presentedthemselves as the world's leading environmentalists-indeed, practicallyas the mothers of eco-feminism. There could be no better story than thatof Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees for narrating the healing touch betweennature and society, mediated by a science that produces full communicationin a chain that leads innocently "from curiosity, to observation,to learning, to understanding."25 Here is a story of blissful incorporation. There is another repressed set of codes in the ad as well, that of raceand imperialism, mediated by the dramas of gender and species, scienceand nature. In the National Geographic narrative, "Jane" enteredthe garden "alone" in 1960 to seek out "man's" closestrelatives, to establish a knowing touch across gulfs of time. A naturalfamily is at stake; the PBS specials document a kind of inter- speciesfamily therapy. Closing the distance between species through a patientdiscipline, where first the animals could only be known by their spoorand their calls, then by fleeting sightings, then finally by the animal'sdirect inviting touch, after which she could name them, "Jane"was admitted as "humanity's" delegate back into Eden. Societyand nature had made peace, "modern science,, and "nature"could co-exist. Jane/Dr. Goodall was represented almost as a new Adam,authorized to name not by God's creative hand, but by the animal's transformativetouch. The people of Tanzania disappear in a story in which the actorsare the anthropoid apes and a young British white woman engaged in a thoroughlymodern sacred secular drama. The chimpanzees and Goodall are both enmeshedin stories of endangerment and salvation. In the post-World War II erathe apes face biological extinction; the planet faces nuclear and ecologicalannihilation; and the West faces expulsion from its former colonial possessions.If only communication can be established, destruction can be averted. AsGulf Oil insists, "Our goal is to provoke curiosity about the worldand the fragile complexity of its natural order; to satisfy that curiositythrough observation and learning; to create an understanding of man's placein the ecological structure, and his responsibility to it-on the simpletheory that no thinking person can share in the destruction of anythingwhose value he understands." Progress, rationality, and nature joinin the great myth of modernity, which is so thoroughly threatened by adozen looming apocalypses. A cross-species family romance promises to avertthe threatened destruction. Inaudible in the Gulf and National Geographic version, communicationand understanding are to emerge in the communion between Jane/Dr. Goodalland the spontaneously trusting chimpanzee at just the historical momentwhen dozens of African nations are achieving their national independence,15 in 1960 alone, the year Goodall set out for Gombe. Missing from thefamily romance are such beings as Tanzanians. African peoples seek to establishhegemony over the lands in which they live; to do that the stories of thenatural presence of white colonists must be displaced, usually by extremelycomplex and dangerous nationalist stories. But in "Understanding IsEverything," the metonymic "spontaneous gesture of trust"from the animal hand to the 308DONNA HARAWAY white hand obliterates once again the invisible bodies of people ofcolor who have never counted as able to represent humanity in Western iconography.The white hand will be the instrument for saving nature-and in the processbe saved from a rupture with nature. Closing great gaps, the transcendentalsof nature and society meet here in the metonymic figure of softly embracinghands from two worlds, whose innocent touch depends on the absence of the"other world," the "third world," where the drama actuallytranspires. In the history of the life sciences, the great chain of being leadingfrom "lower" to "higher" life forms has played a crucialpart in the discursive construction of race as an object of knowledge andof racism as a living force. After World War II and the partial removalof explicit racism from evolutionary biology and physical anthropology,a good deal of racist and colonialist discourse remained projected ontothe screen of "man's closest relatives," the anthropoid apes.26It is impossible to picture the entwined hands of a white woman and anAfrican ape without evoking the history of racist inconography in biologyand in European and American popular culture. The animal hand is metonymicallythe individual chimpanzee, all threatened species, the third world, peoplesof color, Africa, the ecologically endangered earth-all firmly in the realmof Nature, all represented in the leathery hand folding around that ofthe white girlwoman under the Gulf sun logo shining on the Seven Sisters'commitment to science and nature. The spontaneous gesture of touch in thewilds of Tanzania authorizes a whole doctrine of representation. Jane,as Dr. Goodall, is empowered to speak for the chimpanzees. Science speaksfor nature. Authorized by unforced touch, the dynamics of representationtake over, ushering in the reign of freedom and communication. This isthe structure of depoliticizing expert discourse, so critical to the mythicpolitical structures of the "modern" world and to the mythicpolitical despair of much "postmodernism," so undermined by fearsabout the breakdown of representation.27 Unfortunately, representation,fraudulent or not, is a very resilient practice. The clasping hands of the Gulf ad are semiotically similar to the elusionpeak in the Vega ad of Figure 5: "Guaranteed. Pure."; "UnderstandingIs Everything." There is no interruption in these stories of communication,progress, and salvation through science and technology. The story of JaneGoodall in Gombe, however, can be made to show its conditions of possibility;even in the footage of the National Geographic specials we see the youngwoman on a mountain top at night eating from a can of pork and beans, thatsign of industrial civilization so crucial to the history of colonialismin Africa, as Orson Welles's voice-over speaks of the lonely quest forcontact with nature! In one of Goodall's published accounts of the earlydays at Gombe, we learn that she and her mother, enroute to the chimpanzeepreserve, were stopped on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in the town ofKigoma, across from the no-longer-Belgian Congo, as uburu, freedom, soundedacross Africa. Goodall and her mother made 2000 spam sandwiches for fleeingBelgians before embarking for the "wilds of Tanzania" (Goodall,1971, p. 27). It is also possible to reconstruct a history of Gombe asa research site in the 1970s. One of the points that stands out in thisreconstruction is that people- research staff and their families, African,European, and North American-considerably outnumbered chimpanzees duringthe years of most intense scientific work. Nature and Society met in onestory; in another story, the structure of action and the actants take adifferent shape. It is hard, however, to make the story of Jane Goodall and the wildchimpanzees shed its "modern" message about "saving nature,',in both senses of nature as salvific and of the scientist speaking forand preserving nature in a drama of representation. Let us, therefore,leave this narrative for another colonized tropical spot in the Real/Earth 309THE PROMISES OF MONSTERSquadrant in the semiotic square-Amazonia. Remembering that all colonizedspots have euphemistically stated, a special relation to nature, let usstructure this story to tell something amodern about nature and society-andperhaps something more compatible with the survival of all the networkedactants, human and unhuman. To tell this story we must disbelieve in bothnature and society and resist their associated imperatives to represent,to reflect, to echo, to act as a ventriloquist for "the other."The main point is there will be no Adam-and no Jane-who gets to name allthe beings in the garden. The reason is simple: there is no garden andnever has been. No name and no touch is original. The question animatingthis diffracted narrative, this story based on little differences, is alsosimple: is there a consequential difference between a political semioticsof articulation and a political semiotics of representation? The August 1990 issue of Discover magazine has a story entitled "Techin the Jungle." A one and one-half page color photo of a Kayapo Indian,in indigenous dress and using a videocamera, dramatically accompanies theopening paragraphs. The caption tells us the man is "tap[ing] histribesmen, who had gathered in the central Brazilian town of Altamira toprotest plans for a hydroelectric dam on their territory" (Zimmer,1990, 42-5). All the cues in the Discover article invite us to read thisphoto as the drama of the meeting of the "traditional" and the"modern," staged in this popular North American scientific publicationfor audiences who have a stake in maintaining belief in those categories.We have, however, as disbelieving members of those audiences, a differentpolitical, semiotic responsibility, one made easier by another publication,Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn's The Fate of the Forest (1989; seealso T. Turner, 1990) through which I propose to suggest articulationsand solidarities with theflming practice of the Kayapo man, rather thanto read the photograph of him, which will not be reproduced in this essay.28 In their book, which was deliberately packaged, published, and marketedin a format and in time for the 1989 December gift-giving season, a modestact of cultural politics not to be despised, Hecht and Cockburn have acentral agenda. They insist on deconstructing the image of the tropicalrain forest, especially Amazonia, as "Eden under glass." Theydo this in order to insist on locations of responsibility and empowermentin current conservation struggles, on the outcome of which the lives andways of life for people and many other species depend. In particular, theysupport a politics not of "saving nature" but of "socialnature," not of national parks and walled-off reserves, respondingwith a technical fix to whatever particular danger to survival seems mostinescapable, but of a different organization of land and people, wherethe practice of justice restructures the concept of nature. The authors tell a relentless story of a "social nature" overmany hundreds of years, at every turn co-inhabited and co-constituted byhumans, land, and other organisms. For example, the diversity and patternsof tree species in the forest cannot be explained without the deliberate,long-term practices of the Kayapo and other groups, whom Hecht and Cockburndescribe, miraculously avoiding romanticizing, as "accomplished environmentalscientists." Hecht and Cockburn avoid romanticizing because they donot invoke the category of the modern as the special zone of science. Thus,they do not have to navigate the shoals threatening comparisons of, accordingto taste, mere or wonderful "ethnoscience" with real or disgusting"modern science." The authors insist on visualizing the forestas the dynamic outcome of human as well as biological history. Only afterthe dense indigenous populations-numbering from six to twelve million in1492-had been sickened, enslaved, killed, and otherwise displaced fromalong the rivers could Europeans represent Amazonia as "empty"of culture, as "nature," or, in later terms, as a purely "biological"entity. 310THE PROMISES OF MONSTERS But, of course, the Amazon was not and did not become "empty,,,although "nature" (like "man") is one of those discursiveconstructions that operates as a technology for making the world over intoits image. First, there are indigenous people in the forest, many of whomhave organized themselves in recent years into a regionally grounded, world-historicalsubject prepared for local/global interactions, or, in other terms, forbuilding new and powerful collectives out of humans and unhumans, technologicaland organic. With all of the power to reconstitute the real implied indiscursive construction, they have become a new discursive subject/object,the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon, made up of national and tribal groupsfrom Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru, numbering about one million persons,who in turn articulate themselves with other organized groups of the indigenouspeoples of the Americas. Also, in the forest are about 200,000 people ofmixed ancestry, partly overlapping with the indigenous people. Making theirliving as petty extractors-of gold, nuts, rubber, and other forest products-theyhave a history of many generations in the Amazon. It is a complex historyof dire exploitation. These people are also threatened by the latest schemesof world banks or national capitals from Brasilia to Washington.29 Theyhave for many decades been in conflict with indigenous peoples over resourcesand ways of life. Their presence in the forest might be the fruit of thecolonial fantasies of the bandeirantes, romantics, curators, politicians,or speculators; but their fate is entwined intimately with that of theother always historical inhabitants of this sharply contested world. Itis from these desperately poor people, specifically the rubber tappersunion, that Chico Mendes, the world-changing activist murdered on December22, 1988, came.30 A crucial part of Mendes's vision for which he was killed was the unionof the extractors and the indigenous peoples of the forest into, as Hechtand Cockburn argue, the "true defenders of the forest." Theirposition as defenders derives not from a concept of "nature underthreat,'' but rather from a relationship with "the forest as the integumentin their own elemental struggle to survive'' (p. 196).31 In other words,their authority derives not from the power to represent from a distance,nor from an ontological natural status, but from a constitutive socialrelationality in which the forest is an integral partner, part of natural/socialembodiment. In their claims for authority over the fate of the fores~ theresident peoples are articulating ~ social collective entity among humans,other organisms, and other kinds of non-human actors. Indigenous people are resisting a long history of forced "tutelage,"in order to confront the powerful representations of the national and internationalenvironmentalists, bankers, developers, and technocrats. The extractors,for example, the rubber tappers, are also independently articulating theircollective viewpoint. Neither group is willing to see the Amazon "saved"by their exclusion and permanent subjection to historically dominatingpolitical and economic forces. As Hecht and Cockburn put it, "Therubber tappers have not risked their lives for extractive reserves so theycould live on them as debt peons" (p. 202). "Any program forthe Amazon begins with basic human rights: an end to debt bondage, violence,enslavement, and killings practiced by those who would seize the landsthese forest people have occupied for generations. Forest people seek legalrecognition of native lands and extractive reserves held under the principleof collective property, worked as individual holdings with individual returns"(p. 207). At the second Brazilian national meeting of the Forest People's Allianceat Rio Branco in 1989, shortly after Mendes's murder raised the stakesand catapaulted the issues into the international media, a program wasformulated in tension with the latest Brazilian state policy called NossaNatureza. Articulating quite a different notion of the first person pluralrelation to nature or natural surroundings, the basis of the program ofthe Forest People's Alliance is control by and for the peoples of the forest.The core THE PROMISES OF MONSTERS311 matters are direct control of indigenous lands by native peoples; agrarianreform joined to an environmental program; economic and technical development;health posts; raised incomes; locally controlled marketing systems; anend to fiscal incentives for cattle ranchers, agribusiness, and unsustainablelogging; an end to debt peonage; and police and legal protection. Hechtand Cockburn call this an "ecology of justice" that rejects atechnicist solution, in whatever benign or malignant form, to environmentaldestruction. The Forest People's Alliance does not reject scientific ortechnical know-how, their own and others'; instead, they reject the "modern"political epistemology that bestows jurisdiction on the basis of technoscientificdiscourse. The fundamental point is that the Amazonian Biosphere is anirreducibly human/non-human collective entity.32 There will be no naturewithout justice. Nature and justice, contested discursive objects embodiedin the material world, will become extinct or survive together. Theory here is exceedingly corporeal, and the body is a collective;it is an historical artifact constituted by human as well as organic andtechnological unhuman actors. Actors are entities which do things, haveeffects, build worlds in concatenation with other unlike actors.33 Someactors, for example specific human ones, can try to reduce other actorsto resources-to mere ground and matrix for their action; but such a moveis contestable, not the necessary relation of "human nature,' to therest of the world. Other actors, human and unhuman, regularly resist reductionisms.The powers of domination do fail sometimes in their projects to pin otheractors down; people can work to enhance the relevant failure rates. Socialnature is the nexus I have called artifactual nature. The human "defendersof the forest" do not and have not lived in a garden; it is from aknot in the always historical and heterogeneous nexus of social naturethat they articulate their claims. Or perhaps, it is within such a nexusthat I and people like me narrate a possible politics of articulation ratherthan representation. It is our responsibility to learn whether such a fictionis one with which the Amazonians might wish to connect in the interestsof an alliance to defend the rain forest and its human and non-human waysof life-because assuredly North Americans, Europeans, and the Japanese,among others, cannot watch from afar as if we were not actors, willingor not, in the life and death struggles in the Amazon. In a review of Fate of the Forest, Joe Kane, author of another bookon the tropical rain forest marketed in time for Christmas in 1989, theadventure trek Running the Amazon (1989),34 raised this last issue in away that will sharpen and clarify my stakes in arguing against a politicsof representation generally, and in relation to questions of environmentalismand conservation specifically. In the context of worrying about ways thatsocial nature or socialist ecology sounded too much like the multi-usepolicies in national forests in the United States, which have resultedin rapacious exploitation of the land and of other organisms, Kane askeda simple question: "[W]ho speaks for the jaguar?" Now, I careabout the survival of the jaguar-and the chimpanzee, and the Hawaiian landsnails, and the spotted owl, and a lot of other earthlings. I care a greatdeal; in fact, I think I and my social groups are particularly, but notuniquely, responsible if jaguars, and many other non-human, as well ashuman, ways of life should perish. But Kane's question seemed wrong ona fundamental level. Then I understood why. His question was preciselylike that asked by some pro-life groups in the abortion debates: Who speaksfor the fetus? What is wrong with both questions? And how does this matterrelate to science studies as cultural studies? Who speaks for the jaguar? Who speaks for the fetus? Both questionsrely on a political semiotics of representation.35 Permanently speechless,forever requiring the services of a ventriloquist, never forcing a recallvote, in each case the object or ground of representation is the realizationof the representative's fondest dream. As Marx said 312DONNA HARAWAY in a somewhat different context, "They cannot represent themselves;they must be represented."36 But for a political semiology of representation,nature and the unborn fetus are even better, epistemologically, than subjugatedhuman adults. The effectiveness of such representation depends on distancingoperations. The represented must be disengaged from surrounding and constitutingdiscursive and non-discursive nexuses and relocated in the authorial domainof the representative. Indeed, the effect of this magical operation isto disempower precisely those-in our case, the pregnant woman and the peoplesof the forest-who are "close" to the now-represented "natural"object. Both the jaguar and the fetus are carved out of one collectiveentity and relocated in another, where they are reconstituted as objectsof a particular kind-as the ground of a representational practice thatforever authorizes the ventriloquist. Tutelage will be eternal. The representedis reduced to the permanent status of the recipient of action, never tobe a co-actor in an articulated practice among unlike, but joined, socialpartners. Everything that used to surround and sustain the represented object,such as pregnant women and local people, simply disappears or re-entersthe drama as an agonist. For example, the pregnant woman becomes juridicallyand medically, two very powerful discursive realms, the "maternalenvironment" (Hubbard, 1990). Pregnant women and local people arethe least able to "speak for" objects like jaguars or fetusesbecause they get discursively reconstituted as beings with opposing "interests."Neither woman nor fetus, jaguar nor Kayapo Indian is an actor in the dramaof representation. One set of entities becomes the represented, the otherbecomes the environment, often threatening, of the represented object.The only actor left is the spokesperson, the one who represents. The forestis no longer the integument in a co-constituted social nature; the womanis in no way a partner in an intricate and intimate dialectic of socialrelationality crucial to her own personhooilyn Strathern, "BetweenThings: A Melanesianist's Comment on Deconstructive Feminism," unpublishedmanuscript. Western feminists have been struggling to articulate a phenomenologyof pregnancy that rejects the dominant cultural framework of productionism/reproductionism,with its logic of passive resource and active technologist. In these effortsthe woman-fetus nexus is refigured as a knot of relationality within awider web, where liberal individuals are not the actors, but where complexcollectives, including non-liberal social persons (singular and plural),are. Similar refigurings appear in ecofemmlst discourse. 38. See the fall 1990 newsletter of the Society for the Social Studyof Science, Technoscience 3, no. 3, pp. 20, 22, for language about "goingback to nature." A session of the 4S October meetings is titled "Backto Nature." Malcolm Ashmore's abstract, "With a Reflexive Sociologyof Actants, There Is No Going Back," offers "fully comprehensiveinsurance against going back," instead of other competitors' lessgood "ways of not going back to Nature (or Society or Self)." 336DONNA HARAWAY All of this occurs in the context of a crisis of confidence among many4S scholars that their very fruitful research programs of the last 10 yearsare running into dead ends. They are. I will refrain from commenting onthe blatant misogyny in the Western scholar's textualized terror of "goingback', to a phantastic nature (figured by science critics as "objective"nature. Literary academicians figure the same terrible dangers slightlydifferently; for both groups such a nature is definitively pre-social,monstrously not-human, and a threat to their careers). Mother nature alwayswaits, in these adolescent boys' narratives, to smother the newly individuatedhero. He forgets this weird mother is his creation; the forgetting, orthe inversion, is basic to ideologies of scientific objectivity and ofnature as "eden under glass." It also plh is represented; the objective worldappears to be the actant solely by virtue of the operations of representation(Latour, 1987, pp. 70-74, 90). THE PROMISES OF MONSTERS313 The authorship rests with the representor, even as he claims independentobject status for the represented. In this doubled structure, the simultaneouslysemiotic and political ambiguity of representation is glaring. First, achain of substitutions, operating through inscription devices, relocatespower and action in "objects" divorced from polluting contextualizationsand named by formal abstractions ("the fetus,'). Then, the readerof inscriptions speaks for his docile constituencies, the objects. Thisis not a very lively world, and it does not finally offer much to jaguars,in whose interests the whole apparatus supposedly operates. In this essay I have been arguing for another way of seeing actors andactants- and consequently another way of working to position scientistsand science in important struggles in the world. I have stressed actantsas collective entities doing things in a structured and structuring fieldof action; I have framed the issue in terms of articulation rather thanrepresentation. Human beings use names to point to themselves and otheractors and easily mistake the names for the things. These same humans alsothink the traces of inscription devices are like names-pointers to things,such that the inscriptions and the things can be enrolled in dramas ofsubstitution and inversion. But the things, in my view, do not pre-existas ever-elusive, but fully pre-packaged, referents for the names. Otheractors are more like tricksters than that. Boundaries take provisional,neverfinished shape in articulatory practices. The potential for the unexpectedfrom unstripped human and unhuman actants enrolled in articulations-i.e.,the potential for generation- remains both to trouble and to empower technoscience.Western philosophers sometimes take account of the inadequacy of namesby stressing the "negativity" inherent in all representations.This takes us back to Spivak's remark cited early in this paper about theimportant things that we cannot not desire, but can never possess-or represent,because representation depends on possession of a passive resource, namely,the silent object, the stripped actant. Perhaps we can, however, "articulate"with humans and unhumans in a social relationship, which for us is alwayslanguage-mediated (among other semiotic, i.e., "meaningful,"mediations). But, for our unlike partners, well, the action is "different,"perhaps "negative" from our linguistic point of view, but crucialto the generativity of the collective. It is the empty space, the undecidability,the wiliness of other actors, the "negativity," that give meconfidence in the reality and therefore ultimate unrepresentability ofsocial nature and that make me suspect doctrines of representation andobjectivity. My crude characterization does not end up with an "objective world"or "nature," but it certainly does insist on the world. Thisworld must always be articulated, from people's points of view, through"situated knowledges" (Haraway, 1988; 1991). These knowledgesare friendly to science, but do not provide any grounds for history-escapinginversions and amnesia about how articulations get made, about their politicalsemiotics, if you will. I think the world is precisely what gets lost indoctrines of representation and scientific objectivity. It is because Icare about jaguars, among other actors, including the overlapping but non-identicalgroups called forest peoples and ecologists, that I reject Joe Kane's question.Some science studies scholars have been terrified to criticize their constructivistformulations because the only alternative seems to be some retrograde kindof "going back" to nature and to philosophical realism.38 Butabove all people, these scholars should know that "nature" and"realism" are precisely the consequences of representationalpractices. Where we need to move is not "back" to nature, butelsewhere, through and within an artifactual social nature, which thesevery scholars have helped to make expressable in current Western scholarlypractice. That knowledge-building practice might be articulated to otherpractices in "pro-life" ways that aren't about the fetus or thejaguar as nature fetishes and the expert as their ventriloquist. 314DONNA HARAWAY Prepared by this long detour, we can return to the Kayapo man videotapinghis tribesmen as they protest a new hydroelectric dam on their territory.The National Geographic Society, Discover magazine, and Gulf Oil-and muchphilosophy and social science-would have us see his practice as a doubleboundary crossing between the primitive and the modern. His representationalpractice, signified by his use of the latest technology, places him inthe realm of the modern. He is, then, engaged in an entertaining contradiction-thepreservation of an unmodern way of life with the aid of incongruous moderntechnology. But, from the perspective of a political semiotics of articulation,the man might well be forging a recent collective of humans and unhumans,in this case made up of the Kayapo, videocams, land, plants, animals, nearand distant audiences, and other constituents; but no boundary violationis involved. The way of life is not unmodern (closer to nature); the camerais not modern or postmodern (in society). Those categories should no longermake sense. Where there is no nature and no society, there is no pleasure,no entertainment to be had in representing the violation of the boundarybetween them. Too bad for nature magazines, but a gain for inappropriate/dothers. The videotaping practice does not thereby become innocent or uninteresting,but its meanings have to be approached differently, in terms of the kindsof collective action taking place and the claims they make on others-suchas ourselves, people who do not live in the Amazon. We are all in chiasmaticborderlands, liminal areas where new shapes, new kinds of action and responsibility,are gestating in the world. The man using that camera iS forging a practicalclaim on us, morally and epistemologically, as well as on the other forestpeople to whom he will show the tape to consolidate defense of the forest.His practice invites further articulation-on terms shaped by the forestpeople. They will no longer be represented as Objects, not because theycross a line to represent themselves in "modern" terms as Subjects,but because they powerfully form articulated collectives. In May of 1990, a week-long meeting took place in Iquitos, a formerlyprosperous rubber boom-town in the Peruvian Amazon. COICA, the CoordinatingBody for the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon, had assembled forest people(from all the nations constituting Amazonia), environmental groups fromaround the world (Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Rain Forest ActionNetwork, etc.), and media organizations (Time magazine, CNN, NBC, etc.)in order "to find a common path on which we can work to preserve theAmazon forest" (Arena-De Rosa, 1990, pp. 1-2). Rain forest protectionwas formulated as a necessarily joint human rights-ecological issue. Thefundamental demand by indigenous people was that they must be part of allinternational negotiations involving their territories. "Debt fornature" swaps were particular foci of controversy, especially whereindigenous groups end up worse off than in previous agreements with theirgovernments as a result of bargaining between banks, external conservationgroups, and national states. The controversy generated a proposal: insteadof a swap of debt-for-nature, forest people would support swaps of debt-for-indigenouscontrolledterritory, in which non- indigenous environmentalists would have a "redefinedrole in helping to develop the plan for conservation management of theparticular region of the rain forest" (Arena-De Rosa, 1990). Indigenousenvironmentalists would also be recognized not for their quaint "ethnoscience,"but for their knowledge. Nothing in this structure of action rules out articulations by scientistsor other North Americans who care about jaguars and other actors; but thepatterns, flows, and intensities of power are most certainly changed. Thatis what articulation does; it is always a non-innocent, contestable practice;the partners are never set once and for all. There is no ventriloquismhere. Articulation is work, and it may fail. All the people THE PROMISES OF MONSTERS315 who care, cognitively, emotionally, and politically, must articulatetheir position in a field constrained by a new collective entity, madeup of indigenous people and other human and unhuman actors. Commitmentand engagement, not their invalidation, in an emerging collective are theconditions of joining knowledge- producing and worldbuilding practices.This is situated knowledge in the New World; it builds on common places,and it takes unexpected turns. So far, such knowledge has not been sponsoredby the major oil corporations, banks, and logging interests. That is preciselyone of the reasons why there is so much work for North Americans, Europeans,and Japanese, among others, to do in articulation with those humans andnon-humans who live in rain forests and in many other places in the semioticspace called earth. B. Outer Space: The Extraterrestrial Since we have spent so much time on earth, a prophylactic exercise forresidents of the alien "First World," we will rush through theremaining three quadrants of the semiotic square. We move from one topicalcommonplace to another, from earth to space, to see what turns our journeysto elsewhere might take. An ecosystem is always of a particular type, for example, a temperategrassland or a tropical rain forest. In the iconography of late capitalism,Jane Goodall did not go to that kind of ecosystem. She went to the "wildsof Tanzania," a mythic "ecosystem" reminiscent of the originalgarden from which her kind had been expelled and to which she returnedto commune with the wilderness's present inhabitants to learn how to survive.This wilderness was close in its dream quality to "space," butthe wilderness of Africa was coded as dense, damp, bodily, full of sensuouscreatures who touch intimately and intensely. In contrast, the extraterrestrialis coded to be fully general; it is about escape from the bounded globeinto an anti-ecosystem called, simply, space. Space is not about "man~s"origins on earth but about "his" future, the two key allochronictimes of salvation history. Space and the tropics are both utopian topicalfigures in Western imaginations, and their opposed properties dialecticallysignify origins and ends for the creature whose mundane life is supposedlyoutside both: modern or postmodern man. The first primates to approach that abstract place called "space"were monkeys and apes. A rhesus monkey survived an 83 mile-high flightin 1949. Jane Goodall arrived in "the wilds of Tanzania" in 1960to encounter and name the famous Gombe Stream chimpanzees introduced tothe National Geographic television audience in 1965. However, other chimpanzeeswere vying for the spotlight in the early 1960s. On January 31, 1961, aspart of the United States man-in-space program, the chimpanzee HAM, trainedfor his task at Holloman Air Force Base, 20 minutes by car from Alamogordo,New Mexico, near the site of the first atom bomb explosion in July 1945,was shot into suborbital flight (Figure 8). HAM's name inevitably recallsNoah's youngest and only black son. But this chimpanzeets name was froma different kind of text. His name was an acronym for the scientific-militaryinstitution that launched him, Holloman AeroMedical; and he rode an arcthat traced the birth path of modern science-the parabola, the conic section.HAM's parabolic path is rich with evocations of the history of Westernscience. The path of a projectile that does not escape gravity, the parabolais the shape considered so deeply by Galileo, at the first mythic momentof origins of modernity, when the unquantifiable sensuous and countablemathematical properties of bodies were separated from each other in scientificknowledge. It describes the path of ballistic weapons, and it is the tropefor "man's" doomed projects in the writings of the existentialistsin the 1950s. The parabola traces the path of Rocket Man at the end ofWorld 316DONNA HARAWAYWar II in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973). An understudy forman, HAM went only to the boundary of space, in suborbital flight. On hisreturn to earth, he was named. He had been known only as #65 before hissuccessful flight. If, in the official birth-mocking language of the ColdWar, the mission had to be "aborted," the authorities did notwant the public worrying about the death of a famous and named, even ifnot quite human, astronaut. In fact, #65 did have a name among his handlers,Chop Chop Chang, recalling the stunning racism in which the other primateshave been made to participate.39 The space race's surrogate child was an"understudy for man in the conquest of space" (Eimerl and Deyore, 1965, p. 173). His hominid cousins would transcend that closed parabolicfigure, first in the ellipse of orbital flight, then in the open trajectoriesof escape from earth's gravity. HAM, his human cousins and simian colleagues, and their englobing andinterfacing technology were implicated in a reconstitution of masculinityin Cold War and space race idioms. The movie The Right Stu~ (1985) showsthe first crop of human astronau(gh)ts struggling with their affrontedpride when they realize their tasks were competently performed by theirsimian cousins. They and the chimps were caught in the same theater ofthe Cold War, where the masculinist, death-defying, and skillrequiringheroics of the old jet aircraft test pilots became obsolete, to be replacedby the media-hype routines of projects Mercury, Apollo, and their sequelae.After chimpanzee Enos completed a fully automated orbital flight on November29,1961, John Glenn, who would be the first human American astronaut toorbit earth, defensively "looked toward the future by affirming hisbelief in the superiority of astronauts over chimponauts." Newsweekannounced Glenn's orbital flight of February 20,1962, with the headline,"John Glenn: One Machine That Worked Without Flaw."40 Sovietprimates on both sides of the line of hominization raced their U.S. siblingsinto extraterrestrial orbit. The space ships, the recording and trackingtechnologies, animals, and human beings were joined as cyborgs in a theaterof war, science, and popular culture. Henry Burroughs's famous photograph of an interested and intelligent,actively participating HAM, watching the hands of a white, laboratory-coated,human man release him from his contour couch, illuminated the system ofmeanings that binds humans and apes together in the late twentieth century(Weaver, 1961). HAM is the perfect child, reborn in the cold matrix ofspace. Time described chimponaut Enos in his "fitted contour couchthat looked like a cradle trimmed with electronics.41 Enos and HAM werecyborg neonates, born of the interface of the dreams about a technicistautomaton and masculinist autonomy. There could be no more iconic cyborgthan a telemetrically implanted chimpanzee, understudy for man, launchedfrom earth in the space program, while his conspecific in the jungle, "ina spontaneous gesture of trust," embraced the hand of a woman scientistnamed Jane in a Gulf Oil ad showing "man's place in the ecologicalstructure." On one end of time and space, the chimpanzee in the wildernessmodeled communication for the stressed, ecologically threatened and threatening,modern human. On the other end, the ET chimpanzee modeled social and technicalcybernetic communication systems, which permit postmodern man to escapeboth the jungle and the city, in a thrust into the future made possibleby the socialtechnical systems of the "information age" in aglobal context of threatened nuclear war. The closing image of a humanfetus hurtling through space in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968) completed the voyage of discovery begun by the weaponwielding apesat the film's gripping opening. It was the project(ile) of self- made,reborn man, in the process of being raptured out of history. The Cold Warwas simulated ultimate war; the media and advertising industries of nuclearculture produced in the317THE PROMISES OF MONSTERSbodies of animals--paradigmatic atives and aliens--the reassuring imagesappropriate to this state of pure war (Virilio and Lotringer, 1983).42In the aftermath of te Cold War, we face not the end of nuclearism,but its dissemination. Even without our knowing his ultmate fate as anadult caged chimpanzee, the photograph of HAM rapidly ceases to entertain,much less to edify. Therefore, let us look to another cyborg image to figurepossible emergencies of inappropriate/d others to challenge our rapturousmythic brothers, the postmodern spacemen. At first sight, the T-shirt worn by anti-nuclear demonstrators at theMother's and Others' Day Action in 1987 at the United States's Nevada nucleartest site seems in simple opposition to HAM in his electronic cradle (fFigure9). But a little unpacking shows the promising semiotic and political complexityof the image and of the action. When the T-shirt was sent to the printer,the name of the event was still the Mother's Day Action," but notlong after some planning participants objected. For many, Mother's Daywas, at best, an ambivalent time for a women's action. The overdeterminedgender coding of patriarchal nuclear culture all too easily makes womenresponsible for peace while men fiddle with their dangerous war toys withoutsemiotic dissonance. With its commercialismand multi-leveled reinforcementof compulsory heterosexual reproduction, Mother's Day is also not everbody'sfavorite feminist holiday. For others, intent  FIGURES 8 & 9In Figure 8 Ham awaits release in his couch aboardthe recovery vessle LSD Donner after his successfulMercury Project launch. Photograph by HenryBurroughs 318DONNA HARAWAYon reclaiming the holiday for other meanings, mothers, and by extensionwomen in general, do have a special obligation to preserve children, andso the earth, from military destruction. For them, the earth is metaphoricallymother and child, and in both figurations, a subject of nurturing and birthing.However, this was not an all-women's (much less all-mothers') action, althoughwomen organized and shaped it. From discussion, the designation "Mother'sand Others' Day Action" emerged. But then, some thought that meantmothers and men. It took memory exercises in feminist analysis to rekindleshared consciousness that mother does not equal woman and vice versa. Partof the day's purpose was to recode Mother's Day to signify men's obligationsto nurture the earth and all its children. In the spirit of this set ofissues, at a time when Baby M and her many debatable-and unequally positioned-parentswere in the news and the courts, the all-female affinity group which Ijoined took as its name the Surrogate Others. These surrogates were notunderstudies for man, but were gestating for another kind of emergence. From the start, the event was conceived as an action that linked socialjustice and human rights, environmentalism, anti-militarism, and anti-nuclearism.On the T-shirt, there is, indeed, the perfect icon of the union of allissues under environmentalism's rubric: the "whole earth," thelovely, cloud-wrapped, blue, planet earth is simultaneously a kind of fetusfloating in the amniotic cosmos and a mother to all its own inhabitants,germ of the future, matrix of the past and present. It is a perfect globe,joining the changeling matter of mortal bodies and the ideal eternal sphereof the philosophers. This snapshot resolves the dilemma of modernity, theseparation of Subject and Object, Mind and Body. There is, however, a jarringnote in all this, even for the most devout. That particular image of theearth, of Nature, could only exist if a camera on a satellite had takenthe picture, which is, of course, precisely the case. Who speaks for theearth? Firmly in the object world called nature, this bourgeois, family-affirmingsnapshot of mother earth is about as uplifting as a loving commercial Mother'sDay card. And yet, it is beautiful, and it is ours; it must be broughtinto a different focus. The T-shirt is part of a complex collective entity,involving many circuits, delegations, and displacements of competencies.Only in the context of the space race in the first place, and the militarizationand commodification of the whole earth, does it make sense to relocatethat image as the special sign of an anti-nuclear, anti-militaristic, earth-focusedpolitics. The relocation does not cancel its other resonances; it contestsfor their outcome. I read Environmental Action's "whole earth" as a sign of anirreducible artifactual social nature, like the Gaia of SF writer JohnVarley and biologist Lynn Margulis. Relocated on this particular T-shirt,the satellite's eye view of planet earth provokes an ironic version ofthe question, who speaks for the earth (for the fetus, the mother, thejaguar, the object world of nature, all those who must be represented)?For many of us, the irony made it possible to participate-indeed, to participateas fully committed, if semiotically unruly, eco- feminists. Not everybodyin the Mother's and Others' Day Action would agree; for many, the T-shirtimage meant what it said, love your mother who is the earth. Nuclearismis misogyny. The field of readings in tension with each other is also partof the point. Eco-feminism and the non-violent direct action movement havebeen based on struggles over differences, not on identity. There is hardlya need for affinity groups and their endless process if sameness prevailed.Affinity is precisely not identity; the sacred image of the same is notgestating on this Mother's and Others' Day. Literally, enrolling the satellite'scamera and the peace action in Nevada into a new collective, this LoveYour Mother image is based on diffraction, on the processing of small butconsequential differences. The processing of differences, semiotic action,is about ways of life. THE PROMISES OF MONSTERS319 The Surrogate Others planned a birthing ceremony in Nevada, and so theymade a birth canal-a sixteen-foot long, three-foot diameter, floral polyester-covered worm with lovely dragon eyes. It was a pleasingly artifactual beast,ready for connection. The worm-dragon was laid under the barbed-wire boundarybetween the land on which the demonstrators could stand legally and theland on which they would be arrested as they emerged. Some of the SurrogateOthers conceived of crawling through the worm to the forbidden side asan act of solidarity with the tunneling creatures of the desert, who hadto share their subsurface niches with the test site's chambers. This surrogatebirthing was definitely not about the obligatory heterosexual nuclear familycompulsively reproducing itself in the womb of the state, with or withoutthe underpaid services of the wombs of "surrogate mothers." Mother'sand Others' Day was looking up. It wasn't only the desert's non-human organisms with whom the activistswere in solidarity as they emerged onto the proscribed territory. Fromthe point of view of the demonstrators, they were quite legally on thetest-site land. This was so not out of some "abstract" sensethat the land was the people's and had been usurped by the war state, butfor more "concrete" reasons: all the demonstrators had writtenpermits to be on the land signed by the Western Shoshone National Council.The 1863 Treaty of RuLy Valley recognized the Western Shoshone title toancestral territory, including the land illegally invaded by the U.S. governmentto build its nuclear facility. The treaty has never been mod)fied or abrogated,and U.S. efforts to buy the land (at 15 cents per acre) in 1979 was refusedby the only body authorized to decide, the Western Shoshone National Council.The county sheriff and his deputies, surrogates for the federal government,were, in "discursive" and "embodied" fact, trespassing.In 1986 the Western Shoshone began to issue permits to the anti-nucleardemonstrators as part of a coalition that joined anti-nuclearism and indigenousland rights. It is, of course, hard to make citizens' arrests of the policewhen they have you handcuffed and when the courts are on their side. Butit is quite possible to join this ongoing struggle, which is very much"at home," and to articulate it with the defense of the Amazon.That articulation requires collectives of human and unhuman actors of manykinds. There were many other kinds of "symbolic action" at the testsite that day in 1987. The costumes of the sheriff's deputies and theirnasty plastic handcuffs were also symbolic action-highly embodied symbolicaction. The "symbolic action" of brief, safe arrest is also quitea different matter from the "semiotic" conditions under whichmost people in the U.S., especially people of color and the poor, are jailed.The difference is not the presence or absence of "symbolism,"but the force of the respective collectives made up of humans and unhumans,of people, other organisms, technologies, institutions. I am not undulyimpressed with the power of the drama of the Surrogate Others and the otheraffinity groups, nor, unfortunately, of the whole action. But I do takeseriously the work to relocate, to diffract, embodied meanings as crucialwork to be done in gestating a new world.43 It is cultural politics, andit is technoscience politics. The task is to build more powerful collectivesin dangerously unpromising times. Not-B. Inner Space: The Biomedical Body The limitless reaches of outer space, joined to Cold War and post-ColdWar nuclear technoscience, seem vastly distant from their negation, theenclosed and dark regions of the inside of the human body, domain of theapparatuses of biomedical visualization. But these two quadrants of oursemiotic square are multiply tied together in technoscience's heterogeneousapparatuses of bodily production. As Sarah Franklin noted, "The twonew investment frontiers, outer space and inner space, vie for the futuresmarket." 320DONNA HARAWAY In this "futures market," two entities are especially interestingfor this essay: the fetus and the immune system, both of which are embroiledin determinations of what may count as nature and as human, as separatenatural object and as juridical subject. We have already looked brieflyat some of the matrices of discourse about the fetus in the discussionof earth (who speaks for the fetus?) and outer space (the planet floatingfree as cosmic germ). Here, I will concentrate on contestations for whatcounts as a self and an actor in contemporary immune system discourse. The equation of Outer Space and Inner Space, and of their conjoineddiscourses of extraterrestrialism, ultimate frontiers, and high technologywar, is literal in the official history celebrating 100 years of the NationalGeographic Society (Bryan, 1987). The chapter that recounts the magazine'scoverage of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Mariner voyages is called"Space" and introduced with the epigraph, "The Choice Isthe Universe-or Nothing." The final chapter, full of stunning biomedicalimages, is titled "Inner Space" and introduced with the epigraph,"The Stuff of the Stars Has Come Alive."44 The photography convincesthe viewer of the fraternal relation of inner and outer space. But, curiously,in outer space, we see spacemen fitted into explorer craft or floatingabout as individuated cosmic fetuses, while in the supposed earthy spaceof our own interiors, we see non-humanoid strangers who are the means bywhich our bodies sustain our integrity and individuality, indeed our humanityin the face of a world of others. We seem invaded not just by the threatening"non-selves" that the immune system guards against, but morefundamentally by our own strange parts. Lennart Nilsson's photographs, in the coffee table art book The BodyVictorious (1987), as well as in many medical texts, are landmarks in thephotography of the alien inhabitants of inner space45 (Figure 10). Theblasted scenes, sumptuous textures, evocative colors, and ET monsters ofthe immune landscape are simply there, inside us. A white extruding tendrilof a pseudopodinous macrophage ensnares bacteria; the hillocks of chromosomeslie flattened on a blue-hued moonscape of some other planet; an infectedcell buds myriads of deadly virus particles into the reaches of inner spacewhere more cells will be victimized; the auto-immune disease-ravaged headof a femur glows against a sunset on a dead world; cancer cells are surroundedby the lethal mobil squads of killer T-cells that throw chemical poisonsinto the self's malignant traitor cells. A diagram of the "Evolution of Recognition Systems" in a recentimmunology textbook makes clear the intersection of the themes of literally"wonderful" diversity, escalating complexity, the self as a defendedstronghold, and extraterrestrialism in inner space (Figure 11). Under adiagram culminating in the evolution of the mammals, represented withoutcomment by a mouse and a fully-suited spaceman, is this explanation: "Fromthe humble amoeba searching for food (top left) to the mammal with itssophisticated humoral and cellular immune mechanisms (bottom right), theprocess of 'serf versus non-self recognition' shows a steady development,keeping pace with the increasing need of animals to maintain their integrityin a hostile environment. The decision at which point 'immunity' appearedis thus a purely semantic one" (Playfair, 1984, emphasis in the original).These are the "semantics" of defense and invasion. The perfectionof the fully defended, "victorious" self is a chilling fantasy,linking phagocytotic amoeba and space-voyaging man cannibalizing the earthin an evolutionary teleology of post-apocalypse extraterrestrialism. Whenis a self enough of a self that its boundaries become central to institutionalizeddiscourses in biomedicine, war, and business? Images of the immune system as a battlefield abound in science sectionsof daily newspapers and in popular magazines, e.g., Time magazine's 1984graphic for the AIDS virus's "invasion" of the cell-as-factory.The virus is a tank, and the viruses ready for  FIGURES 10 & 11Figure 10. Design for Lennart Nilsson book. Figure 11. From a reentimmunology textbookexport from the expropriated cells are lined up ready to continue theiradvance ont he body as a productive force. The National Geographic explicitlypunned on Star Wars in its graphic called "Cell Wars" (Jaret,1986). The militarized automated factory is a favorite convention amongimmune system technical illustrators and photographic processors. The specifichistorical markings of a Star Wars-maintained individuality are enabledby high-technology visualization technologies, which are also basic toconducting war and commerce, such as computer-aided graphics, artificialinteligence software, and specialized scanning systems.It is not just imagers of the immune system who learn from militarycultures; military cultures draw symbiotically on immune system discourse,just as strategic planners draw dirctly from and contribute to video gamepractices and science fiction. For example, arguing for an elite specialforce within the parameters of "low i-intensity conflict" doctrine,a U.S. army officer wrote: "The most appropriate example to describehow this system would work is th emost complex biological model we know--thebody's immune system. Within the body there exits a remarkably complexcorps of internal bodyguards. In absolute numbers they are small--onlyabout one percent of the body's cells. Yet they consist of reconnaissancespecialists, killers, reconstitution specialists, and communicators thatcan seek out invaders, sound the alarm, reproduce rapidly, and swarm tothe attack to repel the enemy...In this regard, the June 1986 issue ofNational Gographic contains a detailed account of how the body's immunesystem functions." (Timmerman, 1987).The circuits of competencies sustaining the body as a defended self--personally,culturallly, and nationally--spiral through the fantasy entertainment industry,a branch of the apparatus of bodily production fundamental to craftingthe important consensual hallucinations about "possible" woldsthat go into building "real" ones. In Epcot Center of Walt DisneyWorld, we may be interpellated as subjects in the new Met Life Pavilion,which is "devoted to dramatizing the intricacies of the human body."A special thrill ride, called "Body Wars," promises that we will"experience the wonders of life," such as encounterning "theattack of the platelets."46 This lively battle simulator is promoted 322DONNA HARAWAY as "family entertainment." The technology for this journeythrough the human body uses a motion-based simulator to produce three-dimensionalimages for a stationary observer. As in other forms of high-tech tourism,we can go everywhere, see everything and leave no trace. The apparatushas been adopted to teach medical anatomy at the University of ColoradoHealth Sciences Center. Finally, we should not forget that more Americanstravel to the combined Disney worlds than voyage in most other mythrealizingmachines, like Washington, D.C.47 Met Life cautions those who journey on"Body Wars" that they may experience extreme vertigo from thesimulated motion. Is that merely "symbolic action', too? In the embodied semiotic zones of earth and outer space, we saw thediffraction patterns made possible by recomposed visualizing technologies,relocated circuits of competencies that promise to be more user-friendlyfor inappropriate/d others. So also, the inner spaces of the biomedicalbody are central zones of technoscientific contestation, i.e., of scienceas culture in the amodern frame of social nature. Extremely interestingnew collectives of human and unhuman allies and actors are emerging fromthese processes. I will briefly sketch two zones where promising monstersare undergoing symbiogenesis in the nutrient media of technoscientificwork: 1) theories of immune function based on laboratory research, and2) new apparatuses of knowledge production being crafted by Persons withAIDS (PWAs) and their heterogeneous allies. Both sets of monsters generatedistinctly diffracted views of the self, evident in beliefs and practicesin relation to vulnerability and mortality. Like non-violent direct action and environmentalism, immune system discourseis about the unequally distributed chances of life and death. Since sicknessand mortality are at the heart of immunology, it is hardly surprising thatconditions of battle prevail. Dying is not an easy matter crying out for"friendly" visualization. But battle is not the only way to figurethe process of mortal living. Persons coping with the life-threateningconsequences of infection with the HIV virus have insisted that they areliving with AIDS, rather than accepting the status of victims (or prisonersof war?). Similarly, laboratory scientists also have built research programsbased on non-militaristic, relational embodiments, rather than on the capabilitiesof the defended self of atomic individuals. They do this in order to constructIS articulations more effectively, not in order to be nice folks with pactfistmetaphors. Let me attempt to convey the flavor of the artifactual bodily objectcalled the human immune system, culled from major textbooks and researchreports published in the 1980s. These characterizations are part of workingsystems for interacting with the immune system in many areas of practice,including business decisions, clinical medicine, and lab experiments. Withabout 10 to the 12th cells, the IS has two orders of magnitude more cellsthan the nervous system. IS cells are regenerated throughout life frompluripotent stem cells. From embryonic life through adulthood, the immunesystem is sited in several morphologically dispersed tissues and organs,including the thymus, bone marrow, spleen, and Iymph nodes; but a largefraction of its cells are in the blood and Iymph circulatory systems andin body fluids and spaces. If ever there were a "distributed system,,,this is one! It is also a highly adaptable communication system with manyinterfaces. There are two major cell lineages to the system: (1) The first is theIymphocytes, which include the several types of T cells (helper, suppressor,killer, and variations of all these) and the B cells (each type of whichcan produce only one sort of the vast array of potential circulating antibodies).T and B cells have particular specificities capable of recognizing almostany molecular array of the right size that can ever exist, no matter howclever industrial chemistry gets. This specificity is enabled by a baroquesomatic THE PROMISES OF MONSTERS323 mutation mechanism, clonal selection, and a polygenic receptor or markersystem. (2) The second immune cell lineage is the mononuclear phagocytesystem, including the multitalented macrophages, which, in addition totheir other recognition skills and connections, also appear to share receptorsand some hormonal peptide products with neural cells. Besides the cellularcompartment, the immune system comprises a vast array of circulating acellularproducts, such as antibodies, Iymphokines, and complement components. Thesemolecules mediate communication among components of the immune system,but also between the immune system and the nervous and endocrine systems,thus linking the body's multiple control and coordination sites and functions.The genetics of the immune system cells, with their high rates of somaticmutation and gene product splicings and rearrangings to make finished surfacereceptors and antibodies, makes a mockery of the notion of a constant genomeeven within "one" body. The hierarchical body of old has givenway to a network-body of amazing complexity and specificity. The immunesystem is everywhere and nowhere. Its specificities are indefinite if notinfinite, and they arise randomly; yet these extraordinary variations arethe critical means of maintaining bodily coherence. In the early 1970s, winning a Nobel Prize for the work, Niels Jerneproposed a theory of immune system self-regulation, called the networktheory, which deviates radically from notions of the body victorious andthe defended self. "The network theory differs from other immunologicalthinking because it endows the immune system with the ability to regulateitself using only itself" (Golub, 1987; Jerne, 1985).48 Jerne proposedthat any antibody molecule must be able to act functionally as both antibodyto some antigen and as antigen for the production of an antibody to itself,at another region of "itself." These sites have acquired a nomenclaturesufficiently daunting to thwart popular understanding of the theory, butthe basic conception is simple. The concatenation of internal recognitionsand responses would go on indefinitely, in a series of interior mirroringsof sites on immunoglobulin molecules, such that the immune system wouldalways be in a state of dynamic internal responding. It would never bepassive, "at rest,', awaiting an activating stimulus from a hostileoutside. In a sense, there could be no exterior antigenic structure, no"invader," that the immune system had not already "seen"and mirrored internally. Replaced by subtle plays of partially mirroredreadings and responses, self and other lose their rationalistic oppositionalquality. A radical conception of connection emerges unexpectedly at thecore of the defended self. Nothing in the model prevents therapeutic action,but the entities in the drama have different kinds of interfaces with theworld. The therapeutic logics are unlikely to be etched into living fleshin patterns of DARPA's latest high- tech tanks and smart missiles. Some of those logics are being worked out in and by the bodies of personswith AIDS and ARC. ln their work to sustain life and alleviate pain inthe context of mortal illness, PWAs engage in many processes of knowledge-building. These processes demand intricate code switching, language bridging,and alliances among worlds previously held apart. These "generativegrammars,, are matters of life and death. As one activist put it, "ACTUP's humor is no joke" (Crimp and Rolston, 1990, p. 20; see also Crimp,1983). The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) is a collective builtfrom many articulations among unlike kinds of actors-for example, activists,biomedical machines, government bureaucracies, gay and lesbian worlds,communities of color, scientific conferences, experimental organisms, mayors,international information and action networks, condoms and dental dams,computers, doctors, IV drug-users, pharmaceutical companies, publishers,virus components, counselors, innovative sexual practices, dancers, mediatechnologies, buying clubs, graphic artists, scientists, lovers, lawyers,and more. The actors, however, are not all equal. ACT UP has an animatingcenter-PWAs, who 324DONNA HARAWAY are to the damage wrought by AIDS and the work for restored health aroundthe world as the indigenous peoples of the Amazon are to forest destructionand environmentalism. These are the actors with whom others must articulate.That structure of action is a fundamental consequence of learning to visualizethe heterogeneous, artifactual body that is our "social nature,"instead of narrowing our vision that "saving nature" and repellingalien invaders from an unspoiled organic eden called the autonomous self.Saving nature is, finally, a deadly project. It relies on perpetuatingthe structure of boundary violation and the falsely liberatingirisson oftransgression. What happened in the first Eden should have made that clear. So, if the tree of knowledge cannot be forbidden, we had all betterlearn how to eat and feed each other with a little more sawy. That is thedifficult process being engaged by PWAs, Project Inform, ACT UP, NIH, clinicalpractitioners, and many more actors trying to build responsible mechanismsfor producing effective knowledge in the AIDS epidemic.49 Unable to policethe same boundaries separating insiders and outsiders, the world of biomedicalresearch will never be the same again. The changes range across the epistemological,the commercial, the juridical, and the spiritual domains. For example,what is the status of knowledge produced through the new combinations ofdecision-making in experimental design that are challenging previous researchconventions? What are the consequences of the simultaneous challenges toexpert monopoly of knowledge and insistence on both the rapid improvementof the biomedical knowledge base and the equitable mass distribution ofits fruits? How will the patently amodern hybrids of healing practicescohabit in the emerging social body? And, who will live and die as a resultof these very non- innocent practices? Not-A. Virtual Space: SF50 Articulation is not a simple matter. Language is the effect of articulation,and so are bodies. The articulate are jointed animals; they are not smoothlike the perfect spherical animals of Plato's origin fantasy in the Timaeus.The articulate are cobbled together. It is the condition of being articulate.I rely on the articulate to breathe life into the artifactual cosmos ofmonsters that this essay inhabits. Nature may be speechless, without language,in the human sense; but nature is highly articulate. Discourse is onlyone process of articulation. An articulated world has an undecidable numberof modes and sites where connections can be made. The surfaces of thiskind of world are not frictionless curved planes. Unlike things can bejoined-and like things can be broken apart- and vice versa. Full of sensoryhairs, evaginations, invaginations, and indentations, the surfaces whichinterest me are dissected by joints. Segmented invertebrates, the articulateare insectoid and worm-like, and they inform the inflamed imaginationsof SF filmmakers and biologists. In obsolete English, to articulate meantto make terms of agreement. Perhaps we should live in such an "obsolete,"amodern world again. To articulate is to signify. It is to put things together,scary things, risky things, contingent things. I want to live in an articulateworld. We articulate; therefore, we are. Who "I" am is a verylimited, in the endless perfection of (clear and distinct) Self- contemplation.Unfair as always, I think of it as the paradigmatic psychoanalytic question."Who am I?" is about (always unrealizable) identity; always wobbling,it still pivots on the law of the father, the sacred image of the same.Since I am a moralist, the real question must have more virtue: who are"we"? That is an inherently more open question, one always readyfor contingent, friction-generating articulations. It is a remonstrativequestion. In optics, the virtual image is formed by the apparent, but not actual,convergence of rays. The virtual seems to be the counterfeit of the real;the virtual has effects by THE PROMISES OF MONSTERS325 seeming, not being. Perhaps that is why "virtue" is stillgiven in dictionaries to refer to women's chastity, which must always remaindoubtful in patriarchal optical law. But then, "virtue" usedto mean manly spirit and valor too, and God even named an order of angelsthe Virtues, though they were of only middling rank. Still, no matter howbig the effects of the virtual are, they seem somehow to lack a properontology. Angels, manly valor, and women's chastity certainly constitute,at best, a virtual image from the point of view of late twentieth-century"postmoderns." For them, the virtual is precisely not the real;that's why "postmoderns" like "virtual reality." Itseems transgressive. Yet, I can't forget that an obsolete meaning of "virtual"was having virtue, i.e., the inherent power to produce effects. "Virtu,"after all, is excellence or merit, and it is still a common meaning ofvirtue to refer to having effficacy. The "virtue" of somethingis its "capacity." The virtue of (some) food is that it nourishesthe body. Virtual space seems to be the negation of real space; the domainsof SF seem the negation of earthly regions. But perhaps this negation isthe real illusion. "Cyberspace, absent its high-tech glitz, is the idea of virtualconsensual community.... A virtual community is first and foremost a communityof belief.''5l For William Gibson (1986), cyberspace is "consensualhallucination experienced daily by billions.... Unthinkable complexity."Cyberspace seems to be the consensual hallucination of too much complexity,too much articulation. It is the virtual reality of paranoia, a well-populatedregion in the last quarter of the Second Christian Millenium. Paranoiais the belief in the unrelieved density of connection, requiring, if oneis to survive, withdrawal and defense unto death. The defended self re-emergesat the heart of relationality. Paradoxically, paranoia is the conditionof the impossibility of remaining articulate. In virtual space, the virtueof articulation-i.e., the power to produce connection-threatens to overwhelmand finally to engulf all possibility of effective action to change theworld. So, in our travels into virtual space, if we are to emerge from ourencounter with the artifactual articulate into a livable elsewhere, weneed a guide figure to navigate around the slough of despond. Lisa Foo,the principal character in a Hugo and Nebula award-winning short storyby John Varley (1986), will be our unlikely Beatrice through the System. "If you wish to know more, press enter" (p. 286).52 With that fatal invitation, Varley's profoundly paranoid story beginsand ends. The Tree of Knowledge is a Web, a vast system of computer connectionsgenerating, as an emergent property, a new and terrifyingly unhuman collectiveentity. The forbidden fruit is knowledge of the workings of this powerfulEntity, whose deadly essence is extravagant connection. All of the humancharacters are named after computers, programs, practices, or concepts-VictorApfel, Detective Osborne, and the hackers Lisa Foo and Charles Kluge. Thestory is a murder mystery. With a dubious suicide note, called up by respondingto the command "press enter" on the screen of one of the dozensof personal computers in his house, which is also full of barrels of illicitdrugs, Kluge has been found dead by his neighbor, Apfel. Apfel is a reclusivemiddle-aged epileptic, who had been a badly treated prisoner-of-war inKorea, leaving him with layers of psychological terror, including a fearand hatred of "orientals." When Los Angeles homicide DetectiveOsborne's men prove totally inept at deciphering the elaborate softwarerunning Kluge's machines, Lisa Foo, a young Vietnamese immigrant, now aU.S. citizen, is called in from Cal Tech; and she proceeds to play SherlockHolmes to Osborne's Lestrade. The story is narrated from Apfel's pointof view, but Foo is the tale's center and, I insist, its pivotal actor. 326DONNA HARAWAY Insisting, I wish to exercise the lic | |
