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Donna J. Haraway
Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_On coMouse™

ROUTLEDGE, NEW YORK AND LONDON, 1997, PP.361

reviewed by CANDIDA ELTON

Introduction

Such is the complexity of the title of this book, that it would seem an obvious first step to break it down into its elements and provide an explanation or definition of each one. Indeed, this is precisely how Haraway herself begins, in a brief first section labelled Syntactics. Here she draws attention not only to the words which form the title, but also to the symbols @, . ,© , and ™, which carry considerable semiotic weight in her argument.

The modest witness is Haraway herself, in her role as narrator, but could be all of us, and is based on the historical model of the witness to early scientific experiments, such as Boyle's experiment with the air pump. We should recognise the Second Millenium as the culturally specific contemporary. FemaleMan© is a fictional character in a novel by Joanna Russ, and OncoMouse™ is a mouse bearing a gene guaranteed to produce cancer, and patented as such by DuPont. Feminism is central: 'Reproductive politics are at the heart of questions about citizenship, liberty, family and nation. Feminist questions are not a "special preserve" but a "general" discourse critical for science studies as such.' Technoscience is a 'region of historical hyperspace', which 'extravagantly exceeds the distinction between science and technology as well as those between nature and society; subjects and objects, and the natural and the artifactual that structured the imaginary time called modernity.' (p. 3)

The structure of the book, three sections labelled Syntactics, Semantics, Pragmatics, indicates its nature: this is a handbook for negotiating The New World order, Inc., in which we now find ourselves. Structure, meaning and usage of language are all addressed, providing readers with the necessary tools to negotiate that order.

According to Haraway, we all exist in 'a powerful sea of stories' (p. 45) and technoscience is no exception to the rule of storytelling: 'First, I call attention to the figures and stories that run riot throughout the domains of technoscience. Not only is no language, including mathematics, ever free of troping; not only is facticity always saturated with metaphoricity; but also, any sustained account of the world is dense with storytelling.' (p. 64)

Haraway unpacks the density of the sustained account of the world offered by technoscience as we read through her book, and also provides us with counter narratives from many different sources. She makes use of numerous types of story found in cartoons advertising genetic engineering products, science fiction, textbooks, and in the emerging mythology of rumour.

Location, Transgression, Transcription, Possession.

Location

Finally, technoscience is more, less and other than what Althusser meant by ideology; technoscience is a form of life, a practice, a culture, a generative matrix. (p.47)

Situated historically in the post-Enlightenment, post-modern era technoscience is here and now, and we are living in and through it. Our modest witness, who acts as our guide, identifies herself as a child of the Enlightenment - one whose perspective on science and progress has been determined by Enlightenment values.

In addition to temporal location the use of the e-mail address as the form of the title refers to the peculiar geographical location made possible by the net: an e-mail address is dislocated from our bodily earth-bound experience to the extent that it can (at least in theory) be accessed from anywhere else. However, we should not mistake this egalitarian access for egalitarian representation, since an e-mail address may tell its own story, just as surely as an address in a city. Haraway uses one of Trudeau's Doonesbury cartoons to illustrate this: the free address handed out by the public library to a homeless job-seeker, lunatic@streetlevel, does not prove attractive to many employers.

Haraway highlights historical and geographical location because she wants us to recognise the importance of where we stand in relation to the stories that surround us. This is a world in which our foundational narratives are constantly being challenged by the appearance of new products from technoscience, and narratives to justify their production: 'Stories and facts do not keep a respectable distance; indeed, they promiscuously cohabit the very same material places. Determining what constitutes each dimension takes boundary-making and maintenance work.' (p.68)

Identifying the work involved in story production is a key aspect of Haraway's project in this book. Where boundaries are made and maintained they can also be altered, but only if they are first recognized as the products of intellectual labour.

Transgression

Like the transuranic elements, transgenic creatures, which carry genes from "unrelated" organisms, simultaneously fit into well-established taxonomic and evolutionary discourses and also blast widely understood senses of the natural. (p. 56)

Haraway employs the tools of poststructuralism in her engagement with the foundational narratives of technoscience. For instance, she focuses on the category pair relationship of nature and culture, as it is conceived within contemporary scientific practice.

Although classification itself is a subject undergoing comprehensive review, as taxonomy comes to be perceived as necessarily related to its purpose, rather than universal, (at least by some: John Dupre suggests a model of 'pluralistic, or promiscuous realism') nevertheless our general conception of what is natural in the biological world is largely formed by our inheritance of Linnaeus' taxonomies. In terms of chemistry our reference point is Mendeleyev's (1869) periodic table. Yet these systems contain the possibility of exceeding themselves: 'Nature in technoscience still functions as a foundational resource but in an inverted way, that is, through its artifice. In a gesture of materialized deconstruction that literary Derrideans might envy, the technoscience foundational narrative inverts the inherited terms of nature and culture and then displaces them decisively.' (p. 102)

This displacement makes it possible for the phrase 'Natural Genetic Engineering' to be used without irony. It may sound 'unnatural' now, but to the generation of American schoolchildren being educated through a joint national and private enterprise funded textbook where this phrase heads a chapter, the clash will have far less resonance. The textbook under discussion is Advances in Genetic Technology (Drexler et al. 1989). A glance at the sources of funding for this book indicates that the narrative represented within the text is far from disinterested. The genetic engineering textbook project was funded by the National Science Foundation; Monsanto Agricultural Projects Company; E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co.; Ward's Natural Science Establishment, Inc.; and CIBA-Geigy Corporation (p.105). In a characteristic gesture, Haraway takes this fact as a reason to use the textbook for the study of the construction of narrative, in addition to its use as a resource in the school laboratory.

Transcription

Although the metaphor of hypertext insists on making connections as practice, the trope does not suggest which connections make sense for which purposes and which patches we might want to follow or avoid. Communication and articulation disconnected from yearning toward possible worlds does not make enough sense. (p.127)

Central to the theoretical conception of Haraway's book is the concept of hypertext. Perceived as both the tool and the metaphor for technoscience, Haraway emphasizes the necessity to know where we are going in forging new links.

Like other developments in writing technology - writing itself and printing - informatics has facilitated the possibility of knowing as well as storing, increasingly complex information. In this sense, Mendeleyev's periodic table and Linnaeus' taxonomies were forerunners of the relational database, the mode of record and storage for genetics. This mode of transcription possesses the benefit and the flaw of being 'an ideal place where all elements are equal in the grid.' We can now transcribe ourselves in this form: GenBank© is one instance of several such databases. (p.74)

The following comment from The Human Genome Project Information reminds us that data alone is of limited value: 'Databases need to be designed that will accurately represent map information (linkage, STSs, physical location, disease loci) and sequences (genomic, cDNAs, proteins) and link them to each other and to bibliographic text databases of the scientific and medical literature.' Mapping and sequence databases already exist. Increasingly sophisticated searching and matching of sequence information is essential if the HGP is to achieve its stated goals.

The development of informatics and biogenetics drive each other, demand creating demand. The capacity to store information generates the demand to interrogate it, the demand to interrogate generates the demand to store at more precise levels of detail for finer differentiation. The ability to store all this data does not help us decide how to read it: for that we require a narrative context. Standard Query Language, the tool for interrogating databases, requires the premeditated definition of a query, but hypertextual links can be created or followed more fleetingly. Haraway borrows bell hooks' concept of yearning, from her 1990 book of that title, as a possible model for driving our searches.

Haraway illustrates how we might respond to the idea of 'an ideal place where all elements are equal in the grid' with her own chart of twentieth-century biological kinship categories (p.219). Through the placement of discourses in columns and rows the chart offers a variety of possibilities for narrative interpretation. How different is the exhaustive measuring and recording of visible features in eugenics from the data collection of biogenetics? How different is resistance to transgenics from fears of miscegenation?

Possession

Gene fetishists "forget" that the gene and gene maps are ways of enclosing the commons of the body- or corporeatizing- in specific ways, which, among other things, often put commodity fetishism into the program of biology at the end of the Second Millenium. (p.148)

Transcription leads to copyright, and also to patenting. Tracing the history of a symbol, ™ , and demonstrating the depth contained within it, Haraway recounts a brief history of U.S. patent law. The 1790 act provided for "any new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof". The 1952 act substituted the word process for art. "Products of nature" were not patentable, according to the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), but in 1980, the Supreme Court overruled this decision, and 'The result was a patent for a genetically modified bacterium that breaks down petroleum.'

The Supreme Court decision is now deemed a landmark, in that it overturned legal categories, and opened the way to the patenting of OncoMouse™: 'OncoMouse™ is the first patented animal in the world. By definition, then, in the practices of materialized refiguration, s/he is an invention.' (p.79) What are the implications of treating a living being as an invention? Haraway interprets as follows: Inventions do not have property in the self; alive and self-moving or not, they cannot be legal persons, as corporations are.' (p.80) Although inventions cannot themselves be legal persons, they can derive from legal persons, as we shall see.

Haraway's use of stories includes reference to the vampire myth. This has arisen from the pursuance of the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), which has come to be known as the 'vampire project'. The HGDP arose from the objection to the HGP which took the form of the question "Whose genes are we mapping?" Barbara Rothman describes the project: 'The Human Genome Diversity Project presents itself as an attempt to read evolutionary history from our DNA. The plan is to get DNA samples from 25 individuals from each of several hundred groups of indigenous peoples from around the earth, and from that try to tell how we became who and what we are.' (p. 93) Haraway refers to the 'periodically surfacing stories in Latin America about white North Americans stealing body parts, sucking blood and kidnapping children to be organ donors.' (p.253) As she points out, the significance of these stories, true or not, is 'the ready association of technoscience with the realm of the undead, tales of vampires, and transgressive traffic in the bloody tissues of life. Sampling blood is never an innocent symbolic act.' The purpose of this sampling, to record the information in a database, is a peculiar culturally specific activity, and the sense of exploitation expressed in these stories is justifiable.

To illustrate fusion of this myth with the significance of the change in law which allows the living to be patented, Haraway tells the following story:

The Guaymi people carry a unique virus and its antibodies that might be important in leukemia research. Blood taken in 1990 from a 26-year-old Guaymi woman with leukemia, with her "informed oral consent," in the language of the U.S. Center for Disease control in Atlanta, was used to produce an "immortalized" cell line deposited at the American Type Culture Collection. The U.S. Secretary of Commerce proceeded to file a patent claim on the line. Pat Moony of the Rural Advancement Foundation International found out about the claim in August1993 and informed the president of the Guaymi Congress. Considering the patent claim to be straightforward biopiracy, Acosta and another Guaymi representatives went to Geneva to raise the issue with the Biological Diversity Convention, which had been adopted at the 1993 Earth Summit in Brazil. That convention had been intended to deal with plant and animal material, but the Guaymi made strategic use of its language to address technoscientifically defined human biodiversity. The Guaymi also went to the GATT secretariat to argue against the patentability of material of human origin in the intellectual property provisions of the new GATT treaty then being drafted.

In late 1993, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce withdrew the patent application, although by early 1994 the cell culture had not been returned, as demanded, to the Guaymi. (p. 251)

Haraway's interpretation of the events in the story is that the Guaymi 'are actors who are reconfiguring these powerful discourses, along with others they bring to the encounter. In the process, the Guaymi are changing themselves, the international scientists, and other policy elites.' The Guaymi have by their actions at least written themselves in to the story of the HGDP, but I find Haraway's positive reading of these events is usefully counterbalanced by Rothman's more pessimistic account.

One positive outcome is that the Council of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) asked its ethical, legal and social issues committee to respond to the concerns expressed by the Guaymi case and the representative bodies of Indigenous Peoples. HUGO came up with a list of issues and associated policies which address: competence, communication, consultation, consent, choices, confidentiality, collaboration, conflict of interest, compensation, continual review.

Two negative outcomes are:

The case has not prevented subsequent cases of bio-piracy.

Health care among the Guaymi has suffered because of the fear and suspicion aroused by the case.

Conclusion

This challenging book tackles issues which are increasingly relevant. For instance, in 1998, Monsanto embarked on a major advertising campaign in the UK national press, designed to familiarize the British public with their plans for introducing genetically engineered crops - it was not a success: 'Before the campaign started, 44 per cent opposed the idea of food with genetically-modified ingredients. After it , and with £1m spent, 51 per cent opposed the idea.' However, despite this, the same article claims that the British government suppressed a report addressing potential dangers of the system. In preparing the report, civil servants consulted: 'English Nature, the RSPB and members of the Government's Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE), which advises the Secretary of State for the Environment on the effects of GN organisms on the human health and environmental safety.' All these bodies represent the old world order of natural nature. Not only have the opinions they expressed to the report compilers been suppressed, 'They have all been instructed not to discuss its contents.' (Independent on Sunday, 13/12/98)

Should the consequences of the Guaymi case lead us to question whether Haraway places too much emphasis on the importance of narrative and control of discourse? One way of responding to such a doubt is to consider the alternatives. Haraway's intriguing use of charts emphasizes both the historical parallels and the complex relationships between narratives. It is her ability to consider the issues from a wide range of perspectives, represented in the charts, which is the strongest merit of the book. This reflexive use of the tools she is critiquing indicates the necessary complexity of any kind of ethical stance towards the subjects under discussion. If technoscience's sustained account of the world is dense with storytelling, so too must be the account of any modest witness.

The Monsanto case and the outcomes of the Guaymi case are just two instances of many developments which have arisen since Modest_Witness went to press. The political and ecological issues will affect us all, and an intelligent guide like Haraway's to the processes and implications is essential, especially one which does not simply reject the potential benefits out of hand. Haraway's application of theory to these live political issues is exciting to read. Her use of poststructuralist thought to make sense of technoscience, and her sophisticated use and critique of science studies in this context is both apt and refreshing. For this reader at least, her exercise in setting up tools for interpreting the subject area has provided an incentive to keep up with developments and a framework for thinking through their implications.

Candida Elton is a research student in the School of Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham.

Bibliography

Dupre, John, The Disorder of Things, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1993

Hooks, Bell, Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics, South End Press, Boston MA, 1990

Rothman, Barbara K., Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations, W.W. Norton and Co., 1998

http://www.ornl.gov/TechResources/Human_Genome/publicat/primer

http://www.biol.tsukuba.ac.ip/~macer/HUGO.hti

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Donna J. Haraway Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_On coMouse™