Katie King introducing Donna Haraway at the Cyberculture Conference, 27 April 2002
Interdisciplinary work requires great friendships. It means, in the words of Margaret Mead: "we continue to meet and take delight in one another's minds." (p. 109 BW) My own best teachers have been people who practiced great friendships, friendships that required care for thinking about thinking, care for the "liveliness of subject-shaping and reshaping," caring alternative models of household, of "solidarity and difference" --such friendships drawing us all beyond our own first impulses. (p. 126 Leaf)
I met Donna Haraway for the first time in the late 70s over stories about our teachers Gregory Bateson and Evelyn Hutchinson, both of whom were figures at the famous Macy Conferences on Cybernetics following WWII. The Macy Conferences themselves have been described as "annual conversations among friends who recognized possible connections and implications beyond their individual specialties. They committed to be in a conversation that explored the connections and transcended the boundaries...." (berkana.org) But as Gregory Bateson pointed out, this is a kind of interdisciplinarity in which, he says, "the relations are to be thought of as somehow primary, the relata [the things related] as secondary." (p. 154 Steps)
Donna was arriving at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to be interviewed for the first job specifically advertised as in "feminist theory" in the U.S. I had the good fortune to spend a following six odd years studying feminist theory with her in the History of Consciousness, the department in which she still teaches. As an intellectual mentor Donna richly entered into the social worlds of her students' projects, while introducing her own communities of practice. What we all shared was not necessarily subject matter, but rather a search for how to think well, how to make interventions into knowledge production as feminists.
As I work on my current book project, I keep running into Donna's friends. I
remember one from Donna's first visit to Xerox Parc, there she met Lucy Suchman,
whose analysis of working relations I've begun to explore as a model for (inter)interdisciplinary
communication. Suchman's work honors movements among, she says, "...an
increasingly dense and differentiated layering of people and activities, each
operating within a limited sphere of knowing and acting that includes variously
crude or sophisticated conceptualizations of the others." (Located)
It takes great friendship to inspire our commitments to the complexities of
creating reciprocal "new working relations" among our interdisciplines.
In Suchman's words "[i]n place of the model of knowledge as a product that
can be assembled through hand-offs in some neutral or universal language, we
began to argue the need for mutual learning and partial translations. This in
turn required new working relations not then in place." (Located)
In great friendships we slow down to learn one another's languages, taking care
because we come to love the very words, their relationality, their glimpses
into unfamiliar meanings, what Donna calls "the sheer wiliness and complexity
of it all." (p. 82 Leaf) And more, she says: "[i]t isn't as though
I make a choice to work with and through metaphor, it's that I experience myself
inside these constantly swerving, intensely physical processes of semiosis."
(p. 86 Leaf)
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