Magnolia Pauker, “Technoscience is Everywhere, but is Not Everything: In Conversation

with Donna Haraway,” Pyramid Power 7 (2010), 80-86.

Technoscience is Everywhere, But is Not Everything:

In Conversation with Donna Haraway – June 18, 2003
By Magnolia Pauker
MP: You have written a lot about inheritance, what we’ve inherited, and how we inhabit our
inherited spaces. You never use the word heritage. I think that there is a fundamental difference
between inheriting and having a heritage. With heritage it is ours and we are personally in it, it’s
celebratory, part of affirming identities. Inheritance is something that comes to us from above.
DH: Or below. I actually think of it as from below. It’s interesting that my implicit geometry
was reversed from yours although I hadn’t noticed it until you made the gesture.
MP: Why below?
DH: Comes up from the past and the past geometrically is down, though there is no reason
that should be so. It’s kind of a ‘metaphors we live by’ problem. I think of inheritance more that
way. And inheritance is partly lineal, but it’s more branched than that. You see, I think we inherit
all kinds of things that we don’t necessarily want.
MP: Precisely. And I think that when we speak of heritage there is an inference that we want
it.
DH: Only because I think, of the commodification of heritage culture which produces these
little dioramas, these little heritage culture things, these little identity practices that make money.
I think that’s why heritage has that tone – heritage culture stuff. And I really am interested in
trying to find out what it is, like it or not, that I am accountable to, most of which I don’t even
know about. And then, finding out about some of that seems like something an ordinary person
needs to be doing.
MP: Considering our current political context, the state of journalism and the types of
questions that are being asked presently, how can we bear witness? How can we be responsible
in the world?
DH: One of the things that I want, that I’m hungry for is not yet another report of a focus
group. The larger question is: How is a public constructed? And how would a public discourse
be nurtured on matters of politics, matters of foreign and military policy, matters of economic
policy, whatever topic is at issue, matters of environmental health, questions of fishery and so
forth. All of these things are inescapably on the agenda. How is a public constituted on all of
these sorts of questions that matter? It seems to me that we are being given in various ways,
through technique, false unbelievable publics, publics that don’t deserve to be called public. And
technologies like the focus group are the means for depleting public discourse so that I want to
know somehow the range of how people are thinking and feeling about their worlds. I want to
know what folks are actually afraid of that makes fear manipulable post-911. I want to know, for
example, thinking of Sam Weber’s talk last night, I want to know particularly the way he used
the Freudian ideas of a kind of thrown forward in relation to anxiety, a kind of moving into
preemptive anxious behaviour out of fear and guilt. I want to know something about how people
think and feel that makes that possible, that makes that a kind of collective possibility. And yet
what I get is yet more focus group reports or surveys. I get instruments, I get the results of
instrumental inquiries, surveys, focus groups, poles, or perhaps individual interviews, and so on

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and so forth, as if that were the public. But I don’t get a sense that might be ethnographic, a kind
of more endured in, lived-in reporting that would include space on air and in the print media for
a kind of historical alternative to sketch out ways of doing historical setting, to lay out the starts
and stops of peoples’ thinking about issues. I want different kinds of mediation that are not yet
one more kind of stripped down instrumental tool like a focus group or a survey. I want
something more like ethnography, ethnographic practice, a kind of mediated presentation of
complex representational practices that people are actually engaged in on issues they care about
– the safety of their children on the streets, the question of whether the increased security
apparatus does or does not produce a greater sense of security.
MP: Which is looking at the multiplicity of individuals and communities interacting…
DH: And a more expensive journalism. No question about it. And also, less is more. I don’t
want to have to be presented with so much. I don’t want 100 channels and endless websites. It’s
true that I can access anything, blah blah blah. I don’t want more. I don’t want more choices. I
don’t want more sites. I want more inhabited reporting.
MP: Do you listen to Democracy Now?
DH: I do and I like that program. I think that’s a step in the right direction.
MP: It’s a good model?
DH: It’s a good model, yes.
MP: Did you listen throughout the invasion of Iraq?
DH: Yes, not every day, but frequently and I think that they are doing a good job, an amazing
job.
MP: Did you hear the interview with Aaron Brown from CNN?
DH: No.
MP: Amy Goodman interviewed Aaron Brown and asked him questions about CNN’s
coverage. She asked why CNN was only interviewing Generals…
DH: Their little pet experts…
MP: …and asking questions focused on preparations for war instead of asking, for example,
whether or not the war was legal. Brown’s response was that this wasn’t important, these
questions are not to be asked, it doesn’t matter, the war is underway.
DH: Right, it’s a done deal and we can stop asking that surpassed question. It’s not surpassed,
because the war happened and is happening. It’s not past tense, it is ongoing after all. Though
victory was declared, victory didn’t happen, whatever victory would be.
MP: A preemptive declaration of victory.
DH: A staged declaration of victory followed by an intensification of the war. The question of
legality is, if anything, more pressing because among other things, the US is involved in
systematic destabilization actions in Iran, its threats to Syria couldn’t have been more obvious,

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and the failure to put sufficient pressure on Israel is very clear. Insofar as Iraq is perceived as a
victory the permission to a rogue regime is increased. So, the question of “did it commit illegal
acts?” is even more pressing. And so, as you know, the Bush administration is pushing for even
more immunity from the international courts, from the world court, than had already been
granted, even more immunity for American citizens against war crimes and human rights
accountability. The illegality of this war cannot be allowed to drop.
MP: I was stunned that under the auspices of human rights they embarked on this war for
freedom which by the way, was originally heralded under the banner Operation Iraqi Liberty
whose acronym is OIL.
DH: Oh, I missed the liberty bit. It’s all too good. But it isn’t just Iraq. Iraq is an especially
sharp, present tense instance, but it’s also issues like water policy in California, in the Northwest
around agriculture and fisheries, and urban use issues – really important and pressing issues, big
decisions being made. And on the one hand, there is a fair amount of public information and a
modestly developed public understanding of these issues that’s actually rather heartening. There
is a growing public understanding of the complexities of salmon fisheries and farmed salmon, of
salmon hatcheries and watersheds. Surprising they actually do know a lot. But perhaps there is a
kind of disjoin between being informed about a discussion and having the slightest idea how to
engage.
MP: You have said that there is a fine line between emergency and apocalypse. Are we
walking that line?
DH: Oh yes. I think apocalyptic discourse is a paralyzing discourse. It’s fatalist, it doesn’t
require engagement.
MP: It’s too much.
DH: It’s all about too much. It’s about: “We’ve already lost.” And an emergency is about:
“We might lose.” But there is a “we” yet to construct here. There is a “we” to inhabit. Something
can still be done and must be done, and is being done. It’ not like you’re inventing the wheel.
MoveOn.org is doing a lot of interesting political work. A number of judicial appointments have
actually been blocked by MoveOn organized actions. True, protests didn’t block the war, it’s true
they couldn’t have cared less that the opposition was massive. Why are we surprised about that,
really? Wouldn’t the astonishment have been if it had been blockable?
MP: I read many articles claiming that the original plans for the invasions, the scale of shock
and awe was diminished in response to the protests.
DH: I have no idea if that’s true. But it is certainly true that the way that war started surprised
everyone. And the way it is not ending is surprising some. The people who launched the war
apparently really did expect to be appreciated and I think really are surprised by how hard it is to
restore services never mind anything else.
MP: Well, it took a long time to admit that services had even been affected.
DH: It did. And how in the world did they fail to guard the nuclear facilities? Any kind of
serious net analysis has got the rapid response mobile units ready to move to all the key places
which are identified as the water works, the oil works, the nuclear works, the search for weapons

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of mass destruction teams, the civil defense teams, and the police teams. It’s actually not that net
war is happening, but that it’s not happening. It’s that the rapid response teams weren’t there,
that the planning apparently didn’t happen and still isn’t.
MP: Is it possible that this didn’t happen?
DH: Doesn’t it seem that it didn’t? Where were the ready to move military police? Where
were the teams ready to guard the museums and the nuclear facilities? Everybody knew, I cannot
imagine that the war planners didn’t know that more material could be stolen for dirty bombs
than ever already existed. They had to have known. If they didn’t know their incompetence
surpasses all bounds.
MP: But that’s what I mean.
DH: And that’s even more scary. I find this whole thing kind of bewildering. I find the failures
bewildering.
MP: Were you involved in any protests?
DH: Yes, but only in the sense of going, not in the sense of planning them. Although, one of
my friends in Hawaii, actually one person, a woman named Carolyn Hadfield, an absolutely
marvelous life-time political activist, she has been a fundamental moving force in organizing
quite interesting actions in Hawaii, bringing together different constituencies and producing
some serious resistance around Homeland Security. And it’s true that Hawaii is in some ways a
containable place, different from California and New York. Nonetheless, she is evidence to me
that one person really does matter. She quit her job in December and threw herself full-time into
organizing, and she had been organizing full-time effectively before that. And she’s been doing it
for years. She has a kind of political ideology and commitment that’s different from mine. It’s
much more convinced, Maoist party formation. She has a kind of relationship of belief to certain
kinds of Marxism that I don’t. It sustains her. But hey!
MP: So, I wonder if we can switch tracks a bit. I would like to talk about genetically modified
food.
DH: Why do you care? What is it about genetically modified food that bothers you most?
MP: It’s who does it…
DH: And you don’t trust them.
MP: I don’t trust them because of their history, which is still current, of manufacturing
pesticides and herbicides. I eat organic food and try to buy local. What bothers me most is the
same people who brought us DDT are making seeds.
DH: Right, and that this is all part of integrated packages. So, it’s not transgenics as such
that’s the issue, but the apparatus of food production.
MP: Right, industrial agriculture.
DH: That makes sense to me. I don’t have any sympathy, or not much anyway, for certain
kinds of discourses around ‘we don’t know what kind of biological damage altered or irradiated
foods will do to us’.

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MP: Superweeds?
DH: Superweeds I think are kind of an interesting problem. But I’m not particularly convinced
that genetically modified soybeans or corn are dangerous.
MP: I’ve heard about tests done with GM soybeans and rats where there were carcinogenic
results, but I’m not sure if this is myth or fact.
DH: I don’t know. And yes, they should be tested. There should be a very well thought
through and broad-based testing apparatus. And, more fundamentally, I think these matters ought
to proceed within a general framework of a precautionary practice. And a precautionary practice
such as that developed by many European thinkers, and some US thinkers, has been
systematically disavowed. The spokesperson for the man who is in charge of vetting rules in the
application of law, vetting the rules that will actually go into place in a new regulatory law, in the
US Office of Management and Budget, in other words, a person in a very important place, who’s
really going to effect how a law works in its inner apparatus, a place that really matters, he
recently gave a speech in which he discussed the precautionary principle as “mythological like
the unicorn.” That’s a quote. That scares me big-time.
So, the genetic modification bit, I can readily think of genetic modification practices properly
conducted that I think would be beneficial and that would be agriculturally sound, ecologically
sound. But that implies in a research apparatus quite different from the one that’s in place and
accountable to bodies quite other than the ones they are now accountable to. So, Martha Crouch
who was a botanist and geneticist at the University of Indiana resigned her grants many years
ago. I think this remains a paradigm case of a person who felt her research that was potentially
justifiable and interesting and many good things could be said about it, in the current research
apparatus should not be done. Because the apparatus in which it is done is systematically not
conducting the kind of testing that needs to be done, doesn’t involve the ecologists and
population geneticists, and isn’t seriously alert, it appears… I am much more interested in the
problem of genetic pollution than I am dangerous foods, partly because I don’t believe the foods
are dangerous, I don’t think it’s very plausible.
MP: Do you eat them?
DH: Yes, more out of laziness than much of anything else. It would take too much work to
find out what has them and what doesn’t. So, I’m all for strict labeling laws. I think that all sorts
questions, about the well-being of the soil, the well-being of surrounding organisms, the species
diversity of the patches between fields, all those questions ought to be integrated into any ‘good
enough’ food system.
MP: You really dislike the purity discourse around foods.
DH: Yes, I hear too much, almost theology of GMO’s, it’s like GMO is like WMD, it ends up
being an “it”. It’s almost like a thing, like there’s a GMO and a WMD, they are the devil. And
the questions are much more, if you will, ecological. What’s the apparatus here?
MP: Have you ever spoken with Vandana Shiva on this topic?
DH: I have. And I have a love-hate relationship with Vandana Shiva, both her politics and her
person. Any important, charismatic, intelligent, energetic, politically complicated person who is

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out there on the world stage using all her privilege to do everything she can, can’t but evoke
love-hate responses. And I find Vandana Shiva all too ready to do ideological work that just
leaves me disgusted. The way she develops ideologies of Indian tribalism, I find her willing to
make ideological moves that I think she must know better than. I don’t know.
MP: She has commented that as a Western academic, it is easy for you to condemn the purity
discourse sitting where you’re sitting.
DH: Yes, and I think we’re probably both right about each other. I think we both have each
other’s sore point. So, I respect the work that Vandana Shiva does and there ought to be some
way that these two positions don’t end up… I don’t consider her an enemy or an opponent, but as
a kind of tense alliance, a fraught alliance.
I think the reason that I disagree with Vandana, she’s right about me being too little engaged and
I make that criticism of myself for a million reasons, but I think she is wrong about the complaint
about purity being the cause. Because it seems to me that for people like Carolyn, who we talked
about earlier, people who are working less exclusively in the university and more as organizers,
there shouldn’t have to be either-or. They actually have to take into account even more
complexity and ought to be capable of even richer ideological work, rather than more purified
and polarizing work.
MP: Why?
DH: Because I think they are actually working more in touch with where the contradictions
are operating. For example, if you are really trying to organize people around food issues, there
is so much complexity involved. What kind of food do you have access to? What kinds of
cultures of food do you come from? What sorts of knowledge do you have of food production
systems? What sorts of time and money? People get into so many contradictions when they are
trying to put a meal on the table, especially when they are trying to feed other people.
MP: In Modest Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ you
comment on something that really bothers me, which is that when organizing around food issues
the axis is always the consumer whereas the majority of damage with regards our food industry
is to the people who are in the fields, barns, and factories.
DH: It’s the farm workers who are bearing the burden of the toxins. The consumer is getting
the toxins too and it’s not okay and ought to be a site of organization, but no question the toxins
are being born by farm workers and their children overwhelmingly, and the other organisms in
the fields.
MP: Why don’t we have this discourse?
DH: Class privilege and being an unmarked category where you don’t have to notice on whose
lives you depend.
MP: Clearly part of consumer culture.
DH: Yes, there is a pretty systematic operating at the level of the market place. You don’t
have to see the system. I become a fairly orthodox Marxist on this point. And the domain of
commodity exchange does not reveal the system that sustains it, the system of value-production
and all of the labour practices within it. That’s really why I’ve written about dogs the way I did,

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because I wanted to unpack these many-layered histories of labour practices which include the
dogs I picked – pastoral dogs. They were all in food economies and they were all in meat eating
economies. That was not an innocent choice - it’s not what I’m after. But what I am after, what I
really think is true is that the people who are living with these particular dogs maybe have a little
more obligation than people who aren’t to be worried about restoration ecology and western
grasslands, to be worried about how to get ranching practices in sync with grasslands ecology
practices and in sync with wolf restoration projects, and tourism industries. There really is a
getting on together to be done here.
MP: Such simple things. Put the dogs in place before the wolves.
DH: Yes, why weren’t the Department of the Interior people in touch with the Department of
Agriculture people? Things like that. And we are not motivated to do that if we have an
ideological dogma that gives us the answers.
MP: Do you eat farmed salmon?
DH: I do, but am not altogether sure that I will continue to do so for a whole lot of reasons.
Most fundamentally I think, the questions of water pollution, the same reason that factory raised
pigs are a problem. I am not against eating pork. I think a pig can live a good pig life, be killed
properly, and under those circumstances I don’t find meat eating problematic. But I don’t think
that contemporary salmon farms are being run that way either in terms of a decent salmon life or
in terms of a decent ecological relationship to the waterways, the other species, or to the wild
salmon. I think they are not ecologically justifiable, that’s the conclusion I am reaching. And, it
also seems to me that they are not doing, don’t deliver, as promised in terms of the human
nutritional advantage of eating fatty fish because it appears that a large proportion of fats are
saturated and that the Omega-3 fatty acids are low. So, there might be a way to do salmon
farming that does all that, but this ain’t it!
MP: Also, the question of genetic pollution.
DH: Yes, the question of disrupting the evolutionarily significant units, the micro-adaptations
of remaining salmon runs – those questions seem to me, really important. And, again it’s a
precautionary principle problem. It doesn’t seem to me from what research I’ve done so far,
which is too little, but not nothing, it doesn’t seem to me that the science is good enough to know
things that we damn well better know before we act. It’s, do you act first or do you find out first?
We’re still working off of a reactionary science as opposed to a precautionary science.
MP: One of Jacques Derrida’s most famous and misinterpreted lines is: “There is nothing
outside the text.”
DH: Horribly misinterpreted.
MP: Dangerous though it is, could we, in a similar way, remaining true to Derrida’s meaning
there, sum up your philosophy with the phrase: “There is nothing outside of technoscience”?
DH: Oooh, because such statements are so easily made to mean their opposite I would actually
say it rather differently. Something like: “Technoscience is everywhere, but is not everything.”

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