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The third approach presented here is that of feminist writer Donna Haraway who offers a nuanced account of the concept of situatedness (1991). Contributing to and building on feminist debates on epistemology, Haraway argues for an understanding of objectivity – a value she wants to retain as an ideal – as constituted in situated knowledges.⁷

Responding to feminist debate, in which it is argued that knowledge always emerges from a standpoint, Haraway writes of the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics and epistemologies. In place of emphasizing the identity of the researcher in her understanding of situated-ness she proposes that, ‘Splitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge’:

‘Splitting’ in this context should be about heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously necessary and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. This geometry pertains within and among subjects … Here is the promise of objectivity: a scientific knower seeks the subject position not of identity, but of objectivity; that is, partial connection. (1997: 193)

But Haraway’s approach is also not to be confused with ‘the death of the subject, that single ordering point of will and consciousness’, but rather is a process of ‘generative doubt’ that follows ‘the opening of non-isomorphic subjects, agents, and territories of stories unimaginable from the vantage point of the cyclopean, self-satiated eye of the master subject’ (1991: 192).

Haraway’s resistance to, or at least complication of, standpoint is not a proposal for a view from nowhere or ‘above’. The only way to find a larger vision, she says, ‘is to be somewhere in particular’:

The science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned rationality. Its images are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits, i.e. the view from above, but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions, i.e. of views from somewhere. (1991: 196)

For Haraway, ‘feminist embodiment resists fixation and is insatiably curious about the webs of differential positioning’ (1991: 196). Significantly, she argues that it is not only humans that know, and describes the importance of acquiring ‘the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different, and power-differentiated communities’ in an earth-wide network of connections that includes the objects of knowledge as ‘knowers’ themselves. Perhaps most well-known is her concern with knowing with animals, most notably with companion species such as dogs (Haraway 2003; see also Motamedi-Fraser 2019).

Haraway’s knowledge is not only situated however: it is also post-plural, a term also associated with another feminist writer, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1991). Haraway cautions against the ‘easy relativisms and holisms built out of summing and subsuming parts’. She refuses ‘to resolve the ambiguities built into referring to science without differentiating its extraordinary range of contexts’ (1991: 197) while Strathern says of her own practice:

[The book] Partial Connections was an attempt to act out, or deliberately fabricate, a non-linear progression of argumentative points as the basis for description … Rather than inadvertent or unforeseen – and thus tragic or pitiable – partitionings that conjured loss of a whole, I wanted to experiment with the ‘apportioning of size’ in a deliberate manner. The strategy was to stop the flow of information or argument, and thus ‘cut’ it. (2004: xxix)

This is a rather different understanding of cutting or partitioning to that outlined by Simon above, in which cutting divides a problem into parts that can be solved independently and then put together again as a whole. For Strathern and Haraway, cutting is (perhaps counter-intuitively) a way to acknowledge patterning as a way to make connection and continuity. What they add is the importance of recognizing that this continuity is only ever partial, and is emergent in the practice of situatedness (of splitting). In consequence, Haraway stresses the importance of seeking ‘perspective from those points of view, which can never be known in advance, which promise something quite extraordinary; that is, knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organized by axes of domination’ (1991: 192).⁸

In addition to splitting, Haraway introduces figuration as a method to do this, a practice to put alongside Rockburne’s drawing that draws itself, Dewey’s line of inquiry and Simon’s notion of design. Describing herself as ‘a person cursed and blessed with a sacramental consciousness and the indelible mark of having grown up Irish-Catholic in the United States’, she puts forward an understanding of the figure as an image, a sign that is the thing in itself: in her work the figures of the cyborg, the OncoMouse, or the cat’s cradle are a way of acknowledging an ‘implosion of sign and substance, a literalness of metaphor, the materiality of trope, the tropic quality of materiality’ (Haraway and Goodeve 2000).

For Haraway, ‘Figurations are performative images that can be inhabited. Verbal or visual figurations can be condensed maps of contestable worlds’ (1997: 17). The practice of figuration is to ‘somehow collect up and give back the sense of the possibility of fulfillment, the possibility of damnation, or the possibility of a collective inclusion in figures larger than that to which they explicitly refer’ (Haraway and Goodeve 2000). Methodologically speaking, figuring involves the activation of methodological potential in a process that is neither teleological nor mechanistic, both of which conceive as problemetization as going in one direction only, from givens to goals, but instead is a becoming-with.

In describing figuration in this way, Haraway might be seen to call up what Hayden White, in a commentary on the literary theory of Erich Auerbach, describes as figural causation, a concept that speaks to the potential of a figure for progressive fulfilment (Erfüllung), a kind of ‘anomalous, nondetermining causal force or ateleological end’ (White 1991: 88): ‘the later figure fulfils the earlier by repeating the elements thereof, but with a difference’ (White 1991: 91). However, in discussions of the practice of string figuring, Haraway seeks to distance herself from the Judeo-Christian temporalities of salvation or damnation. In contradistinction, she identifies three key features of string figuring or sf as methodological practice:

First, promiscuously plucking out fibers in clotted and dense events and practices, I try to follow the threads where they lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places and times. In that sense, sf [string figuring] is a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where who lives and who dies and how might become clearer for the cultivating of multispecies justice. Second, the string figure is not the tracking, but rather the actual thing, the pattern and assembly that solicits response, the thing that is not oneself but with which one must go on. Third, string figuring is passing on and receiving, making and unmaking, picking up threads and dropping them. sf is practice and process; it is becoming-with each other in surprising relays; it is a figure for ongoingness. (2016: 2)

In developing this understanding, she emphasizes that string figures ‘are not everywhere the same game’: as she says, ‘Like all offspring of colonizing and imperial histories, I – we – have to relearn how to conjugate worlds with partial connections and not universals and particulars’ (2016: 12).⁹