Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (1)

Donna Haraway is perhaps best known as the critical theorist behind the cyborg manifesto. Haraway wrote the manifesto during the Reagan years. In it she made the case for, among very other things, an intelligently hybridized understanding of the feminine.

Haraway has since moved on to work on the species boundary and an exploration of the relationships that obtain between dogs and their human cohorts. What I think is much less well known is that Haraway's work Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields from the 1970s is something of a gold mine of images and explanations for why the life sciences model certain key concepts as they do.

From Scott Gilbert's forward to the new printing of the book:

"... I would contend that one of the most important precepts in her most recent pamphlet -- namely that "'the relation' is the smallest possible unit of analysis" -- can be traced directly to the embryological science analyzed in this 1976 volume. No matter what else Donna's philosophy might be -- Marxist, feminist, affectionate, ironic, cyborgian, anthropocanine -- it is thoroughly and uncompromisingly epigenetic."

And further:

"What does that mean? Epigenesis is an embryological concept that celebrates interaction, change, emergence, and the reciprocal relationship between the whole and its component parts. Epigenesis states that the identity of any particular cell is not preordained, but that this particular fate arises through the interactions between the cell and its neighbors ... Epigenesis tells us that 'being' never is anything except the processes of 'becoming' ..."