War and Peace
a reading circle held on 29.08.21 at West Den Haag and online
In the Manifesto for Cyborgs, Donna Haraway takes up the trickiness of the military pedigree in high technology, not just in weapons but also in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and other domains on the vanguard of industrial innovation. This concern is still simmering in Haraway’s more recent writing from OncoMouse (TM) in Modest Witness to Premarin (R) in Staying with the Trouble. The military agenda of conquest and control mirrors the capitalist-industrial imperative of analyse and instrumentalize, in our highly automated world, increasingly subjected to shareholder/stakeholder logic. For Haraway the military paradigm is cartesian, patriarchal, and alienated. It needs to be reintegrated into an understanding of our condition which does not disqualify the functions it provides in the current system, if we can hope to transition toward another way of managing our needs within the affordances of the planet.
Readings:
Introduction and Chapter 3 of the Donna Haraway Reader