reading circle organized by West Den Haag took place online on March 28th 2021 from 2pm to 4pm, there were about 20 participants. Readers were Tamara, Jack and Channa.

Haraway’s humour, her playfulness is a less-discussed but methodologically core aspect of her critical practice. She writes like she speaks and she speaks like a playful companion, enticing her counterparts into a learning and mutually informative dance or game. This spontaneity in prose is part of her commitment to situatedness in knowledges, constantly bringing the reader or witness of her words back into their circumstance, physicalising again the work of thinking through the thick and troubled present so that we may open ourselves up to what Haraway calls ‘the world's independent sense of humour’. In this third session of the circles we will read from the fascinating chapter on Situated Knowledges from ‘Simians, Cyborgs and Women’ (1991), where Haraway traces out some radical feminist responses to visual culture, visuality, and visual bias in epistemology. Unreserved in her irony and uninhibited in her scientific challenges to established masculinist norms of knowledge-production, Haraway demonstrates radical rhetorical virtuosity encouraging and instructing us to be both subject to the scientific tradition yet simultaneously irrepressibly exceeding it.

The quantum revolution brought about a re-Socratic or Aristotelian turn in modern philosophy where scientific knowledge was urgently re-situated, re-localized and subject to radical scrutiny of its truth claims. Haraway engages in this condition, bristling with witty neologisms and testy turns of phrase, radically situated philosophical rhetoric which is not stripped of vulnerability and committed concern.

Baruch Gottlieb's introductory slides

Reading from Chapter 9 of Simians, Cyborgs and Women

Reading from Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium