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Feminist knowledge politics in situated zones A different hi/story of knowledge construction

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

This paper is an attempt to stress some political issues at stake in feminist interventions in science and knowledge. I would like to give some elements to debate on the use of epistemology as a theoretical tool. I mean to stress the original way in which feminism has constructed a knowledge tradition and specially the singularity of the hi/stories told about this knowledge construction - what is usually called, in academic circles, epistemologies. The sophisticated title of my paper intends to expose my preference to speak of knowledge politics instead of epistemology to refer to hi/stories told about feminist interventions on knowledge and science. Working in an academic context which largely ignores this hi/story I have spent the two last years celebrating my discovery of feminist texts - a new political, affective and theoretical world for me and trying to prolong the pertinence of feminist propositions for knowledge politics, insisting on the different project they belong to. My concern to prolong this difference, leads me to be reluctant to use epistemology. Creating new concepts is a practice which comes out of necessity. We want to say something but we dont have the word. I find it difficult to empty epistemology from its scientistic, normative connotations, and I don't feel smart enough to invent a new concept that doesn't mask, under an academic label, the originality of feminist propositions. So, for the moment, I content myself on avoiding the word, shifting to its limits. And the limits of epistemology as they have been illuminated by feminists with their transgressive moves are marked by the use of politics : situated transversal politics of knowledge, that challenge disembodied generalising theories typical of epistemological accounts. I take as a figure of this politics the idea of situated knowledges as it has been developed by Donna Haraway[1]. The idea that feminists have changed epistemology is not new. Lorraine Code stresses the radical transformation of epistemological frameworks in feminism which is giving place to inter-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary projects where the knowledge at issue has to be worked at, unearthed, and analysed not just in standards epistemologists S knows that P propositions but in its workings at the heart of local, specific inquiry and action [2]. Lorraine Code is not alone, other feminists are advocating for situated epistemologies in many different ways[3]. With this paper I intend to follow this path advocating for nonepistemological hi/stories of knowledge construction. Three main arguments motivate this paper. Accounts of feminist successful knowledge projects have been pushed to accomplish a move out of epistemology by the very different hi/story they where committed to tell, hi/story-telling that belongs to an original tradition of knowledge politics. Situated accounts of this different hi/story deviate from epistemological linear hi/stories which stress how present theorists have gone past the mistakes of the nave times (for instance : when feminists believed in sisterhood and other illusions as such). An advocacy for feminists situated theoretical practices is continuation and constant interaction with feminist constructions and politics from the past. In this sense I will argue, following Bruno Latour, that this different situated hi/stories are not modern and not necessarily post-modern. Maybe amodern?[4] Still following Latour, I will argue that the amodernity of feminist situated accounts on knowledge construction is linked to the specificity of feminist objects to think, complicated webs of nature, society and discourse. I dont take situatedness as the new paradigm for feminist knowledges marking an epistemological break - to speak the canonical epistemological jargon - but as a beautiful concept for the description and transmission of feminist practices. It seems to me that its pertinence and strength are more rooted in a political move that in an epistemological one. This concept enacts a political gesture born in a complex hi/story of knowledge construction embedded in politics; in struggle to learn to recognise the situated value of different propositions. A hi/story that appeals for different hi/story-

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tellings which are not necessarily epistemological. This is no original argument and maybe you find the issue a repetition of debates on is this politics or knowledge?. Nevertheless, this open issue and the very fact that it remains open, is one of the most fascinating singularities of feminist knowledge. This paper is en effort to stress some elements for a different hi/story-telling, being myself confronted to the difficult challenge of telling it differently. This difficulty touches a more general concern : what am I doing when doing theory and how? Writing hi/stories instead of histories or stories is an small attempt to deviate from the truth or fiction alternative. The accounts we make on our knowledge constructions are rooted on reality and representations. They are not mere illusionary fictions nor mere real truths, they are collective fabulations[5] building the past in a way that challenges the future. Let me say two things so to avoid misunderstandings : First : that what its often called feminist epistemologies is one of my central fields of interest and a heritage I claim. So I am far from dismissing them, even if I concentrate myself on the paths they show to get out of epistemology. Second : that while I will speak of feminist knowledge politics without specifying to which feminist tendency I refer to, I am aware that what I call feminist cant be a definition of feminism as a whole. I am therefore consciously transgressing the academic principle of clear taxonomy because my aim is to propose a position, to witness, from my specific location, of what feminist knowledge politics mean to me. A meaning drawing a zigzag path through multiple feminist positions. 1To be or not to beepistemologist 2 Lets start with some cultural clarifications. I have studied philosophy in a French speaking culture. In this tradition, epistemology fundamentally represents the search for the scientific core which grants to science its status. Once found, this scientific core endows the role of a foundational origin myth. Epistemologies tell the heroic hi/stories of how sciences became sciences. Often, this hi/stories, if you change the names of disciplines and specialisations, into those of countries and regions, can be confounded with a war hi/story between nationalistic countries, where the victors erase the defeated under new truths. In any case, epistemology concentrates mainly on scientific practices, aiming to define the scientific logos (rationality) underlying the progress of science towards more adequate (read true) foundational accounts of the natural (read real) world. We also find philosophers in this hi/stories, as are Hume, Descartes, Locke and Kant, who are retrospectively called epistemologists, and whose theories are used to justify the hierarchy of sciences and the submission of human knowledge to scientistic models[6]. Probably, my reluctance to use this word is informed by this hi/story. In the meantime, I have met feminist approaches embedded in Anglo-American traditions which address a larger version of epistemology, considering knowledge as a whole, distinguishing its approach from the one reserved to philosophy of science. In this context the fundamental issues of epistemology are : what counts as knowledge worthy of that name, and how this knowledge gets to be worthy of that name. Historical epistemologies address the process of legitimisation of knowledge. We also find, in Anglo-American hi/stories, the philosophers quoted above as the founders of the discipline and notions and concepts, inspired by models often built to account of scientific modern practices. I will rely on etymology to deepen the insight of my allergy to epistemology Episteme means science. It comes from isteme which refers to what holds in itself. When you add epi it refers to what is able to stand up straight. Science is what stands up by itself and logos is the rational discourse which expresses the underlying meaning and shows its rules. Thus, Epistemology refers to the rational discourse on a science (or knowledge) capable of holding by itself, a valid knowledge. The rational discourse of the logos as it has been theorised by dominant western philosophical traditions -

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designs a passage to generalities, averages, rules[7]. Abstracting meanings from concrete specific situations so to find their reliable, general foundations. The concrete situations from which epistemology aims to extract the generalities are those where knowledge is constructed[8]. It is of course a quite well known human practice to try to extract from a situation elements to speak of/with other situations, to propose shareable meanings; but it is also true that the way this is done can take multiple forms. Epistemological discourses tend to transcend the situation bringing its located singularities to endow normative looks and methodological ambitions. It is this tendency, encrusted in epistemology, which makes me feel uncomfortable[9]. Being informed by this mixture of theoretical frameworks, epistemology makes me think of the generalising power of theory, what some theorists call meta-theories. It makes me think of a constructed relation of knowers (rational subjects) to an objectivised inanimate world. Another of my fears to espouse epistemological narratives to give accounts of feminist knowledge is to import methods and terminology from approaches linked basically to scientific practices.This analogical importation moves often carry positivistic hierarchical tendencies and universalistic drives. So here I am, interested in the construction of knowledge but allergic to epistemology. What tools are left to me? Fortunately, feminists, among other interesting people, have moved away from epistemology and showed the path. From a perspective of critical resistance, feminism has challenged the existing delimiting frameworks of knowledge. The move to valorise knowledges which had been historically left out of the game produced a shift which reformulated great number of the games rules. Womens knowledge was at bottom of a pyramid constructed with academic, scientific and, as feminists have shown, political standard bricks. Bringing politics into epistemological scenes means quite a radical shift[10]. What I mean by politics here is not the politics of a radical sociology of sciences[11] approach which tends to reduce sciences politics to mere power relations, and whose political approach of scientific practices consists in unveiling this real face of power games and interests. What I mean by politics is the delicate process of negotiations involved in all human constructions and representations. A relational process, which includes of course hegemonic power games, but not only. A political approach to knowledge means a delicate and implicated re-construction of its processes, the search of the links and relations between many different elements often irreducible one to another. In feminism, this gaze into knowledge, is informed by confidence on collective re-constructions, not only on theoretical deconstructions. Far from limiting themselves to a suspicious move, which sees power effects everywhere and unveils the true being of science, the feminism which I would like to follow has searched for attentive accounts on knowledge constructions which reconsider histories of knowledge in a double constructivist move of critique and affirmation[12]. Is this still epistemology? At least not in the sense I have portrayed above. I will try to dress two problematising scenarios to illustrate this point of view. The definition of feminism. The delimiting aims of epistemological theorisation often go hand in hand with generalising definitions. As such, they have been largely reconsidered within feminism. Delimiting, defining, is a necessity which feminism has not left unexamined. See, for instance, the problems encountered by the very definition of feminism and feminist theory. The review Feminist Theory addresses in its first issue the question what counts as feminist theory? (which could be of course addressed as an epistemological question). In this issue Bronwyn Winter stresses a feminist reluctance to define feminism based in the fear for closure. She fears two consequences from this reluctance : one, the abandon to malestream of the task of defining our movement; two, the undermining of the possibility of debate[13]. This two points can be approached politically, by formulating the problem in this well known way : how are we going to ground a strong feminist standpoint which will be respected and taken into account while avoiding simplistic and insulting definitions? The dimension of the problem which preoccupies
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Winter is that, in this delicate process, we may forget to take positions - as it is necessary in contexts of political struggle so to negotiate from a particular stance. As one who encountered feminist theories in the late nineties, I have been confronted myself to this challenge which marks contemporary feminist propositions : I dont want to give the definition of feminism, I still want to say myself a feminist[14]. Moreover, while I am not interested in searching general epistemological groundings for feminist knowledges (more true than) I still want to defend the importance of this knowledge (more pertinent than). So let me suggest a non-epistemological way out of this infertile definitional alternative : If feminists cannot possibly avoid to situate themselves politically they may dont need to found this situated position in epistemological frameworks[15]. The confusing between foundations and positions, or the belief that one cant exist without the other, can be paralysing, specially in times when foundational pretensions still wear the modernist dress which inspires suspicion due to its oppressive past. This question is linked to present feminist struggles and deeply rooted in practical political difficulties and conflicts within the Womens Movement. Feminism has been confronted to the difficulty of defining women and feminism [16]. The fear for closure which Winter points is a proof of political honesty : the desire to avoid general accounts of women's experience comes from the experience of the historical insult of being victims of definitions made by others for our own good. So there is a legitimate resistance to definitions which I advocate, but does this entail that we dont take positions? The answers to the question of what it means to speak as a woman have given birth to many different standpoints and positions in feminism. Tensions between this standpoints have been the terrain for political creativity[17]. The idea that feminism doesn't reflect the voice of a naturalized essentialised speaker doesn't dissolve feminism as a fundamental part of our political identity[18]. Theoretical accounts produced by feminists are deeply rooted in feminist political experiences (including politics of knowledge). This cultivated link between theory and politics is one of the elements which marks the different hi/story to tell which I am advocating here because feminist knowledge resists to be described as the result of pure theoretical evolution. To say that feminist knowledge is rooted in successful politics its different that to root it in teleological epistemologies. The different hi/story of knowledge construction that I feel committed to tell as a feminist stresses the originality of feminist knowledge in its resistance to ground its propositions - accounts of the world linked to multiple political positions and alliances - in general knowledge theories as they are typical of epistemological accounts. Objectivity I could limit myself to say that telling this different hi/story, feminists have transformed epistemology, but I still think that the word tends to mask the originality of feminist projects and that epistemology remains a reductionist approach to account of the construction of reliable knowledge and scientific practices. The logos is not all, but pretends to cover all. Let me give an illustration of what I try to stress here. Epistemological accounts on objectivity have developed hegemonic generalising tendencies. The objective relationship between subjects and objects that modern experimental sciences have produced in laboratories could be seen as a success. An event, a located success (and sure not the only successful object/subject relationship possible in experimental sciences). Nevertheless, problems appear when we try to extend the power of this local success out of its soil of origin (for example social scientists who tend to treat the social as a group of electrons). Epistemologists have helped to accomplish this move, translating a located sense of objectivity into methodological projections. The logos is at work here, building general rules from a situated success. If we could say that progress means the creation of something new and interesting epistemology tends to translate the new into positive methodological foundations that say why and how a success can pretend to be better[19]. Feminists have questioned this version of objectivity in many interesting ways. Sandra Harding has

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stressed that the objectivity of a science depends on the self-conscious and critical examination of the relationship between the social experience of its creators and the kinds of cognitive structures favoured in its inquiry [20].This idea of objectivity moves out of epistemological ambitions for methodological, abstract and general frameworks. Harding proposes a reliable principle but based on a concrete, always located, political gesture. In this context, shareable meanings are built through transversal knowledge politics rather that through generalising theoretical frameworks. Moving further out from epistemology, it is important to remind that objectivity has served as an alibi for imposing ones scientific knowledge onto others. So while we must question objectivity, challenge its meanings and uses by producing different versions[21], we couldnt possibly avoid the other important movement which is to ask : why should objectivity (be it scientific or academic) have the last word? Knowledge has been imposed onto others by means of objectivity : can we really lead a battle against this hegemonic and homogenising tendencies (often at stake out of laboratories and disciplines) by offering a more objective point of view? One of the tasks of epistemology may be, in the French meaning, to define (or redefine) what is objective in a particular scientific context; in the Anglo-American meaning it may be to define (or redefine) what is objective in a particular knowledge construct. Nevertheless, re-examining this practice doesn't spare us a crucial question : how are we going to deal with gestures, belonging to politics and power games, which consist in imposing our objective legitimate knowledge onto others? Again, why should objectivity (the authority of science) have the last word? This struggle seems to me a matter of politics of knowledge particularly important today. An example of this non-epistemological zones where our knowledges and sciences are situated today could be human cloning : how are we to address this issue within arguments grounded on objectivity? Or, in another order of things, aren't we dealing with a dismissed problem? In my particular case, the frequently asked question I am confronted to is not, are you objective or epistemologically founded but are you efficient and socially pertinent? (read economically). Let me quote Michel Foucault, a thinker often classed as an epistemologist but who tried to account of his practice in other ways. He leaves apart the epistemological concern of searching which is the irreducible core of scientificity in a science? to search instead which is the force of a science, how, in our society, the truth effects of a science are power effects?. This proposition expresses quite well the perspective I privilege in feminist knowledge politics. It seems to me that even in the work of feminists who are attempting to produce epistemological accounts on science and knowledge this is the political engine that motivates and assures their originality. They have attained the limitations of epistemological realms and normative pretensions to build reliable, shareable accounts on our realities. But, am I reproducing the delimiting epistemological aim which I intend to criticise? Am I being tempted by definiology? Maybe not. What I am attempting is not an epistemological definition of what counts as epistemology and what does not, I am trying to account of a political position which is the one where I find my feminist force. As I stressed before, proposing a position is different from grounding it in a definition. My position is situated in the cultural context that I have exposed earlier so it is possible that you dont recognise yourselves in my concerns and I hope we can discuss it. Now that I have exposed my allergy to epistemology. I would like to get nearer from this move out of epistemology I have tracked in feminism. My favourite figure is the version conceptualised by Donna Haraway as situated knowledges. I have argued that the different hi/stories told by feminists on their own knowledge construction are embedded in a different hi/story. Our visions on this hi/story are probably different. The conceptual personage of situated knowledges is for Haraways the modest witness, let me try to embody it and modestly account of what I have seen, as a located and implicated witness. 3 Feminist knowledge politics : the challenge of situatedness As a witness my vision is partial.

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From my partial vision I fear the epistemological temptation to tell the hi/story of the feminist empiricist, who became a standpoint theorist when she realised she had been duped by Enlightment ideals, but then, realising the essentialising limits of this position becomes post-modern or deconstructionist. This hi/story (a resumed and commodified version of the much more subtle and illuminating version by Harding[22]), is very useful when we have to adapt ourselves, as our academic circles or founding institutions demand, to the vertiginous speed of communicating. As a vulgarising model it has proved very important. I have used it myself, (even without using the words of post-modernist or deconstructionist), tempted by this easy comprehensible progressist model in the occasions I have to speak far from feminist environments. Nevertheless, as a situated account of a different hi/story it seems too rapid, quite weak [23]. Fortunately, many feminists have found the subtlety lacking to most of their disciplined epistemological fathers and have insisted in the fact that this theories/positions do not replace each other as paradigmatic moments in a progressist, linear and teleological hi/story, but that they are deeply linked one to another and that they still coexist nowadays[24]. More, that this is not uniquely a theoretical hi/story. This is an important detail for the commitment for situated accounts of feminist knowledge politics. Different feminist approaches are born in different contexts. In the first place they respond to problems that are probably posed differently on different historical moments, which doesnt mean that we can dismiss their importance. In addition, this problems are often far of being solved, and feminists have stressed the necessity to combine this different strategies. A different hi/story telling : standpoints vs. situatedness[25] The idea of situated knowledges doesnt easily fit an evolutionary hi/story. It can be told as the response of one theorist (Haraway) to another's (Harding) account. It may be told as what comes after standpoint feminism, in the search for a feminist position which can acknowledge the death of the modern subject; and therefore can better account of the complicated identity webs at stake in feminist standpoints. Another version could say that while situatedness is difficult to class as uniquely postmodernist or deconstructionist, it is informed by this tendencies. Neither of this views expresses fully what I see here : that point where I bump against the irreducible character of feminist hi/story to a epistemological account of teleological theoretical progress. As an example : the situated approach theorised by Haraway integrates elements of standpoint theories, for instance by acknowledging the importance of taking into account the standpoint of women in marked positions when we produce our theories[26]. But differences between standpoint and situatedness exists though. And not (only) epistemological differences, but political. What I mean by standpoint positions is basicaly the idea that women have a different point of view on reality which can give place to different knowledge. Standpoint feminism has been accused of essentialism, but the standpoint feminism I am exposing here stresses that standpoint is constructed in struggle, in collective depersonalising politics, and not in womans essence[27]. This position, which stresses the active dimension of political positioning, is linked to situatedness in that the latter expresses also the production of an account on reality based on our passive/active role as witness. As witness we are passive because observing a situation in which we are more or less implicated in spite of ourselves. But the witness is active because it produces a position, an account, out of this existence. Haraway took the modest witness figure out of the hi/story of modern science. The modest witness which accompanies the invention of modern sciences[28] is the one which doesnt add any external considerations to the account of the object, the one which is at the origins of our modern notion of objectivity. This witness literally represents the object, he speaks in its behalf : It is not I who say this; it is the machine[29]. Haraways modest witness is, on the contrary, suspicious, implicated, knowing, ignorant, worried and hopeful[30], and doesnt ambition to speak in others behalf. She can nevertheless

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speak (among others) as a woman" a possibility created collectively by women. So what is the difference between standpoints and situated positions if both are trying to produce accountable positions? A feminist standpoint is a necessary mobilising political strategy whose pertinence is alive, as a necessary move in a situation of struggle. We still speak as a woman, even if we know this is a complicated stance. On the contrary of situatedness, a standpoint is not a modest position and it is not meant to be one. Feminism has created the possibility of the coexistence of standpoints with situated positions. I would say that feminism needs the closure of standpoints as it needs the open situations of witnesses. Something happens to us in a particular situation and we produce an account, we enter a becoming-witness when we keep our eyes wide open to the webs that link our witnessing to others. A situation is never closed while a standpoint expresses the political need for strategic closures[31]. At that point modesty remains at the rearguard. Situatedness is not an alternative deconstructive theory against essentialist standpoints but a different position which doesnt erase the latter. I dont think the point is to find if one is more true than the other, more adequate to reality as an epistemological jargon would express. What interests me here is to stress that different approaches in feminism, often theorised within a progressive process (equality/empiricism, difference/standpoint, postmodernism/deconstructionism) obey to different historical situations, specific struggle fronts on knowledge territories, which inform different contemporary ways of conceiving feminist politics. The same feminists may use them at different moments, because they may be strategically better. There is no epistemological definite foundation for this use, only strategic and politically positioned. The situatedness figure seems to me an attempt to draw a "political line" present through different feminist approaches. A beautiful tool for mapping the successful knowledge project of feminism. Not because it would be the theoretical accomplishment, the final concept, copyrighted Donna Haraway. I see, it - as Haraway recognises it herself - as rendered possible by this original hi/story of women in movement attentive not to reproduce the insults that they have suffered themselves. A political line grounded on a position which was born the very day where women stood up and claimed stop speaking in our behalf!. Since that moment, trying not to speak in others behalf has been a political aim for feminism, the move that made possible for feminist black women to say as feminists to other feminists (specially white occidental women) : dont speak in our behalf. Of course this beautiful hi/story is not naturally born beautiful. It carries a painful hi/story of conflictive sisterhood, as sisters are often quarrelling. But maybe this political sisters have a different hi/story to tell : one of sisters who choose to see each other as such, through the experience of suffering, struggle and construction. Some elements for a different hi/story So there is a different hi/story to tell, and I have chose the "situated" approach to tell it. This approach stresses that we are all ways speaking, producing knowledge from somewhere. That all knowledge is located. But situatedness is also an act, a gesture. A political gesture. It doesn't function as an accusative external moralistic theory but as an embodied gesture of affirmation : we situate ourselves. As such, it is better propagated by contagion, not as a normative framework. You cannot force situatedness on others, you cannot simply force somebody to be a witness : s/he would lie. I have described and tried to enact one of the moves out of epistemology implied in approach to knowledge construction: it avoids teleological schemes - the ones who erase the old under new truths. This treatment of our past differs from the hi/story of the triumphant because it approaches positions and the knowledge they entail as located webs, mapping their existence in complex political (interrelational) situations. Other things can be said about this situated hi/story telling. It means to pay attention to the in-between zones, sites of political relations of our knowledge constructions, to cherish ambiguities and contradictions not mobilising against them as if they were theoretical obstacles which separate us from truth. As Harding has often stressed, traditional epistemological discourses tend to mask tensions to produce stable

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and coherent stances. A coherence based on a non-contradictory principle. Harding invites us to cherish our tensions and don't try to eliminate them[32]. In addition, this hi/stories are meant to be situated not only in an autobiographical sense but in a political positioning of what the hi/story teller privileges as pertinent. Embodiment and experience are key terms what doesn't meant they are authoritative tools. Concepts are "introduced", not given as impersonal evidences, as objective universal data. As Tobie Nathan says, civilised people are those who know how to introduce themselves. Occidental philosophy is plenty of those uncivilised moments where neutrality (i.e. :needing no introduction) served as an alibi to colonise in the name of the norm[33]. Situatedness is an attempt to deviate from this destiny[34]. And, last but not least, transversal connections are preferred to generalising connections, a transversality which needs a great deal of modesty and diplomacy[35]. In academic practices this entails situated transdisciplinarity, respectful of closures, specially when we are willing to transgress them. All this are elements of knowledge politics at stake in feminism[36]. I have said before that there are many ways of trying to connect a singular situation to another, and I have affirmed that the typical epistemological move is to turn situated singularities into generalities to be able to connect them in a global picture. A situated account, instead, shows how the singularity of a situation yearns for connections with other situated singularities : a feminist standpoint is a practical technology rooted in yearning, not an abstract foundation[37]. Transversal moves that resist to sacrifice the local to the global, but to build the global on consented (never easy) constructive politics. An account of common tendencies needs to be subtle enough if it aspires to be meaningful to a large number of people. I think of situatedness as a powerful appeal to yearning, as an effort to work out shared meanings on a situation without trying to transcend it . A situated account of knowledge construction resembles more to an implicated mapping gesture than to a normative foundational gesture. An encounter in situated zones : Latours amoderns I fear to be pointed as deconstructionist or post-modern, when I advocate strategies and political positioning instead of foundations. Maybe the difference from what I think this words intend to mean when used in a pejorative way - is that while I do believe that every human institution is a construction, I respect constructions and dont dismiss or think them as illusions because they have failed or refused to ground themselves in transcendent or universal claims. I indeed respect and fear knowledge politics and struggles on it. Isabelle Stengers says that it is different to affirm this is nothing but construction than to affirm this is construction. Human constructions help, they can also be very painful, so I think we can spare the nothing but. So I am not deconstructing if this means to find nothing but discourse, text or ideology under human constructions[38] as some accounts claimed post-modern seem to pretend[39]. Bruno Latour is also interested in knowledge construction, specially scientific knowledge. His position (which reclaims neither post-modernism or deconstructionism) seems interesting to me and can encounter feminist hi/stories of knowledge. The feminist situated position I am exposing here makes me think to the amodern position advocated by Bruno Latour. Let me (re)produce this possible encounter[40] in two times. Firstly, feminist situated hi/stories on their own hi/story are not modern accounts if we accept Latours definition of moderns as those in rupture with the past, and with all others that have not acknowledged the great break of Modernity. Moderns are those who believe that others believe(d). When modern is pronounced in a polemical context it designs both a break in time and a struggle with its victors and defeated[41]. From this particular point of view, feminist theoretical accounts are not modern, as far as we dont believe that women from the past were dupe, drown in ideology, that they were unconscious believers

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while we are conscious knowers, that past theoreticians where wrong, misguided by their believes, while we know better now. They are not modern, as long as we dont believe that women from other cultures are believers while we are (rational) knowers. Sandra Hardings last book is an exemple of an attempt for situated respectful relationships between past and present as well as between different culturess knowledge[42]. So following Latour, it seems that feminist situated accounts, in conflict with teleological meanings, are not modern[43]. The other characteristic of moderns is for Latour the love of purification moves between carefully delimited universes, including theoretical, to which we apply epistemology, politics, sociology, natural sciences The challenging argument produced by Latour is that we are not post-modern because we have never been moderns in the sense that we have always been producing hybrids in between our modern well delimited universes[44]. Even if we didnt believe in hybrids and we tried to purify them, life happens in the inbetween zones. Relations have always proliferated in those zones - what Nina Lykke calls grey zones - and because we deal with relations, we need a concern for politics and power effects implicated which doesnt mean that we can reduce everything to power effects[45], as we cant reduce it to nature or even to discourse[46]. Situated hi/stories of knowledge construction cant be produced by merely objectivist fact believers, or power believers, or discourse believers This hi/stories are not about facts/objects or illusions/ideologies or texts/ discourses. They are not addressing or natures or cultures. All this divisions are of no use to account differently of this different hi/story. Latour stresses that contemporary objects to think cant be addressed from this separated points of view. He gives the example of ozone holes, which cant be either simply naturalised or sociologicised or deconstructed, we could also give Dolly, the cloned sheep, as an example. Latour argues that our objects are webs : which without being mere objective or natural, nor mere social not mere discourse effects they are still real, collective and discursive[47]. They are at the same time real as nature, narrated as discourses, collective as society[48].This objects can't be addressed while maintaining this divisions. A better attention given to our hybrid webbed constructions appeals for different accounts. So I arrive to the second time of the encounter. Translative and transdisciplinary moves are somehow inevitable in feminism : women and social relations between genders are, everywhere ,the subject is not containable within a single disciplinary framework. [49]. If feminists have developed amodern positions it is maybe because many of their questions were born of hybrid situated objects. Hybridity of that odd and paradoxical position of claiming recognition for woman as a group while being the first to re-consider this identity and rejecting it partially. As Braidotti puts it female subjects are objectified as the other of patriarchy but the site of resistance to patriarchy[50]. The contradictory positions where feminist women find themselves in issues of their identity are well known in feminism. It is not easy to say, for instance, that second wave feminists believed in a modern unified subject of knowledge until post-modernists gave the alert against essentialist tendencies. The collective and political subject of second wave feminism doesnt easily fit in the idea of the modern individualistic subject or in naive essentialism. Something else was already being produced in a complex position in-between natural, social and political identities which we have only began to theorise, the emergence and limits of new forms of political subjectivity[51]. Hybridity of feminist objects to think. For instance, women, and the sex/gender system are already monsters : hybrids of our naturecultures, impossible to think in purified ways[52]. This dimension is being constantly discussed in feminist environments around the issue of the sex/gender distinction. It seems to me that feminist experience in addressing strange webbed objects has been illuminating for situated knowledge politics. Objects which cant be addressed from a mere natural, nor mere social, nor mere discursive point of view. Addressing our in-between position as women in-between nature and culture, personal and political,

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passive and active, ignorant because uneducated but savants because plenty of knowledge, ideological because trapped by systems but conscious because ever in struggle, addressing the inseparability of theory and practice, the reality of discourses and representations but the irreducibility of pain to discourses feminists have tried to develop transversal politics which is very different from homogeneous purified models for theory and politics. A politics of addition : and woman, and black (or white), and oppressed, and strong[53]. Situatedness is the conceptual expression of our political difficulty/ability to be in so many places at the same time, dealing with the micro-politics of situatedness. Situatedness is a key for this transversal politics, Haraway has picked-up bell hooks idea of yearning as a strong pass-word for feminist coalitions. But the very possibility of yearning coalitions, is situatedness, situated political positions, knowledges and hi/stories. We cant make alliances with abstractions, we can make alliances with situated positions which recognise our own situatedness. Mutual respect based in the naturecultural acknowledgement that we are not the owners of what it means to speak as a woman. Situated alliances also because they can be reformed strategically depending on the mask hegemonic oppressive tendencies choose to wear. I have tried to produce in this paper a witnessing position. I have told that I prefer to avoid the word epistemology because I think it is in their deviance from epistemology that feminist accounts on knowledge construction are more interesting. It is not my intention to dismiss the reference to epistemology as the account of knowledge constructions. Yet I have tried to show what epistemology means to me, and by contrast a different oppositional path within feminist politics. I have tried to exhibit some typical epistemological manners (linear teleological hi/stories, purification moves) and how feminists very often escape from this framework. This meanings belong to mixed cultural and theoretical influences. A word appears as less important than what it represents. Even while appealing to epistemology, feminists have developed theories that are not epistemological in that hegemonic sense. The move that translates descriptions, propositions and positions into epistemologies, methodologies and normative frameworks is not easily found in feminist situated accounts. I have tried to show in this paper the importance of this knowledge politics and my commitment to try to prolong them in my academic work, by following the path of situated accounts of knowledge constructions. I dont find it an easy task, the legitimity of our propositions seems often linked to serious language, academic prestigious labels. This confronts me to the impurity of politics. I may have to use the word epistemology to describe aspects of my research to be quickly understood in academic and institutional contexts of communication. But there is a different speed at stake when I try to work out what I want to say : a situated, slowing down pace. At this reduced speed, when accounts of knowledge construction take epistemological forms the word appears before me as the empty abstract label which can assure the respect that methodological aspirations and "scientificity" inspire : a tied-up bundle of noncontradictory axioms. An abstraction which is far from the delicate concreteness of accountable theoretical practices at stake in feminism. If theory implies power, epistemology pretends to "metapower" the power to say who is able to think the world and how. Epistemology aims to define general rules underlying the possibility of knowledge : a powerful aim indeed. A fearful aim. My current main location is the academy, within this location, where my job is mainly theoretical, words are an important political terrain. Words (specially those with theoretical homogenous tendencies) are a territory of struggle. For feminism, this means at least two things, first the resistance to see concepts born political commodified and deradicalised, second, a reflexive use of concepts which have been historically the allies of multiple forms of oppression. Situatedness is not only a question of sex/gender, class and race, it concerns situated gender@tional relations with our inherited pasts and our desired futures. In this sense situatedness concerns the ways we construct our theories, with old words and new desires. As a witness the vision I have exposed is partial, and as a yearning witness (trying to be) modest, this

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paper is an appeal for connections.

[1] See of course "Situated Knowledges : The Science Question in Feminism and the Priviledge of Partial Perspective", in Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, Free Association Books, 1991, see also Modest_Witness @ Second_Millenium FemaleMan c_Meets_OncoMouse tm; Routledge 1997. [2] Cf. Lorraine Code, Epistemology in A companion to feminist philosophy, Alison M. Jaggar, Iris Marion Young, Blackwell 1995, p 183. For an account on the debate "are feminist epistemologies really epistemologies?" see also Sandra Harding, Whose Science, Whose knowledge. Thinking from Women's Lives Cornell University Press, 1991. [3] See Ann Phoenix, "Aspiring to a politics of alliance" (in response to Sylvia Walby's "Beyond the politics of location : the power argument in a global era") Feminist Theory, vol. 1 n2, SAGE, 2000, for a beautiful tracking of situated theoretical practices within feminism. [4] Cf. Bruno Latour, Nous n'avons jamais t modernes. Essai d'anthropologie symtrique, La dcouverte, Paris 1994. [5] Fabulation is a concept that I pick up from G. Deleuze and F. Guattari s philosophy. Fabulation is a constitutive gesture of a community, which marks the creative character of truth. Cf. Deleuze Les intercesseurs in Pourparlers Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1990. [6] " The image that, Hume, Locke, Descartes, Kant founded in philosophical terms of an objective scientific process that addresses a world legitimately submitted to its exigencies has conquered its pertinence because it encounters the interest in the advantages of the label of scientificity given by the resemblance to this image. Be it referred to God, theories of knowledge, epistemology or transcendental philosophy, to operative reason or to constitutive conditions of the progress of sciences, its the consequence that counts : the scientist is transformed in the credited representing figure of a practice that will point all form of resistance as obscurantist or irrational" Isabelle Stengers L'invention des sciences modernes, La dcouverte, Paris, 1993. (recently translated into English) p 29. See also, Sandra Harding, The Science Question in feminism, Cornell University Press, 1986, p 249. [7] In itself the search for shareable meanings is quite an universal human tendency. Nevertheless, the rational discourse of the logos, as it has been developed by occidental philosophy, designs a particular kind of normative androcentric rationality which submits nature to the hierarchical superiority of human thought and its capacity of expressing non contradictory truths. At its origins, in Greek philosophy, we can find other paths of understanding the logos, for instance in Heraclite's philosophy, where the logos is simultaneously and without following a hierarchical order the principle of cosmic becomings and the expression of human thought. [8]I am very grateful to my PhD supervisor Isabelle Stengers for helping me to translate into shareable words my allergy to epistemology and other issues of this paper. Her book (op.cit.), was of great help too. Other references : Bruno Latour, op. cit., Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits, Gallimard 1994 (specially vol. 1, p 772, vol. 2 p 29, vol. 3, p 771; Alison M. Jaggar & Iris Marion Young, op. cit.; A companion to epistemology, Blackwell; Alan F. Chalmers, Qu'est-ce que la science? Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend. Le livre de Poche, La dcouverte, Paris 1987; A Glossary of feminist theory, Sonya Andermahr, Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz, London, Arnold, 1997; Sandra Harding op cit, [9] For an example of this generalising drive in relation to the notion of objectivity see below. [10] Sandra Harding has produced an interesting argument in this sense. In The Science Question in Feminism op cit she shows how the politics of "affirmative action", (add women and stir), are under their "reformist" looks already challenging the traditional edifice of science. [11] Isabelle Stengers, Op. cit.p 70 [12] What feminist courant I am portraying here? As I said above I am referring to a line which seems to traverse feminist practices and which I don't will to taxonomise. I have my favourite theorists of course (some of them quoted along this paper). But what I aim to describe here is present throughout feminism in many forms and coexisting within different positions, including some I wouldn't fully advocate. [13] Bronwyn Winter, "Who counts (or doesn't count) what as feminist theory? An exercise in dictionary use", in Feminist Theory, vol 1, n 1, SAGE, April 2000. [14] And it is not enough for me to say, to which feminism I belong, usually I advocate different feminist positions depending on their located strategical role. [15] This argument has been produced by Judith Grant in Fundamental feminism. While I agree with Grant, I have to say that it is not for the same reasons. It would be too long to discuss this here, let me say only that while Grant insists on the "failure" of feminism to be solidly grounded I don't see a failure here but an ability and a political success. Grant's argument is typically epistemological, seeking logical contradictions to demonstrate incoherence, while I don't see unresolved contradictions as a

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proof of incoherence. [16] The historical conflicts within the Women's Movement and their links with feminist theoretical developments have been largely discussed. An example of this are the conflicts on Reclaim the night demonstrations when feminists where confronted to other feminist points of view on the sense of demonstrating for women's security in black neighbourhoods . Black feminists asked "security for which women?", see (among many others) Many voices, one chant. Black feminist perspectives, Feminist Review n 17 autumn 1984, see also bell hooks, Feminist Theory, From Margins to Center , South End Press, Boston, 1994. [17] Sandra Harding advocates through her work that we cherish this tensions, see specially Whose Science op cit. [18] Sandra Harding, The Science Question op cit, p 246. [19] See Isabelle Stengers op cit. [20] Harding op cit. p 250. [21] Among others, Harding's work on strong objectivity (influenced by standpoint feminism) has been particularly illuminating here. [22] Harding produced one of the first hi/stories of feminist epistemologies and knowledge politics in The Science Question op. cit. which searched the interrelated hi/story of feminist positions on the gender and science issue. In her hi/story, empiricism, standpoint and postmodern feminisms are beautifully and subtly exposed and distinguished. This hi/story has been addressed in many ways since. [23] Jackie Stacey has produced a strong argument in this sense in her article, " Feminist theory, Capital F, Capital T", in Introducing Women's Studies, (2nd Edition) Victoria Robinson and Diane Richardson eds., Mac Millan 1997. See also Katie Kings critiques of the tendency to taxonomise the womens movement to make ones own political tendency appear to be the telos of the whole (...) literally all other feminisms are either incorporated either marginalised usually by building an explication on ontology and epistemology. Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviations from womens experience . Quoted by haraway in her cyborg manifesto ( op cit. 1991, p 296) [24] For instance Rosemarie Buikema, who uses a parallel scheme of successive "paradigms": equality difference and deconstruction to account for feminist theoretical hi/story, though stressing that this various theoretical approaches do not follow each other chronologically in the sense that the birth of one theoretical framework marks the death of the other. .Nevertheless, the use of the paradigmatic model to describe this moments is less subtle. A paradigm (In Thomas Kuhns sense) is meant to explain the passage from a pre scientific world to an organised and mobilised world closed around a commonly accepted discovery . And as Buikema stresses herself : once initiated the various types of research develop simultaneously and for the greater part in relation to each other. Cf. : Windows in a round house : feminist theory, in Womens Studies and Culture. A feminist Introduction. London Zed Books, 1995. Another example of resistance to this evolutionist scheme of feminist theory's cohabitation is the article of Jackie Stacey : "Feminist theory with a capital F", op cit where she criticises the progressist underlining tendencies (typical of modernism) present in some post-modernist accounts. [25] For an account of the articulation of standpoint feminism and the idea of situatedness see Sandra Harding op cit (1987) and op cit (1991). [26] Haraway has insisted, as standpoint feminists have also done, in the importance of taking into account the point of view of what is not the average standard vision (white,northern,male) to produce knowledge. "Conducting an analysis of reproductive freedom from the point of view of "marked" groups groups that do not fit with the white, middle class, or other unmarked standards is the only way to produce anything like a general statement that can bind us together as a people", Modest Witness, op cit p 197-198. [27] This position has been developed specially by Nancy Harstock, "The Feminist Standpoint : Developing the ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism" in Discovering Reality : Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Harding, Hintikka eds, Dordrecht/ Boston / Reidel, 1983. [28] Isabelle Stengers op cit. [29] Haraway op. cit. p 25. I have referred above to the typical move of epistemological accounts of objectivity which tend to generalise the singularity of an event : for example how the "objective" success of a scientist which learns how to reproduce the conditions for a phenomenon is translated by epistemology into methodological general principles with normative aims. [30] Haraway op cit p 3. [31] See, for example, the strategic essentialism of Gayatri Spivak advocated by Rosi Braidotti, cf. "The politics of ontological difference", in Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory p 177, 1994. [32] Harding invites us in The Science Question p 249. Harding often leaves opened the possibility that we are maybe in a period marked by "transitional epistemologies", which a neither internalist nor externalist approaches to science. A period where non contradictory victorious accounts of the world should be suspected. [33] Within feminism the "unmarked position" of white women, belonging to the-race-without-race, the only one who can afford not to present itself, has been criticised by black feminism. This is a very important moment in the "different hi/story", a conflict opened the path for a "new alliance" within feminism. [34] I am struck by the resistance to imagine that there can be other ways of thinking the world than those canonised by occidental philosophy, to imagine that we can escape this destiny. While I can easily measure myself the difficulty of thinking out of my usual frameworks, I find more difficult to understand a certain lack of curiosity to test other tools than for instance,

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universalism or even dialectics. I am often confronted to this in theoretical responses to propositions for "situated knowledges" which try to deconstruct this position bringing everything back to dialectical logical argumentations, seeking contradictions everywhere and pointing the inevitability of some classic either/or binary couples: for example universality OR relativism. This is of course a philosophical problem which doesn't only exist within feminism, maybe what strucks me here, is the contrast between the radical character of a feminist position, its political creativity, and this theoretical resistance to test new ways of thinking. [35] For an eulogy to diplomacy see Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitiques 7. Pour en finir avec la tolerance, La dcouverte/ Les Empcheurs de penser en rond, Paris 1997. [36] As I am (nearly) finishing this paper I found in my mailbox the 2nd issue of "Feminist Theory". The article by Ann Phoenix op cit. stresses in a beautiful way some of the issues at stake in feminist knowledge politics that I am trying (maybe with less success) to expose here. [37] Modest Witness op cit. p 1999.: bell hooks advocates yearning politics in her text "Postmodern blackness" (on the net) which is quoted by Rosi Braidotti in her Nomadic Subjects op cit where Donna Haraway comes across the notion and picks it up to account of a fundamental gesture of her modest witness. This is a beautiful example of the feminist relay race where the baton is passed over the "transatlantic dis-connection" - as Rosi Braidotti herself likes to describe (in Domna Stanton terms) feminist nomadic contagions. See R. Braidotti, "Uneasy Transitions" in Scott, Kaplan, Keates, Transitions, environments, translations. Feminism in international politics, Routledge 1997. [38] Isabelle Stengers 1993 op cit p26. [39] I don't refer to postmodernism here as way to name the historical location we share I refer to postmodernism as an aesthetic posture (which celebrates postmodern pastiche and is often apolitical), and a theoretical methodology (an historical location that endows the privilege of coming after to be able to define its others, its past others). For a subtile approach of this distinction see Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, 'Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity' in I. Grewal and C. Kaplan (ds.) Scattered Hegemonies. Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practives. University of Minnesota Press, 1997. [40] Of course there is no coincidence I have realised that Nina Lykke has also met Latours amoderns in her "Between monsters, goddesses and cyborgs : feminist confrontations with science" in Braidotti and Lykke (eds). Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs, Feminist Confrontations with Science Medecine and Cyberspace, Zed Books, 1996. Donna Haraway herself has already met Latour on the same point I had the feeling they could meet. While she strongly criticises Latours first work as reproducing the warrior language of other accounts on scientific practices, she finds interesting his latter work as We have never been Modern , and uses herself the word amodern In addition both use the concept of naturecultures to account of the subjects they are addressing. Haraway remarks though that Latour (as other male theorists) has not enough met feminist accounts on knowledge, in the sense that they rarely acknowledge or even know that feminists have a lot to say about the areas of knowledge they address Cf. Modest Witness. [41] Bruno Latour, op cit. [42] Sandra Harding Is Science Multicultural ?Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies, Indiana University Press, 1998. [43] But all this doesnt give us the right to disavow moderns because they believed in divided binary constructions. Deconstructive
moves shouldn't be used as a new master power tool. Lets not be more modernist than moderns. For example by giving people who claim identity the death of the subject lesson : we post-moderns know what is underlying your naive beliefs of an unified subject, of identity essentialist illusions.

[44] This doesn't mean dismissing the terrible effects that modernist divisions can have when the are not negotiated but imposed as "neutral" and thought as the "pure" against the "impure". It means to acknowledge as Grewal and Kaplan do ( op cit p 8) that modern occidental cultures have always been hybrid and syncretic. It means to affirm that moderns have tended to mask tensions and what Nina Lykke calls "grey zones". See her introduction to Braidotti and Lykke op cit. [45] Isabelle Stengers, proposes a variation of a leibnizian principle, "not everything is nature but there is nature everywhere" when she says "not everything is political but there is politics everywhere", we could say the same about power "not everything is reducible power but there is power everywhere". [46] Nina Lykke has also advocated for cherishing this tensions and not reducing our accouts either to the extremity of texts or to the extremity of a naturalised reality, op cit p 22 [47] Latour op cit. [48] Latour op cit. p 15. [49] Harding, 86 op cit p 245. [50] Rosi Braidotti, Cyberfeminism with a difference, www.let.ruu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem. [51] Donna Haraway, Gender for a marxist dictionnary , in Between simians... op cit. p 147, Foucault recognised this new political subjectivities as apparently contradictory see Le sujet et le pouvoir 1982, in Dits et Ecrits op cit vol IV. Felix Guattari in Les trois cologies pointed also their emergence, that he called existential territories. [52] Many accounts of the kinds of subjectivity produced by this position have been developed by feminists. The interest for a

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"non isomorphic" feminist subject, is found in Haraway's figures (Cyborgs) but also all through Rosi Braidotti's work (nomadic subjects and monsters), Nina Lykke's (cybergoddesses), Braidotti and Lykke (eds) op cit; Gloria Anzaldua (Mestizas) Borderlands/La frontera, aunt lute books, 1987, among many others today, that make me think of the beautiful sentence by Anne Balsamo : "my mother was a computer but she never learned how to drive. De Laurentis expresses the assumption of the historical complexity of women's existence and the political character of the female feminist subject : one to be constructed accross a multiplicity of discourses, positions and meanings which are often in conflict with each other and inherently (historically) contradictory, Teresa de Laurentis technologies of Gender Indiana University Press 1987. For an account on the feminist subject see Rosi Braidotti, The female feminist subject in Nomadic subjects op cit. [53] Politics of addition could be the name for the Deleuzian advocacy of and ( et in french). The and is the articulation of multiplicities. Deleuze opposes this et to tre (to be). a stranger use of language against its use comodified and dominant () diversity, multiplicity, destruction of identitites () but diversity and multiplicity are not aesthetic collections () nor dialectical schemes. Multiplicity is not in the terms, even if they are many, not in their whole or totality. Multiplicity is precisely in the AND which doesn t have the same nature that have elements or wholes , Pourparlersi op cit, p 64-65.

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