Strings

I'd first like to say that trying to use full web-based applications while tethered to your phone's edge connection is pretty awful. Actually, using the web at all over an edge connection is practically impossible and enraging.


With my mobile internet access gripe(s) out of the way,  I'll be talking about Donna Haraway article titled "A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies." I think this article provides a solid model of critical theory or for looking at the world and the interaction(s) of all sorts of human and non-human systems. In this article Haraway not only explains this worldview, but also how her work is influenced by it.  Haraway starts her article by explaining the fields noted in the title and various other areas that constitute the typical understandings of modern life. She does this with very academic language that is kind of outside of my scope of knowledge so I'll try to skip going into detail and possibly misinforming everyone with a potentially  flawed interpretation of the early definition/rationale/justification portion of Haraway's article. Instead, I'll roll what I got from that part into the core of the article.

Approximately half-way through the nine page article, Haraway explains the "cat's cradle" that all these different points of view and disciplines operate within. All these lines or strings of thought do not exist outside each other, they rely on one another to build a more complete whole. In this interconnected webbing, all of these different avenues/thought processes need to be elastic and work with the other strings or hands in the cat's cradle game. People often see these different threads as completely separate and even possibly in conflict to some degree (i.e., one discipline or "discourse" should/can acquiesce and fall under the rules of another, rather than working together in their unique, but collaborative ways); however, if we consider Haraway's cat's cradle metaphor where all these different things are interconnected, we see that one thing can't stay still or overtake the others because that will either make the system static (and lead to stagnation) or will result in a tangled mess that we'll never pick apart. Neither confrontational approach accomplishes the goal of any of the others. Furthermore, what do we gain if we keep plodding down the same path regardless of what forks we might see? Maybe, we'll eventually get somewhere, but maybe we'll just go in circles never seeing that path that could have led to what we were missing. It's not only important to see that things are happening elsewhere, but work with how those things are influencing and can influence everything else. Maybe I'm using the following terms incorrectly, but Haraway seems to be advocating an interdisciplinary approach (approaches that are actually commingled) to the world rather than a multidisciplinary one (approaches that consider others, but don't actually consider intersections of those approaches). Sure, we can try to fit everything under the umbrella of XYZ, but we're missing out on seeing a much larger picture.


Like I noted in the beginning of this post, Haraway addresses many other things in greater detail, but this idea of understanding and employing different approaches without trying to make them fit into a single conceptual framework is most critical.

Haraway, Donna J. "A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist
     Theory, Cultural Studies." Critical Digital Studies.
     Eds. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker. University of Toronto
     Press, 2008. Web.
     http://books.google.com/books?id=2MCAp3mhdlgC&lpg=PP1
     &vq=Haraway&pg=PA45#v=onepage&q=&f=false