DONNA HARAWAY

The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others

Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York; Routledge, 1992) , pp. 295-337.

 If primates have a sense of humor, there is no reason why intellectuals may not share in it. (Plank, 1989)

 A Biopolitics of Artifactual Reproduction

 "The Promises of Monsters" will be a mapping exercise and travelogue through mind-scapes and landscapes of what may count as nature in certain local/global struggles. These contests are situated in a strange, allochronic time-the time of myself and my readers in the last decade of the second Christian millenium-and in a foreign, allotopic place-the womb of a pregnant monster, here, where we are reading and writing. The purpose of this excursion is to write theory, i.e., to produce a patterned vision of how to move and what to fear in the topography of an impossible but all-too-real present, in order to find an absent, but perhaps possible, other present. I do not seek the address of some full presence; reluctantly, I know better. Like Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, however, I am committed to skirting the slough of despond and the parasite-infested swamps of nowhere to reach more salubrious environs.7 The theory is meant to orient, to provide the roughest sketch for travel, by means of moving within and through a relentless artifactualism, which forbids any direct si(gh)tings of nature, to a science fictional, speculative factual, SF place called, simply, elsewhere. At least for those whom this essay addresses, "nature" outside artifactualism is not so much elsewhere as nowhere, a different matter altogether. Indeed, a reflexive artifactualism offers serious political and analytical hope. This essay's theory is modest. Not a systematic overview, it is a little siting device in a long line of such craft tools. Such sighting devices have been known to reposition worlds for their devotees-and for their opponents. Optical instruments are subject-shifters. Goddess knows, the subject is being changed relentlessly in the late twentieth century.

 My diminutive theory's optical features are set to produce not effects of distance, but effects of connection, of embodiment, and of responsibility for an imagined elsewhere that we may yet learn to see and build here. I have high stakes in reclaiming vision From the technopornographers, those theorists of minds, bodies, and planets who insist effectively--i.e., in practice--that sight is the sense made to realize the fantasies of the phallocrats.2 I think sight can be remade for the activists and advocates engaged in fitting political filters to see the world in the hues of red, green, and ultraviolet, i.e., from the perspectives of a still possible socialism, feminist and anti-racist environmentalism, and science for the people. I take as a self-evident premise that "science is culture."3 Rooted in that premise, this essay is a contribution to the heterogeneous and very lively contemporary discourse of science studies as cultural studies. Of course, what science, culture, or nature-and their "studies"-might mean is far less self-evident. 

Nature is for me, and I venture for many of us who are planetary fetuses gestating in the amniotic efffluvia of terminal industrialism,4 one of those impossible things characterized by Gayatri Spivak as that which we cannot not desire. Excruciatingly conscious of nature's discursive constitution as "other" in the histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, and class domination of many kinds, we nonetheless find in this problematic, ethno-specific, long-lived, and mobile concept something we cannot do without, but can never "have." We must find another relationship to nature besides reification and possession. Perhaps to give confidence in its essential reality, immense resources have been expended to stabilize and materialize nature, to police its/her boundaries. Such expenditures have had disappointing results. Efforts to travel into "nature" become tourist excursions that remind the voyager of the price of such displacements-one pays to see fun-house reflections of oneself. Efforts to preserve "nature" in parks remain fatally troubled by the ineradicable mark of the founding explusion of those who used to live there, not as innocents in a garden, but as people for whom the categories of nature and culture were not the salient ones. Expensive projects to collect "nature's" diversity and bank it seem to produce debased coin, impoverished seed, and dusty relics. As the banks hypertrophy, the nature that feeds the storehouses "disappears." The World Bank's record on environmental destruction is exemplary in this regard. Finally, the projects for representing and enforcing human "nature" are famous for their imperializing essences, most recently reincarnated in the Human Genome Project.

 So, nature is not a physical place to which one can go, nor a treasure to fence in or bank, nor as essence to be saved or violated. Nature is not hidden and so does not need to be unveiled. Nature is not a text to be read in the codes of mathematics and biomedicine. It is not the "other" who offers origin, replenishment, and service. Neither mother, nurse, nor slave, nature is not matrix, resource, or tool for the reproduction of man. 

Nature is, however, a topos, a place, in the sense of a rhetorician's place or topic for consideration of common themes; nature is, strictly, a commonplace. We turn to this topic to order our discourse, to compose our memory. As a topic in this sense, nature also reminds us that in seventeenth-century English the "topick gods" were the local gods, the gods specific to places and peoples. We need these spirits, rhetorically if we can't have them any other way. We need them in order to reinhabit, precisely, common places-locations that are widely shared, inescapably local, worldly, enspirited; i.e., topical. In this sense, nature is the place to rebuild public culture.5 Nature is also a tropos, a trope. It is figure, construction, artifact, movement, displacement. Nature cannot pre-exist its construction. This construction is based on a particular kind of move- a tropos or "turn." Faithful to the Greek, as tro'pos nature is about turning. Troping, we turn to nature as if to the earth, to the primal stuff-geotropic, physiotropic. Topically, we travel toward the earth, a commonplace. In discoursing on nature, we turn from Plato and his heliotropic son's blinding star to see something else, another kind of figure. I do not turn from vision, but I do seek something other than enlightenment in these sightings of science studies as cultural studies. Nature is a topic of public discourse on which much turns, even the earth. 

In this essay's journey toward elsewhere, I have promised to trope nature through a relentless artifactualism, but what does artifactualism mean here? First, it means that nature for us is made, as both fiction and fact. If organisms are natural objects, it is crucial to remember that organisms are not born; they are made in world-changing technoscientific practices by particular collective actors in particular times and places. In the belly of the local/global monster in which I am gestating, often called the postmodern world,6 global technology appears to denature everything, to make everything a malleable matter of strategic decisions and mobile production and reproduction processes (Hayles, 1990). Technological decontextualization is ordinary experience for hundreds of millions if not billions of human beings, as well as other organisms. I suggest that this is not a denaturing so much as a particular production of nature. The preoccupation with productionism that has characterized so much parochial Western discourse and practice seems to have hypertrophied into something quite marvelous: the whole world is remade in the image of commodity production.'

 How, in the face of this marvel, can I seriously insist that to see nature as artifactual is an oppositional, or better, a differential siting?8 Is the insistence that nature is artifactual not more evidence of the extremity of the violation of a nature outside and other to the arrogant ravages of our technophilic civilization, which, after all, we were taught began with the heliotropisms of enlightment projects to dominate nature with blinding light focused by optical technology?9 Haven't eco-feminists and other multicultural and intercultural radicals begun to convince us that nature is precisely not to be seen in the guise of the Eurocentric productionism and anthropocentrism that have threatened to reproduce, literally, all the world in the deadly image of the Same?

I think the answer to this serious political and analytical question lies in two related turns: 1) unblinding ourselves from the sun-worshiping stories about the history of science and technology as paradigms of rationalism; and 2) refiguring the actors in the construction of the ethno-specific categories of nature and culture. The actors are not all "us." If the world exists for us as "nature," this designates a kind of relationship, an achievement among many actors, not all of them human, not all of them organic, not all of them technological.10 In its scientific embodiments as well as in other forms nature is made, but not entirely by humans; it is a co-construction among humans and non-humans. This is a very different vision from the postmodernist observation that all the world is denatured and reproduced in images or replicated in copies. That specific kind of violent and reductive artifactualism, in the form of a hyper-productionism actually practiced widely throughout the planet, becomes contestable in theory and other kinds of praxis, without recourse to a resurgent transcendental naturalism. Hyper-productionism refuses the witty agency of all the actors but One; that is a dangerous strategy-for everybody. But transcendental naturalism also refuses a world full of cacophonous agencies and settles for a mirror image sameness that only pretends to difference. The commonplace nature I seek, a public culture, has many houses with many inhabitants which/who can refigure the earth. Perhaps those other actors/actants, the ones who are not human, are our topick gods, organic and inorganic.]'

It is this barely admissible recognition of the odd sorts of agents and actors which/ whom we must admit to the narrative of collective life, including nature, that simultaneously, first, turns us decisively away from enlightenment-derived modern and postmodern premises about nature and culture, the social and technical, science and society ~nd, second, saves us from the deadly point of view of productionism. Productionism and its corollary, humanism, come down to the story line that "man makes everything, including himself, out of the world that can only be resource and potency to his project and active agency."l2 This productionism is about man the tool-maker and -user, whose highest technical production is himself; i.e., the story line of phallogocentrism. He gains access to this wondrous technology with a subject-constituting, self-deferring, and self splitting entry into language, light, and law. Blinded by the sun, in thrall to the father, reproduced in the sacred image of the same, his reward is that he is self- born, an autotelic copy. That is the mythos of enlightenment transcendence.

 Let us return briefly to my remark above that organisms are not born, but they are made. Besides troping on Simone de Beauvoir's observation that one is not born a woman, what work is this statement doing in this essay's effort to articulate a relentless differential/oppositional artifactualism? I wrote that organisms are made as objects of knowledge in world-changing practices of scientific discourse by particular and always collective actors in specific times and places. Let us look more closely at this claim with the aid of the concept of the apparatus of bodily production.!, Organisms are hiological embodiments; as natural-technical entities, they are not pre-existing plants, animals, protistes, etc., with boundaries already established and awaiting the right kind of instrument to note them correctly. Organisms emerge from a discursive process. Biology is a discourse, not the living world itself. But humans are not the only actors in the construction of the entities of any scientific discourse; machines (delegates that can produce surprises) and other partners (not "pre- or extra-discursive objects," but partners) are active constructors of natural scientific objects. Like other scientific bodies, organisms are not ideological constructions. The whole point about discursive construction has been that it is not about ideology. Always radically historically specific, always lively, bodies have a different kind of specificity and effectivity; and so they invite a different kind of engagement and intervention.

Elsewhere, I have used the term "material-semiotic actor" to highlight the object of knowledge as an active part of the apparatus of bodily production, without ever implying immediate presence of such objects or, what is the same thing, their final or unique determination of what can count as objective knowledge of a biological body at a particular historical juncture. Like Katie King's objects called "poems," sites of literary production where language also is an actor, bodies as objects of knowledge are materialsemiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries materialize in social interaction among humans and non- humans, including the machines and other instruments that mediate exchanges at crucial interfaces and that function as delegates for other actors' functions and purposes. "Objects" like bodies do not pre-exist as such. Similarly, "nature" cannot pre-exist as such, but neither is its existence ideological. Nature is a commonplace and a powerful discursive construction, effected in the interactions among material-semiotic actors, human and not. The siting/sighting of such entities is not about disengaged discovery, but about mutual and usually unequal structuring, about taking risks, about delegating competences.14

The various contending biological bodies emerge at the intersection of biological research, writing, and publishing; medical and other business practices; cultural productions of all kinds, including available metaphors and narratives; and technology, such as the visualization technologies that bring color-enhanced killer T cells and intimate photographs of the developing fetus into high-gloss art books, as well as scientific reports. But also invited into that node of intersection is the analogue to the lively languages that actively intertwine in the production of literary value: the coyote and protean embodiments of a world as witty agent and actor. Perhaps our hopes for accountability for techno-biopolitics in the belly of the monster turn on revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse. So while the late twentieth-century immune system, for example, is a construct of an elaborate apparatus of bodily production, neither the immune system nor any other of biology's world-changing bodies-like a virus or an ecosystem-is a ghostly fantasy. Coyote is not a ghost, merely a protean trickster.

 This sketch of the artifactuality of nature and the apparatus of bodily production helps us toward another important point: the corporeality of theory. Overwhelmingly, theory is bodily, and theory is literal. Theory is not about matters distant from the lived body; quite the opposite. Theory is anything but disembodied. The fanciest statements about radical decontextualization as the historical form of nature in late capitalism are tropes for the embodiment, the production, the literalization of experience in that specifi' mode. This is not a question of reflection or correspondences, but of technology, where the social and the technical implode into each other. Experience is a semiotic process- a semiosis (de Lauretis, 1984). Lives are built; so we had best become good craftspeople with the other worldly actants in the story. There is a great deal of rebuilding to do, beginning with a little more surveying with the aid of optical devices fitted with red, green, and ultraviolet filters.

 Repeatedly, this essay turns on figures of pregnancy and gestation. Zoe Sofia (1984) taught me that every technology is a reproductive technology. She and I have meant that literally; ways of life are at stake in the culture of science. I would, however, like to displace the terminology of reproduction with that of generation. Very rarely does anything really get reproduced; what's going on is much more polymorphous than that. Certainly people don~t reproduce, unless they get themselves cloned, which will always be very expensive and risky, not to mention boring. Even technoscience must be made into the paradigmatic model not of closure, but of that which is contestable and contested. That involves knowing how the world's agents and actants work; how they/we/it come into the world, and how they/we/it are reformed. Science becomes the myth not of what escapes agency and responsibility in a realm above the fray, but rather of accountability and responsibility for translations and solidarities linking the cacophonous visions and visionary voices that characterize the knowledges of the marked bodies of history. Actors, as well as actants, come in many and wonderful forms. And best of all, `'reproduction"-or less inaccurately, the generation of novel forms-need not be imagined in the stodgy bipolar terms of hominids.15

If the stories of hyper-productionism and enlightenment have been about the reproduction of the sacred image of the same, of the one true copy, mediated by the luminous technologies of compulsory heterosexuality and masculinist self-birthing, then the differential artifactualism I am trying to envision might issue in something else. Artifactualism is askew of productionism; the rays from my optical device diffract rather than reflect. These diffracting rays compose interference patterns, not reflecting images. The "issue" from this generative technology, the result of a monstrous,16 pregnancy, might be kin to Vietnamese-American filmmaker and feminist theorist Trinh Minhha's (1986/7b; 1989) "inappropriate/d others."17 Designating the networks of multicultural, ethnic, racial, national, and sexual actors emerging since World War II, Trinh's phrase referred to the historical positioning of those who cannot adopt the mask of either "self" or "other" offered by previously dominant, modern Western narratives of identity and politics. To be `'inappropriate/d', does not mean "not to be in relation with"-i.e., to be in a special reservation, with the status of the authentic, the untouched, in the allochronic and allotopic condition of innocence. Rather to be an "inappropriate/ d other" means to be in critical, deconstructive relationality, in a diffracting rather than reflecting (ratio)nality-as the means of making potent connection that exceeds domination. To be inappropriate/d is not to fit in the taxon, to be dislocated from the available maps specifying kinds of actors and kinds of narratives, not to be originally fixed by difference. To be inappropriate/d is to be neither modern nor postmodern, but to insist on the amodern. Trinh was looking for a way to figure "difference'' as a "critical difference within," and not as special taxonomic marks grounding difference as apartheid.

She was writing about people; I wonder if the same observations might apply to humans and to both organic and technological non-humans.

 The term "inappropriate/d others" can provoke rethinking social relationality within artifactual nature-which is, arguably, global nature in the 1990s. Trinh Minhha's metaphors suggest another geometry and optics for considering the relations of difference among people and among humans, other organims, and machines than hierarchical domination, incorporation of parts into wholes, paternalistic and colonialist protection, symbiotic fusion, antagonistic opposition, or instrumental production from resource. Her metaphors also suggest the hard intellectual, cultural, and political work these new geometries will require. If Western patriarchal narratives have told that the physical body issued from the first birth, while man was the product of the heliotropic second birth, perhaps a differential, diffracted feminist allegory might have the "inappropriate/d others" emerge from a third birth into an SF world called elsewhere-a place composed from interference patterns. Diffraction does not produce "the same" displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear. Tropically, for the promises of monsters, the first invites the illusion of essential, fixed position, while the second trains us to more subtle vision. Science fiction is generically concerned with the interpenetration of boundaries between problematic selves and unexpected others and with the exploration of possible worlds in a context structured by transnational technoscience. The emerging social subjects called "inappropriate/d others" inhabit such worlds. SF-science fiction, speculative futures, science fantasy, speculative fiction-is an especially apt sign under which to conduct an inquiry into the artifactual as a reproductive technology that might issue in something other than the sacred image of the same, something inappropriate, unfitting, and so, maybe, inappropriated.

Within the belly of the monster, even inappropriate/d others seem to be interpellated-called through interruption-into a particular location that I have learned to call a cyborg subject position.18 Let me continue this travelogue and inquiry into artifactualism with an illustrated lecture on the nature of cyborgs as they appear in recent advertisements in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. These ad figures remind us of the corporeality, the mundane materiality, and literality of theory. These commercial cyborg figures tell us what may count as nature in technoscience worlds. Above all, they show us the implosion of the technical, textual, organic, mythic, and political in the gravity wells of science in action. These figures are our companion monsters in the Pilgrim's Progress of this essay's travelogue.

 Consider Figure 1, "A Few Words about Reproduction from a Leader in the Field," the advertising slogan for Logic General Corporation's software duplication system. The immediate visual and verbal impact insists on the absurdity of separating the technical, organic, mythic, textual, and political threads in the semiotic fabric of the ad and of the world in which this ad makes sense. Under the unliving, orange-to-yellow rainbow colors of the earth-sun logo of Logic General, the biological white rabbit has its (her? yet, sex and gender are not so settled in this reproductive system) back to us. It has its paws on a keyboard, that inertial, old-fashioned residue of the typewriter that lets our computers feel natural to us, user-friendly, as it were.19 But the keyboard is misleading; no letters are transferred by a mechnical key to a waiting solid surface. The computeruser interface works differently. Even if she doesn't understand the implications of her lying keyboard, the white rabbit is in her natural home; she is fully artifactual in the most literal sense. Like fruit flies, yeast, transgenic mice, and the humble nematode worm, Cacuorhabditis elegans,20 this rabbit's evolutionary story transpires in the lab; the lab is its proper niche, its true habitat. Both material system and symbol for the measure of fecundity, this kind of rabbit occurs in no other nature than the lab, that preeminent scene of replication practices.

 With Logic General, plainly, we are not in a biological laboratory. The organic rabbit peers at its image, but the image is not her reflection, indeed, especially not her reflection. This is not Lacan's world of mirrors; primary identification and maturing metaphoric substitution will be produced with other techniques, other writing technologies.21 The white rabbit will be translated, her potencies and competences relocated radically. The guts of the computer produce another kind of visual product than distorted, self-birthing reflections. The simulated bunny peers out at us face first. It is she who locks her/its gaze with us. She, also, has her paws on a grid, one just barely reminiscent of a typewriter, but even more reminiscent of an older icon of technoscience-the Cartesian coordinate system that locates the world in the imaginary spaces of rational modernity. In her natural habitat, the virtual rabbit is on a grid that insists on the world as a game played on a chess-like board. This rabbit insists that the truly rational actors will replicate themselves in a virtual world where the best players will not be Man, though he may linger like the horse-drawn carriage that gave its form to the railroad car or the typewriter that gave its illusory shape to the computer interface. The functional privileged sign)fier in this system will not be so easily mistaken for any primate male's urinary and copulative organ. Metaphoric substitution and other circulations in the very material symbolic domain will be more likely to be effected by a competent mouse. The if-y femaleness of both of the rabbits, of course, gives no confidence that the new players other to Man will be women. More likely, the rabbit that is interpellated into the world in this non-mirror stage, this diffracting moment of subject constitution, will be literate in a quite different grammar of gender. Both the rabbits here are cyborgs-compounds of the organic, technical, mythic, textual, and political-and they call us into a world in which we may not wish to take shape, but through whose "Miry Slough" we might have to travel to get elsewhere. Logic General is into a very particular kind of ecriture. The reproductive stakes in this text are future life forms and ways of life for humans and unhumans. "Call toll free" for "a few words about reproduction from an acknowledged leader in the field.,'

 Ortho-mune*'s monoclonal antibodies expand our understanding of a cyborg subject's relation to the inscription technology that is the laboratory (Figure 2). In only two years, these fine monoclonals generated more than 100 published papers-higher than any rate of literary production by myself or any of my human colleagues in the human sciences. But this alarming rate of publication was achieved in 1982, and has surely been wholly surpassed by new generations of biotech mediators of literary replication. Never has theory been more literal, more bodily, more technically adept. Never has the collapse of the "modern" distinctions between the mythic, organic, technical, political, and textual into the gravity well, where the unlamented enlightenment transcendentals of Nature and Society also disappeared, been more evident. 

LKB Electrophoresis Division has an evolutionary story to tell, a better, more complete one than has yet been told by physical anthropologists, paleontologists, or naturalists about the entities/actors/actants that structure niche space in an extra-laboratory world: "There are no missing links in MacroGene Workstation" (Figure 3). Full of promises, breaching the first of the ever-multiplying final frontiers, the prehistoric monster Ichthyostega crawls from the amniotic ocean into the future, onto the dangerous but enticing dry land. Our no-longer-fish, not-yet-salamander will end up fully identified and separated, as man-in-space, finally disembodied, as did the hero of J. D. Bernal's fantasy in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. But for now, occupying the zone between fishes and amphibians, Ichthyostega is firmly on the margins, those potent places where theory is best cultured. It behooves us, then, to join this heroic reconstructed beast with LKB, in order to trace out the transferences of competences-the metaphoric-material chain of substitutions-in this quite literal apparatus of bodily production. We are presented with a travel story, a Pilgrim's Progress, where there are no gaps, no "missing links." From the first non- original actor-the reconstructed Ichthyostega-to the final printout of the DNA homology search mediated by LKB's software and the many separating and writing machines pictured on the right side of the advertisement, the text promises to meet the fundamental desire of phallologocentrism for fullness and presence. From the crawling body in the Miry Sloughs of the narrative to the printed code, we are assured of full success-the compression of time into instantaneous and full access "to the complete GenBank ... on one laser disk." Like Christian, we have conquered time and space, moving from entrapment in body to furfillment in spirit, all in the everyday workspaces of the Electrophoresis Division, whose Hong Kong, Moscow, Antwerp, and Washington phone numbers are all provided. Electrophoresis: pherein-to bear or carry us relentlessly on.

Bio-Response, innovators in many facets of life's culture, interpellates the cyborg subject into the barely secularized, evangelical, Protestant Christianity that pervades American techno-culture: "Realize the potential of your cell line" (Figure 4). This ad addresses us directly. We are called into a salvation narrative, into history, into biotechnology, into our true natures: our cell line, ourselves, our successful product. We will testify to the efficacy of this culture system. Colored in the blues, purples, and ultraviolets of the sterilizing commercial rainbow-in which art, science, and business arch in lucrative grace-the virus- like crystalline shape mirrors the luminous crystals of New Age promises. Religion, science, and mysticism join easily in the facets of modern and postmodern commercial big-response. The simultaneously promising and threatening crystal/virus unwinds its tail to reveal the language-like icon of the Central Dogma, the code structures of DNA that underlie all possible bodily response, all semiosis, all culture. Gem-like, the frozen, spiraling crystals of Bio- Response promise life itself. This is a jewel of great price-available from the Production Services office in Hayward, California. The imbrications of layered sign)fiers and sign)fieds forming cascading hierarchies of signs guide us through this mythic, organic, textual, technical, political icon.22

 Indigenous people are resisting a long history of forced "tutelage," in order to confront the powerful representations of the national and international environmentalists, bankers, developers, and technocrats. The extractors, for example, the rubber tappers, are also independently articulating their collective viewpoint. Neither group is willing to see the Amazon "saved" by their exclusion and permanent subjection to historically dominating political and economic forces. As Hecht and Cockburn put it, "The rubber tappers have not risked their lives for extractive reserves so they could live on them as debt peons" (p. 202). "Any program for the Amazon begins with basic human rights: an end to debt bondage, violence, enslavement, and killings practiced by those who would seize the lands these forest people have occupied for generations. Forest people seek legal recognition of native lands and extractive reserves held under the principle of collective property, worked as individual holdings with individual returns" (p. 207).

At the second Brazilian national meeting of the Forest People's Alliance at Rio Branco in 1989, shortly after Mendes's murder raised the stakes and catapaulted the issues into the international media, a program was formulated in tension with the latest Brazilian state policy called Nossa Natureza. Articulating quite a different notion of the first person plural relation to nature or natural surroundings, the basis of the program of the Forest People's Alliance is control by and for the peoples of the forest. The core matters are direct control of indigenous lands by native peoples; agrarian reform joined to an environmental program; economic and technical development; health posts; raised incomes; locally controlled marketing systems; an end to fiscal incentives for cattle ranchers, agribusiness, and unsustainable logging; an end to debt peonage; and police and legal protection. Hecht and Cockburn call this an "ecology of justice" that rejects a technicist solution, in whatever benign or malignant form, to environmental destruction. The Forest People's Alliance does not reject scientific or technical know-how, their own and others'; instead, they reject the "modern" political epistemology that bestows jurisdiction on the basis of technoscientific discourse. The fundamental point is that the Amazonian Biosphere is an irreducibly human/non-human collective entity.32 There will be no nature without justice. Nature and justice, contested discursive objects embodied in the material world, will become extinct or survive together.

Who speaks for the jaguar? Who speaks for the fetus? Both questions rely on a political semiotics of representation.35 Permanently speechless, forever requiring the services of a ventriloquist, never forcing a recall vote, in each case the object or ground of representation is the realization of the representative's fondest dream. As Marx said in a somewhat different context, "They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented."36 But for a political semiology of representation, nature and the unborn fetus are even better, epistemologically, than subjugated human adults. The effectiveness of such representation depends on distancing operations. The represented must be disengaged from surrounding and constituting discursive and non-discursive nexuses and relocated in the authorial domain of the representative. Indeed, the effect of this magical operation is to disempower precisely those-in our case, the pregnant woman and the peoples of the forest-who are "close" to the now-represented "natural" object. Both the jaguar and the fetus are carved out of one collective entity and relocated in another, where they are reconstituted as objects of a particular kind-as the ground of a representational practice that forever authorizes the ventriloquist. Tutelage will be eternal. The represented is reduced to the permanent status of the recipient of action, never to be a co-actor in an articulated practice among unlike, but joined, social partners.

Everything that used to surround and sustain the represented object, such as pregnant women and local people, simply disappears or re-enters the drama as an agonist. For example, the pregnant woman becomes juridically and medically, two very powerful discursive realms, the "maternal environment" (Hubbard, 1990). Pregnant women and local people are the least able to "speak for" objects like jaguars or fetuses because they get discursively reconstituted as beings with opposing "interests." Neither woman nor fetus, jaguar nor Kayapo Indian is an actor in the drama of representation. One set of entities becomes the represented, the other becomes the environment, often threatening, of the represented object. The only actor left is the spokesperson, the one who represents. The forest is no longer the integument in a co-constituted social nature; the woman is in no way a partner in an intricate and intimate dialectic of social relationality crucial to her own personhood, as well as to the possible personhood of her social-but unlike- internal co-actor.37 In the liberal logic of representation, the fetus and the jaguar must be protected precisely from those closest to them, from their "surround." The power of life and death must be delegated to the epistemologically most disinterested ventriloquist, and it is crucial to remember that all of this is about the power of life and death.

In this essay I have been arguing for another way of seeing actors and actants- and consequently another way of working to position scientists and science in important struggles in the world. I have stressed actants as collective entities doing things in a structured and structuring field of action; I have framed the issue in terms of articulation rather than representation. Human beings use names to point to themselves and other actors and easily mistake the names for the things. These same humans also think the traces of inscription devices are like names-pointers to things, such that the inscriptions and the things can be enrolled in dramas of substitution and inversion. But the things, in my view, do not pre-exist as ever-elusive, but fully pre-packaged, referents for the names. Other actors are more like tricksters than that. Boundaries take provisional, neverfinished shape in articulatory practices. The potential for the unexpected from unstripped human and unhuman actants enrolled in articulations-i.e., the potential for generation- remains both to trouble and to empower technoscience. Western philosophers sometimes take account of the inadequacy of names by stressing the "negativity" inherent in all representations. This takes us back to Spivak's remark cited early in this paper about the important things that we cannot not desire, but can never possess-or represent, because representation depends on possession of a passive resource, namely, the silent object, the stripped actant. Perhaps we can, however, "articulate" with humans and unhumans in a social relationship, which for us is always language-mediated (among other semiotic, i.e., "meaningful," mediations). But, for our unlike partners, well, the action is "different," perhaps "negative" from our linguistic point of view, but crucial to the generativity of the collective. It is the empty space, the undecidability, the wiliness of other actors, the "negativity," that give me confidence in the reality and therefore ultimate unrepresentability of social nature and that make me suspect doctrines of representation and objectivity.

 My crude characterization does not end up with an "objective world" or "nature," but it certainly does insist on the world. This world must always be articulated, from people's points of view, through "situated knowledges" (Haraway, 1988; 1991). These knowledges are friendly to science, but do not provide any grounds for history-escaping inversions and amnesia about how articulations get made, about their political semiotics, if you will. I think the world is precisely what gets lost in doctrines of representation and scientific objectivity. It is because I care about jaguars, among other actors, including the overlapping but non-identical groups called forest peoples and ecologists, that I reject Joe Kane's question. Some science studies scholars have been terrified to criticize their constructivist formulations because the only alternative seems to be some retrograde kind of "going back" to nature and to philosophical realism.38 But above all people, these scholars should know that "nature" and "realism" are precisely the consequences of representational practices. Where we need to move is not "back" to nature, but elsewhere, through and within an artifactual social nature, which these very scholars have helped to make expressable in current Western scholarly practice. That knowledge-building practice might be articulated to other practices in "pro-life" ways that aren't about the fetus or the jaguar as nature fetishes and the expert as their ventriloquist.

Not-B. Inner Space: The Biomedical Body

The limitless reaches of outer space, joined to Cold War and post-Cold War nuclear technoscience, seem vastly distant from their negation, the enclosed and dark regions of the inside of the human body, domain of the apparatuses of biomedical visualization. But these two quadrants of our semiotic square are multiply tied together in technoscience's heterogeneous apparatuses of bodily production. As Sarah Franklin noted, "The two new investment frontiers, outer space and inner space, vie for the futures market."

In this "futures market," two entities are especially interesting for this essay: the fetus and the immune system, both of which are embroiled in determinations of what may count as nature and as human, as separate natural object and as juridical subject. We have already looked briefly at some of the matrices of discourse about the fetus in the discussion of earth (who speaks for the fetus?) and outer space (the planet floating free as cosmic germ). Here, I will concentrate on contestations for what counts as a self and an actor in contemporary immune system discourse.

 The equation of Outer Space and Inner Space, and of their conjoined discourses of extraterrestrialism, ultimate frontiers, and high technology war, is literal in the official history celebrating 100 years of the National Geographic Society (Bryan, 1987). The chapter that recounts the magazine's coverage of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Mariner voyages is called "Space" and introduced with the epigraph, "The Choice Is the Universe-or Nothing." The final chapter, full of stunning biomedical images, is titled "Inner Space" and introduced with the epigraph, "The Stuff of the Stars Has Come Alive."44 The photography convinces the viewer of the fraternal relation of inner and outer space. But, curiously, in outer space, we see spacemen fitted into explorer craft or floating about as individuated cosmic fetuses, while in the supposed earthy space of our own interiors, we see non-humanoid strangers who are the means by which our bodies sustain our integrity and individuality, indeed our humanity in the face of a world of others. We seem invaded not just by the threatening "non-selves" that the immune system guards against, but more fundamentally by our own strange parts.

 Lennart Nilsson's photographs, in the coffee table art book The Body Victorious (1987), as well as in many medical texts, are landmarks in the photography of the alien inhabitants of inner space45 (Figure 10). The blasted scenes, sumptuous textures, evocative colors, and ET monsters of the immune landscape are simply there, inside us. A white extruding tendril of a pseudopodinous macrophage ensnares bacteria; the hillocks of chromosomes lie flattened on a blue-hued moonscape of some other planet; an infected cell buds myriads of deadly virus particles into the reaches of inner space where more cells will be victimized; the auto-immune disease-ravaged head of a femur glows against a sunset on a dead world; cancer cells are surrounded by the lethal mobil squads of killer T-cells that throw chemical poisons into the self's malignant traitor cells.

 A diagram of the "Evolution of Recognition Systems" in a recent immunology textbook makes clear the intersection of the themes of literally "wonderful" diversity, escalating complexity, the self as a defended stronghold, and extraterrestrialism in inner space (Figure 11). Under a diagram culminating in the evolution of the mammals, represented without comment by a mouse and a fully-suited spaceman, is this explanation: "From the humble amoeba searching for food (top left) to the mammal with its sophisticated humoral and cellular immune mechanisms (bottom right), the process of 'serf versus non-self recognition' shows a steady development, keeping pace with the increasing need of animals to maintain their integrity in a hostile environment. The decision at which point 'immunity' appeared is thus a purely semantic one" (Playfair, 1984, emphasis in the original). These are the "semantics" of defense and invasion. The perfection of the fully defended, "victorious" self is a chilling fantasy, linking phagocytotic amoeba and space-voyaging man cannibalizing the earth in an evolutionary teleology of post-apocalypse extraterrestrialism. When is a self enough of a self that its boundaries become central to institutionalized discourses in biomedicine, war, and business?

Not-A. Virtual Space: SF50

 Articulation is not a simple matter. Language is the effect of articulation, and so are bodies. The articulate are jointed animals; they are not smooth like the perfect spherical animals of Plato's origin fantasy in the Timaeus. The articulate are cobbled together. It is the condition of being articulate. I rely on the articulate to breathe life into the artifactual cosmos of monsters that this essay inhabits. Nature may be speechless, without language, in the human sense; but nature is highly articulate. Discourse is only one process of articulation. An articulated world has an undecidable number of modes and sites where connections can be made. The surfaces of this kind of world are not frictionless curved planes. Unlike things can be joined-and like things can be broken apart- and vice versa. Full of sensory hairs, evaginations, invaginations, and indentations, the surfaces which interest me are dissected by joints. Segmented invertebrates, the articulate are insectoid and worm-like, and they inform the inflamed imaginations of SF filmmakers and biologists. In obsolete English, to articulate meant to make terms of agreement. Perhaps we should live in such an "obsolete," amodern world again. To articulate is to signify. It is to put things together, scary things, risky things, contingent things. I want to live in an articulate world. We articulate; therefore, we are. Who "I" am is a very limited, in the endless perfection of (clear and distinct) Self- contemplation. Unfair as always, I think of it as the paradigmatic psychoanalytic question. "Who am I?" is about (always unrealizable) identity; always wobbling, it still pivots on the law of the father, the sacred image of the same. Since I am a moralist, the real question must have more virtue: who are "we"? That is an inherently more open question, one always ready for contingent, friction-generating articulations. It is a remonstrative question. In optics, the virtual image is formed by the apparent, but not actual, convergence of rays. The virtual seems to be the counterfeit of the real; the virtual has effects by seeming, not being. Perhaps that is why "virtue" is still given in dictionaries to refer to women's chastity, which must always remain doubtful in patriarchal optical law. But then, "virtue" used to mean manly spirit and valor too, and God even named an order of angels the Virtues, though they were of only middling rank. Still, no matter how big the effects of the virtual are, they seem somehow to lack a proper ontology. Angels, manly valor, and women's chastity certainly constitute, at best, a virtual image from the point of view of late twentieth-century "postmoderns." For them, the virtual is precisely not the real; that's why "postmoderns" like "virtual reality." It seems transgressive. Yet, I can't forget that an obsolete meaning of "virtual" was having virtue, i.e., the inherent power to produce effects. "Virtu," after all, is excellence or merit, and it is still a common meaning of virtue to refer to having effficacy. The "virtue" of something is its "capacity." The virtue of (some) food is that it nourishes the body. Virtual space seems to be the negation of real space; the domains of SF seem the negation of earthly regions. But perhaps this negation is the real illusion.

"Cyberspace, absent its high-tech glitz, is the idea of virtual consensual community.... A virtual community is first and foremost a community of belief.''5l For William Gibson (1986), cyberspace is "consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions.... Unthinkable complexity." Cyberspace seems to be the consensual hallucination of too much complexity, too much articulation. It is the virtual reality of paranoia, a well-populated region in the last quarter of the Second Christian Millenium. Paranoia is the belief in the unrelieved density of connection, requiring, if one is to survive, withdrawal and defense unto death. The defended self re-emerges at the heart of relationality. Paradoxically, paranoia is the condition of the impossibility of remaining articulate. In virtual space, the virtue of articulation-i.e., the power to produce connection-threatens to overwhelm and finally to engulf all possibility of effective action to change the world.

The whole argument of "The Promises of Monsters" has been that to "press enter" is not a fatal error, but an inescapable possibility for changing maps of the world, for building new collectives out of what is not quite a plethora of human and unhuman actors. My stakes in the textual figure of Lisa Foo, and of many of the actors in Varley's SF, are high. Built from multiple interfaces, Foo can be a guide through the terrains of virtual space, but only if the fine lines of tension in the articulated webs that constitute her being remain in play, open to the unexpected realization of an unlikely hope. It's not a "happy ending" we need, but a non-ending. That's why none of the narratives of masculinist, patriarchal apocalypses will do. The System is not closed; the sacred image of the same is not coming. The world is not full.