It’s a symptomatic reading that highlights the ways that that the medical model was thought in 1908-1936: ‘hygienic’, ‘disease’, ‘health’, ‘prophylaxis’, ‘malaise’ emphasise that this is a medical model; “moral status of healthy manhood” marks that this is a psychology. This race, class, and gender based hierarchy (“manhood’s highest forms”) was, nevertheless, universalising and democratic (“any…could spiritually participate”). Haraway’s material-semiotic analysis of Akeley’s African Hall at New York’s Natural History Museum undoes the binary opposition between human history and animal history, ‘culture’ and ‘nature’. Her non-binary notion of material-semiotic analysis became one of the foundations of the academic discipline of New Science Studies. If Haraway’s approach is historical, diachronic, building on Hayden White’s work, the other major figure in the New Science Studies, Bruno Latour, is more anthropological, synchronic.
The synchronic/diachronic binary opposition that structures the ways we think of time also runs through psychoanalysis: the synchrony, the structuralism of anthropology influenced Lacan, while Freud’s concept of nachträglichkeit is diachronic in a complex and non-linear way. A line of force proliferates; the synchronic/diachronic difference propagates, walking the line, just like the movement of cations and anions through the semi-permeable membrane in the paragraph about the propagation of the nerve-impulse I remember memorising for my A-level in Biology.
Another profoundly influential paper by Haraway is her Cyborg Manifesto (1991), in which she critiques a whole range of binary oppositions, discussing them in the context of historical change and, in particular, the changes in kinship within which contemporary change in gender and what Lacanians call ‘sexuation’ were taking place. She argues, in this postmodern manifesto for socialist feminism, that neo-Marxists, then debating whether a change was taking place to a new economic mode, were stymied partly because they were focusing primarily on capital and class to the exclusion of the other forms of identity and difference. Her argument is Deleuzean. She argues that we are living through a transition from the “comfortable old hierarchical dominations” to “the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination” (Haraway 1991: 161). This is, roughly speaking, a transition from modernity to postmodernity, with the modern being, in Deleuzean terms, more tree-like, more binary, and the postmodern being more rhizomatic.
At the time and place of her writing, North America in the late twentieth century, radical changes were taking place in kinship. Haraway does not only argue that these changes in kinship— the general anthropological term for the circuit within which what is called ‘gender’ and ‘sexuation’ take their diachronically and synchronically varying forms— were taking place and needed to be taken into account in our theorisation and speculation. She gives this argument a savage and ironic twist. Many people were living in families of choice rather than families organised around reproduction. At the same time, huge numbers of people in Haraway’s community were dying.