With the coyotes of the borders,
G.A. and J.D.
in Memoriam

The dominant knowledge crumbles. Not as the twins towers crumbled, leaving behind them a cloud of dust which feeds the mythology-war, but rather as subsides a form on the surface of a screen of Tetris, or better, as disappears a body have been just made embrace to the bite by a amante vampire.
To speak about this depression of the forms and the bodies while it is occurring is in oneself a tactical exercise of revelation. It is to make with Haraway of the “disposed noise”, of the “strategic contamination” (Haraway, 1985). In the actual position of micro_guerre_totale for the domination of the production of the codes, to give a true cartography of the knowledge located, a complete plan of the vectors of criticism of the knowledge and dominant languages, would amount giving up the play. It will rather be a question of identifying certain displacements of the dominant knowledge towards a multiplicity of local or minority knowledge. This cartography thus wants to be partial and diagrammatic, a simple textual simulation, a collection of already disappeared luminous traces which seek to fit today in the political memory.

The objectivity of the abnormal ones

The abnormal ones can they become experts? Can the subordinates speak? (Spivak, 1988) Which type of objectivity can produce an expertise on the abnormal ones, the trans ones, the intermittent ones, handicapped people or drug addicts? Which can be the adequate knowledge at a time postorganic? It returns to Donna Haraway to have kidnapped the expression “situated Knowledge” (Haraway, 1988), “to know located”, of the field of experimental pedagogy, and more concretely of the research of the relations between training, to know and context (Lava, 1977), to initiate in feminism a displacement of the epistemological debates on objectivity towards a political genealogy of the knowledge.
The knowledge located emerges as an answer to the double bind in which feminist epistemology at the end of the Eighties in its definition of objectivity is: on the one hand between the model of the “radical social constructivism” (that Haraway allots basically to Bruno Latour), and the “feminist empiricism” carried by Sandra Harding; and in addition, between the “subjugated knowledge” and ethics of the informed assent.
Here limits of the epistemological debate. According to Haraway, on a side the constructivism regards any form of scientific objectivity as being the result of a exercise rhetoric, the effect of the tensions between various social actors in a field of forces. Here, science becomes text and field of capacities. Other, the feminist empiricism of Harding, beyond the radical historical contingency of the modes of production of knowing, affirms the possibility of a feminist form of objectivity. The first model led according to Haraway to totalitarian hermeneutics: object and subject of science are reduced to authorities rhetorics producing of the cynical and disengaged political positions. But, in the era of the data-processing domination, feminism cannot allow this modernistic and romantic luxury (Haraway, 1988,576-8). However, Haraway distancie of the model of Harding: heir to a certain Marxist humanism, feminist empiricism remains depend on transcendent epistemologies which aspire to a pure knowledge and presuppose a subject of the innocent and independent knowledge (Haraway, 1988,580-2). Vis-a-vis the universal scientific authorities and with the cultural relativisms, Haraway supports the possibility of a knowledge located like practice of objectivity subordinate. It is not a question of going beyond the two preceding models or exceeding them through dialectical Aufhebung, but rather to cross them to pervert them. As well the radical constructivism as feminist empiricism are let contaminate by a savoir_vampire.

The border: production site of knowing

The knowledge located immediately seems to refer to a place, a position, a localization or a site; but, one of complexities of this concept is that it has suddenly shaken the place even production of the knowledge. Then, Knowledge = Place, but about which place is it? This place is a breach, the effect of a series of displacements: 1. anti-colonial theories and movements towards a criticism postcoloniale; 2. hegemonic feminism hétérocolonial towards a criticism of the transverse construction of the race, sex, kind and sexuality…; 3. policies of the identities towards identity policies post; 4. policies of the body towards denaturalized cyborgologies.
1. One witnesses a slip of philosophies of time towards philosophies of space. The difference (either ontological but rather épistémo-policy) is not determined any more by an essential quality (anatomical, linguistic, symbolic system, economic…) but by an irreducible plurality of the places. The knowledge neither abstract nor is delocalized. There does not exist apart from a precise geography. Walter Mignolo calls “geopolitics of the knowledge” this double lawsuit of “spatialization of the knowledge” and “politization of the place”: “The most important consequence of the geopolitics of the knowledge is to understand that the knowledge functions like the super flow of the globalized economy” (Mignolo, 2003). The war of the knowledge vampires is a fight for the geopolitical off-centring of loci of the scientific stating.
One is under a condition “glocale”. One lives a multiplicity of spaces of friction, border zones. The subordinates are not any more in one simple colonial or sexual externality. The knowledge located does not constitute a transgression coming from the margins of normality (racial, sexual, economic…). As well Paris as Avignon, the penis-bio which the prosthesis, became hybrid zones of contact, superposition. Each city and each body are simultaneously close and distant, familiar and exotic, intimate and strange. With the difference in the narrations anticoloniales, feminists and homosexual of the Seventies, which established oppositions binary between colonizers and colonized, or normal and perverse, while reserving for the latter a place of moral, cultural externality and even metaphysics compared to their oppressors, the knowledge postcoloniaux, queer and trans, hear the modes of colonial or sexual standardization like a field of forces without possible outside. There is a plurality of worlds which are not nevertheless completely external from/to each other. Leibniz is let bite with the neck by Spinoza the vampire.
The first postcoloniaux speeches emerge from this tectonic condition of friction. The withdrawal of case or the against-place of emergence of the knowledge located is the border (Andalzua, 1987). Certain precursors of the knowledge located, expert of the borders: Franz Pennon, Aime Césaire, Edouard Glissant. One finds here narrations against-colonial which do not accentuate the autochtonie but rather the zones of contact, the identities transverse and hybrid spaces. It is about space specific to the languages and identities creole, mongrel, mulattos, post-natives. In another geopolitical plate, the creator of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha, speaks to build a new historiography. If the independence of India had been conquered in 1947, it is time maintaining to seek “the emancipation compared to colonial epistemology” (Guha, 1988). Vis-a-vis the paradox constitutive of the colonial subject, Guha emits a radical anti-epistemological criticism: hegemonic scientific methodologies (as well of hard sciences as of the social sciences) and their categories are not simply unable to reveal the subjectivity of the subordinates, but produce themselves rather the condition of subalternity.
The question is: how to produce a knowledge able to give an account of the historical fittings of the subjects subalternized not colonization? Whereas in the Eighties, Spivak had diagnosed with a certain epistemological pessimism the systematic obliteration of the voice of the subordinate in the text imperialist, a few years later Bhabha, Mohanty, Alexander… and Spivak itself will affirm the existence of languages subordinates in the fractures between several hegemonic speeches. Far from a radical not-translatability of the condition of subalternity, the critic postcoloniale claims the frontier statute of any language: there is no language which is not produced translation, contamination, traffic. If the knowledge dominating is characterized by a claim with the monolinguism, then the knowledge located is hétéroglossies (Derrida, 1996). The savoir_vampire is a technology of translation enters and through a multiplicity of languages which are drawn up against on coding of all languages in a single language.
2. With the course the Eighties, new “glocaux” speeches emergent in another zone of friction, between the United States and the Central America and of the south, but also between the dominant university thought and the languages of feminism black, chicano, lesbian and trans. Feminism emancipationnist will be denounced by his margins like an hegemonic knowledge. The postfeminism term records this displacement of the place of the stating of a universal subject “woman” towards a multiplicity of the subjects located. De Lauretis speaks about a “rupture constitutive of the subject of the feminism” which derives from “nonthe coincidence of the subject of feminism with the women” (De Lauretis, 1994,7). This eccentric subject of feminism is the cyborg of Haraway. It is about a conceptual upheaval of the debates around the equality/difference, justice/recognition, but also essentialisme/constructivism towards the debates around the transverse production of the differences. Transfeminism is the form which feminism takes when it runs the risk of the situation in multiplicity.
The recourse essentialist to only one concept of sexual difference or kind (biological essentialisms of the genitality or the sexual reproduction, Marxist essentialisms dominated still today by the concept of “sexual division of work” or by that more with the mode of “feminization of the productive circuit”, linguistic essentialisms or symbolic systems) is seen today overflowed by a transverse analysis of the production of the differences. Simply it is not a question to take into account the racial or ethnic specificity of oppression like a variable moreover beside sexual oppression and kind, but rather to analyze spaces of superposition between kind, sex and race (the sexualisation of the race and the racialisation of the sex) like processes constitutive of modernity sexocoloniale. The race, the class, the sex, the kind, nationality… exist only like belonging to a complex network of mutual relations. It is not a question to add political homosexual, policy of the kind, political antiracist… It acts to invent “relational policies” (Avtar Brah, 1996), to create “strategies of political intersectionnality” (Kimberly Crenshaw, 1996) which defy spaces of “crossing of oppressions”, of interlocking oppressions (beautiful hooks, 2000).
Here some preliminary figures which operate like indices of situationnality: “will frontera” and “skin” of Gloria Andalzua, the “batârde” and the “malinche” of Cherri Moraga, the “cyborg”, the “coyote”, the “virus”, Modest_Witness, OncoMouseÔ, FemaleManÓ de Donna Haraway, “the wandering subject” of Turned pink Braidotti, “intellectual organics” of Aurora Lewis, the “deviated mimesis” of Hommi Bhabha, the “drag” and the “quotation subversive” of Judith Butler, the gender blending of Kate Bornstein, “the hermaphrodyke” of Del Lagrace Volcano, “the gode” or “the prosthesis” of Preciado, the “transformation” Thaemlitz Ground… All these concepts délégitiment purity, the teleology and unidimensionnality of the knowledge produced by the representations of sexo-colonial modernity.
3. The knowledge located is also opposed to the subjugated knowledge and ethics of the informed assent. D.J. Haraway connects in closed circuit Foucault, Marx and the technoliberalism to produce a scratching. The loop known as: knowledge = communities = capacities.
The subjugated knowledge is not immediately a knowledge located. Subordination is not an innocent platform producing of objectivity. “Subordination, known as Haraway, does not constitute a ground for an ontology”. Vis-a-vis the evolution of the policies of the identities of the last 30 years, Haraway criticizes the facility of the knowledge subjugated with becoming forces of standardization and naturalization: institutionalizations of the policies of the kinds, gay policies and lesbians assimilationnists, nationalist essentialisations of the anticoloniaux projects… In the worst case, the subjugated knowledge tends to the development of the expertises_ victims, with the naturalization of oppression, the construction of a political subject founder (the woman, the proletarian, the homosexual one, the unemployed, the artist, etc) and with the production of outside constitutive (whores, the working poor, the trans ones, the intermittent ones, workers of the sex, etc) like condition of the political action. “The positions of subjugated, said Haraway, are not free of the critical re-examinations, decodings, the déconstructions and of interpretations… the identity does not produce science; the position criticizes if.” (Haraway, 1988,586-7) the knowledge located cannot be either confused with ethics of informed assent: liberal ultra alternatives of the total supercapitalism which promote the access to the knowledge (of the user, the patient, the worker) like a condition of possibility of the choices informed in a world of free and equal individuals in front of the law.
Against-hegemonic epistemologies struggle between two impossible subjects: on the one hand, a spherical subject of the oppositional history (either the “women of the Third World”, or the subject “queer”, or bet them ground…), an ultimate revolutionary subject which operates like engine of the history and which, paradoxically, can speak in the name of all; in addition, a subject burst by the statistical accumulation of the multicultural differences with their quite informed knowledge. Into the first case, one slips gradually towards a kind of internationalism cosmopolitan bet-queer; in the second, no need for political alliances, but rather for strategies of COM, mechanisms of defence of the rights of the minorities (women's right, gays, patients… as they are also consumers faithful always in the search of more than representation and more than visibility.
With the risk to fall again into a universalism from méta-oppressions, one cannot continue any more to use the word “queer today” to speak about a minor or local knowledge. Recently in Europe and for already a few years in the United States, the word queer has seen surcoder, recoloniser by the speech dominating: Ardisson had already deposited the word queer in 1998 with the INPI, but 2004 will have to be waited until to see as well appearing a whole series of standardizing speeches media (pinkinisation of the identities), that academic which will annex the epithet queer to take it in their own effects of knowledge-capacity. The current context of reappropriation requires a displacement even more vertiginous. My own formulation “multitudes queer” is a politically obsolete fitting today. Queer cannot constitute a smooth ground to support the whole of the minor knowledge of the kinds, sexes and sexualities. Afflicted for the gurus, but we are opposite a constitutive impossibility to add up criticism. There is no expert of the local experts. It is necessary to maintain the fragmentation of the stating in becoming: fittings transpédéféministesmusulmanogouines….That does not imply the impossibility of a local alliance of the multiplicities; quite to the contrary, a minor alliance exists only in the multiplicity of the stating, like transverse section of the differences.
It is not a question to choose between an hegemonic knowledge and hooligan, and a whole of innocent and not-commensurable Community knowledge. There is no resolution for such dialectical, since the dialectical one and its resolution is themselves of the figures of the single knowledge. There are not a privileged form of opposition but a multitude of escapes. The knowledge located resembles, says Haraway, with the play “cat' S cradle” (Haraway, 2000,156): it is not given as an opposition, nor as a dialectical resolution, but as a rhizomatic connection.
Objectivity located comes neither from an individual subjectivity nor of an essential identity. It is synthetic connection of the heterogeneous series. Knowledge = the Communities = Capacities. The knowledge located is never the knowledge of a private or individual place (my genes, my kind, my work, me, my choice) (Haraway, 2000,152), but collective fitting, produced of a “transverse relation of the differences inside and through the communities”. The knowledge located is the collective wedding night, the Sabbath of the digital witches.
The subject of the knowledge located coincides neither with an essential identity, nor with a universal subject, it is simply, known as Haraway, a “Modest_Witness” (Haraway, 2000,161). Haraway takes the expression of “Témoin_Modeste” of the experimental method of Robert Boyle like contextual method determined by the practice to be pilot and the relation of the truth at a community of knowing - vis-a-vis the detractors of the experimental method like Thomas Hobbes, who defended a single and transcendent knowledge, independent of the communities of which it emanates. The subject of the knowledge located is a vampire. It is necessary to bite or be bitten to know. To be pilot of its own change. To take the risk of alchemy. The ground of epistemology cracks to open a space éthico-policy: “to be pilot”, for Haraway, depends on the constitutive relation between “testing” and “attesting” (Haraway, 2000,161). “To be pilot, it is to see, attest, make themselves publicly responsible for, and physically vulnerable to, its own visions and representations.” (Haraway, 2000,155.) See always with the other but never in its place. The vampire, Témoin_Modeste, more than one subject in the political or metaphysical direction of the term is a pack, a band, a multiplicity, a process of change: “the vampire pollutes the lines during the wedding night… carries out transformations of the categories through an illegitimate passage of the substances… it infects cosmos, the closed organic community”. (Haraway, 2000,150). The vampire is trans. From there this strange requirement: or to cease the policy, or to make of the policy like a vampire.
4. To know located is the name that Haraway gives to the form of feminist objectivity scientific specific to the body postorganic: “embodied objectivity”, incarnated objectivity. “Objectivity becomes a specific and particular form of incarnation, not a false vision promising the transcendence of all the limits and responsibilities. Morals is simple: only the partial prospect promises an objective vision”. “Incarnated feminist objectivity” does not refer to “a fixed site in a réifié body, a body woman or other” (Haraway, 1988,589), but rather with the body as a technobiopolitic prosthesis. The place of objectivity is not a free prédiscursif body of any technological intervention, but a body technoorganic, a prosthetic subjectivity which already incorporated technology. The subject of the knowledge located is an interface corps_technology.
The place of production to know and life is in change. In this space specific to the savoirs_vampires, the intermediate states between the life and death reign: the vegetable life, brain death, the hormones, the embryos, the viruses, etc If, like wanted it Foucaul, T it acts of biopolitique, this biopolitique cannot be characterized simply like a policy of the alive one, but rather, like “a data processing of the domination of the techno-alive bodies” (Haraway, 2000,162) We passed from an industrial society to a polymorphic and prosthetic system of information. We record a displacement of the physical models and thermodynamic (theories of repression, fight, resistance…) worms of the cyber-textual, but so epidemiologic and immunological models in which exists a primacy of the ecology policy. Why resist whereas being able us to transfer!
The cyborg (term invented in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline to name a rat of laboratory with which had been established an osmotic bomb and a cybernetic control system) of Haraway is only one of the figures to indicate this condition of prosthetic incorporation. All made lines heritage of the supermodernity cross in the cyborg: the automation of work, the sexualisation of the machine, the computerisation of the war, and digitalization of information. The body of the knowledge located is at the same time an organic and artificial creature, a technovivant system. But attention! the life cyborg is not the mechanical existence of the computer but rather, as we learns it Chela Sandoval, “the life of a girl who works to roast hamburgers and which speaks the language-MacDonalds” (Sandoval, 2000). The body postorganic exists in the interstices, between the oppositions which constitute the supermodernity: animal/human, mechanical/organic, white/black, male/female, hétéro/homo, bio/trans… This trans_sujet are “the monster” whose Haraway awaits new political projects (Haraway, 1992).

The laboratory: the night of the weddings of the experts_revenants

The access of the subordinates to technologies of production of knowing, the displacement of the subject of the scientific stating, generates an epistemological rupture. In 1976, Foucault identifies this rupture and names it “return of the fixed knowledge”. It is the night of death-alive of knowledge. Those which had been produced until now like objects of the medical expertise, psychiatric, anthropological or colonial, the subordinates, the abnormal ones will gradually claim the production of a local knowledge, a knowledge on themselves which questions the hegemonic knowledge. It is a process of “general friability of the grounds”, a collapse operated by the multiplicity “of criticisms discontinuous and particular or local” (Foucault, 1976,163): “It is acted in fact of making play knowledge local, discontinuous, disqualified, not-legitimated, against the unit theoretical authority which would claim to filter them, to treat on a hierarchical basis them, to order them in the name of a true knowledge, the rights of a science which would be held by some.” (Foucault, 1976,165)
Codes of the kinds, variations of the sexes, identities sexual, body, technical morphologies of management of the affects, whole fringes of time dedicated to the relation and the attention to alive become properties inside the regulating modes of Supercapitalisme. As many labels of media culture industries and, but also of the patents of the pharmaceutical and medical companies. Practices of measurement such as tests hormonal, psychiatric evaluations or legal, genetic tests, but also écographies in utero, protocols of assignment and change of the sex, assessments professional, tables of profitability of work and production, programs of family planning… belong to the techno-discursive work of sciences to reproduce the materiality of alive in the circuit Sex-Capital. It is that “biopolitic postmodern body” (Haraway, 1989). In this viscous space are the movements postfeminists, black, fags, dykes, trans, but also from the groups such as Act Up, PONY, or the movements of intermittent, postporno, the movement cripple, precarias with derived, the sexyshocks, etc…
A multiform plurality of the packs protests against the processes of capitalization of the alive one. Evangelion cuts a cyberpipe with Doctor Ikari with such a precision that it makes him a vaginoplastie, while recording porn-trans-gore. We attend a multiple process of D-appropriation of technologies of production of the bio-discursive objects such as the sex, the kind, sexuality, but also the race, the reproduction, the disease, the handicap, work, or even death. As many objects of knowledge produced by the biomedical, psychological or economic speeches which, far from being textual entities, take the form of the alive one. Frankenstein opens an office of expertise “freak” with Silicone Valley. The object of the knowledge (the pervert, the unemployed, the whore, the artist, the criminal…) becomes agent through the analysis and the diversion of the speeches and the techniques which had produced it as a species to be controlled. Here, “the localization is itself as much a complex construction that a heritage” (Haraway, 1988). These “new technologies of positioning” (Haraway, 1988) are the places from where the taxable people réapproprient “a knowledge of the anomaly, with all the techniques which are dependent for him”. (Foucault, 1976, 161)
It is a denaturalized policy, structured around the synthetic bonds of affinity, a policy which connects differences, which establishes rhizomatic alliances in discontinuity and not in the consensus, a made policy of “networks of differential positionings” (Chela Sandoval, 2000).
Begin here a transvaluation of the traditional relation between esthetics and policy: one will speak about policies of the affects or cellular esthetics. This same equation reproduces in a chiasme where cross the dramatizing of political space (performatives policies) and the virtuous experimentation in the field of subjectivity (aesthetic cyborgologic). It is about a spinozism of political microphone-passions: a laboratory for the expertise in which the bodies test forms of life collectively. The policy becomes sorcery.

Thank you in Louis Gao, Antonella Corsani and François Matheron for their reading and their correction of this French text.

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