Haraway 1994

Haraway, Donna. "A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies." Configurations 2.1 (1994): 59-71.

“Feminist, multicultural, antiracists technoscience projects do not respect the boundaries of disciplines, institutions, nations, or genres. The projects are as likely to be located in computer graphics labs as in community meetings, in biomedical worlds as in antitoxics work. … But boundary crossing in itself is not very interesting for feminist, multicultural, antiracist technoscience projects. Technoscience provokes an interest in zones of implosion, more than in boundaries, crossed or not. The most interesting questions is, What forms of life survive and flourish in those dense, imploded zones?” -- also says shared task of those playing the cat’s cradle game of antiracist feminist theory and cultural studies is “to produce worldly interference patterns”

"Textual rereading is never enough, even if one defines the text as the world. Reading, no matter how active, is not a powerful enough trope; we do not swerve decisively enough. The trick is to make metaphor and materiality implode in the culturally specific apparatuses of bodily production. What constitutes an apparatus of bodily production cannot be known in advance of engaging in the always messy projects of description, narration, intervention, inhabiting, conversing, exchanging, and building. The point is to get at how worlds are made and unmade, in order to participate in the processes, in order to foster some forms of life and not others. If technology, like language, is a form of life, we cannot afford neutrality about its constitution and sustenance. The point is not just to read the webs of knowledge production; the point is to reconfigure what counts as knowledge in the interests of reconstituting the generative forces of embodiment. I am calling this practice materialized refiguration; both words matter. The point is, in short, to make a difference--however modestly, however partially, however much without either narrative or scientific guarantees. In more innocent times, long, long ago, such a desire to be worldly was called activism. I prefer to call these desires and practices by the names of the entire, open array of feminist, multicultural, antiracist technoscience projects."

"Cat's cradle is where I think the action is in science studies, feminist studies, antiracism, and cultural studies--not in the mind-numbing militarized games of endless agonistic encounters and trials of strength passing as critical theory and as technoscience. If, as we must do, we are fruitfully to mistake the world for the trope, and the trope for our own method, in a spiraling mimesis, cat's cradle promises to be a less-deadly version for moral discourse, knowledge claims, and critical practice than heroic trials of strength. Tracing networks and configuring agencies/actors/actants in antiracist feminist multicultural studies of technoscience might lead us to places different from those reached by tracing actors and actants through networks in yet another war game. I prefer cat's cradle as an actor-network theory."