The God Trick
One of the prominent terms of Haraways essay Situated Knowledge is the God trick or God’s trick. The god trick is the belief in objectivity as a “view of infinite vision”. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation.
”The only position from which objectivity could not possibly be practiced and honoured is the standpoint of the master, the Man, the One God, whose Eye produces, appropriates, and orders all difference. No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference. The god-trick is self-identical, and we have mistaken that for creativity and knowledge, omniscience even.”
But if not objectivity, then what? Well, feminist objectivity. Quite simply; situated knowledges.
”The only position from which objectivity could not possibly be practiced and honoured is the standpoint of the master, the Man, the One God, whose Eye produces, appropriates, and orders all difference. No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference. The god-trick is self-identical, and we have mistaken that for creativity and knowledge, omniscience even.”
But if not objectivity, then what? Well, feminist objectivity. Quite simply; situated knowledges.
