Coyote Figurations, Techne and Feminism

It is within the framework of situated knowledges in the field of biology and technology studies, in its relation to feminism that the coyote figuration is conceptualized by Donna Haraway. In what respect are they conceived by Donna Haraway to be figures of emancipation? What kind of affinity does it establishes with the figure of cyborg, as figure of posthumanism? Certainly, Donna Haraway hypothesizes the privilege of a ‘partial perspective’ having to play a role in expanding the epistemic horizon of feminist thought. This paper probes into the potential role of coyote figures as metaphors illuminating feminist readings of the relation between philosophy and technology. However, coyote figures have a generic character of transgression, and hence, borders on epistemological reduction of its ontico-ontological phenomenality which Catherine Malabou problematizes. Malabou’s eschewal of flexibility counters this binary by developing the role played by the “fantastic” in the espousal of plasticity of being. Being conceived in this originary mutability eliminates the interior-exterior division of beings. What are the comparable features of coyote figurations and the fantastic? And how does it add to the feminist understanding of philosophy of technology?


Introduction: Coyote Feminism
I like to see feminist theory as a reinvented coyote discourse obligated to its sources in many heterogeneous accounts of the world. 1 -Donna Haraway Donna Haraway evokes the metaphor of the coyote as a trickster figure who, instead of dwelling in subject-object dualism, posits the objectivity of science at the intersection of witty agents and prosthetic devices of meaning-making.The "coyote" figuration emerges in Donna Haraway's work as a "metaphor," insinuating the fragmentary constellation of situated knowledges.Extracting coyote figures from the traditional domains of mythical abstraction without thereby slipping into ethnicnaturalism, Haraway underscores that the Coyote figuration is regional but at the same time not reducible to the ethnic, human, or gendered nature, which thus escapes its appropriation as an overdetermination of the feminine.Its fantastic element is a critical figuration dwelling at many intersectionalities not reducible to each other.The pertinent question is whether coyote figures can escape anthropocentric concepts of nature and whether the subject-object nexus formed around them can support somatophillic rationality.In Donna Haraway's conceptualisation, they are found to be lacking in these respects.Hence, transposing coyote figures into the conceptual framework of the plasticity of beings, this paper will discuss the viability of developing the notion of the "fantastic" postulated by Catherine Malabou as offering another dimension of crossing essences, which incidentally also moulds them into a deconstructive technique that trammels with the current mode of cyber-governmentalities in Katherine Hayles's work.In what way does the use of metaphor radicalise our understanding of the makings of scientific objects?In Haraway's doctoral work, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, she compares the critical importance of metaphors to visual imageries. 2Further, citing Ludwig Wittgenstein from his Tractatus, she postulates the importance of "showing" over "saying," which can be more efficiently carried forth through the use of metaphors.She also attributes to metaphor a "predictive value."Above all, for her, metaphors can invoke a sense of community, although in this work, her metaphors are drawn from the communities of scientists.In her analysis, the formation of a community mobilises a metaphor that is formed around a set of problems which demands a shift from one paradigm to another.Coyote Figurations, Techne and Feminism 3 particular, she provides an account of the change brought about in the field of "developmental biology" in the first half of the twentieth century, which saw a shift from the binary of vitalism-mechanism to synthetic organicism.In her justification for the use of "metaphors," she compares it with another symbolic expression-the "paradigm"-that was quite in vogue during this time, being introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
In comparison, "paradigm," though, is a befitting metaphor to wield in the field of physics; in her analysis, it falls short in visual imageries to suit the field of biology.She defends this thesis with an explanation that "paradigm," for Kuhn, embodies a set of shared values which result in the formation of a scientific community of "normal science" as a cumulative enterprise consolidated by a network of shared commitments.In contrast, she observes that community formation is of lesser significance in accounting for a paradigm change in biology, as it is unfurled by the coming together of a set of discrete scientific communities.
However, regarding the role metaphors play in emulating the explanatory power of a scientific paradigm, she is in agreement with Mary Hesse that a metaphor is an image that gives concrete coherence to even highly abstract thought. 3The intelligibility of metaphors arises from the fact that it is shared by a community.Though it is a property of language, it has concrete expectations shared by a community of users, which gives it its explanatory power; this is, nonetheless, not analogous to a logical structure or an archetype.In her doctoral work, she makes use of the potency of "crystal" as a metaphor juxtaposed with how the dynamics of an organism are explained under the framework of a "perfect form" in cell theory.Explaining crystal formation in terms of its organic processes will dispel the imagery of an organism as a hierarchically organised perfect structure in favour of a "discontinuous series of organisms" because crystal formation can be best conceived only as an intermediate state of organisation. 4This analogy, built on the potency of metaphors, travels a long way by the time it assumes the guise of a coyote figure.
As she affirms, coyote figurations are brought into the fold of a "kin group of feminist figures" in an effort to show possibilities towards a more liveable place "elsewhere" in the spirit of science fiction: Figures collect up hopes and fears and show possibilities and dangers.Both imaginary and material, figures root peoples in stories and link them to histories.Stories are always more 3 Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, 9.   4 Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, 11-12.generous, more capacious, than ideologies; in that fact is one of my strongest hopes…I want to know how to help build ongoing stories rather than histories that end. 5 She adds to these feminist figures in the interest of conflating facts, history, and ideology.These figurations have roots in their formative histories of religious rituals.But they are figuratively placated off their historical links in order to transpose them as "tropes" that defer their literal meanings.Thus, the affinity towards cross-cultural tropes and metaphors is in the interest of etching a non-inherited kin group "elsewhere": There can be an elsewhere, not as a utopian fantasy or relativist escape, but an elsewhere born out of the hard (and sometimes joyful) work of getting on together in a kin group that includes cyborgs and goddesses working for earthly survival. 6e figure of the "cyborg" is Haraway's much celebrated and popular imagery when compared to the "coyote" figure, which is one of the reasons why there is a dearth of discussions on the antiracial, decolonial readings of contra-modern or alternative-modern readings of folkloristic imageries divulging the tensions built into their appropriations.
Haraway develops the concept of partial knowledges leery of the uncontestable claims on objectivity upheld by the scientific edifice. 7Whether partial perspectives can be advanced as an account of radical historical contingency of all knowledge claims is a critical project, she ponders along with Sandra Harding, who advanced marginal perspectives representing the standpoint of the marginalised communities of scientific views emanating from their cultural origins as the starting point of scientific research. 8As she adds, the extension of this vision is the fundamental tenet of the critical practice of theory building needed for a "successor science" project that offers a better account of a world for the future.This she holds out as the feminist standpoint theory on objectivity, whose want Haraway recognises as the radical multiplication of local knowledges.
Though the Marxist tradition has been identified as a rich source of critiquing hegemony, it failed, in her analysis, in terms of bringing women's subjectivity into its fold other than as an alienated wage 5 Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader (London: Routledge, 2004)  Review 36, no.3 (1992): 437-470.labourer.The feminist extension of this tradition unmasks objectivity as a placeholder of unmarked positions of Man and White.Haraway's project is to mark the objectivist claims from multiple locations of situated knowledges.But as we are informed by the regimes of oriental and colonial anthropological scholarship, the "local" is no less of a marked position of "an aboriginal" purity.Thus, Haraway invites us to embody our vision in differential "dimensions of mental and physical spaces we hardly know how to name" in an effort to check the unrestricted vision promised by technological mediations, transcending all limits. 9The privileges presumed by the lens of peregrination are what Haraway brings under the critical gaze.Travelling lens ensconced in the imperialist economic privileges of capitalism, allied to its forms of mobility, grants us a false impression about the mightiness of prosthetic devices that they are "active perceptual systems equipped for translations" of specific partial knowledges.
As she acknowledges, there is risk involved in appropriative claims on local knowledges-"danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions." 10Her critical gaze cuts through the relativist positionings of local knowledges, signalling the significance of aligning with the "subjugated standpoints" as they are deemed "in principle least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretive core of all knowledge." 11Such preference for subjugated knowledges is translated as an argument for situated and embodied knowledges.Thus, the politics implied by the epistemology of partial perspectives situate them as an alternative to relativism, which she underlines is the "perfect mirror twin of totalisation," as both deny the stake implied by locations and embodiment.Equality of positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical inquiry "falsely promising a vision from everywhere (instead of nowhere) equally and fully." 12wever, just as any partial perspective will not do, as it would be a disguised form of relativism, the critical potential of partial-subjugated knowledges should signal hope for transformation.Whether this aspect of hope could be contaminated by a "fantastic" element-an extra-rational element of phantasm-is the pertinent question Catherine Malabou shoots into this debate. 13In other words, can the characterisation of partiality manifest itself as an alternative to the exhaustive rationalisation of the object of knowledge?Partial knowledges, when juxtaposed to equal positioning of relativism and universal positioning of totalisation, poises itself on a rational axis as another claimant of reason, masking its act of hegemonisation via channels of systematisation and erasure of differences and inequalities.By contrast, the paradox entailed by positioning partial knowledges as non-isomorphic 9 Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," 582. 10 Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," 584.11 Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," 584. 12 Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," 584.
Roshni Babu 6 reason leaves the element which injects imbalance to exhaustive reasoning mysterious, or least of all, unexplained.And it is at this juncture that Haraway imagines "metaphors" as the intermediary link that sutures the non-isomorphic subject positions and interstitial connections between locations of knowledges: In these metaphors, we find means for appreciating simultaneously both the concrete, "real" aspect and the aspect of semiosis and production in what we call scientific knowledge. 14 other words, as one can notice from the above quote, the coming together of heterogeneities constituting partial knowledges is leveraged on an absence of grounds for an ontology of the subjugated.
At first glance, the choice of this figuration is quite apt to her project of re-defining "objects as boundary projects," where boundaries acquire the guise of liminal spaces which are tricky and risky to invest in terms of generation and production of meanings due to their vulnerability to shifts of displacement at borders.However, envisioning the coyote as a "problematic" figure without thereby problematising the boundaries of reason, only in which case it would become characteristic of being a "trickster," is not promising enough.

Xenofeminist Critique of Donna Haraway
In so far as her search is for granting agency to the local world of objects, an active contender is "ecofeminism."For eco-feminists, however, agency of the world is embodied by the metaphor of a "primal mother" who resists convertibility into an object of resource.Hester (2018). 17XF presents itself as a post-revolutionary feminism seeking to develop strategies of adaptation to technologically mediated realities.Their vehement stance on anti-naturalism is built on the labour of freedom from alienation induced by normatively given "natures."Their orientation towards adaptiveness to the existing technologies organises their thought around the "repurposing of technologies."This strategic stance towards adaptive or repurposed use of technologies is grounded on two premises: 1) that there is no inherently progressive or political techno-scientific imagination, and 2) feminism is a project of reclaiming reason ("feminism must be a rationalism"), or "rationalism must itself be a feminism": Systematic thinking and structural analysis have largely fallen by the wayside in favour of admirable but insufficient struggles bound to fixed localities and fragmented insurrections.
Whilst capitalism is understood as a complex and ever-expanding totality, many would-be emancipatory anti-capitalist projects remain profoundly fearful of transitioning to the universal, resisting big-picture speculative politics by condemning them as necessarily oppressive vectors. 18ough one might agree with their affirmative to go beyond the valorisation of local micro-communities to foster universal solidarity between fractured insurgencies in the interest of emancipatory tactics, there is an equally imminent need to transcend the binaries of local and universal in order to scale up alternative imaginations of "globalism" emanating from heterogeneous forms of milieu formations.
Alternative milieus unfurled by digital realities present recursive networks of reasoning whereby our naïve definitions of the rational do not recognise themselves in the binary contrast under the new algorithmic schemas of the rational.It is with respect to their position on anti-naturalism that XF positions themselves as "Haraway's disobedient daughters": 19 XF is an anti-naturalist endeavour in the sense that it frames nature and the natural as a space for contestation -that is, as within the purview of politics.Any political project based upon nature as a pseudo-theological limit, a cartography of the untouchable, or a space of incontaminable purity risks lending huge conceptual resources to the conservative punishment of radical difference. 20XF's anti-naturalist position, as expressed in the above quote, provokes the "givenness" of gender identities.Seeking to break free of the comforts one experiences in the unfreedom of being born this 17 Helen Hester, Xenofeminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).
18 Cuboniks, Xenofeminism, 3.   19 Hester, Xenofeminism, 20.   20 Hester, Xenofeminism, 19.way leads to their position of gender abolitionism.Heteronormative norms, as we know, are constructed around the immutability of nature.The givenness of gender identity is sequestered into the private realm as a certainty.Severing the natural into the private realm is the biggest challenge one faces today in tearing down the disciplining grid of gender identities.Although in agreement with XF's agenda of anti-naturalism, this paper examines the equitability assumed between the local and the natural.
Most agendas of globalism are a call to transcend localism.Dynamics of the transition from the local to the global appear unproblematic in the rational registers of emancipatory universals.However, it would disclose a checkered history in the registers of semi-rational, mystical-spiritual, or inadequately rational.Donna Haraway's work exposes this intricacy in her articulation of the coyote figuration as an inadequately technophilic figure who could visualise this quandary.However, in this respect, XF's postulation of the "mesopolitical" sphere as a substitution for the local is equally inadequate, 21 as it operates on the advancement of given technological rationality into developing women's self-help tools, a repurposing of second-wave feminism for the fourth-wave, which though certainly serves the everyday ends of the feminist movement, does not serve the end of the heterogenisation of feminist technics per se: Without sufficient attention to the mesopolitical, the difficult work of alliance building and of increasing the reach of political ideas is too often left unconsidered.It is within this context that the example of self-help becomes particularly illuminating, given that the protocol might be considered a specifically mesopolitical tactic. 22nofeminism, on the one hand, imagines a post-capitalist mode of production, thought of as a counter-social production; on the other hand, it executes its vision within the given models of practical solidarity using the universal model of the modern technological apparatus.Hence, this model forecloses the possibilities inherent to "cybernetical cosmotechnics" to realise an alternative future of techne.Instead, XF envisions a future that foregrounds human survival, "remembering that survival is the precondition for any revolutionary politics." 23Although I empathise with XF's concern regarding the acknowledgement of old tools, namely, the "speculum," one of the first gender political tools that mediated the second-wave feminist movement, their lack of empathy towards the heterogenisation of tools is dismal.21 Hester, Xenofeminism, 9.   22 Hester, Xenofeminism, 115.However, Hester's caution against any form of "punitive disdain regarding the reproductive choices of others" 29 does not open up new doors for kin-formations beyond the human species and is a drawback which places Haraway's metaphors harbouring kin-groups of other-than-human species, a reservoir of imageries far exceeding the narrow framework of reproductive justice highlighted by XF, investing exclusively in post-capitalism without a parallel expansion via post-humanist imageries.

Cosmotechnical Affinity of Coyotes
Through hindsight derived from algorithmic modes of governance modelled after recursivity, Yuk Hui dispels the naïve imaginings of monolithic reason identifiable in the eighteenth-century models of technologies.Whether the form of reasoning that fuels the big-data machines governed by cybernetics be legibly called "reason" is not only a challenge to its nomenclature but also delineates the crisis in thinking new horizons of cybernetics.A more pertinent question for us to ponder in the age of cybernetics is to map the recursive movements of reason, which otherwise bestows an aura of mystery to its modes of functioning that resemble the soul. 30The advent of cybernetic governance confuses the given critical apparatuses of thinking, as it readily draws in the so-called radical subjectivations-or, as Haraway would call it, subjugated knowledges-into its feedback loop without thereby distinguishing between positivism and hermeneutics.Thus, while systems of governance optimise themselves through cybernetics, their functioning obtains the guise of new metaphysics.In this regard, posthumanist figurations have been criticised by Hui for their naïve attitude towards technology, which completely ignores the ontological intricacies implicit in the new technological ordering of machine and organism relations. 31Following this analysis, one can see that Haraway's figure of the cyborg ails from such conceptual naiveté.
In Haraway, the presumed affinity between the post-humanist figure of the cyborg and the Native American figure of the coyote is beset with a theoretical dilemma.Though chronologically, the concept of the cyborg precedes the coyote in Haraway's work, the latter could not succeed in becoming a posthuman figure.While feminist counter-dialogues with science and technological discourse can be appraised as a voice of resistance against the increasing synchronisation normalised between different spheres of society and culture aided by cybernetic governance, Hui's work appeals by adding volume to the diversification of technological resistances, instead of naively opposing organicism against the inorganic.If Haraway's figure of the cyborg is premised on a naïve dichotomy between nature and 29 Hester, Xenofeminism, 63-64.30 Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 246.machine, the coyote figuration would beg another disdain from an informed post-humanist like Hui: "Are we not here sacrificing science and technology to the Unknown, or, more precisely, to a mythical and religious thinking?" 32 contrast, Hui maps an alternative route which bypasses a resolution in favour of either science or organic nature.He postulates a new realm of ecology constituted by cybernetics and thus takes the risk of "burning the bridge." 33In this newly forged landscape, cybernetics substitutes the place of the "Unknown" in all its spiritual, aesthetic, or absolutistic senses. 34Consequently, cybernetics is recast in a non-deterministic model of diversification of its technical coordinates.This diversification is leveraged on different visions of the cosmos, embedded in multifarious aesthetic, intuitive sensibilities, whereby each of these conceptual equations, radiated by their respective cosmological milieus, would reverberate in resonance with the corresponding cosmotechnics that emerge.A critical moment of reappraisal of the familiar-sounding notions in a new framework of non-modern epistemologies is demanded by "cosmotechnics."Whether one can reinvigorate the figure of the coyote in cosmotechnical imagery is a compelling question to ponder in the interest of advancing alternative visions of nonmodern technics.However, this demands rediscovery of the corresponding cosmological imaginations in which these coyote figures are nestled by various corpora of folklore.

Conclusion: Plasticity of Coyotes
This concluding section gesticulates certain theoretical moves that can be viably conceived to have resonance with the contemporary post-human feminist discourse of new materialism wherein the coyote figuration can emerge as a "critical" metaphor with political intent.In this regard, I bring the works of new material feminism into dialogue with each other.The voices of Karen Barad, Katherine Hayles, and Catherine Malabou are brought into dialogue with Donna Haraway for the pursuance of an informed reinvention of the coyote metaphor in technophilic feminism.
In the trajectory of the post-human feminist discourse leading up to its inflexions in new feminist materialism, Haraway's work belongs to the feminist critiques of the epistemological authority of science.
It thus opens new ways of imagining objectivity, but which is still a far cry from new materialism, which is rooting for a shift towards an ontological redefinition of materiality and material agencies.Barad is the key figure who pronounces this shift by engaging with matter's agentive properties as opposed to a 32 Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, 270.33 Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, 274.  is the specific modes of intelligibility to change that this figure brings into vision.Trickster figures are not identified as a fixed-type; rather, they are endorsed as potent figures of subversion.Narratives of subversion are renewed each time a new text or a new oral tradition is recreated.This also attests to the changing face of the cultural and religious dynamics of this discourse at the ground level.
Malabou shoots the poignant question at the onset of her work, titled, The Heidegger Change-whether the palpable elusiveness we experience in thinking on "change without presence"-its mode of operation in thought-exuding the "plasticity of being," be looked upon as a "converter"?Katherine Hayles deploys this concept in the space of digital media technologies of GIS and GPS, which convert physical geographical spaces into digital information programs. 50While the above-mentioned digital program for conversion is a flexible model very amenable to the logic of the global economic model of algorithms, both Malabou and Hayles underline the need to distinguish plasticity as a critical model from flexibility.Flexibility is defined in this context as the passive mode of adaptation to the given techno-economic model of global capitalism, and by contrast, plasticity restores a critical space for resistance by creating new digital devices that contravene the logic of the givenness of the capitalist model. 51Hayles conceives "technics" as cognitive partners, whereby the spectrum of cognition is broadened to include non-conscious cognition as well. 52The inclusivity of non-conscious cognitions would decentralise thinking as a prerogative of humans.Thus, in her understanding of posthuman feminist materialism, she distinguishes between the idea of materiality from the physicality of matter, thereby asserting that materiality is an emergent quality not reducible to the latter.Materiality emerges as part of the meaning-making process of intra-action between human intelligence, the physical attributes of artefacts, and our empirical practices in this robust world.
However, one must also delineate the post-colonial/decolonial/post-racial order of things in the articulations of the situatedness of coyote knowledges, specifying the local constraints that the partial agencies of any cosmotechnical milieu implies.In the given socio-material realities, "plasticity" is embedded in a problematic milieu whereby it becomes symbolic of the entangled material realities of a social class in India within the economy of plastic governmentality as a waste product of everyday life.In the Indian context in particular, and in the racialised economies in general, waste workers and garbage collectors constitute a particular social class who are normalised within the caste-economies in India and racialised economies across the global capitalist order. 53Hence, it is in resonance with these intricacies of Asian/African/migrant as well as other forms of impoverished materialities of plastic and e-waste matters that a re-imagination of plasticity has to emerge, wherein a re-invigoration of coyote metaphor ought to insinuate the originary mutability of knowledges on plasticity; thereby delineating the potent convertibility implied by specific political interventions through metamorphoses of subjugated knowledges. 54However, in this modest articulation, it can only be deemed as a conjecture placed in the ethical space-time that Luce Irigaray articulates as the "interval between," where nonhuman others could also possibly include the mythical/occult, alongside the cyborg elements, earth, and nature, in a new economy of relations of energies. 55New material feminism suggested in the works of Barad, Hayles, Malabou, et al. exudes the potential for becoming a coyote materialism if mobilised by metaphors embedded in cosmotechnical milieus and thereby, advancing the performative act of meeting in an ethically mediated ground of "the interval between," conceived as a space both politically contested as well as effectively transformational, where Haraway would meet new material feminism inflected by decolonial agencies in thinking.
Haraway pursues two fundamental problems in this work: 1) how we account for the change in the field of sciences and 2) the new equation these changes bring about in making sense of what may be termed as "nature."In 1 Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 48, no.3 (1988): 594. 2 Donna Jeanne Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that shape Embryos (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2004), 2.
Figurations of mothers are designed to claim mastery over the world (including the artificial) via recourses to the mystical powers.It is in defiance of this primal figuration of nature that Haraway opts for the coyote figure as symbolising a "trickster" figure enabling the visualisation of the world as a "'witty agent," thus giving way to a feminist account of objectivity which "makes room for surprises and ironies." 15However, Haraway could not envision this figure as a technophilic figure, although it is not a technophobic figure either.Xenofeminism (henceforth XF) poses itself as one of the contemporary technophilic feminist positions in the work of Laboria Cuboniks (2015) 16 and in their extended vision presented in the work of Helen 14 Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," 589.15 Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," 593-594.16 Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, laboriacuboniks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism-a-politics-for-alienation/,accessed January 14, 2017.