Excerpt from "Prospects for a Materialist Informatics: An Interview with Donna Haraway" by Lisa Nakamura

DH  Well, I just finished in my own individual life negotiating a 25 percent reduction of my job so that I'm a 75 percent person not 100 percent. A very large part of the reason for doing that was an attempt to open up more spaces in life for something other than work, including friendship, sleep, not being under pressure every minute of every day, which I think is just routine and a fact of everybody's life. Remember Marx; perhaps he's more eloquent on this than anybody. I think perhaps the fundamental issue remains time, struggle for the control of time, and the ability to say these are the conditions of work, these kinds of time commitments make sense - the ability to draw limits and mean it. That means both for students and for faculty, I think, often doing less, resisting the speedup of publication, resisting the constant audit culture ethic that says you always have to do more or you won't get your merit increase. Our career lives from, well, let's say from graduate school on - although it starts before then - are lived in a kind of audit culture moral system, where we're auditing what we're doing along some kind of constant approval axis that is a speedup axis. I experience this as always having to show more stuff. You know, we have to always write and make our students write in such ways as to speedup production. The whole moral system, we impose it on ourselves and our students, even as it is imposed on us structurally.

LN  Well, it seems to me to be part of the narrative in which people see their lives, the narrative of progress.

DH It's very much part of that, and a narrative of "If I don't do it, someone else will do it and they'll get ahead of me and I'll lose my job." Or, "I'm a soft-money person"; or "I'm not tenured"; or "I am tenured, but I need to get my promotion." These are not made-up issues; these are real structural issues. We can't just call this approach a neurosis and treat it like a private problem because it's a structural problem. And if Marx argued that the control of the length of the working day was the factory worker's issue in the 19th century, he was quite right. The source of surplus value had everything to do with labor time. I think that remains true, that the source of value production remains the intensification of work in ever shorter periods of time and that somehow or other that's what we need to learn to get a grip on in our academic cultures. You know, how do we ask students to read less, write less, think more? How can open up spaces for ourselves and our students in our daily work practices?

LN  Right. Open the spaces and at the same remove the rhetoric of "quality," which has invaded our rhetorical system, I think, recently as a sort of corporate move.

DH That's right, and the kind of hurry-up culture which god knows the .dotcom culture and the start-up company is hurry-up culture in spades.

LN  Right. And also I've heard that described as "just in time delivery."

DH Yes.

L Which always makes me think of, "I'm not going to give you any notice but I'm going to ask you for a lot."

DH That's right. Well, and the just-in-time warehousing systems, the just-in-time productions, it's basically a lot of various types of inventory control. It's being applied to us in a deep cultural and moral way; it's more than just which parts are available and go on the truck on a certain day. Our lives are being lived in a kind of inventory management for speedup. So I suppose I'm, in this regard, an old-fashioned Marxist - I still think the fundamental struggles are about time.

LN  That seems very correct to me, especially in light of Arlie Hochschild's book The Second Shift. It's time and gender too, I think, time and everything.

DH You know, that gets us back to where we started this whole discussion in terms of the pseudo-universalist categories of "human" and "machine." Those entities exist in a kind of ideological time that I call the techno-present. It's a very thin way of thinking about time that loses track of the thickness of history or the complexity of lived time. The techno-present is like the unmarked categories of "woman" or "man" or "machine" or "white" or, for that matter, of color. These pseudo-universals that lose track of the thickness of lived time. The philosophical struggle for what I call situated knowledge, it seems to me, is very closely allied to the practical struggle for lived time.

LN  By the way, I think that when we talk about our work it is in terms of always, are you "half-time," "full-time," "part-time," making no reference to the nature of the work a lot of times, or the feeling of the work. It seems that it's about the techno-present.