A Gentle Wind
Doyle, Richard "Dislocating Knowledge, Thinking out of Joint: Rhizomatics, Caenorhabditis elegans and the Importance of Being Multiple"
Configurations - Volume 2, Number 1, Winter 1994, pp. 47-58
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Excerpt
It is time to put our reading practices into action. My question, rooted in a reading of the technoscience text in the world, is a political one: If technological products are cultural actors, and if "we," whoever that problematic invitation to inhabit a common space might include, are technological products at deeper levels than we have yet comprehended, then what kind of cultural action will forbid the evolution of OncoMouse(tm) into Man(tm)? The question has a historical antecedent from the olden times of historical narrative, when revolution was not a bad joke: What is to be done?--Donna Haraway, "When Man Is on the Menu" 1
"We"--that fluid, viscous, and vicious stew of thinkers who intersect at the vanishing point, cursor, or cross hairs of cultural studies and science--have been inserted into a technoscientific text. Donna Haraway (among others too many to mention, and some unidentifiable) has clicked on the mouse, and cut up a historical narrative that has begun to sound more and more like an old joke. This cut-up--at once a joke, a disruption, a gleeful mockery of a master narrative, and an interpellation--follows an ethics of incision, a call for disruption in the name of difference.
And we must read this technoscientific text. From our own places, topoi that are inflected and inscribed by the hilarious and horrifying objects of culture and science that tell us, precisely and [End Page 47] in repetition, what is to be done. What is called for here is not, or at least not only, another articulation of the validity of the truth claims and normative impacts of the sociology, anthropology, history, and rhetoric of science. Do we need more referees? Instead, I would like to argue, we need to rethink the "software" of the cultural studies of science--the tropes, schemes, and operating systems by which we "order" our works--in light of the joke(s) of the...
Configurations - Volume 2, Number 1, Winter 1994, pp. 47-58
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Excerpt
It is time to put our reading practices into action. My question, rooted in a reading of the technoscience text in the world, is a political one: If technological products are cultural actors, and if "we," whoever that problematic invitation to inhabit a common space might include, are technological products at deeper levels than we have yet comprehended, then what kind of cultural action will forbid the evolution of OncoMouse(tm) into Man(tm)? The question has a historical antecedent from the olden times of historical narrative, when revolution was not a bad joke: What is to be done?--Donna Haraway, "When Man Is on the Menu" 1
"We"--that fluid, viscous, and vicious stew of thinkers who intersect at the vanishing point, cursor, or cross hairs of cultural studies and science--have been inserted into a technoscientific text. Donna Haraway (among others too many to mention, and some unidentifiable) has clicked on the mouse, and cut up a historical narrative that has begun to sound more and more like an old joke. This cut-up--at once a joke, a disruption, a gleeful mockery of a master narrative, and an interpellation--follows an ethics of incision, a call for disruption in the name of difference.
And we must read this technoscientific text. From our own places, topoi that are inflected and inscribed by the hilarious and horrifying objects of culture and science that tell us, precisely and [End Page 47] in repetition, what is to be done. What is called for here is not, or at least not only, another articulation of the validity of the truth claims and normative impacts of the sociology, anthropology, history, and rhetoric of science. Do we need more referees? Instead, I would like to argue, we need to rethink the "software" of the cultural studies of science--the tropes, schemes, and operating systems by which we "order" our works--in light of the joke(s) of the...
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