Book Description
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances, and politics in twentieth- century technoscience.
The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, OncoMouse.
Haraway sees the world of contemporary technoscience as a drama. Information sciences and life sciences are at the center of the dramatic action. Scenes are set in landscapes where maps of human genetic differences are stored in databases, racialized bodies are reconfigured by morphing for photographs in popular magazines, and transgenic mice important to breast cancer research are patented intellectual property.
The actors are many, and not all are human. Beginning with the Modest Witness, the key figure in the Science Revolution, Haraway shows us the trouble lurking in race and gender- marked practices for attesting to matters of fact. In later scenes, Haraway explores the kinship relations among the many cyborg creatures produced in the late twentieth-century--in nuclear research, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, computer-mediated representational practices, and mutations in biological approaches to "race."
Customer Reviews:
Haraway Review.......2006-03-24
A note to be made to any potential readers regarding the accessibility of this book is that there are two areas in which some background is extremely helpful: critical theory (certain terms and concepts) and Sandra Harding's idea of strong objectivity, which is used, in Haraway's altered form, as a central concept in the book. Neither critical theory terminology nor strong objectivity is explained in enough depth for a reader unfamiliar with them to understand well, and, in the case of the latter, have a strong enough grasp to consider crucial differences in the approaches of Harding and Haraway.
Haraway's stated purpose of the book is that it is an "exercise regime and self-help manual for how not to be literal-minded, while engaging promiscuously in serious moral and political inquiry (...). I also want [readers] to have a good time. Comedy is both object of attention and method" (15). There is a certain tension throughout the book resulting from her dual commitment to the non-literal and playful and to the very serious. Her way of delving deeply into the adventures and symbolic meaning of fictional characters to use them to illustrate her points and her penchant for word-play are rather distracting, and frequently detract from the substance and clarity of her arguments. Additionally, the content of Haraway's book is enmeshed in a perhaps altogether unnecessarily elaborate format, for example, with sections of the book intended to correspond with parts of the study of semiotics.
Yet, Haraway's main argument concerning technoscience, that there is a need to create what has been called a politicoscientific community based on participatory democratic structures, is well supported by her numerous and thought-provoking inquiries into who the actors in technoscience are, who is benefiting, who is suffering, etc. She offers effective criticism of conventional scientific (weak) objectivity, which is grounded in an ideal of the scientist as neutral or value-free, and seeks to build a strong objectivity that will bring into focus the interests and contributions of humans and non-humans who remain unseen or unheard in technoscientific development and practice. I cannot help but wonder, however, why a book intending to promote participatory democratic involvement has been written in so complex a manner that it is inaccessible to countless numbers of people.
I have two main reservations about what Haraway writes. First, she is using her own version of Harding's strong objectivity, which differs in important ways from the original concept. Haraway attempts to generate knowledge from the perspectives of both fictional characters, ones from paintings and ones that Haraway helps invent, and non-humans, and this is much out of keeping with Harding's approach and yet no implications of the altered meaning of this key concept are discussed. Second, Haraway has a clear bias toward, even a romanticization of, certain technoscientific feats like putting fish genes in tomatoes. While she makes no attempts to conceal this bias, I do think it influences her too-quick dismissal of activists working against such human tinkering, as she claims she "cannot hear discussion of disharmonious crosses among organic beings and of implanted alien genes without hearing a racially inflected and xenophobic symphony" (62). The activists to which she is referring simply deserve more credit than this.
Postmodern tropes that get lost.......2003-11-11
Haraway attempts to pull together many different disciplines, thoughts, and ideas in her book, but unfortunately there is no praxis.
The book is written and directed towards scientists, but from the outset the book alienates them.
The book has very little to substanciate the ideas, other than self referencing.
The ideas presented are interesting, and if you are able to delve through layers of meta-linguistic jargon the Modest_Witness could perhaps have a good discussion, but her synthetic form of muddled argumentation makes for a poor read.
The ideas could have been presented with the tropes in a much clearer manner, the theories could have been supplied with some way to put them into action.
I urge anyone who attempts to read this book, to thoroughly question the ideas presented in an attempt to find real world possible applications.
Hopefully, the future of science studies.......2002-05-23
Haraway's work is stunning in the risks she takes. Refusing to buy into categorical distinctions between disciplines, Haraway references and subreferences science, literature, technology, art, and anything else that could possibly be used to emphasize the cultural production of knowledge. I disagree with just about all of Haraway's conclusions about capitalism, but I love what she says about technology, and find in her work a fresh and innovative alternative to that of stuffy analytic philosophers and overly pedantic sociologists of science. Not the easiest read, but worth a look if you're into SSK, STS, HPS or any other initials having to do with the study of science. Whether you take the book to bed with you at night or toss it out the nearest fifth story window, Haraway's work is bound to impress. Check it out.
Very witty writing.......2000-06-20
Donna Haraway is without question America's most gifted postmodern cultural critic. In this book, Haraway considers the realms of "technoscience," focussing mostly on genetic research, to consider how this emerging science constructs race, gender, and human relations. Haraway is an extremely witty writer and a true humanitarian, dedicated to questioning those cultural assumptions which hurt so many social groups. Well written, well organized, well illustrated (by Lynn Randolph)... a great book.
Book Description
Before 1980, sick building syndrome did not exist. By the 1990s, it was among the most commonly investigated occupational health problems in the United States. Afflicted by headaches, rashes, and immune system disorders, office workers—mostly women—protested that their workplaces were filled with toxic hazards; yet federal investigators could detect no chemical cause. This richly detailed history tells the story of how sick building syndrome came into being: how indoor exposures to chemicals wafting from synthetic carpet, ink, adhesive, solvents, and so on became something that relatively privileged Americans worried over, felt, and ultimately sought to do something about. As Michelle Murphy shows, sick building syndrome provides a window into how environmental politics moved indoors.
Sick building syndrome embodied a politics of uncertainty that continues to characterize contemporary American environmental debates. Michelle Murphy explores the production of uncertainty by juxtaposing multiple histories, each of which explains how an expert or lay tradition made chemical exposures perceptible or imperceptible, existent or nonexistent. She shows how uncertainty emerged from a complex confluence of feminist activism, office worker protests, ventilation engineering, toxicology, popular epidemiology, corporate science, and ecology. In an illuminating case study, she reflects on EPA scientists’ efforts to have their headquarters recognized as a sick building. Murphy brings all of these histories together in what is not only a thorough account of an environmental health problem but also a much deeper exploration of the relationship between history, materiality, and uncertainty.
Book Description
Chasing Technoscience brings together four prominent figures who make technoscience, or science embodied in its technologies, a central theme of their work. Through lively personal interviews and substantive essays, the ideas of Andrew Pickering, Don Ihde, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour are brought to bear on the question of materiality in technoscience. The work of these theorists is then compared and critiqued in essays by colleagues.
Customer Reviews:
Continental philosophy and Science & Technology.......2003-06-28
Chasing Technoscience is an excellent volume for anyone interested in the intellectual provocations of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Andrew Pickering,and Don Ihde. The interviews and original pieces found in the first half of the book are immensely informative and finely crafted.
The comparative pieces comprising the second half of the text are quite illuminating in their depth and scope. Because the volume is carefully organized, it is conducive to critically broadening one's perspective on how phenomenology, actor-network-theory, and the cultural studies of science relate to one another. Ultimately, this unique volume will be remembered for initiating of a long overdue and valuable dialogue between Continental philosophy and Science and Technology Studies.
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Confronting Disaster: An Existential Approach to Technoscience
Raphael Sassower
Manufacturer: Lexington Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0739108514 |
Book Description
Contemporary society is rife with instability. Contemporary genetic research has raised and given life to the one-time science fiction specter: the clone. The scarcity of natural energy sources has led to greater manipulation of atomic or nuclear energy and as a result greater danger. And the promises of globalization have, in some cases, delivered their intended results, but in many other ways they have created even greater social and economic gaps. An urgent commentary in the tradition of Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man or even Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, Raphael Sassower's powerful new book is a culmination of many years of research and thought carefully arranged into an extended essay on our contemporary social, cultural, and existential orientation in the modern world.
Book Description
This provocative collection incites a fundamental rethinking of women's health and healing and challenges readers to see fresh sites of action. It envisions transformations in women's health through the transdisciplinary lenses of recent work in feminist theory, cultural studies and technoscience studies.
Contributors pursue new approaches to women's health through direct examination of theoretical interventions, strategies for destabilizing taken-for-granted research methods, and modes of (re)constructing experiences through searching the self and multiple selves--individually and collectively. Several authors confront the novel kinds of surveillance, commodification and stratification engendered by new world reproductive orders. Discursive constructions of "good" and "bad" mothers by race and class in the "American national family" are detailed. Other contributors disrupt traditional agendas for women's health in areas such as health reform, lesbian health and midlife. Throughout, enhanced recognition of differences and complexities of women's knowledges, bodies, experiences and desires undergirds the project of revisioning. The editors' theoretical introduction and conclusion provide historical and material contexts which locate revisioning and emphasize fluidities in recasting women's health in the millennium.
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Technoscience In Contemporary American Film: Beyond Science Fiction
Aylish Wood
Manufacturer: Manchester University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0719057736 |
Book Description
Technoscience in Contemporary American Film is an innovative analysis of images of science and technology from popular films of the 1980's and 1990's. It argues that films such as Twelve Monkeys, Lawnmower Man, and Strange Days explore the complex social, cultural, and economic intersections that lead to the generation of scientific knowledge, and the different ways that such knowledge emerges within the world.
Book Description
In Aircraft Stories noted sociologist of technoscience John Law tells “stories” about a British attempt to build a military aircraft—the TSR2. The intertwining of these stories demonstrates the ways in which particular technological projects can be understood in a world of complex contexts.
Law works to upset the binary between the modernist concept of knowledge, subjects, and objects as having centered and concrete essences and the postmodernist notion that all is fragmented and centerless. The structure and content of Aircraft Stories reflect Law’s contention that knowledge, subjects, and—particularly— objects are “fractionally coherent”: that is, they are drawn together without necessarily being centered. In studying the process of this particular aircraft’s design, construction, and eventual cancellation, Law develops a range of metaphors to describe both its fractional character and the ways its various aspects interact with each other. Offering numerous insights into the way we theorize the working of systems, he explores the overlaps between singularity and multiplicity and reveals rich new meaning in such concepts as oscillation, interference, fractionality, and rhizomatic networks.
The methodology and insights of Aircraft Stories will be invaluable to students in science and technology studies and will engage others who are interested in the ways that contemporary paradigms have limited our ability to see objects in their true complexity.
Customer Reviews:
Best example of pomo flatulence.......2004-10-07
Content - 0.13 star.
As a superb example of idle, pointless, academic inanity - 5 stars. So, 3 stars.
The "professional" reviews were seductive. So I bought it. And read it -- groaning most of the way through. Happily, it's a short book, with the text taking up only about 200 pages. Six stories in all, one of them self-consciously devoted to the problem of the author's own "reflexivity" -- that is, how the writer's subjectivity affects and intereferes, for better or worse, the subject of study. How very considerate and so... Stuart Smalley of you.
No doubt, this book has much to offer, especially to those people who might think that thinking about, and living in, a universe in which 'x' can "oscillate" into other states of identity -- 'y' and/or 'z' -- is so "radical." However, so much of what is said in the name of postmodernity and "Other" is said with so much parochial ignorance of others (that is, other cultures' far more exhaustive work on this topic -- Hello! Buddhism?), and received with enthusiasm as if there is something genuinely new here.
In this book, if you remove all the tedious academic jargon ("singular multiplicity," "coherence without a center," "oscillation," etc), the argument boils down to something very obvious -- and (I'll be generous here) highly 'mediocre' in insight value -- that has not only received more thorough treatment in various philosophical traditions, but also available to plain common sense: Namely, that no thing has a fixed identity in and of itself.
Forget the technobabble: Really, is it so damn hard to say that a large "table" can also be used as a "bed" or as a small "stage"? Or, that 'John Doe' can be simultaneously a soldier, husband, brother, father, etc? Where is the "Johnniness" in John? Well, there isn't any, since even John is a composite of flesh, nerves, bones, water, memory, desires, etc. Same for an aircraft: sometimes it excites young men, sometimes it flies, sometimes it drops bombs, sometimes it's called by other names --like a 'weapons system'... 'Nuf said.
Law's style of prose is at once flaccid, flatulent, and fastidious. And the content piggy-back rides on the names of some famous people (like Deleuze) and their concepts (like rhizome) without getting anywhere.
Despite my own disappointment with this book, I think the author wrote it in good faith. I think Professor Law really believes that he has something new and interesting to say. Well, he might, but I think only for three types of readers:
One: Undergrads who need to be told, and learn how to say obvious things in respectable academese (convoluted prose).
Two: Assistant profs looking to secure tenure someday in the so-called burgeoning field of Technoscience Studies -- as they have to incestuously quote (and praise) one another's work. (Scientists could not give a rat's arse about what these people have to say about their work.)
Three: People who cannot figure out why an "aircraft" cannot just remain an "aircraft"; and cannot understand that the name a thing goes by is NOT the thing "itself" as no thing has a specific, absolutely determined "selfhood."
Now, I will take that vote of "Not Helpful" for having said Not Nice things about your friend or colleague's book.
Sublime stories on things in their making.......2004-03-09
While at no point downspeaking to its reader, this book poses a large number of essential questions on technology, science and design. Based on the case of the TSR-2 aircraft, it keeps on asking stubbornly like a detective investigating a crime, uncovering bit by bit how objects are not singular, homogeneous entities, but just as heterogene and active in the formation of society and things as the subjects. It makes very clear that the 'interpellation' between human and nonhuman actors is crucial to investigate, and is itself a paradigmatic example on how to conduct such studies. Its points on the relevance of oscillating between modernity and postmodernity are lucid, imaginative and very informing.
I still hate this book.......2003-11-02
I had to rate this a second time because my one star rating only reduced the overall rating (it's been reviewed by one other reader) to a two and a half and that's two and a half too many.
I feel like a chump for buying it, but I'm happy admitting my mistake to the world if it could save one helpless soul from having to read paragraphs like...:
"The book as a whole, then, is not treelike in structure. It is not an arborescence. Instead it takes the form of a rhizomatic network. It makes overlaps and juxtapositions, and it makes interference effects as a result of making these overlaps. So that is the fourth way of introducing the book. It is about writing fractionally." - p. 9 John Law, Aircraft Stories.
You really don't want to know about other three ways of introducing the book. I was struggling during the first two, the third had me gasping for air and number four was kinda it for me.
I was dubious at first.......2003-07-15
Unless you are very used to post-modern theory, you will not find Law's idea lucid at first. I believe that I shook my head in disbelief. His explanation of a fractal reality fell on death ears, but then I read more. Once I finished the book and discussed it in class, I realized that Law had altered how I viewed technoscience. This book is highly recommended and Law should be commended for his approach to a reconciliation of the modern and post-modern.
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Cultural Collisions: Postmodern Technoscience
Raphae Sassower
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0415911109 |
Book Description
In
Cultural Collisions Raphael Sassower brings postmodernism face to face with technoscience and considers the viability of public works, such as the Superconducting Supercollider, in a postmodern age. Contending that technoscientific projects are contingent upon economic and political support, and not simply upon their scientific feasibility, Sassower illuminates the cultural context of postmodern technoscience vis-a-vis an examination of postmodernism and the philosophy of late 20th century science.
Drawing upon conflicts among Popperians and postmodernists, Popperians and feminists, Sassower claims that "translation" between competing discourses are necessary to avoid cultural collisions and foster fruitful exchange between divergent discourse. Sassower claims that an inevitable common ground exists in the form of a natural and social reality and referentiality. He emphasizes also the material, political economic conditions which underlie technoscientific projects, and stresses the indispensable role imagination and art play in the teaching the responsible development of technology in the next century.
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Esthetique et technoscience: Pour la culture techno-esthetique (Philosophie et langage)
Jean-Claude Chirollet
Manufacturer: P. Mardaga
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
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ASIN: 2870095600 |
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La Technoscience: Les fractures des discours (Collection "Logiques sociales")
Manufacturer: L'Harmattan
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Binding: Unknown Binding
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ASIN: 2738413501 |
Books:
- Money Mama & The Three Little Pigs
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- Opium War, 1840-1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by Which They Forced Her Gates
- Regional Landscapes of the United States and Canada
- Sailor Jerrys Tattoo Stencils
- Sight, Sound, Motion with infotrac: Applied Media Aesthetics
- Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers
- Singing: The Mechanism and the Technic
- Smoke Your Firefighter Interview
- Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation
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