Archive for the ‘ANT’ Category
French wine & Detroit garage rock
In a lengthy footnote on Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway writes,
Correctly working to resist a “social” explanation of “technical’, practice by exploding the binary, these scholars have a tendency covertly to reintroduce the binary by worshipping only one term-the “technical.” Especially, any consideration of matters like masculine supremacy or racism or imperialism or class structures are inadmissible because they are the old “social” ghosts that blocked real explanation of science in action. See Latour (1987). [...] I agree with Latour and Lynch that practice creates its own context, but they draw a suspicious line around what gets to count as “practice.” They never ask how the practices of masculine supremacy, or many other systems of structured inequality, get built into and out of working machines. How and in what directions these transferences of “competences” work should be a focus of rapt attention. Systems of exploitation might be crucial parts of the “technical content” of science. But the SSS scholars tend to dismiss such questions with the assertion that they lead to the bad old days when science was asserted by radicals simply to “reflect” social relations.
I think this is important commentary. Reading Latour’s Reassembling the Social, I felt jittery. Latour’s notion of the social is, as best as I can tell, brilliant; in turning sociology towards the study of associations, Latour aligns himself with, of all people, Jack White.
My micro-world.
Last Friday, I orally defended my knowledge of the sociology of gender against the queries of two friendly professors. The Chair of my area-committee is a social theorist who has spent a considerable portion of his academic life developing a method of sociological deconstruction. The Committee Member’s research interests are at the intersection of gender and trauma – sexual violence. Drawing from his own research on extrafamiliar child abuse, The Committee Member asked me how I would account for the fact that individuals, even when participants in feminist organizations that challenge traditional ideologies of gender, reproduce, in their practices, those traditional ideologies.
Last Friday, I was flighty. My sister was in the hospital with a baby in her belly; while I was defending, she was in something like the thirteenth hour of her induced pregnancy. I had also taught my final course of my first semester teaching the day prior. When The Committee Member asked his question, which was, at its core, a question about agency and structure, I shut-down for minutes, or some shorter, but equally awkward, amount of time.
