not+near+but+har-away


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My Notes From This and Last Time I read “Modest Witness” by Haraway

She spends the first few pages on visual and symbolic analysis? What form of discourse, and knowledge production? What does this do for her freedom process? What does cultural analysis in general do for us?

We think of images as seen in different ways, and so since we all accept their indeterminacy, we can use them to open the conversation, non-agonistic approach to see wherein we can show the process of interpretation as present, without challenging the conversation with an explicit correct reading. That there is an expected indeterminacy leads to an available “interpretive flexibility”… She engages? Cuts through? Mediates? Arbitrates?

P. 201 “Who cares?” Who chooses and defines what Latour called “matters of concern” as being not simply “matters of fact”. Do we need to all care? Do we have the ability to encourage care, to development an approach to the problem of care?

Final section of chapter is the “invisible fetus” including the discussion about the population explosion, and overpopulation. We can discuss the problem of population and the problem of justice, which requires a certain amount of mixing.

--- Brand names as genders, that is as generic marks of types, directional signals on a map of power and knowledge. May be related to notions of Race or other typographies. P 8-9

--- Summary of the book on pages 15-17, specifically emphasizing the figurative conceptualization of material world.

--- Quick explanation of title end of p. 22

--- Conceptions of modern, post-modern and the amodern (from Latour) as ways of explaining the network of society and information p 43

--- “Trans” liminality, boundary crossing as fertile intellectual soil, link to discussion of purity of type and traditional and scientific taxonomy construction. Pg 56

--- Framing of writing in ideology, connotation of ideology as burden/content of ideas, politics, and politicization pg62 – 63

---Fantastic quote about metaphor and language: “First I call attention to the figures and stories that run riot throughout the domains of technoscience. Not only is no language, including mathamatics, evr free of troping, not onl is facticity always saturated with metaphoricity; but also, any sustained account of the world is dense with storytelling. ‘Reality’ is not compromised by the pervasivness of narrative; one gives up nothing, except the illusion of epistemological transcendence, by attending closely to stories. I am consumed with interest in the stories that inhabit us and that we inhabit; such inhabiting is finaly what constitutes this ‘we’ among whom communication is to be possible.” Haraway (Modest_witness Page 64)

---We like science, technoscience is not slandered by saying it is cultural. P 66 Defense against relativism Pg. 99, The connection of culture and science, example 104

--- Great quote about everything: “Fourth and last in my score for orchestrating the action in technoscience is the dubiously mices physical and biological metaphor of the force of implosion and the tangle of sticky threads in transuranic and transgenic worlds. The point is simple: The technical, textual, organic, historical, formal, mythic, economic, and political dimensions of entities, actions, actions and worlds implode in the gravity well of technoscience – or perhaps of any world massive enough to bend our attention, warp our certainties, and sustain our lives. Potent categories collapse into each other. Analytically and provisionally, we may want to move what counts as the political to the background and to foreground elements called technical, formal, or quantitative, or to highlight the textual and semiotic while muting the economic or mythic. But foreground and background are relational and rhetorical matters, not binary dualisms or ontological categories. The messy political does not go away because we think we are in the zone of the technical, and vice versa. Stories and facts do not naturally keep a respectable distance; indeed, they promiscuously cohabit the same very material places. Determining hat constitutes each dimension takes boundary-making and maintenance work. In addition, many empirical studies of technoscience have disabled the notion that the word technical designates a clean and orderly practical or epistemological space. Nothing so productive could be so simple.” Haraway (Modest_Witness, p 68)

---The connection of science and ethics 111

---Discussion of Harding’s Strong Objectivity 112

---“Politicoscientific community”, “… the foundational ontological divide between the social and the technical, between science and society, between the technical and political.” Page 114

--- Discussion of the connection of science and society is not relativism page. 115

---Objectivity & subjectivity 116

---Situated and global not exclusive 121,292

---Bell Hook’s yearnings 128, 269

---Learning from Gaps Pg 128

---Perspectivism 132, 277

Relativism 137

Epistemology local knowledge and authority 139 ---Intersubjectivity, statistics and knowledge 199

---Genetics, category, race, figuration 246-248

---Self Evidence, Convention 269

---Nature of real as experienctial and consensus quote below, and expanded discussion in page 301 “One must understand that the reality effect of ‘virtual reality’ is no less and no more ‘real’ than that made available – and enforced – by the material, literary, and social conventions of the first scientific revolutions and renaissances that make up the stories of about European derived apparatuses for the production of matters of fact and states of self-evidence.” Haraway (modest_Witeness, p 270)