[sigh] Yes, yes, and yes…

It’s complicated, actually, and it’s not just the scientists who will simply claim objectivity as some kind of foundational moment. I’ve had numerous discussions with philosophers (or philosophy students, I should probably say, who do indeed fancy themselves philosophers) of the anglo-analytic persuasion who simply cannot understand what I’m worried about. Not to mention a course called ‘Knowledge and Reality’ in which the tutor consistently treated me like I was simply being foolish for wanting to think about how the knowing affected the known. It’s the dismissiveness that gets me. On the one hand, you know, I kinda get it: the whole point of the critical engagement with science is that there is no happy third space we can occupy to ’settle’ this battle. On the other, the tendency (and it’s not monolithically the case, I want to point out) to be dismissive because it might force you to rethink your own position, your own knowledges, your own expertise and privilege? Mmm. Bad.

That said, Haraway’s not the sole sweet, critical thing to come out of science. Margrit Shildrick, who seems to have managed to develop some wonderful contacts in the sciences, says that once you get to know a few people, you’ll discover that whilst they have to say that cloning is fine and what’s the matter with you all anyway you stand in the way of science!, will admit that what keeps them awake at night is wondering what it is that makes us human. And again, there’s a friend of a friend who is doing rather troubling research which involves making rats fear, is more than willing to grant that ’social stuff’—the ways that people relate, the things they do, and the things, apparently, they fear—affects the ways that brains work. It seems so simple, but such an admission gives me hope. And hope not just for a dialogue (though I would celebrate that with strawberries and champagne), but for a critically-engaged science that can work out the hierarchy it produces when it says ‘abnormal’ has numerous consequences for the production of both normalcy and abnormalcy: that it has effects on what is imaginable for us, on what is knowable. The science-is-the-new-avant-garde/humanities-as-scientific-PR perspective seems counter-productive to this; at least to me. Oh, and CSAA does indeed refer to Australasia (kinda Australia and its surrounds: New Zealand, some of the local island nations, perhaps even some of Indonesia? I forget where the line gets drawn (how very uncharacteristic of me. )

I haven’t read Oryx and Crake, though I did see Atwood read a section from it at a writers’ festival and nearly bought it on the spot it was so witty and well-observed. (Poverty dictated otherwise, as it so often does). It shall be added to my list. And as for your friends? Keep asking them what goes into making fact fact and an opinion an opinion. Foucault would be proud Oh, and remind them that once a molecule was thought to be a pudding-like thing…

Best to you and all my readers too, in the new year.

I am probably not eloquent enough to respond in a lucid and convincing way — either that or the gap between approaches and attitudes between the humanities and sciences is too serious for arguments to leap across it (but then there’s Haraway, as you rightly point out)… but I could never get any of them, curious thinking people, to question the assumed objectivity of what they were doing and reading. At their most angry and impatient, they’d tell me they were dealing with tangible fact while I was dealing with, um, fairy tales… How do you respond to that?

I would feel like sending them copies of Haraway’s essays, if only I thought they’d read them. But no, she stepped over to the “dark side,” n’est-ce pas?

Such pointless conversations bring me back to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Bleak as the novel is, it helped me get rid of the humanities complex. I, as an individual, do not claim to possess the faculty of absolute critical understanding of reality, but that to me is what we are striving for when we are not putting on lab coats and silently slipping into the lab hierarchy.

My problem with science is that in its narrowing focus it encourages narrowmindedness among scientists. It sounds disparaging and bitter, I know, but where has the erudite scientist gone? Oh, they don’t have time to read the news and need to cut down on literature for the sake of keeping up with the staggering text-production in their field?… Should I just nod? Should I also nod when they say that bioethics is an unnecessary obstacle to their work? Well, in my head I have this old sci-fi movie image of a mad scientist laughing “I do it because I can!” Too rarely and too few of them question the organization of labor in laboratories, their professional hierarchies, gender stereotypes that are alive and well among them.

I was fascinated by Haraway’s discussion of vision in science. The disembodied, all-seeing eye that creates new proportions, and won’t reveal its constructive machinery. Yet when I tried to explain the idea to a friend (an ambitious, devoted biotechnologist who did not want to read the original text), I felt like I didn’t have the language. “You humanities people keep skirting around the issue,” he interrupted, insisting that objectivity is blatantly clear, not constructed.

Where do we go from here, when discussions are cut like with a knife by a statement that amounts to “it is so because it is so”?

Sorry for bringing up stories, Wildly. But the lack of dialogue keeps bothering me, making me feel like we genuinely are rolling towards delegating humanities to advertisement for the Empire of the Lab, the Oryx and Crake scenario.

Your post offered me a glimpse into Australian (or should I rather say Australasian? — where were the conference participants from?) acdemic culture. Interesting and novel.

All the best in the new year.