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A discussion on'Material Hermeneutics' (thanks to Don Ihde for the paper):
D.Ihde Material Hermeneutics 2.doc
Posted at Jun 06/2005 08:25PM:
tim webmoor: I thoght Ihde's article on 'material hermeneutics' was timely, especially the suggestion of extending the investigation of instrumentation in knowledge constitution to the humanities. I suppose, though, the 'hard sciences' have become such a focus for such studies due precisely to the almost fetishization of instrumentation - so that their role almost recedes from reflective attention. In the humanities? I guess 'discourse analysis' of the 80's could be seen as a critical look at textualization (Derrida especially) and 'visual culture' studies now definitely look at materialization of aesthetic experience for academic production. Then I like his suggestion to include word-processing (all important instrument for humanities) and how it may structure our thoughts (ability to type/re-type/paste/cut/links/jump/etc.) - more rhyzomatic? then with linear and pre-structured type-writing. This is something Chris Witmore is working on for the discipline of arch. as 'sociotechnical genealogy'. Well, just thoughts.
-Also, the inclusion of archaeology in the piece was very good. Without, perhaps, knowing the ups/downs of archaeological theory over the past 40 years, his 'external' suggestion of a 'scientificization' and instrumentation of the discipline after the 50's was spot on. In fact, it seems just such and instrumentation and its new possibilities jolted archaeological theory into a self-avowed positivist phase (began w/the arch.theorist L. Binford in 1960 in the states and G.Clarke in the UK). So arch. theory was instrumentally-driven. Such an emulation of science's 'laboratory practices' still continues in the majority of arch., including Biblical, W.European, and American. However, his material hermeneutics is very much what is happening now in 'cutting-edge' arch. theory. This is so because of the importance of the 'interpretive turn'/linguistic turn that hit arch. a little late (mid-80's) which emphasized the ineluctable role of the subject in interpretation, combined with the now rising focus on materiality and material culture (an independent field which grew out of a group of arch.'s at Cambridge.) I would be less helpful on the details, as his examples are out of my area...
...Any thoughts on the article Chris?
Posted at Jul 25/2005 05:59PM:
chris witmore: I read it briefly just over a month ago. Let me give it some more in depth consideration. I'll continue the discussion soon.
Articles on Actor Network Theory and interpretive archaeology:
Posted at Aug 24/2004 03:42 PM:
tim webmoor: RE: Callon and Law (1997) O.K., 1997 - a bit outdated for an academic article, yet it seems relevant for STS even today (criticism) as the summation that Callon and Law provide (I thought very good), particularly their '3 principles' asserting, in sum, that STS provides a 'new theory of action' (p.7), which simultaneously bypasses the interventing social thought since the enlightenment (erroneous humanism bias) and updates thinking on 'agency' and culture for the very contemporary condition (post-)modern of frenetic Becoming by drawing attention to the particular and specific configurations of human-nonhuman 'entities', seems equally salient to current works in STS. So, as a summary, the piece was nice. But, (and Chris, I haven't finished Latour's latest book) I come away feeling that the same eg.s (as in their selections of classic eg.s in the piece -Pasteur, RAF+TSR2, Moses' bridges, etc.) and argumentative phrases are put forward to convince skeptics of what we already know (p.2). ~The heterogenity of people/things in a process of strategic negotiation (p.7) which circumscribes or enables possibility in social action. Yes, this is good, and attends to what we have been saying. But I feel it's getting repetitive and sophistic. And their call for a detailed exploration of the 'patterns' of 'collective configurations' which determine social action (and history) - behind the false cohesion of black boxes - is interesting. But does/will it get us very far? It expands the stucture/agency formula to include material things, but still insists on 'Process', 'Becoming' (vs. an essentialist Being), 'Transformation' - old themes in social thought that could themselves use some re-invigoration or conceptual transformation. And which seem all to predictable given the taken-for-granted characterisation of contemporary life as a Heraclitean 'flux'. Can we push it a bit further - I do think digital- or tech-ontologies may do this - past the 1997-2004 consensus of STS to predict what comes after a resounding acknowledgement of things-people assemblages (which, as they said, is already commonsensical p.2)?
-Just some initial thoughts. (STS is beginning to sound more and more like Quantum and particle Physics Theory - inalienability of human intention-matter.) Thanks for the article. -tim
Posted at Aug 25/2004 02:57 PM:
Chris Witmore: Great thoughts Tim. I should say that I chose the Callon and Law article because it is one of the seminal essays attempting to bypass, to be distinguished from overcome, the collective | individual divide, which archaeology still struggles with. As symmetrical archaeology is about moving around such modernist divides and reformulating our relationship with the material world it works well.
I understand your frustration with regard to the repetition. I would argue that the piece represents not an expansion to the structure/agency formula, but rather a complete alternative through ideas conserning the nature of the collective and the network.
Push it further? Ah, here is where Traumwerk comes in. We are taking the argument further through action.
Katherine Hayles and the posthuman.
Posted at Jul 28/2005 11:55AM:
tim webmoor: I have not read the entirety of Hayles' How we became Posthuman, so these are restricted to the article - justified as she recapitulates and then extends from her book in the piece (p.297). I thought her 'readings' of the art installation pieces was compelling, particulalry that of Einstein's Brain and N0time. To me such enactive, performative art pieces always immerse the mind-body in an experiential contemplative state, complementing the underlying, formative idea of 'relational co-mingling'. And as illustrative 'evidence', Hayles' forays into the techno-rich art exhibitions are interesting. But enough to be convincing?
Hayles is attempting to bring forward the (re)conception of a relational ontology of human-world existence: "In this sense all human experience is a “mixed reality,” emerging from another kind of brightness confound in which technology, the world, and human embodiment all play a role (315)." This is the posthuman push. And she cites that in her book she has rallied other advances besides strictly technological - cognitive science, evolutionary biology, A.I., etc (319) - to provide enough support for this re-orientation away from the (too) much derided Cartesian split. Too much as in her article (and I assume the book), Descartes' lamentable lapse in searching for a foundational 1st principle for epistemology is belaboured into a straw-man with very little attention as to what the original argumentation was, why it was compelling for liberal humanist sympathies, and how it has been modified, developed and rejected in subsequent philosophy. All told, my impression is that arraying a list of eg.s which we in the technologically immersed States and Europe can relate with in order to bolster an argument is convincing if the counter-argument is derided to caricature. Rather, following fromt the eg.'s, the common-sense impression is ...of course, there is so much of this body-mind-tech flux in my dialy life... This is why I think the appeal to common-sense is so strong among the proponents of Posthumanism: common-sense has, I believe, a narrow focus of intellectual engagements with the world, justified in being so by a pragmatic appeal to 'productive consensus' (~if it works for most of us, it must contain truthful elements; and here is it's aligment with scientific experimentalism). At least as the streamlined pragmatism selected from 'classical pragmatism' (vs. neo-analytic pragmatism of Quine, Davidson, ~Rorty).
Given equal treatment and weight, the conclusions of Hayles contra Cartesianism might in fact smack of ethno-centrism and technophilia, projecting the process of technological evolution accelerating in (accelerated by) a few select contexts to an intimated universal ontological scheme. I suppose from my own narrowly chosen value of critical anthropology, Hayles' thesis must be contextualized to appropriate circumstances. Finally, my own knee-jerk reaction (techno-phobe?) comes from this concentration in PH to direct criticism at the 'dead white philosopher' while somewhat complacently or non-critically accepting this process of accelerated techno immersion of our minds-bodies. There is some critique of 'where is this going' in Harraway's contempt of the military-industrial complex which 'jump-started' much of the technological innovation after the World Wars. But not enough in my opinion. So while subscribing and relating to Hayle's argument, I am interested in that future-oriented critical projection: is this indubitble tech. acceleration, which increasingly catalyzes the erasure of mind and body distinctions, inevitable or even desirable? Will the triumph of non-Cartesianism result in a better framework for relating to the world and, by consequence, eachother? (obviously Latour speaks directly to this in his Parliament of Things). Or will it result in a predicament (I'm recalling those classic 1984ish depictions) not much better than Foucault's predicament of panoptic surveillance derived from Descartes circumspection?
All-in-all, I liked the piece and will track down her book again.
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