Comments for On the Assembly of Things

Comment on Collaboration by Carlo

Carlo — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:24:27 +0000

Here is the journal website:

http://www.marshall.edu/coll-anth/

Comment on Collaboration by Carlo

Carlo — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:23:33 +0000

New Anthropology Journal on Collaboration:

Collaborative Anthropologies is a forum for dialogue with a special focus on the complex collaborations between and among researchers and research participants/interlocutors. It features essays that are descriptive as well as analytical, from all subfields of anthropology and closely related disciplines, and that present a diversity of perspectives on collaborative research.

http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Collaborative-Anthropologies,673970.aspx

Comment on Finally, a project worth funding… by Kevin Costa

Kevin Costa — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:57:45 +0000

A proposal of staggering genius.

Comment on what are the veridictional modes of advertising? by Anthony

Anthony — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:59:12 +0000

i haven’t got firm data on this yet, but it seems that it is exactly this “jurisdictional ecology” that determines how the array of metrics are coupled. There was a lunchtime seminar where the environment and human behavior came up as a topic. One argument on the table was the following;; if you want people to do something “better” for the environment, “education” is not enough. If you want people to recycle or use less packaging you have to couple one desired outcome, like protection of the environment to another ‘which has a more powerful effect on behavior’, namely price. This example is appropriate in Switzerland where you can only throw away your trash in special bags, which cost about $3 a bag. In a follow up conversation, the point is reiterated analogically “think about it with a themodynamic analogy; you need to couple a thermodynamically unfavourable reaction, with a thermodynamically favourable one”. Of course the one limitation of this analogy is that there is a metric, delta G (if my crash course in enzyme kinetics stands up to scrutiny)that is used for two reactions/practices. The more complicated dimension of the “ecology of jurisidiction/veridiction” is that there will be jurisdictional practices which couple multiple metrics.

Comment on what are the veridictional modes of advertising? by ckelty

ckelty — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:53:44 +0000

I had a discussion in Spain with my host, Alberto Corsin, about a related issue, which came about through talking about Strathern, Born and Barry’s recent work on “interdisciplinarity.” The crux of the discussion was the question of whether different forms of what counts as innovation (and by extention, what counts as curiosity) are related to the institutional and intellectual bildung of those doing the investigating. Yes, obviously, but precisely how: and if, for instance, amateur scientists start to compete with each other to invent new logic gates using e. coli, are the modes of veridiction invented there recognizable to university or corporate scientists. I think I was going to blog about that conversation… in any case, the “ecology of veridiction” strikes me as exactly the right way to pose the problem, so long as we can agree (in ecological terms) what the resources are and how to think about ecological equilibrium or dis-equilibrium. Or, is there an attendant “ecology of jurisdiction’?

Comment on what are the veridictional modes of advertising? by Anthony

Anthony — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:13:21 +0000

An additional element is the “stylization” point that has been made previously by others viz ‘hacker culture’. “Cool” has perhaps outmoded curiosity, and from Beowulf (or Yukio Mishima) to 50s cool jazz we could say that the affects referred to by this term are dispassion, assurance, excitement and something like ‘trend’ (why are so many biologists making logic gates?, for instance).

I think that whilst it is true that scientists have to respond to these other rationalities and arbitrate, anxiously or otherwise, between them, an additional point is that they don’t necessarily know what has scientific significance outside of these self-stylizations, or outside a metric of utiltiy. Perhaps this is where the angst comes from?

Comment on what are the veridictional modes of advertising? by Paul Rabinow

Paul Rabinow — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:32:58 +0000

Chris, thanks for the comment.
I think we need to explore some more what the limits and forms of “their own curiosity” are today, As funding and competition more and more shape things, and as Shapin points out, science is more and more a job rather than a vocation we can’t assume that the Blumenberg curiosity is still central.
That being said, there are distinctive forms of work and commitment. What are they? And what does it do to have to constantly be aware from an early point that the constraints are real.

Comment on what are the veridictional modes of advertising? by ckelty

ckelty — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:19:01 +0000

one other way to read this, on the part of the scientists, is simple anxiety about control over the mode of veridiction (or anxiety about being lost in the ecology of veridiction). Making the opposition between the real answer and the grant/funding/PR answer is also a way of saying “this is what I know to be interesting based on my life and education, and not what *they* think is interesting, for whatever reason”. What’s perhaps interesting is that scientists used to have the legitimacy, or the cathexis, in which it was possible to ignore what other people thought, to value curiosity above all (at least, this is what Weber and Blumenberg both want us to believe, but it may be to idealized). Today (but in what new way today?) scientists have to respond to these other rationalities–they have to weight their own commited sense of curiosity with a sense that other people are also trying to do good. This would be the opposite of the cynical reading, obviously… though there’s no reason they have to be mutually exclusive I suppose.

Comment on More biohacking (UK angle) by Newt

Newt — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 20:44:45 +0000

Utter bloody paranoia.

Comment on what are the veridictional modes of advertising? by Paul Rabinow

Paul Rabinow — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:17:17 +0000

Perhaps we could begin to think about an “ecology of veridiction”?
Bioscientists now have the grant proposal metric, the IP metric, the competitive metric, the informal what counts as convincing data metric, and at the very least the publishing metric (and the power point presentation).
The standards of evidence, form, and credit vary with each.
These metrics and the whole ecology has shifted several times in recent decades.