February 13, 2007
Reproblematizing the Social
This is a request for collaboration and/or comments. I am currently working on a field statement about the practice of social assessment in the environmental research project I study- so about the concept of social assessment generally and how various literatures can be brought to bear on the topic. I am also attempting to describe/diagnose the problem space in which something called “the social” is scrutinized, remediated, and made necessary and legitimate in realms of scientific research. I follow the work of Strathern here, especially her critique of social assessment as task of the Canadian Commission on New Reproductive Technologies (”Robust Knowledges and Fragile Futures,” Global Assemblages, Ong and Collier Eds.), a task which activated a particular idea of Canadian society in order to legitimate and ground notions of preference which the Commission alread had. How do we, as scholars of the contemporary, diagnose such practices as the instrumental creation of social interlocutors? And how do we, in another Luhmannian move, diagnose Strathern’s own observations as having something important to do with our present? I am writing, but I don’t know yet if I am getting anywhere.
vistas/modules
An object is not a thing. I am still stuck on this. Through the Human Practices work on synthetic biology I have been exposed to the work of the Voigt lab who have the ambition to develop a tumor destroying bacterium (see especially task 3)
Is the yet-to-be bacterium - a la Haraway - a material-semiotic object, much more semiotic than material at this stage? Is it in fact a thing, or rather not even a thing?
Read more »
Problems with the media
I am trying to figure out how a problematization might work in the domain of the media, without involving an over-attribution of influence at the level of meaning and ideology, to media productions as texts available for analysis.
I’ve thought to do this by making the object of problematization the professional practice of media workers, rather than the things that they produce. One can imagine a project that situates media professionals’ value-determination practices in the broader context of changing conceptions of (economic, social and ethical) value in ‘late-socialist’ China.