Order Cheap Ativan Online

September 3, 2009

Order cheap ativan online, This is a not-completely-thought-through attempt to provoke continued conversation here. I'm in the middle of trying to finish a manuscript on Nanotechnology and Responsibility based on the work i've pursued amongst this group over the last few years. Among the concepts that has emerged for me that I cannot get rid of, buy ativan without prescription, but cannot think without is novelty--including all its variations such as innovation, Order ativan from canada, creativity, the new and the fashionable. My attempt at reasoning through why this is important in my case is the following tagline/aphorism: "Making things new, West Virginia WV W.Va. , making things safe, Nevada NV Nev. , making a career." Unraveled, the phrase is intended to capture the way that my subjects transformed the problem of environmental and biological properties of nanomaterials (e.g. their "safety") into a kind of problem which other scientists and engineers experienced as novel, Rhode Island RI R.I. . Novel enough to merit the kinds of accolades and approbation that supposedly drive scientists--it was an attempt not just to solve a problem, but to "make" their careers (at all levels, the grad students excitement about partcipation, the interdisciplinary invention of a new thing, and the classic senior scientists struggling for power and recognition for what they did), order cheap ativan online.

But I am no longer sure what I mean by novelty. Wyoming WY Wyo. , At one level, this is not just about conventional novelty in science, which is often treated as an unproblematic feature of scientific research--rather, where to buy ativan, it is about the effort necessary to make something unrecognizable into something novel. Colorado CO Colo. , It's not just one set of scientists that needs to see something as new, but an intersection or union of multiple sets. Safety was seen by most chemists, Montana MT Mont. , physicists, Cheapest ativan prices, engineers in nano as something downstream, an uninteresting test after the real action is over. Order cheap ativan online, The story I tell is about making safety into something "novel" enough to transcend that image.

At another level, Koop korting ativan, however, Ordering ativan pills, novelty is so pervasive and so important today that nearly everything counts as something new. I've started to wonder whether it would be possible to find anyone in science who was in fact not interested in making something new, and if such a creature could ever survive, ativan prescription. This rise to prominence of novelty as the supervalue of values renders it unstable, Purchase ativan, both as a feature of working science, and as a concept for understanding what is happening. Is novelty being decoupled from power, ativan sale. Is it proliferating into a bureaucratic value like cleanliness or accuracy, order cheap ativan online.

Finally, Buy ativan online, there is a philosophical angle to this concern. Concerning the cultural significance of nanotechnology (those conceptual interconnection of problems of Weberian fame), the question of novelty is in the background all the time, acquistare online ativan. Weber's Tolstoyish question “how shall we live” is rendered problematic today because the way we live is changing, For ativan online, and quickly by most accounts, with the knowledge and things we create. Old answers don't apply, billiga ativan apotek, new double binds arise, Cheapest ativan in the world, paradoxes and dangers and uncertainties which, even in the best of cases, seem unanswerable in classic philosophical terms, buy ativan from canada. Order cheap ativan online, The twist is the contemporary concern (obsession even) with novelty: both within science and engineering and outside of it, novelty has become the single most important cultural feature of knowledge production in our world. More important than lastingness, Ativan pedido en línea, more important than certainty, more important than utility even, the race for novelty absolutely structures and determines the lives of scientists and engineers, buy ativan cheap, as well as those who observe them (journalists, Vermont VT Vt. , funders, regulators, anthropologists and philosophers), cheap ativan online without prescription. If novelty has become so important, then it gives a twist to that classic philosophical question: how should we live now. And now. And.... now, order cheap ativan online. Like that annoying mobile phone salesperson who says “Can you hear me now?” the question can be asked over and over again. How should we answer this question when things seem to be changing so fast and so constantly. According to what temporality should the problem of novelty be rendered conceptually solid.

So two questions: 1) what is the conceptual locus of this problem. Order cheap ativan online, Are there other concepts (and/or texts) which form the horizon of the problem. 2) Is novelty as I've described it above, a problem that relates science and politics (or rationality and governmentality) in ways that need to be explored. Does novelty play as central a role in the security of vital systems or in the formation of police power as it does in the generation of scientific and engineering objects.

Update:: Okay maybe three, since I forgot to include the equally problematic concept of "emergence" and "emergent forms" which I do not think helps matters all that much. It shifts the problem away from the de novo creation of things to their recombination. This is useful as a first step, but I also think there is as much "emergence" out there (and as valued) as there is novelty.

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February 15, 2007

Latour, Dewey and Concept work

by Christopher Kelty

I've just come off of a week of discussions with Bruno Latour, (more on that over here) who was a "distinguished visitor" for a week. In particular, I roped him into teaching in my class on the topic of Dewey's The Public and its Problems and Lippman's The Phantom Public. The discussion was electrifying, not least because Latour has recently read both books extremely carefully. His current work, which is increasingly in the domain of metaphysics, takes the Dewey-Lippman debate as an occasion for theorizing "political truth"--or the possibility of achieving a distinctive form of truth in politics. The diagnosis and critique from which PP proceeds is the debate with Lippmann on the status of publics and public opinion. Contrary to the wikipedia version of things, it's clear that there is more agreement than disagreement between these two, and the Lippmann is almost as radical a thinker (perhaps more) than Dewey. Lippmann is usually branded as a conservative, a theorist of elitist democracy--but he was as much a pragmatist as Dewey, it was only his solutions that differed. Latour gave a fantastic lecture on the debate. Reading it apropos of ARC, Dewey's book contains a prescription of something not unlike the "concepts" and concept labor discussed by ARC. Here is a salient quote that gives a sense of how familiar the language is: "Our central need [is] to possess conceptions which are used as tools of directed inquiry and which are tested, rectified and caused to grow in actual use."(168) Lifted from context such a claim can sound exactly as postivistic and methodologically narrow as the worst kind of naive realism. As with most of Dewey, however, there is subtlety everywhere. In the case of PP, the question of "concepts" is not the center--rather the practice of "inquiry" is, especially what he calls "social inquiry." Dewey's logical theory, his experience-based system also referenced by the term "inquiry" (as in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry) is extended in PP to include a range of forms of "social inquiry"--journalism, social science, and expertise more generally. It's purpose however is more than just the scholastic test-and-refine version of concepts familiar to most economists and political scientists--it's purpose is the production of political truth that leads to the discovery of the state, necessitated by the empirical fact of our complex entanglements with each other, and the unintended consequences thereof. Social inquiry proceeds amidst a broken system of media reporting and propaganda--the news media cannot turn "sensations" into "perceptions", so this is the task of social inquiry. The practical prescriptions that attend to this are akin to current demands for "open access": "There can be no public without full publicity in respect to all consequences which concern it. Whatever obstructs and restricts publicity, limits and distorts public opinion and checks and distorts thinking on public affairs (166)." Without that baseline publicity, there is every reason for individuals and collectives to take advantage of the differential access to the results of social inquiry. A social inquiry that is available only to experts in DC, for instance, is useless, regardless of how accurate or correct or scientifically sophisticated it is. The fact that Dewey suggests that inquiry lead to cocenpts that "grow in actual use" is also a kind of radical departure from our contemporary status quo: concepts are not "critques" of practice, they do not undermine, unmask, reveal or deconstruct. Rather they are fundamentally meant to be like tools ('equipment' in Paul's sense) which connect the ceaseless production of sensations related to a particular issue (stem cells, for instance) into meaningful perceptions that allow a public to attach meanings to events, and to form attachments that are good rather than bad, with respect to contemporary events. The down side of Dewey's public, however, is that it is so eerily familiar. My students all agreed that his descriptions of the "Great Society" (read, globalization avant le lettre) sound exactly like the present--except that things today are much worse, much more entangled, much less amenable to an optimistic faith in "social inquiry." Nonetheless, there is a germ of a possible renewal of pragmatism here--or rather, more specifically, a renewal of Dewey's theory of logical inquiry or James' radical empiricism (in order to avoid dead-ends like Rorty), that might be brought into productive engagement with the questions raised in ARC. Is social inquiry similar to collaborative conceptual labor? Is "inquiry" a better term for what ties these collaborations together than "research" or "fieldwork" or "ethnography?" especially if it is given the force that dewey gives it as a version of experience-based logical inquiry? Dewey's attentiveness to experience as a necessary feature of thinking seems to share much with the "contemporary"... Obviously, I think Dewey is just dreamy. What about you?

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Concept Work

September 3, 2009