Tuesday 14 December 2010

A rich, improvised manifesto



I had to watch this several times before I turned it into bullet points. Writing as a feminist historian of science she shows that she must also write as a philosopher, and make general, bold, arrogant claims even as she works within the specificity of her immediate concerns. The first few minutes are unbelievably awkward and amusing to watch, because of the various miscommunications and interruptions between the philosopher and her interlocutor. But eventually when things get underway it becomes clear that she had a lot of things on her mind to unload..

- 'The non-anthropomorphic agency of artifacts.'
- Humans as ontologically constituted by the relationality between human and nonhuman liveliness
- Conviviality with nonhuman kinship networks of agency
- Humans do not produce machines, even in areas of direct human invention
- Nontranscendence of the nonhuman and nonanimal- 'life is a verb, and the actors aren't all human'
- 'Point of view' is a limited metaphor because it tends toward anthropomorphism
- Working within small, mundane places to name emergent ontologies
- A resistance to both universalism and relativism: 'a pox on both your houses, thank you.'
- Deadly 'fraternal sibling rivalries' of binary oppositions such as realism and social constructionism--'both supposed choices are a false choice'
- Crosstalk summoned by postcolonialism, intersectional feminist analysis, rearrangements of life and death in general
- Arguing against this kind of general relevance, and for a reveling in finitude
- Lack of translation does not prevent communication; it is its precondition because the condition of language is troping, troping is tripping, and there is no making sense in general, only in fact

1 comment:

  1. Hehe... the beginning really is hilarious... "but i wanna know about the dogs...!" lol.

    ReplyDelete