On the subject of the object: Narrative technology and interpellation

Configurations

Volumn 8, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 1-29

  Law, John ^a  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0002335695     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.2000.0003     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. Louis Althusser Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation) in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays ed. Louis Althusser (London: New Left Books 1971) p. 137.
2. Donna Haraway A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies Feminist Theory Cultural Studies Configurations 2 (1994): 63.
3. See Sharon Traweek Beamtimes and Lifetimes: Tlie World of High Energy Physics (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press 1988);
4. idem Border Crossings: Narrative Strategies in Science Studies and among Physicists in Tsukuba Science City Japan in Science as Practice and Culture ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press 1992) pp. 429-466;
5. idem Bodies of Evidence: Law and Order Sexy Machines and the Erotics of Fieldwork among Physicists in Clioreograpliing History ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1995) pp. 211-225;
6. idem Bachigai (Out of Place) in Ibaraki: Tsukuba Science City Japan in Teclmoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations Profiles and Memoirs ed. George E. Marcus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995) pp. 355-377.
7. Having introduced the sneer quotes to signal my reservations I will now stop them.
8. Ironically while I was working on a version of this paper in May 1996 it was announced that the last of these Polaris submarines was being decommissioned.
9. For a brief review see Judy Wajcman Feminism Confronts Teclmology (Cambridge: Polity Press 1991).
10. In the context of military technology see Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott eds. Gendering War Talk (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993);
11. John Law Machinic Pleasures and Interpellations in Machines Agency and Desire ed. Brita Brenna John Law and Ingunn Moser (Oslo: University of Oslo 1998) pp. 23-48.
12. Donna Haraway Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective in idem Simians Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books 1991) p. 188.
13. Ibid. p. 189.
14. Ibid. p. 190.
15. The term partial connections is another of Donna Haraway's phrases taken from A Cyborg Manifesto: Science Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century in Simians Cyborgs and Women (above n. 7) p. 181-
16. a phrase picked up and explored at length by Marilyn Strathern in Partial Connections (Savage Md.: Rowman and Littlefleld 1991).
17. Svetlana Alpers TlieArt of Describing: Dutch Art in the Se\'cnteentli Century (London: Penguin 1989) pp. 103-109.
18. For a beautiful discussion of literary witnessing see Clifford Geertz Works and Lives: Tlie Anthropologist as Author (Cambridge: Polity Press 1988).
19. There is a large literature on this topic. For those who like historical stories the creation of the space of the laboratory and the character of witnessing by gentlemen in the seventeenth century is described in two wonderful books: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985);
20. and Steven Shapin A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Smnteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994)
21. -together with a fine commentary on exclusion and gendering by Donna J. Haraway Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.Femak_Maii©_Meets_Oncomotise: Feminism and Technoscience (New York/London: Routledge 1997). For those who prefer ethnography I would recommend Sharon Traweek's Beamtimes and Lifetimes (above n. 3) which considers the related way in which scientific heroes are constituted-heroes that is who have (in the mythology) wrested truths from an unwilling nature. Again the iconography is gender-saturated.
22. More gendering to be sure. For many tropes of artistic heroism see Arthur K. Wheelock ed. Johannes Vermeer (Washington/The Hague/New Haven: National Gallery of Art Royal Cabinet of Paintings and Yale University Press 1995).
23. 1 learned this term from Sharon Traweek whom I thank. She is often accused of such vanity ethnography. In what follows it is implied that such accusations presuppose a truth-regime that entirely misunderstands the character of such writing.
24. For further reading see Malcolm Ashmore The Reflexive Tliesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1989);
25. Anthony Giddens Tlie Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press 1990);
26. Hugh Gusterson Becoming a Weapons Scientist in Marcus Teclitiosdentific Imaginaries (above n. 3) pp. 255-274;
27. Hugh Gusterson Short Circuit: Watching Television with a Nuclear Weapons Scientist in Tlie Cyborg Handbook ed. Chris Hables Gray (New York/London: Routledge 1995) pp. 107-117;
28. Bruno Latour The Politics of Explanation: An Alternative in Knowledge and Reflexhity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge ed. Steve Woolgar (London: Sage 1988) pp. 155-176;
29. Traweek Bachigai (Out of Place) in Ibaraki (above n. 3).
30. The material character of such practices has been described by David Turnbull for the case of Gothic cathedrals: see David Turnbull The Ad Hoc Collective Work of Building Gothic Cathedrals with Templates String and Geometry Science Technology and Human Values 18 (1993): 315-340.
31. See Norbert Elias Tlie History of Manners (Oxford: Blackwell 1978);
32. idem The Court Society (Oxford: Blackwell 1983).
33. This is the implied (though friendly) criticism made of his work by Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity anil the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press 1989).
34. For further commentary see the first volume of Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies (Cambridge: Polity Press 1987).
35. See Michel Foucault Tlie Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock 1970);
36. idem The Archaeology of Knowledge {London: Tavistock 1972).
37. On medicine see Michel Foucault Tlie Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Tavistock 1976).
38. On the prison and punishment see Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsvvorth: Penguin 1979).
39. want quite unfairly to cite Walter Benjamin in this context. For a fine explanation as to why this is unfair and an exposition of the arcades project see Susan BuckMorss The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press 1989).
40. But see also Kevin Hetherington The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London: Routledge 1997).
41. On this see Paul Rabinow's extraordinary French Modem: Nonas and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press 1989) which may be read as a continuation of Michel Foucault's project by other means.
42. See the series of books on the construction of the sexuality of modernity starting with Michel Foucault Tlie History of Sexuality vol. 1 An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1981). Note that there have been many questions about Foucault's treatment of the body. It has been seen by many feminists no doubt rightly as a location for the performance of discourse while forgetting the specificities of corporeality-including the sexualities of corporeality.
43. For discussion of the multiple spatiality of the architectural and the discursive see Kevin Hetherington Museum Topology and the Will to Connect Journal of Material Culture 2:2 (1997): 199-218.
44. 1 am most grateful to Martin Gibbs for extensive and productive discussion about the analytical possibilities of the notion of interpellation.
45. See Althusser Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (above n. 1). Note also that the term is used and explored by Teresa de Lauretis Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory Film and Fiction (London: Macmillan 1987).
46. It is indeed a fascinating matter-but it takes us beyond the scope of the present paper. For discussion in the context of military technology see Law Machinic Pleasures and Interpellations (above n. 6).
47. Althusser Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (above n. 1) p. 139.
48. These are the final words of Foucault Birth of the Clinic (abpve n. 21).
49. [W]hat I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field the episteme in which knowledge envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection but rather that of its conditions of possibility; in this account what should appear are those configurations within the space of knowledges which have given rise to the diverse forms of empirical science. Such an enterprise is not so much a history in the traditional meaning of that word as an 'archaeology' (Foucault Order of Tilings [above n. 20] p. xxii).
50. See Foucault Birth of the Clinic (above n. 21);
51. Hetherington Badlands of Modernity (above n. 23);
52. idem Museum Topology and the Will to Connect (above n. 26). I am most grateful to Kevin Hetherington for extensive discussion of the significance of the heterotopic.
53. Althusser Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (above n. 1) p. 148.
54. This is a topic explored in both real and imagined conversations with Leigh Star. For a trace of these conversations see John Law Organizing Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell 1994).
55. The results of this work are reported in John Law The Olympus 320 Engine: A Case Study in Design Development and Organisational Control Technology and Culture 33 (1992): 409-440;
56. idem The Anatomy of a Sociotechnical Struggle: The Design of the TSR2 in Technology and Social Process ed. Brian Elliott (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1988) pp. 44-69;
57. John Law and Michel Gallon Engineering and Sociology in a Military Aircraft Project: A Network Analysis of Technical Change Social Problems 35 (1988): 284-297;
58. idem The Life and Death of an Aircraft: A Network Analysis of Technical Change in Slmping Teclmology Building Society: Studies in Sodotechnical Change ed. Wiebe Bijker and John Law (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press 1992) pp. 21-52.
59. Derck Wood Project Cancelled (London: McDonald's and Janes 1975) p. 153.
60. No I am not endorsing empiricism by the back door. I am making albeit very rapidly an argument to do with intertextuality: the relationship between narratives intertextualities that perform empiricist effects.
61. Stephen Hastings The Murder ofTSR-2 (London: Macdonald 1966) p. 60.
62. See Max Weber Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press 1978) p. 24.
63. Hansard 710 (1964-5): col. 1258 April 13 1965.
64. Law and Gallon Engineering and Sociology (above n. 36) p. 289.
65. The direction of parasitism is defined tautologically by defining this style of narrative as esoteric. However its one-way character is not given in the order of thingsand esoteric forms of narrative have not infrequently emerged into and remodeled other story forms.
66. Roland Beamont Plioeiiix into Ashes (London: William Kimber 1968) p. 152. Beamont was the pilot who was primarily responsible for testing the TSR2 aircraft. He is here describing a moment on the first and only supersonic flight of TSR2 on February 22 1965.
67. The citation is from Law Orgaiiiiing Modernity (above n. 35). In this study I argued that much of the laboratory ordering in which managers were implicated could be treated as an expression and a performance of four logics: enterprise administration vocation and vision; that these rubbed along together sometimes supporting one another and sometimes eroding one another; that the ordering of the laboratory could not be reduced to any one of these; and that the whole was a process an unfinished enactment.
68. Haraway Game of Cat's Cradle (above n. 2) p. 63 (the preceding citation is from p. 62).
69. There is to be sure no necessity that academic and policy narratives will interfere in a destructive or immobilizing fashion. Very often-for instance in the form of stories about large technical systems-they do not. Interference is a contingency.
70. Ten years later I returned to RAF Cosford. The erotics and aesthetics of that ambivalent day are described in John Law Air Show (working paper Department of Sociology University of Lancaster 1999).
71. Althusser talks about the personal but only in his late autobiography: again the division between personal and scientific.
72. On difference between specificities and their links see the exemplary work of Annemarie Mol who with her collaborators has explored the diversity and coordination of medical practices within certain parts of medicine: Annemarie Mol Tlie Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press forthcoming);
73. Annemarie Mol and Marc Berg Principles and Practices of Medicine: The Coexistence of Various Anaemias Culture Medicine and Psychiatry 18 (1994): 247-265;
74. Annemarie Mol and John Law Regions Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology Social Studies of Science 24 (1994): 641-671;
75. Annemarie Mol and Bernard Elsman Detecting Disease and Designing Treatment: Duplex and the Diagnosis of Diseased Leg Vessels Sociology of Health and Illness 18:5 (1996): 609-631;
76. Annemarie Mol and Jessica Mesman Neonatal Food and the Politics of Theory: Some Questions of Method Social Studies of Science 26 (1996): 419-444;
77. Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology ibid (forthcoming).
78. I have tried to survey some of these practices in Law Machinic Pleasures and Interpellations (above n. 6) pp. 23-48.