‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

BRUNO LATOUR, The pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. 273, £23.95. GEORGES CANGUILHEM, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xi, 160, £17.95. Bruno Latour has written a wonderfully funny book about himself. It is difficult, however, to summarize a text committed to the view that \"Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else\", (p. 158). In Latour's opinion, the common view that sociologists of knowledge and scientists are opposed is incorrect. Both groups, according to Latour, are the authors of identical mistakes: reductionism and, relatedly, attempting to conjoin (in the instance of the sociologist) science and society, or (in the instance of the scientist) keeping them apart. For Latour, there are only forces or resistances which different groups encounter and attempt to conquer by forming alliances. These groups, however, are not simply the actors of conventional sociology. They include, for example, microbes, the discovery of the Pasteurians, with which they have populated our world and which we must now take notice of in any encounter or war in which we engage. War is a fundamental metaphor for Latour, since in a war or a battle clashes of armies are later called the \"victory\" of a Napoleon or a Kutuzov. Likewise, he argues, the Pasteurization of France can be viewed as a battle, with its field and its myriad contestants, in which opposing sides attempted to mould and coerce various forces of resistance. Strangely, he points out, the outcome of this huge battle, the labour and struggle of these masses, we attribute to the scientific genius of Pasteur. Pasteur's genius, however, says Latour, lay not in science (for this could be yet another way of making science and society distinct) but as strategist. Pasteur was able to cross disciplinary lines, recruiting allies to laboratory science by persuading them that they were recruiting him. This was possible because, like the armies in battle, they had already done the work of the general. Thus Pasteur's microbiology, which might conventionally be seen as a whole new science, can also be construed as a brilliant reformulation of all that preceded it and made it possible. Hygienists seized on the work of the Pasteurians and the two rapidly became powerful allies because \"The time that they [the hygienists] had made was now working for them\" (p. 52). French physicians, on the other hand, resisted recruitment, since for them it meant enslavement. Finally, however, they recruited the Pasteurians to their enterprise. Pasteurian public health was turned into a triumph of medicine. It is impossible to read this book and not substitute Latour for Pasteur. At the head of his own army, increasingly enlarged by the recruitment of allies, Latour now presents us, in his own language, with something we have made, or at least made possible. The cynic might say, using the old jibe against sociologists, that Latour has explained to us in his own language everything we knew anyway. Retorting thus, however, would be to unselfconsciously make an ally of Latour and miss the point by a narrow margin that might as well be a million miles. Latour says all this much more clearly (and certainly more wittily) than any review. Read it, but beware; in spite of Latour's strictures about irreducibility, the text is not what it seems. This is a recruitment brochure: Bruno needs you. Among the many historians whom Latour convicts by quotation of mistaking the general for the army, Pasteur for all the forces at work in French society, is Georges Canguilhem. Latour uses two quotes from Canguilhem, both taken from the original French version of Ideology and rationality in the life sciences, first published in 1977. Reading Canguilhem after Latour induces a feeling akin to culture shock. Astonishingly, Canguilhem seems almost Anglo-American. Anyone familiar with Canguilhem's epistemological universe would hardly be surprised to discover that Latour finds in it perspectives different from his own. After all, Canguilhem remains committed to the epistemologically distinct entity science or, better still, sciences. Likewise he employs distinctions between science and ideology, as in Spencerian ideology and Darwinian science, which will seem familiar, possibly jaded to English-reading eyes. His text is liberally seeded with unLatourian expressions, including injunctions to distinguish \"between ideology and science\" (p. 39), lamentations that eighteenth-century medicine \"squandered its energy in the erection of systems\" (p. 53), rejoicing that physiology \"liberated itself' from classical anatomy (p. 54), and regret that \"Stahl's influence ... seriously impeded experimental

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Bruno Latour, The pasteurization of France , trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. 273, £23.95. - Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences , trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xi, 160, £17.95.

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

This is not a comprehensive article about what enlightenment is. I actually question what the enlightened state might be, and might not be, or in what context one might view it. For too long we have accepted a general definition of enlightenment as it was traditionally passed on. When one starts to ask questions, it becomes much more complicated, but also more interesting. I think it is high time to start a discussion of what enlightenment really is.

What Is Enlightenment

This paper expands on recent attempts to destabilise the static, bordered, and linear framings that typify human geographical studies of place, territory, and time. In a world conceptualised as open, immanent, and ever-becoming, scholars have turned away from notions of fixity towards fluidity and flow, and, in so doing, have developed networked, ‘flat’ ontologies. Recent attempts have gone further, challenging the horizontalism inherent in such approaches by opening up a vertical world of volume. In this paper we contend that such approaches are still somewhat lacking. The vertical element of volume is all too often abstract and dematerialised; the emphasis on materiality that is typically used to rectify this excess of abstraction tends to reproduce a sense of matter as fixed and grounded; and the temporality that is employed to reintroduce ‘motion’ to matter has the unintended effect of signalling a periodised sense of time that minimises the chaotic underpinnings and experiences of place. We argue that the ocean is an ideal spatial foundation for addressing these challenges since it is indisputably voluminous, stubbornly material, and unmistakably undergoing continual reformation, and that a ‘wet ontology’ can reinvigorate, redirect, and reshape debates that are all too often restricted by terrestrial limits.

/pdf/wet-ontologies-fluid-spaces-giving-depth-to-volume-through-4a3cba7lra.pdf

Wet ontologies, fluid spaces: : Giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking

The impact of new materialism on the study of rhetoric is indefinite, but one cannot deny the fact that it is having an impact. Simple but important questions, such as how new materialism differs f...

Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

This essay suggests a way to historicize different rhetorical practices—in effect, alternative ways to write genealogies of diverse rhetorics. A certain distinction between culture and nature is a fundamental organizing concept in humanistic rhetoric that has circumscribed scholars' ability to appreciate rhetoric that does not emanate from the subject as conceptualized in Greco‐Roman theory and the theory derived from it. Accordingly, scholarship is preoccupied with the ways that the motivated discourse of subjects leaps the gap between discourse and things to affect the material world. Rather than treating it as natural, the formation of a gap between discourse and things is defined in this essay as a performance articulated through everyday practices, which shifts the focus from human agents to practices. Articulation is a performative concept about the ordering of matter and meaning. To articulate is to produce bodies, language, and the space of their relative disposition through shared acts. Ultimatel...

Articulation: a working paper on rhetoric and taxis

Rhetoric is multiple and mutable in the sense that there is more than one kind of rhetoric and any particular rhetoric is highly adaptable to the point that what qualifies as rhetoric according to scholar A may be unrecognizable as such to scholar B. It is not safe to assume that we can account for rhetoric as a multiplicity or in its mutability. Despite an arsenal of terms to characterize rhetoric, how to talk about it as diverse?This essay first conceptualizes material “diversity” and presents a borrowed term, polythesis, to give some character to the problem of rhetoric as ontologically one and many. Second, the essay discusses genealogy as an approach that enables the sorting of different rhetorics without producing a fixed taxonomy. Parsing rhetoric’s multiplicity requires mobile discriminations and should be paired with a methodology sensitive to ontological flux. As historical ontologies, genealogies of different rhetorics can produce meaningful distributions while emphasizing impermanence ...

Rhetoric’s diverse materiality: polythetic ontology and genealogy

IT IS ONLY IN THE LAST 30 YEARS THAT IT HAS BEEN POSSIBLE to visualize the living fetus. Before then, its life was often acknowledged at “quickening,” when the pregnant woman firstnoticeditmovingwithintheuterus.Withthenewability to see the fetus as an independent organism, however, bothmedicalscienceandsocietynowenvisionthematernalfetal relationship as beginning at a much earlier stage in fetal development. Visual imagery, specifically sonography, has become an important representation of that relationship.Considerarecenttelevisioncommercialfeaturinghighresolution 3-dimensional sonographic images of a thirdtrimester fetus or a Time cover story describing Alexander Tsiaras’ beautifully detailed, computer-enhanced images of fetal development as “at the forefront of a biomedical revolution.” 1 These contemporary biomedical images of the fetus are changing public perception of the unborn and may shift the balance of legal rights from the maternal to the fetal body. Due in part to laws restricting human anatomical dissection, accurate depictions of the fetus did not appear until 1799, when Samuel Thomas Soemmerring published plates ofstagedembryonicdevelopment. 2 Anditwasnotuntil1965, whenLennartNilsson’sphotographofan18-weekfetusappeared on the cover of Life, that the image of a fetus became widely recognized. The photographic quality of modern sonography, given its role in fetal measurement and diagnostics, carries with itaconnotationofobjectivitythatmaydeflectattentionfrom the cultural assumptions that give these images such authority.FasouliotisandSchenkerwrite,“Thebiologicalmaternal fetal relationship has not changed but the medical model of that relationship has shifted emphasis from unity to duality. Physicians no longer look to the maternal host for diagnostic data and a therapeutic medium; they look through her to the fetal organism and regard it as a distinct patient in its own right.” 3 Casper agrees that as fetal imaging technology advances, so does the likelihood of seeing the fetus as an entity separate from its maternal host. 4 Mirroring the improved resolution of the fetal image has been the growth of “fetus as patient” advocates who explicitly argue for equal and competing interests of the fetus. 5 When the fetus is increasingly visualized as a person, resolving ethical tensions betweenthewelfareofthemotherandfetusbecomesacontest between their rights and obligations. 3 Pateman has argued that the assumption of the impregnable male body was im

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/articlepdf/196296/jms0402-3-1-1.pdf

Seeing the Fetus: The Role of Technology and Image in the Maternal-Fetal Relationship

This essay argues that abortion is more than the termination of a pregnancy: it is a metaphor for cultural amnesia. Early medical anti‐abortion rhetoric in the United States established women's bodies as rhetorical sites of cultural memory. Physicians formed a system of mnemonics: cultural truth about humanity was located in women's reproductive physiology, protocols for accessing that truth were formed via diagnostic practices, and a network of bodies (discursive and corporeal) was established through which truth could circulate. In the face of increasing numbers of abortions, physicians made the act of listening to the female body a culturally genealogical act.

In living memory: Abortion as cultural amnesia

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