At a certain point, when studying STS, after having read up on cyborg theory and every word Donna Haraway had ever written, having plumbed the depths At a certain point, when studying STS, after having read up on cyborg theory and every word Donna Haraway had ever written, having plumbed the depths of medieval alchemy, Foucault, Feyerabend, and quantum mechanics three different ways (excluding the messy math each time), I started realizing that there were many, many books in the field where my eyes would just glaze over and sweep across each page inconsequentially, because those pages themselves were inconsequential and quite frivolous. They might have earned someone tenure but while some were really insightful, most were being written in an echo chamber and if whole chapters had been replaced with BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BlAH, the world would have been exactly the same, maybe not even minus a tenured professor.
I started to realize that there's a Fordist economy at work in academe, where some people mess around with the tiniest widgets for hour after hour, seeing how oppressed group A fits into narratives B and C of postcolonial experience and how that affects thought-system D and, by extension, scientific activity E, or declaiming how, say, it is unfair to judge that humoral theory is entirely wrong because to Galen it was damned real and the same with each and every blind alley in science EVER and let's write a book defending each and every one as integral to the culture of its adherents, because who cares if you will ever get up after some stupid assed Greek psychic performs surgery on you using a dull butterknife and mashed crickets as anesthetic, science is one grand social exercise after another without any real expectation of change or results or consequences.
A few days later, I was like, holy SHIT, what am I going to do when I graduate from college?
I found this as I was going through my crates upon crates of books from in storage. I honestly don't know what possessed me to try so many times to liI found this as I was going through my crates upon crates of books from in storage. I honestly don't know what possessed me to try so many times to like Donald Barthelme. In this novel, the boldface pronouncements on history and philosophy, which read like the titles interspersed throughout a few of Jean-Luc Godard's movies, are the most insightful part of the book - the rest is pretty uninteresting, except for those people, bless them, who think otherwise....more
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