Nobel Savage
Steven Shapin

Steven Shapin is the author of The Scientific Revolution, in which he argues that there is no such thing as the Scientific Revolution. And as annoyingly fashionable as it has become to proclaim that there are no such things as things, Shapin's sociological history of the development of the modern scientific outlook is quite compelling. In this article from the London Review of Books, Shapin reviews a memoir written by Kary Mullis, Nobel prize-winning chemist and general ass.

In one of the most celebrated expressions of scientific humility, Isaac Newton said that he felt himself to have been 'only like a boy playing on the seashore . . . whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me'. Kary Mullis approaches the seashore from a different direction. On the day he won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Mullis went surfing. The camera crews tried to follow him down the Southern California coast, 'asking everyone who came out of the water whether he was Kary Mullis'. Mullis was enjoying his new-found anonymity and got a surfer-dude friend to admit to being the great man himself. How does it feel to win the Nobel Prize? The surfer-dude was word-perfect: 'It's like a dream come true.' By the time Mullis had towelled off and chilled out, the paparazzi were laying siege to his house. 'As it turned out,' he writes, 'none of the other Nobel laureates that year were serious about surfing, and "Surfer Wins Nobel Prize" made headlines.'

posted by neel master at 12:15 AM

What Made Albert Run
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

You wake up one morning, the whole world is grey, you have had enough of your cold, colourless life. You want to drop everything, escape, far away, where life is real. Who has not had this dream from time to time? Nothing could be more normal. The desire to escape, to travel, is deeply rooted in everyone, from the young runaway to the tourist, from the beatnik to the Sunday hiker. But suppose now that this desire to flee becomes an obsession, a truly irresistible compulsion. Suppose further that it all happens in a state of absence and you cannot remember any of it: you arrive somewhere, dazed, without the slightest idea of what happened in the interval. Obviously, you have become a pathological runaway, a mad traveller, fit for the asylum and for therapy.

So how do you get from normal escapist desire to mad travelling? What is the difference between these two, almost identical impulses? How did you become mentally ill? Besides, are you really ill? Ian Hacking has written a wonderful philosophical fable about these and several other equally fascinating questions. Its moral is simple, if somewhat untimely: what we call 'mental illness' is not a permanent, intangible reality. For it to develop, it needs a hospitable environment, what Hacking compares to an ecological niche. Without a facilitating environment, mental illness languishes, wastes away, disappears, or emigrates somewhere more propitious. You who dream of dropping everything, for example, there is almost no chance of your becoming a pathological fugueur. Our modern psychiatric bibles may still make room for the diagnosis of 'dissociative fugue', but there is no longer, in late 20th-century Europe, any ground on which that illness could truly thrive. A century ago it was different. Hacking is more precise (or peremptory): fugue, he claims, became an illness in 1887 with the publication of Philippe Tissié's Les Aliénés Voyageurs, and it began to wane after the 1909 congress of alienists and neurologists in Nantes.

posted by neel master at 12:01 AM

The Problematics of Postmodern Culture within Disciplinary Liberalism: The Norplant Case
Philip Jenks

The growing debate over the medical safety of Norplant and its role in the American welfare state delineates an increasing tension over the relationship between public and private bodies. Recently, Norplant has been "prescribed" by judges and political representatives as a condition for parole or the receipt of welfare (over a dozen attempts have been made to legalize a tie between Norplant and welfare) in a milieu which displays considerable apprehension over the right to privacy. In the following work, I examine the specific mechanisms by which the categories of public and private are constituted within the frameworks of postmodern fragmentation of human identity and the world political economy of disciplinary liberalism.

posted by neel master at 12:56 PM

A Most Dangerous Method
Margaret Talbot

Most academics would just as soon forget the queasy intensity with which they both loved and hated their favorite professor in graduate school. To remember would mean recognizing how much their own graduate students hunger for approval while longing to supplant them; how much students compete for their favor while winding around them ambiguous garlands of gossip. It would mean acknowledging that professors are often drawn to their protégés for reasons of their own--narcissistic, faintly unwholesome reasons not easily assimilable to a model of pure-hearted pedagogy.

If she is prudent, a professor won't speak too much in public about any feelings of identification or desire a student has stirred in her. Especially not now, when everyone is at such pains to avoid eroticizing the classroom. Better for an academic to err in the direction of a selfless, sexless schoolmarm than a Miss Jean Brodie, triangulating her passions through the bodies of her girls. A prudent professor won't look too closely at the relationship whose potential for immoderation and transference German academics acknowledge by calling their thesis advisers Doktor-Vaters.

But Jane Gallop, the feminist theorist and literary critic, is not especially prudent.

posted by neel master at 12:52 PM

Dam Hypocrite

Apparently, not everyone loves Arundhati Roy:

Read the interviews with her and see how she conjures up the lifestyle of a bohemian radical, a maverick living on the edge of society; not a word about attending one of India’s most exclusive boarding schools. One of the teachers who taught Roy says that the headmaster was so upset at her refusal to mention the Lawrence School in Lovedale in any interview following her Booker Prize fame that he printed a copy of her leaving certificate in the school magazine to prove that she had actually been a student there.

Virtually every clipping on Roy also recounts the story of how she left home at 16 and lived in a squatters’ colony in New Delhi. The image that emerges is of a romantic waif, vulnerable yet feistily fighting against the odds. But, when you come from an English-speaking, privileged background in India, what’s the big deal about leaving home at 16? Or roughing it a bit, as she says she did, as a hippy on the beaches of Goa? Or spending a period living in a slum?

These events constitute no more than the usual trivia of any adolescence. Their narration in interviews is important only in that it is meant to convey the image of an unusual, courageous individual prepared to take risks. We all know the cliché about India: whatever you say, the exact opposite is also true. But there is an exception and it is this: it is an incontrovertible fact that an Indian woman of Roy’s background simply cannot slip through the safety-net of an upper-middle-class upbringing.

posted by neel master at 5:48 PM

The Dialectic of Sex
Shulasmith Firestone

Sex class is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labour force. But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child - 'That? Why you can't change that! You must be out of your mind!' - is the closest to the truth. We are talking about something every bit as deep as that. This gut reaction - the assumption that, even when they don't know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological condition - is an honest one. That so profound a change cannot be easily fitted into traditional categories of thought, e.g., 'political', is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution - we would use it.

Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity. Why should a woman give up her precious seat in the cattle car for a bloody struggle she could not hope to win? But, for the first time in some countries, the preconditions for feminist revolution exist - indeed, the situation is beginning to demand such a revolution.

The first women are fleeing the massacre, and sharing and tottering, are beginning to find each other. Their first move is a careful joint observation, to resensitise a fractured consciousness. This is painful: no matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper. It is everywhere. The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer. To so heighten one's sensitivity to sexism presents problems far worse than the black militant's new awareness of racism: feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organisation of culture itself, and further, even the very organisation of nature. Many women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know. Others continue strengthening and enlarging the movement, their painful sensitivity to female oppression existing for a ,purpose: eventually to eliminate it.

Before we can act to change a situation, however, we must know how it has arisen and evolved, and through what institutions it now operates. Engels's '[We must] examine the historic succession of events from which the antagonism has sprung in order to discover in the conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict.' For feminist revolution we shall need an analysis of the dynamics of sex war as comprehensive as the Marx-Engels analysis of class antagonism was for the economic revolution. More comprehensive. For we are dealing with a larger problem, with an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.

In creating such an analysis we can learn a lot from Marx and Engels: not their literal opinions about women - about the condition of women as an oppressed class they know next to nothing, recognising it only where it overlaps with economics but rather -their--analytic method.

[...]

The biological family - the basic reproductive unit of male/female/infant, in whatever form of social organisation - is characterised by these fundamental - if not immutable - facts:

(1) That Women throughout history before the. advent of birth control were at the continual mercy of their biology - menstruation, menopause, and 'female ills', constant painful childbirth, wet-nursing and care of infants, all of which made them dependent on males (whether brother, father, husband, lover, or clan, government, community-at-large) for physical survival.

(2) That human infants take an even longer time to grow up than animals, and thus are helpless and, for some short period at least, dependent on adults for physical survival.

(3) That a basic mother/child interdependency has existed in thus has shaped some form in every society, past or present, and the psychology of every mature female and every infant.

(4) That the natural reproductive difference between the sexes led directly to the first division of labour at the origins of class, as well as furnishing the paradigm of caste (discrimination based on biological characteristics).

posted by neel master at 5:43 PM

Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction
Interview with Gary A. Olson

Geertz: I was trained in the fifties, so I was trained as a New Critic. Close reading is important to me. Though I agree with many of the critiques of the New Critics, I often remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's "soul" and such things. I still have a fair amount of nostalgia for New Critical discipline and for close reading, and there hasn't been that in anthropology.

posted by neel master at 3:03 AM