On techno-bunny bliss

I live in fear of ever meeting my favourite writer, I might not live up to her expectation.
And she might not live up to mine, but i am in phd writer love.

I cannot forget the moment as a phd student when my mouth fell open at reading an academic journal from 1988 that said "And like the god trick, this eye f#cks the world of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.
(Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3), 575-599. p581)

And now i find this same author cited on twitter and I just had to go chasing down another rabbit hole to find the article that referred to "not some kind of techno-bunny bliss".

Ahhh the eloquence, fluffy dolphin syndrome has nothing on techno-bunny bliss.

And now I have a rebuttal to Latour's thinly veiled reference to Haraway
with "Bruno Latour’s complaint about the stupidity of critical theorists is just doing critique once again."

Nonetheless she also states:
Bruno and I are in relentless alignment, even as we give each other indigestion about some of the ways we do it. I think we love each other’s work because that is what matters.
(To think of the world through connections)

And some more clarity on why a perspectives or relativistic position is not being argued in my thesis:
This is not a relativist position. This is not about things being merely constructed in a relative sense. This is about those objects that we non-optionally are. Our systems are probabilistic information entities. It is not that this is the only thing that we or anyone else is. It is not an exhaustive description but it is a non-optional constitution of objects, of knowledge in operation. It is not about having an implant, it is not about liking it. This is not some kind of blissed-out techno- bunny joy in information. It is a statement that we had better get it – this is a worlding operation. Never the only worlding operation going on, but one that we had better inhabit as more than a victim. We had better get it that domination is not the only thing going on here. We had better get it that this is a zone where we had better be the movers and the shakers, or we will be just victims.

And a final note:
"women thinkers are made to seem derivative of male philosophers, who are often their contemporaries – made to be derivative and the same, when we are neither."

I found the article i wanted and more,
Nicholas Gane, interview with Donna Haraway.
Gane, N. (2006). When we have never been human, what is to be done?: Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture, Society., 23, 135-158.

many thanks to @bonstewart on twitter for providing the retweet that got me t/here.

my phone just does its own thing without me

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/12/carrier_iq_it_s_totally_rational_to_worry_that_our_phones_are_tracking_everything_we_do_.html

Ok so its its not so much watching me as telling mobile network operators where its been to....

If my thesis was ... a writing retreat exercise

The writing retreat I am on had a small exercise i thought i would share because it prompted some unusual thinking for me about my thesis.
Here's the exercise as shared by Gilly Bolton to Barbara Grant,
(And it starts a lot like a Youthline feedback exercise i use in personal development groups so dont know why i had never applied it to my work in progress, but there you go- it takes intersections with others sometimes to see things can be done differently)

If your thesis was a colour what colour would it be?

If your thesis was a piece of fruit what fruit would it be?

If your thesis was a piece of music what music would it be?

Share it with a friend, you might also say why.

Then write a 15 minute letter to a novice, or a researcher switching to your field as to what your piece of writing is about and why it is hugely important.

Then 10 minutes, imagine and write what you think that novice would say back to you.


What i got out of this:
I thought my thesis was blue and changed my mind: it was more vibrant than that. So its purple. Not in the sense that chaos is purple, and regalness never crossed my mind. Just that it is not cool, its vibrant, but its also easy going so there is no red yellow or orange there.

Fruit, was a strawberry because of the tang, but then i dropped this for a passionfruit, multiple bits going onn inside.

The music i had always thought would be a symphony. But its not.
Its Mike Oldfields Tubular Bells , 1981 ish so feels a little dated, (not my thesis, just the music) But what Tubular bells does is a controlled demonstration of multiple instruments, these instruments do not come into the network but can be discerned as they enter and their interactions are formed in association. Its not totally like an actor-network as the instruments themselves exit again unaltered, but what i want to convey is the music of two instruments or more is different to any of these individually. In terms of the thesis, it is about not being able to replicate the whole symphony, but to have a controlled entry through the writer that discerns just what is being shaped, identifying the traces.

http://youtu.be/xPEt5OTR6Vc


The other exercise was a surprise- i received back a succinct understanding on how come ANT doesnt do perspectives but is about multiple realities....a bit coloured by the previous exercise but in tubular bells the instruments and their activities are all positioned, the bell doesnt have a perspective on me, it doesnt know i exist, the triangles, or whatever do nor have a perspective on the bells.... what they hold is position and they act from this in their own reality, and our realities differ, our hinterlands differ, our possibilities differ, what we enact differs. Our relaities sometimes interact, sometimes align and sometimes collide, but this is not usually noticed untill we discover contradictions and contestations.

pencil meme "best education allegory ever"

a twittering gone viral pencilchat#

Allegory provokes layered meanings. In this playfully rendered lolcat, a juxtaposition of imagery occurs with txtspk. The disjunction between what is written and the image portrayed allows for multiple meanings to be entertained, and for alternate realities to be glimpsed.

The use of meme invokes a language of puns requiring a second thought forcing the reader beyond the obvious.