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Old 12-05-2009, 11:42 AM   #58 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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so wait....sf: your argument makes some sense if you restrict it to the line that equates **aspects** of how **some** institutions engaged in scientific work with the more general rationalities particular to capitalism. so research "subjects" are types of things to be manipulated, not human beings...which is of a piece with the wider orientation toward "rational mastery" with respect to nature (nature is a collection of resources to be exploited for example).

but it doesn't work as a general critique of this abstraction that the thread has us all referring to as Science.

to get to that, though, you'd need to start differentiating between sciences and institutional spaces that types of scientific work occupy...the extent to which particular institutional spaces are implicated with, say, military research (and all of the examples you've cited are or are alleged to be so implicated)...but not *all* scientific work is so implicated, and there are whole regions of scientific work the frameworks and work of which entirely undermine the basic ideological framework that is presupposed when you say (implicitly anyway) that some scientific work simply repeats more general forms of capitalist rationality.

alot of the work in the biological systems that comes out of dynamical systems for example...much of it does a real job on the subject-verb-object based mode of construing being-in-the-world (spectatorship and all that).

if folk thought in terms of logical hierarchies, undermining base-line relations would topple all the structures built on the basis of those base-line structures.
but it seems that people think in collage terms. another example of the types of separation that keep a fundamentally barbaric mode of production running along with the consent it requires.

but i digress.
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