Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
categories on groups of people and natural things that contained highly
suspect, often flagrantly unjust assumptions, ones frequently implicated
in relationships of domination. A positive first step is to call into ques-
tion these inherited categories and to rethink the beings and situations
involved. In this way, a wide variety of prejudices can be dispelled,
opening the way (in theory at least) for renegotiation of who and what
has standing, and which practical steps are most promising. Thus, science
studies and cultural studies about technoscience sometimes present them-
selves as radical, not just in an intellectual sense, but also as a force for
progressive political change.
29
For many writers in science studies and cultural studies, the methods
of interpretation and explanation that they employ to study things like
bacteria and quarks, also demand a new vision of what human beings
are and might become. As anthropologist David Hakken notes, “Cyborg
anthropology extends anthropological holism by positioning humans
as entities in technology actor networks, thereby reconceptualizing them
as bio-techno-cultural entities.”
30
Hakken draws inspiration from the
theory of actor networks developed by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour
in which social systems are described as hybrids composed of “actors”
and “actants,” living and nonliving agents, arranged in complex combi-
nations. Latour argues that an unacknowledged crisis in modern social
thought is that “the proliferation of hybrids has saturated the constitu-
tional framework of moderns.” Owning up to this crisis requires a new
understanding of humanity altogether since people mistakenly believe
that being human is a narrowly bounded condition. “The expression
'anthropomorphic,' ” Latour writes, “considerably underestimates our
humanity. We should be talking about morphism. Morphism is the place
where technomorphisms, zoomorphisms, phusimorphisms, ideomor-
phisms, theomorphisms, sociomorphisms, psychomorphisms, all come
together. Their alliances and exchanges, taken together, are what define
the
anthropos
.”
31
Attempts to deny that relevant creatures, objects, systems, and situa-
tions are hybrids and to insist that significant varieties of nature and
culture be recognized in their former simplicity is a move Latour calls
“the work of purification.”
32
With insights available to us now, however,
we can set aside such purifying labors and confront the world of hybrids
directly. In this light, Latour notes that some people seem “threatened
