THE SLEEP OF REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS

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THE SLEEP OF REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS

• Silvia Gherardi
• Research Unit on Cognition, Organizational
  Learning and Aesthetics (Rucola)
• University of Trento
• Via Verdi 26
• E-mailsilvia.gherardi_at_soc.unitn.it

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THE SLEEP OF REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS

• The title comes from Albrech Durer (1500)
• But what was the meaning of reason for Durer?
• Reason was the opposite of fooly (see his
  woodcuts for The ship of Fools, 1494)
• I want to explore the contemporary meaning for
  reason/monsters/technology

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Lets start with reason.

• It is argued that science and technology
• become monsters when they sever their
• connections with the social conditions of
• their production (Haraway, 1991, Law, 1991, Star,
  1991)

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..to arrive at the drifting technology

• By drifting I mean a slight or significant shift
  of the role and function in concrete situations
  of usage, that the technology is called to play,
  compared to the planned, pre-defined and assigned
  objectives and requirements (Ciborra, 1996).

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Technology tends to drift when puts to use..

• Drifting technology. is therefore the process
  trough which technology goes when it leaves
  reason and drifts away?
• In drifting does it become a monster?

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On drifting and becoming monstrous

• What are the implicit imaginaries behind the
  metaphor of the drifting technology..
• And the tecnological monsters?

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Drifting.

• The etymological dictionary says.
• To drift the movement or course of something
  drifting
• Drifting to float or be driven along by wind,
  wawes or currents

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Wind, wawes or currents..

• Are blind forces..
• Bear neither responsibility, nor intention.
• Are not under the human domain
• Are independent from human will

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Drifting technology

• The imaginary thus conveyed is one in which the
  technology
• takes the adversities of life lying down.
• Once technology has been procreated, it drifts
  away from the Father, the Fathers Law and the
  Fathers responsibility

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Technology as the post-modern monster

• Historically the biologists have examined the
  phenomena of deviation from the norm in order to
  explain the normal structure of the process of
  development.
• If the drift is the monster, what is the
  normal?
• The monster is the Other of the Normal

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Teratology

• Teratology is the science of monsters, which
  tries solve the enigma of normality exploring
  the devalued alterity of monsters.
• Many feminist scholars have studied the
  fascination that the reproduction of monsters
  exerted over science (Braidotti, 1994, Haraway,
  1992, Kristeva, 1981, Irigaray, 1985).
• The power and mystery of female reproduction is
  at stake, both in the imaginary and in the
  bio-tech.

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On monsters

• The latin etymon of monster is monstrum what
  can be put on show
• Leslie Fiedler (1978) studied how from Europe to
  Coney Island the freaks have been made
  spectacular
• The greeck etymon teras/teratos refers both to
  a prodigy and a demon
• The duplicity of the monster recalls both science
  and fantasy

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The monster as the Same and the Other

• The monster is not completely alien to us, nor it
  is completely familiar.
• It helps us to understand the paradox of
  difference as something which generates fears
  (Braidotti, 1996).
• Its familiar strangeness bear an analogy with
  racism and sexism (the woman, the black, the
  homosexual).

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Monster or Cyborg?

• Bio-tecnologies have changed the fantasies
  associated with the bodies and the technology.
• In the postmodern situation classic reason
  cannot be assumed as representative of all the
  human rationalities.

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Human and non-human alligment

• In a postmodern sensibility the bondaries between
  human and non-human are blurred and agency need
  to be reframed as a property of an action-net.
• The metaphor of technological translation can
  bring agency back, where drifting was hidding it.

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Technology in modern and postmodern
representations

• The movie Metropolis can be taken as the
  representation of the modern fear of the power of
  science and technology. The she-robot is the
  symbol of ambivalence.
• Blade Runner can be taken as representative of
  postmodern fears. The androids are superior to
  humans but live shorter. Aliens become human and
  the boundaries between human and non-human are
  eroded.

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The translation metaphor

• in the translation model a command is obeyed if
  it is obeyed and an innovation or idea is
  adopted because it is passed from actor to
  actor via translation agents who have their own
  interest in performing the operation (Latour,
  1989)

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THE OVAL BALL

• A technology, like an oval ball, needs to be
  passed from one player to another along a chain
  of people that may act in a number of ways they
  may take it, pass it on, or drop it altogether.
  The technology/ball receives the force to be
  passed from the interest and motivation of each
  player. What we are interested when we look at a
  rugby match is not so much the ball itself as
  much as the process of taking the ball forward,
  the choreographies and strategies that the
  collective uses to take the ball to the goal.

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TRANSLATION IN SPACE AND MEANINGS

• Translation is both the movement of an entity in
  space and time as well as its translation from
  one context to another. Any translation is the
  result of the active work of an array of
  heterogeneous entities that in the process find a
  place or are locked into place. The set of
  entities that enter into the translation (not
  only the rugby players, but also the grass, the
  lights, the referee, his whistle, the poles
  marking the goal, the wind that deviates the
  ball, etc) are called both action-net and
  actor-network

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AN EXAMPLE OF TRANSLATION

• A case-study of e-health will illustrate how a
  group of General Practitioners which should have
  used a new tool, were de facto excluded by its
  use, but appropriate the new technology inventing
  their own use of it.

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Discussion

• The end product of a drift is an unwated and
  unexpected result. A monster for those who
  created the technology. A fated event a prodigy
  and a demom.
• The end product of a translation is the active
  appropriation of a technology which has been put
  in social use. We are already cyborg.