Subject: A not so Modest_Witness
From: Royce Froehlich (royce@pipeline.com)
Date: Sun Mar 05 2000 - 20:12:00 CST
Some comments around Donna Haraway's Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.
FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™
Frank Zappa asked, "Does Humor Belong in Music?" One can wonder the
same about critical theory. Donna Haraway would answer, "Definitely!"
However, some things, like the A-Bomb just aren't funny, and our witness
knows it. The origins of the Christian calendar and the notion of
‘progress' may be mythic, but as she points out, "The end of the Second
Millennium threatens to be much more than a narrative device, and
witnessing the story [of progress] is more than a joke on addresses in
the Net" (p. 55). There are smart bombs and there are smart books; this
is one of them. It's got a sense of humor—-one can't sometimes help but
wonder if it isn't somewhat gallows style painted black. From media to
gene technology the modest witness takes us (by us I mean those of us
who haven't read more than Gary Zukav's ‘Quantum physics for the Buddha
in us all' The Dancing Wu-Li Masters or looked beyond high school
chemistry texts) non-scientists on a ride to a future that is already
very much frighteningly present. Our modest witness is a religious
person who offers testimony in the ongoing trial of "the real subject of
universal history," technology. The plaintiffs are a community that
includes feminists, anthropologists, and a bunch of other ists--
including us media philosophists--standing against The New World Order,
Inc.
Thankfully, we are not being led into a New Age, Atlantean panacea
here. The modest witness tells us the technological agenda is
"inescapable" (p. 57). Just as finding a rubric for a psychological
condition (e.g., ‘mother complex', ‘passive-aggressive', ‘paranoid',
etc.) doesn't make it go away, the modest witness reminds us that
"naming does little" (p. 61). "Like it or not," she says: "It will not
help—-emotionally, intellectually, morally, or politically—-to appeal to
the natural or the pure" (p. 62).
OncoMouse™--a transgenic rodent created in the process of doing cancer
(as in oncology) research--and his cousin Mickey have something in
common besides tails and tales of human invention, they signal changes
in human consciousness. OncoMouse™ is an experimental ambassador from
the empire of DuPont, where technoscience is the Word. OncoMouse™;
FemaleMan©, an entity of "commodified transnational feminism," and the
Modest_Witness are biblical style figures that/who—-for the leaders of
an hypothesized transnational corporation/consciousness called The New
World Order, Inc.—-point toward salvation. Salvation, especially for
millennialists, means apocalypse. Apocalypse, if we look at John's
Revelation, and what's going on in science and on the world's killing
fields, seems to be occuring in no other time than now. Just like
Matthew's Kingdom of Heaven, it's already here. It's now or never: hello
goodbye. To the seven churches: so long—-hello Dolly! Do electric sheep
dream of oncomice?
Now a word from Our Sponsor: Modest_Witness is written in the I. What
happens for me (the third person, second witness—and as anyone who knows
me, not always so modest) while reading the modest I-witness' gospel is
that out of her personal anecdotes—-"On the day I wrote the preceding
paragraph . . ." (p. 56)—-I suddenly flip into my own story. I'll be
reading about some of the witness' coincidental happenstances and all of
a sudden I'm back in high school looking at a periodic table of
elements, or thinking about financing my studies on genetech stocks
(unfortunately, I couldn't find Darwin Molecular listed on any stock
index, see p. 59). The point here is that the personally written
testimony of the witness sets the book's thematic traces in a rich
context of an historian of the wannabe transcendent: science. But it is
precisely the ego and its concomitant anthropocentric scientist who
denies a transcendent aspect of Life in a concerted effort to, from a
human standpoint—-the perspective of the anthropos, bring history to an
end. If a history fell in a forest and no one was there to hear it would
it matter?
World War II happened and it was LOUD, giving us witnesses good
evidence to make us skeptical of reason. Philosophically, the structural
metanarratives of progress and science were equated with going into the
atom and finding something at the core; but what was there? Nuclear
reaction: destruction, Auschwitz. The Bomb, another kind of "final
solution," signified the height of reason, providing evidence for the
witness in all of us to call it the point where reason became bigger
than our ability to handle it. But why are some of my very own friends,
biochemists—-one of whom was up for a Nobel prize a couple of years
ago--so hellbent on scientific methodology? I think they envision a race
in which they will finish first, just ahead of the apocalyptic
Antichrist; with a formula for altering the big A's DNA so that he looks
remarkably like the Son. Admittedly, at a lecture I attended not long
ago on genetic research in psychiatry—-where advances in treating
schizophrenia seem to be just around the corner—-I felt like raising my
arm in salute. Robert Romanyshyn's Technology as Symptom and Dream
(1989) is echoed by the modest witness, who says, "Marked with the
stigmata of a dream, a symptom, and an ordinary research project, in a
kind of ultimate genetic transspecific cross, scientific efforts to
splice carbon-based life forms to silicon based computer systems take
many shapes, from the merely ideological to the scientific productive"
(p. 59). It is easy to get caught up in a dream, especially a collective
one. If we cannot, as was already mentioned, escape it, we can at least
be aware that we are dreaming, albeit lucidly. The modest witness is
here to comply with the request of the band Was Not Was: "Tell me that
I'm dreaming."
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium sets its tone by referencing a novel
by Marge Piercy: He, She and It, which artfully dances between two
storylines: the plight of Jews in the Prague ghetto of the 1600s and a
similar scenario in a futuristic ‘Freetown', juxtaposing the legend of
the mystical creation of a golem, a ‘man' made of clay, and a series of
cyborgs manufactured by underground Jewish scientists. Judging by the
plethora of contributions to our website here, everyone has lots o time,
and I can only encourage you, dear readers, to prep for Donna's book by
reading Marge's. It is, in best postmodspeak, most excellent.
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium is a text that I'm certain will get
pulled into the gravitational field of my own theme: the transformation
of symbols; as it is yet another contribution to the whirlwind of
publications that report on the whirlwind of "the ferocity of the
transformations lived in daily life throughout the world [which] are
undeniable (p. 4). I look forward to meeting its author and continuing
to engage these themes in the surroundings of a place where chocolate is
made the old fashioned way and biobeer means organically brewed, not
genetically altered. Alteration is still a matter of individual choice.
Vote transcendent!
Aufwiedernetten, colleagues and sauna lovers.
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