A community of critics? Thoughts on new knowledge*

Strathern, Marilyn

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00287.x

Cited by 127 publications

(84 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…The same parallel could be drawn with the present, where countries such as the US and UK see declining literacy levels and support for critical thinking in education (e.g. Strathern, 2006), and the proliferation of anti--intellectualism, which extends beyond vocal conservative religious or political figures. Aforementioned social scientific work on climate change seems to suggest that 'cosmic fear' is perhaps impossible to overcome, due to our extremely vulnerable position at the receiving end of planetary and extra--planetary forces on the one hand (Clark, 2011) and to technological, political and social forces on the other.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Negotiating the Inhuman: Bakhtin, Materiality and the Instrumentalization of Climate Change

Last

2013

Theory, Culture & Society

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The article argues that the work of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin presents a starting point for thinking about the instrumentalization of climate change. Bakhtin’s conceptualization of human–world relationships, encapsulated in the concept of ‘cosmic terror’, places a strong focus on our perception of the ‘inhuman’. Suggesting a link between the perceived alienness and instability of the world and in the exploitation of the resulting fear of change by political and religious forces, Bakhtin asserts that the latter can only be resisted if our desire for a false stability in the world is overcome. The key to this overcoming of fear, for him, lies in recognizing and confronting the worldly relations of the human body. This consciousness represents the beginning of one’s ‘deautomatization’ from following established patterns of reactions to predicted or real changes. In the vein of several theorists and artists of his time who explored similar ‘deautomatization’ strategies – examples include Shklovsky’s ‘ ostranenie’, Brecht’s ‘ Verfremdung’, Artaud’s emotional ‘cruelty’ and Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ – Bakhtin proposes a more playful and widely accessible experimentation to deconstruct our ‘habitual picture of the world’. Experimentation is envisioned to take place across the material and the textual to increase possibilities for action. Through engaging with Bakhtin’s ideas, this article seeks to draw attention to relations between the imagination of the world and political agency, and the need to include these relations in our own experiments with creating climate change awareness.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Negotiating the Inhuman: Bakhtin, Materiality and the Instrumentalization of Climate Change

Last

2013

Theory, Culture & Society

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“…Policy-makers deploy notions of the sacred to perform Latour's 'work of translation' to enable impure, pragmatic alliances. In this sense, sacralisation may enable the 'trade pidgin' approach to managing knowledge which Strathern envisages as curtailing critique [75]. Yet I would suggest here that unpacking these mechanisms involving the sacred affords an opportunity to recontextualise and renegotiate the symbolic order through a recognition of how the sacred is drawn upon in various realms in 'overlapping projects of world-making' [77,85].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Regulating Reprogenetics: Strategic Sacralisation and Semantic Massage

Mackenzie

2007

Health Care Anal

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Abstract:This paper forms part of the feminist critique of the regulatory consequences of biomedicine's systematic exclusion of the role of women's bodies in the development of reprogenetic technologies. I suggest that strategic use of notions of the sacred to decontextualise and delimit disagreement fosters this marginalisation. Here conceptions of the sacred and sacralisation afford a means by which pragmatic consensus over regulation may be achieved, through the deployment of a bricolage of dense images associated with cultural loyalties to solidify support or exclude contradictory elements. Hence an explicit renegotiation of the symbolic order structuring salient debates is necessary to disrupt and enrich the entrenched and exclusionary dominant discourse over reprogenetic regulation. I draw upon previous analyses of strategic rhetoric associated with the regulation of infertility treatment and embryo research in the United Kingdom, the cultural anthropology of biomedicine and feminist ethnographies of reprogenetics to illustrate these claims.

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“…Žižek (2007) deals very interestingly with this sort of process, relating it to a kind of 'game theory' examined by Lacan. Strathern (2006) comes at it from a different angle, but she too stresses that the critic/proponent relation engenders second selves characterised by the 'impetus to divide ourselves from ourselves' (202).…”

Section: Journal Of Education Policymentioning

confidence: 98%