Creatures of Prometheus: Gender and the Politics of Technology (review)

Creatures of Prometheus: Gender and the Politics of Technology. By Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborne. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.

The increasingly networked and mediatized interactions of the information age have placed questions of technology high on many political and theoretical agendas. The ubiquity of screens and buttons in human lives, of tubes, transplants, and transfusions in our births and deaths, suggests that in cyberia there is no escaping technology. At the same time, the virtualization of experience produces its own set of challenges. The broad accessibility of conflicting information decreases the authority of claims emerging from traditionally credentialed sources. Facts become unmoored, surfing electromagnetic waves and traversing fiberoptic cables to assemble themselves into brief and unsteady alliances. Certainty gives way to possibility. Simultaneously, digitalization's easy enhancements and alterations disrupt the authorizing potential of sensory evidence into a blue-screening, photoshopping, audio-sampling extravaganza of unstable, fugitive truths. Given, then, the technocultural formatting of everyday life, on the one hand, and the challenges to trust and truth thereby installed, on the other, how might one hack it? How might one get at the codes, relationships, things, and activities that empower and are empowered by that complex political production that goes by the name "reality?"

Timothy Kaufman-Osborne's Creatures of Prometheus argues that any significant step in this direction requires jettisoning "the Cartesian paradigm of use." The Cartesian paradigm distinguishes between makers (human subjects) and made (artisanal objects). Kaufman-Osborne challenges this distinction, noting that artifacts themselves are makers. Artifacts, for example, make us thinkers insofar as they stand as conditions for thought, rather than simply as its objects. We tend to recognize this when things break down: when the computer crashes, the power goes out, or the pen runs out of ink. Inextricable from the web of human sociality, artifacts, Kaufman-Osborne urges, are the very conditions of human freedom, materialized projections of "the organs, needs, capacities, and vulnerabilities of human bodies" (1997, 43). Even without the Internet, our sense of a common world is artifactually produced: we coordinate our activities by using artifacts to demarcate spaces, times, opportunities, and events. Cartesianism prevents us from understanding the artifactual texturing of everyday life, the unforseen effects and creative impact of made objects. It prestructures our thinking such that we end up in a dualist logic and a "meta-physics of use" that confines power and agency in the creator: the creator is the origin of meaning, the created the source of meaning's loss.

Artifacts affect who we are and how we live in other ways as well. They produce gender. Or, put somewhat differently, gender itself is an artifact. "Gender is an internally complex materialized artifact, one called into being by and within the relations between artisanal artifacts and persons, artisanal artifacts and other artifacts, persons and other persons" (1997, 67); and, "Gender . . . is a materialized reality elicited from bodies via their differential engagement in continuously rearticulated fields of artifactual engagement" (1997, 179). A simple way to grasp Kaufman-Osborne's point here is to consider the spatial production of gender. Feminist theorists have long pointed out that key not simply to women's subordination but to the very notion of woman is the opposition between public and domestic space. Woman is that human being who dwells in the home. Kaufman-Osborne emphasizes the artifactual components of the private sphere, the things with which women work in the home, the interactions with objects that form gendered bodies. How bodies perform gender depends on how bodies are formed through engagement with and in relation to material things.

In one of the many stories Kaufman-Osborne tells to fill out his argument, Venus makes pancakes for Vulcan in their eastern Pennsylvanian home during the 1950s. Engaged with the spatula, the frying pan, the Bisquick, and the pot-holder, Venus is "making herself (and being made) into the sort of being we recognize as a woman" (1997, 182). Kaufman-Osborne asserts, "While...