Dislocating Knowledge, Thinking out of Joint: Rhizomatics, Caenorhabditis elegans and the Importance of Being Multiple

It is time to put our reading practices into action. My question, rooted in a reading of the technoscience text in the world, is a political one: If technological products are cultural actors, and if “we,” whoever that problematic invitation to inhabit a common space might include, are technological products at deeper levels than we have yet comprehended, then what kind of cultural action will forbid the evolution of OncoMouse(tm) into Man(tm)? The question has a historical antecedent from the olden times of historical narrative, when revolution was not a bad joke: What is to be done?—Donna Haraway, “When Man Is on the Menu” ¹

“We”—that fluid, viscous, and vicious stew of thinkers who intersect at the vanishing point, cursor, or cross hairs of cultural studies and science—have been inserted into a technoscientific text. Donna Haraway (among others too many to mention, and some unidentifiable) has clicked on the mouse, and cut up a historical narrative that has begun to sound more and more like an old joke. This cut-up—at once a joke, a disruption, a gleeful mockery of a master narrative, and an interpellation—follows an ethics of incision, a call for disruption in the name of difference.

And we must read this technoscientific text. From our own places, topoi that are inflected and inscribed by the hilarious and horrifying objects of culture and science that tell us, precisely and in repetition, what is to be done. What is called for here is not, or at least not only, another articulation of the validity of the truth claims and normative impacts of the sociology, anthropology, history, and rhetoric of science. Do we need more referees? Instead, I would like to argue, we need to rethink the “software” of the cultural studies of science—the tropes, schemes, and operating systems by which we “order” our works—in light of the joke(s) of the historical narratives above. That is, we need to think about how to deploy, retrofit, and tinker with the tools by which we can introduce some interventions into the lines that lead from technoscience to mouse, and from “mouse” to “Man.”

The sign of “software” serves notice that the trademark leap from reading practices to action has been obliterated by technoscience; it implodes into “software,” a shotgun wedding of word and power, text and practice that is doing the doing—that answers—incessantly, What is to be done? By this I mean that the textual body executed by contemporary life science (a body that, Haraway points out, has the letters (tm) attached) marks out the collusion or implosion of reading practices with “life,” as the body of OncoMouse(tm) becomes a kind of extension of its trademarked genetic “program.” That is, the narratives that make possible the inscription of a (tm) to OncoMouse must be seen as part of the technoscientific software surrounding and saturating the mouse, and not just an effect or description of it. In the olden days of critical theory, Herbert Marcuse, through a reading of Edmund Husserl, located this narrative by arguing that “scientific rationality itself contains its inner and own irrational core which it cannot master.” ² I would argue that this “irrational” element of scientific inquiry is in fact a source of technoscientific power, and that such extrascientific aspects of scientificity cannot be located at science’s “core” but instead must be seen to operate always and everywhere in the economy of technoscience culture.

In order to locate such narratives and dislocate the centrality of science in our cultures, we need tools—softwares that function as much as an intervention in, as a narrative about, scientific discourse. I want to offer some modest tools for dealing with this question/challenge, tools that do not belong uniquely to the field “science studies.” Indeed, it is my contention that they actively disrupt such a taxonomy, as each tool and strategy for disrupting this culture of one God, one science, one mouse forbids the articulation of one theory or one field. This is...