the map is not the territory

it speaks to my experience (or inexperience?) and expectations of feminism that I found Haraway and King both a bit less feminist than I thought they would be. perhaps, being much more used to the color and volume of common internet feminism, I came to these books without a properly calibrated sensitivity to the academic, textual feminism these writers invoke/evoke. I'm still thinking about how this distinction matters to me, or whether it should. I thought (naively?) that at least for me "feminism" had lost its extremist or inflammatory connotation. maybe it actually hasn't, but I just stopped noticing. I know, in my ever-so-rational head, that you don't need to be any kind of wound-up, vociferous extremist to embrace feminism... but I still can't deny the ties between feminism and activism. thinking about this might be a little beyond the scope of my summer readings, but I should still probably think about it along the way. it looks like a complex set of distinctions that needs much thinking about.

as I delightedly devoured Katie King's Networked Reenactments last week, I felt fairly conscious of my brain looking out for and watching how the book works, how it's organized, what each section is doing in conjunction with all the others. this is me trying to learn how to write like that. how to construct arguments and prose and insightful meaning like a proper academic.

my notes on Networked Reenactments ranged all over, much like King's examples seem to (and this is my way of warning you about how the rest of my disjointed comments will proceed). she follows the concept of "reenactment" around and through various media, disciplines, locales. we get to look at popular TV shows, histories, documentaries, collaborations and contests, museums, websites, email lists, forums, fandoms. there are countless people involved in the decisions behind the reenactments of all these groups. one of King's important questions centers on looking at whose interests are served by and through and with these reenactments. I don't know that this ever gets answered. can it? or is it too complicated? (Haraway's what counts, for whom? and at what cost? is a similar question. hmmm.)

another fascinating central idea is that of the black box, and how (or if, and for whom) its secrets get un-black-boxed. since reading about this I've been noticing many black boxes in my own experience. all the tech that seems magical, all the systems that seem impenetrable, but all of it usually so functional, even trustworthy. would it be worth it to spend time un-black-boxing some of these? even if I took that time and effort, would it give me more control or authority in some of those situations? like so many everything elses, it depends. King uses the metaphors of scoping and scaling to explain all the levels at which the boxes and their contexts can be inspected. zoom in, zoom up, scroll back and forth, deeper, shallower. spatial metaphors! so endless.

nearer the end, as I recall, King digs into this "the map is not the territory" idea. she says a reenactment can be both map and territory, depending on which purposes we foreground and why. we can look through some things, considering them as representative surfaces, using them for what they point towards or symbolize... or we can look at these surfaces and see what they do as things themselves. I don't know that the map can be separated from its purpose as a representation though, even if we do find it interesting to treat the map as a territory of its own. maybe this is another instance of oscillatio. we switch back and forth between map as map/map as territory. I also wonder what other similarly related pairs can be both themselves and representations. maybe everything?

museums, for example. they are made up of exhibits and displays signifying so many other things. a museum is not a "natural" space or territory, and it can represent many of these, along with many other signifying/map-like artifacts. but even if it is constructed to emulate and point to a dozen other places, times, etc., a museum is a reality separate from those outside realities. and King points out a tension in the differing value of "made" vs. "discovered" artifacts. are the mostly uncharted territories inherently more important than any chart or other technology we might build around or within those territories? do made things lack worthiness? why is that? not everyone can go see the south pole for themselves, or an original invention where it originated, and nobody can go back in time, so the constructed museum space may be our only access point. the differences between looking/understanding at and then through
still exist, anyway.

the section about the Smithsonian exhibits reminded me of Institutional Rhetoric from last fall, and it also reminded me to think of museums as a technology, too--a social and literary technology--inviting, educating, and creating witnesses to various scientific and historical moments, narratives, and "truths." there was a small mention at one point of "science" as an anthropomorphized entity in the display King describes on p. 77. here, the audience sees science recruiting women. the whole field is casually unified into a conscious, progressive whole. we could look at this as metonymy instead of personification... or we could see it both ways, since both are possible interpretations. the rhetorical consequences there would be interesting to come back to.

there is plenty going on in King's book, so I may make another post about it before I move to Bijker and/or Feenberg and/or Benkler. I'll sign off for now with a recurring reference King makes to Susan Leigh Star about not being afraid to make assertions even as we disregard the possibility of objectivity. "We do not abandon our moral commitments even as we simultaneously and intentionally forswear claims to absolute epistemological authority," she says. my reaction to this mixes admiration and questioning puzzlement. how? why not? isn't the intentional abandonment of such authority simultaneously the abandonment of responsibility? do I want to think so, to somehow absolve myself? I'm going to chase this idea around in my head and see if I can figure it out. maybe there will be connections and ideas that answer it in my further readings.

currently reading: 

Bijker - Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change

(I'm seeing some connections between the technological categories Shapin and Schaffer talk about here. the slightly more Continental-Europe-centric view is a neat shift for my brain, too.)

reading next: 

Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity. 

or....

Wealth of Networks

read so far:

Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life.

ModestWitness @ Second_Millenium: FemaleMan meets OncoMouse

Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell