The Vessel of Knowledge

I am currently working on an idea of introducing my dissertation through The Vessel of Knowledge. The idea derives from a speech given by the vice dean of my faculty at the welcome meeting when I started my PhD-program. He used a metaphor for the research process we were about to begin as the construction of a ship which we had to board and let go already upon starting to build it.

I would like to attach this image to the idea of moving within and through a relentless artifactualism, which forbids any direct si(gh)tings of nature (Donna Haraway), as well as to the theory of The Dream Society (Rolf Jensen), in which he introduces his visions of the society following the information society and an economy (Google definition) based upon the marketing of stories and emotions.

I will follow the idea of The Vessel of Knowledge through the emotional markets of the dream society. I will use it as a technology capable of producing enough noise and friction to allow for an analysis of hidden actors within the material practices of stabilizing meanings and thus producing knowledge (see Haraway 2004, 335, 63, 77). At page 77 of The Haraway Reader, Donna Haraway introduces the idea of a travel machine functioning also as a map. Her choice falls on A. J. Greimas' semiotic square, picked for its ability to generate meanings very noisily. Likewise, The Vessel of Knowledge is my means of traveling through, while mapping, artifactualism to the emotional markets of Dream Society (Jensen 1999, 51).

Through its journey, The Vessel of Knowledge will collect materials used to elaborate the figure, as of now I have thought of using the figure to enter empirical fields enabling us to navigate back and forth between Information Society and Dream Society.

Chapter two of The Dream Society presents six emotional market profiles:

1. Adventures for Sale
2. The Market for Togetherness, Friendship, and Love
3. The Market for Care
4. The Who-Am-I Market
5. The Market for Peace of Mind
6. The Market for Convictions

I am only beginning to explore what my ensemble of empirical fields will consist of. The previously mentioned The Passion of The Christ (TM) Tear Bottle will be tested as an entrance into the Market for Peace of Mind. Likewise, I think of testing the coupling of people who sell stories about science (like Peter Lund Madsen) with The Market for Convictions, the prostitute Susanne with The Market for Togetherness, Friendship, and Love, the Web 2.0 phenomenon with The Who-Am-I Market, and I would like to introduce the study in the light of Clipper Odyssey and its journey into the Pacific Ocean and several trips into exotically staged islands. I still haven't ideas for The Market for Care, but I wonder if a private hospice would serve the purpose here.

I hope that these ideas will be useful for telling a story providing rich and varied insights about human existence, sociotechnical actornetworks, as well as situated studies of easily overseen privileged locations (Google Scholar suggestions on 'politics of location'). I guess that I now need only to learn the magic words allowing this, or something similar or better, to happen.

The Passion of The Christ Tear Bottle

A week ago or so, I found myself immersed in the idea of the emotional markets of Dream Society, especially the Peace of Mind market. I am not fully aware of how, but I think that I was searching ways of understanding these future markets in which emotions are of highest value.

When I am just curious about something, I like to use Google a lot. I do define-searches, image searches, I look for appropriate gadgets for iGoogle, I use a set of notebooks to collect interesting bits and pieces encountered throughout Cyberspace, I search the video directory for animated inspiration, I generally just like and use Google for a whole lot of purposes.

On the journey during which I found this curious artifact, The Passion of The Christ (trademarked) Tear Bottle, I just came from a site that I found by following the first hit of an image search for "who am I?". From there I entered into the realms of The Passion of The Christ, the dispute about its excessive use of violence, and a response from Mel Gibson to that critique. I also found a merchandise section and immediately thought about The Peace of Mind Market of Dream Society. It sat at the lower left corner of the store display, and it caught my attention right away, so I followed it into Tear Catcher Gifts. Before coming here, I knew nothing about tear catchers, their gendered histories, their connections to Christ. Neither did I know anything of The Enduring Word Tablet (trademarked). To keep this story at a reasonable pace, let me just round it up by saying that this artifact so lived up to my expectations of what to find when visiting the markets for peace of mind. And along with a tray in which "Psalm 56:8" ("Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?") is etched in gold, I ordered this artifact to place at my desk in the office. I had to spend that money. The meanings this artifact attracts are so messed up and cacophonic that I had to own it.

I expect the package to arrive within the week, and then I have plenty of time to plan my research of it before my next paper is due. My next paper is the assignment for the course on Feminist Science and Technology Studies I attended a few weeks ago in Trondheim, Norway. The paper will continue where the previous concluded, by taking up the question of my reasons for entering the fields of my project. In the previous paper, I used writing as a method of inquiry as a means of discussing autobiography in feminist research (at least, I assume that this will be the case since I believe that I have the paper thought out well enough for that to happen), in the following I will continue developing this method now focused on my reasons for interest in the stuff that dreams are made of. My main theoretical ressources of the paper are The Promises of Monsters - a regerenarative politics for Inappropriate/d Others and chapter two of Dream Society. Another set of theoretical ressources stem from actornetwork theory and philosophy of technology. My methodological inspiration is drawn from feminist interdisciplinary studies. I will move inspired by virtual ethnography, multisited ethnography, science and technology studies, website analysis, film studies and empirical philosophy of technology (or at least, I hope that I will be able to get around all that as it all seems so relevant and interesting).

I don't know yet how I will narrate this paper. I think that I will make use of immersion, setting the ideas found in the definition search results into play through the ideas covered in the Promises of Monsters which Donna Haraway introduces this way:

"The Promises of Monsters" will be a mapping exercise and travelogue through mind-scapes and landscapes of what may count as nature in certain local/global struggles.

These contests are situated in a strange, allochronic time-the time of myself and my readers in the last decade of the second Christian millenium-and in a foreign, allotopic place-the womb of a pregnant monster, here, where we are reading and writing.

The purpose of this excursion is to write theory, i.e., to produce a patterned vision of how to move and what to fear in the topography of an impossible but all-too-real present, in order to find an absent, but perhaps possible, other present. I do not seek the address of some full presence; reluctantly, I know better.

Like Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, however, I am committed to skirting the slough of despond and the parasite-infested swamps of nowhere to reach more salubrious environs.

The theory is meant to orient, to provide the roughest sketch for travel, by means of moving within and through a relentless artifactualism, which forbids any direct si(gh)tings of nature, to a science fictional, speculative factual, SF place called, simply, elsewhere.

At least for those whom this essay addresses, "nature" outside artifactualism is not so much elsewhere as nowhere, a different matter altogether.

Indeed, a reflexive artifactualism offers serious political and analytical hope.

This essay's theory is modest. Not a systematic overview, it is a little siting device in a long line of such craft tools. Such sighting devices have been known to reposition worlds for their devotees-and for their opponents. Optical instruments are subject-shifters. Goddess knows, the subject is being changed relentlessly in the late twentieth century.

I will use this article combined with some thoughts Haraway expresses in an interview published in the Haraway Reader (conducted in part by two of my current colleagues) about the importance of paying attention to the silenced contributors to the knowledge we provide.

I hope to be able to make a convincing argument that I should treat The Dream Society as a technology for choosing the empirical fields of my study. And then I should call for a deeper investigation of the seamless web of partially connected technological and non-technological actors of my project, including the researcher herself. And then I have something left in the oven for my paper on philosophy of technology. What I hope is that I will be able to use ideas and materials from these three forthcoming papers to sketch a paper which is suitable as a contribution to the Centre for STS-Studies' series of Working Papers. I do recommend that you take a look at the papers available for download at the web page. They are all very interesting commentaries of what STS-Studies are about.