Surprise!

“Philosophers who leave their studies are likely to be surprised”

-Annemarie Mol, 2008 (The Logic of Care.  New York: Routledge.  Pg. 9)

Partial-Vision

“the alternative to relativism is not totalization and single vision, which is always finally the unmarked category whose power depends on systematic narrowing and obscuring.  The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology.  Relativism is a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally.  The ‘equality’ of positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical inquiry.  Relativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalization in the ideologies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective both make it impossible to see well.  Relativism and totalization are both ‘god tricks’ promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully, common myths in rhetorics surrounding science.  But it is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspectives that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective inquiry rests”

-Donna Haraway, 1988 (“Situated Knowledges”  Feminist Studies 14(3) Pg. 584.)

epistemologically otherwise

“if we embrace epistemological relativism we neither have to give up our concern for proper ways of finding out about the world, not…abandon our political and ethical commitments.  To be a relativist – to recognize multivocality – implies no obligatory commitment to immorality or opportunism.  Neither does it necessarily lead us to indifference to distribution.  Rather…it may lead us to an important form of intellectual caution: the sense that all knowledges are shaped, contingent, and in some other world could be otherwise.”

-John Law, 1991 (“Introduction: monsters, machines and sociotechnical relations” In A Sociology of Monsters.  New York: Routledge.  Pg 6

Emergency history

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.”

-Walter Benjamin, 1940 (‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’)

Thought so.

“…the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar…knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience…Every thought which is not idle, however, bears branded on it the impossibility of its full legitimation, as we know in dreams that there are mathematics lessons, missed for the sake of a blissful morning in bed, which can never be made up”

-Theodor Adorno, “Gaps”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 80-1)