The strength of objects

“In talk about meaning and interpretation the physical body stays untouched.  All interpretations, whatever their number, are interpretations of.  Of what?  Of some matter that is projected somewhere.  Of some nature that allows culture to attribute all these shapes to it.  This is built into the very metaphor of ‘perspectives’ itself.  This multiplies the observers – but leaves the object observed alone.  All alone.  Untouched.  It is only looked at.  As if it were in the middle of a circle.  A crowd of silent faces assembles around it.  They seem to get to know the object by their eyes only.  Maybe they have ears that listen.  But no on ever touches the object.  In a strange way that doesn’t make it recede and fade away, but makes it very solid.  Intangibly strong.”

-Annemarie Mol, 2002 (The Body Multiple.  Durham NC: Duke Pg 10)

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

Moral (vs. Cultural?) Relativism

“Consider for example the doctrine of moral relativism.  By this I mean the doctrine that, starting from the (entirely reasonable) premise that one cannot fully understand any action except in the context of the actor’s cultural universe, concludes that as a consequence, no one has the right to stand in judgment over any action committed by someone with a fundamentally different world view…this is a doctrine that could only really emerge as a product of imperialism.  It could only have been produced by members of an elite population whose dominance over the world was so complete and so reliable that they could live their lives in full confidence that no one with a fundamentally different world view would ever be in a position of power over them…Pretenses to some kind of moral superiority, based on their unwillingness to morally condemn ‘the Other’, it seems to me, are often entirely underpinned by tacit support for real walls to shut real other people out…what basis would we have to criticize the structures of power  in the world, unless we at least admit that everyone in the world shares certain things in common?”

-David Graeber’s ‘Anti-Relativist Diatribe’, 2007 (Lost People.  Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.  Pg 386-7)

(Multi)cultural relativism

“The impression of great open-mindedness given by multiculturalism should not hide the price that peoples had to pay for the preservation of their existence in the form of culture. “You possess meaning, perhaps,” they were told, “but you no longer have reality, or else you have it merely in the symbolic, subjective, collective, ideological form of mere representations of a world that escapes you, although we are able to grasp it objectively. And don’t be mistaken, you have the right to cherish your culture, but all others likewise have this same right, and all cultures are valued by us equally.” In this combination of respect and complete indifference, we may recognize the hypocritical condescension of cultural relativism…To the eyes of the cultural relativist, those cultural differences make no real difference anyway, since, somewhere, nature continues to unify reality by means of laws that are indisputable and necessary, even if they are not as charming and meaningful as these delightful productions which human whim and arbitrary categories have engendered everywhere.”

-Bruno Latour, 2002 (War of the Worlds: what about peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.  Pg 14-15)

Relativism, simply put.

“Cultural relativism is first and last an interpretive anthropological—that is to say, methodological— procedure. It is not the moral argument that any culture or custom is as good as any other, if not better. Relativism is the simple prescription that, in order to be intelligible, other people’s practices and ideals must be placed in their own historical context, understood as positional values in the field of their own cultural relationships rather than appreciated by categorical and moral judgments of our making. Relativity is the provisional suspension of one’s own judgments in order to situate the practices at issue in the historical and cultural order that made them possible. It is in no other way a matter of advocacy.“

-Marshall Sahlins, 2002. (Waiting for Foucault, Still. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Pg46)