Abstract
This book is about microontologies. Microontologies describes my interest in beginning to think through the parameters of bringing the microcosmos to bear on our approach to social scientific topics. Microontologies refers to a microbial ethics, or, if you will, an ethics that engages seriously with the microcosmos. This book considers microontologies using an interdisciplinary nonmodern epistemology. Along this path I have some excellent company within biophilosophy: Keith Ansell Pearson’s germinal and viroid life, Bruno Latour’s pasteurization of France, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s creative involution; Donna Haraway’s species-meeting, Karen Barad’s meetings with the universe, Vicki Kirby’s telling flesh, Manuel De Landa’s nonlinear history, Elizabeth Wilson’s neural geographies, Alphonso Lingis’s foreign bodies, Elizabeth Grosz’s time travels, Rosalyn Diprose’s corporeal generosity, and more besides.2 Within the fields of earth systems science and microbiology, the researchers at the Lynn Margulis Laboratory where I spent a year introduced me to laboratory techniques, samples and literature concerned with various forms of microbial life. And, of course, the unfathomable numbers of microbes with which I affiliate contribute to my story. (I do not exaggerate to say that my microbial companions in some ways write this story).
Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself King of infinite space.1
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Notes
Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997)
Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999)
Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)
Vicky Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York: Routledge, 1997)
Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve, 2000)
Elizabeth Wilson, Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition (New York and London: Routledge, 1998)
Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1994)
Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005)
Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002).
Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Selected Letters to the Editor’, in The Sokal Hoax, ed. Editors of Lingua Franca (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 59.
Indeed, Alfred North Whitehead described ‘all of Western philosophy’ as ‘a footnote to Plato’ and Martin Heidegger’s more cryptic assessment was that Plato single-handedly set Western philosophy on the dead-end path it still follows today. See Steven L. Goldman, The Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It (Chantilly, VI: The Teaching Company, 2006), 231.
Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 31.
Francis Bacon, The New Organon (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1960), 97.
Norman Campbell, Physics, The Elements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1920).
Ian Hacking, ‘The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences’, in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 52.
Steve Fuller, Philosophy of Science and its Discontents (New York: Guilford Press, 1992), 420.
William I. Thompson, Gaia 2 Emergence: The New Science of Becoming (New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1991), 14
Niels Bohr, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics’, The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr. Vol. 2 Essays 1933–1957 On Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New York: Science Edition Inc, 1949/ 1961), 72.
Cliff Hooker, ‘The Nature of Quantum Mechanical Reality’, in R.G. Colodny, ed., Paradigms and Paradoxes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 156.
Albert Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, ‘Can Quantum-Mechanical Descriptions of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?’ Physical Review 47 (1935): 777–80
Albert Einstein, ‘Physics and Reality’, Journal of Franklin Institute 221 (1936): 349
Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon, 1990).
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993)
Michael Callon and John Law, ‘After the Individual in Society: Lessons on Collectivity From Science, Technology and Society’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 22, no. 2 (1997): 1–11
Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science, Trans. P. Bains (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)
John Law, Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge, 1986)
Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science
Michel Serres, Les Cinq Sens (Paris: Hachette, 1985)
Henri Bergson. Matter and Memory, Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911)
Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006)
Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne, Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (London: Yale University Press, 1985)
Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).
H.M. Collins and Steven Yearley, ‘Epistemological Chicken’, in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 304.
Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, 193. Latour lists the terms he has variously adopted to document the indivisibility of ‘nonsocial’ nature and’ social’ nature: ‘inscription, visualization, translation, trials, mediation, names of action, black-boxing, historicity of things’. ANT’s approach requires science studies practitioners to take actants seriously, as, according to Latour, scientists already do: ‘any scientist worth the name has been thoroughly redefined by the actors he or she has dealt with’. Bruno Latour, ‘For Bloor and Beyond: A Reply to David Bloor’s“Anti-Latour,”’ Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 30, no. 1 (1999): 121
Steve Woolgar, ‘Some Remarks about Positivism: A Reply to Collins and Yearley’, in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 327–42
For an example, see Bruno Latour, ‘A Relativistic Account of Einstein’s Relativity’, Social Studies of Science, 18 (1988): 3–44
Adrian Mackenzie and Andrew Murphie, ‘The Two Cultures Become Multiple? Sciences, Humanities and Everyday Experimentation’, Australian Feminist Studies, 23, no. 55 (2008): 87–100.
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© 2009 Myra J. Hird
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Hird, M.J. (2009). After War. In: The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230242210_1
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