Rhetoric and Technology – ENC 6421

Haraway discusses the work of Shapin and Schaffer, whose Leviathan and the Air Pump examined Robert Boyle’s design of an air pump to reveal the essential components of scientific objectivity in the seventeenth century. The scientists proposed a “modest witness,” an observer-experimenter whose transparency would not affect  the experiment. She argues that the authors (who were credited with showing that social factors and ideology influenced Boyle’s work) overlooked the fact that the “modest witness” was always male. This strong social tendency to see male as “generic” is problematic, of course:  “They took his masculine gender for granted without much comment. Like the stubbornly reproduced lacunae in the writing of many otherwise innovative science studies scholars, the gap in their analysis seems to depend on the unexamined assumption that gender is a preformed, functionalist category…” (226). She later points out that some scholars have noted the “proliferation of violent, misogynist imagery in many of the chief documents of the Scientific Revolution. The modest man had a least a tropic taste for the rape of nature” (233). Haraway unveils the sinister side of the “nature as female” trope, as well as the masculine culture deluding itself as “the culture of no culture.”  (note to mwz- I know this is a bit scant but I’ve been struggling to read it and write about it because I’m having an arthritis flare and have had to up my pain meds. I will re-read it when I’m clearer– Donna Haraway is very interesting.)