THE SLEEP OF REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS

1. THE SLEEP OF REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS Silvia Gherardi Research Unit on Cognition, Organizational Learning and Aesthetics (Rucola) University of Trento Via Verdi 26 E-mail:silvia.gherardi@soc.unitn.it

2. THE SLEEP OF REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS • The title comes from Albrech Durer (1500) • But what was the meaning of ‘reason’ for Durer? • Reason was the opposite of fooly (see his woodcuts for The ship of Fools, 1494) • I want to explore the contemporary meaning for reason/monsters/technology

3. Let’s start with reason…. • It is argued that science and technology • become monsters when they sever their • connections with the social conditions of • their production (Haraway, 1991, Law, 1991, Star, 1991)

4. ……..to arrive at the drifting technology • ‘By drifting I mean a slight or significant shift of the role and function in concrete situations of usage, that the technology is called to play, compared to the planned, pre-defined and assigned objectives and requirements (Ciborra, 1996).

5. Technology tends to drift when puts to use….. • Drifting technology…. is therefore the process trough which technology goes when it leaves reason and drifts away? • In drifting does it become a monster?

6. On drifting and becoming monstrous • What are the implicit imaginaries behind the metaphor of the drifting technology….. • And the tecnological monsters?

7. Drifting…. • The etymological dictionary says…. • To drift = the movement or course of something drifting • Drifting= to float or be driven along by wind, wawes or currents

8. Wind, wawes or currents….. • Are blind forces….. • Bear neither responsibility, nor intention…. • Are not under the human domain • Are independent from human will

9. Drifting technology • The imaginary thus conveyed is one in which the technology…… …takes the adversities of life lying down…. Once technology has been procreated, it drifts away from the Father, the Father’s Law and the Father’s responsibility

10. Technology as the post-modern monster • Historically the biologists have examined the phenomena of deviation from the norm in order to explain the ‘normal’ structure of the process of development. • If the drift is the monster, what is the ‘normal’? • The monster is the Other of the Normal

11. Teratology • Teratology is the science of monsters, which tries solve the enigma of ‘normality’ exploring the devalued alterity of monsters. • Many feminist scholars have studied the fascination that the reproduction of monsters exerted over science (Braidotti, 1994, Haraway, 1992, Kristeva, 1981, Irigaray, 1985). • The power and mystery of female reproduction is at stake, both in the imaginary and in the bio-tech.

12. On monsters…… • The latin etymon of monster is ‘monstrum’= what can be put on show… • Leslie Fiedler (1978) studied how from Europe to Coney Island the ‘freaks’ have been made spectacular • The greeck etymon ‘teras/teratos’ refers both to a prodigy and a demon • The duplicity of the monster recalls both science and fantasy

13. The monster as the Same and the Other • The monster is not completely alien to us, nor it is completely familiar…. • It helps us to understand the paradox of ‘difference’ as something which generates fears (Braidotti, 1996). • Its ‘familiar strangeness’ bear an analogy with racism and sexism (the woman, the black, the homosexual).

14. Monster or Cyborg? • Bio-tecnologies have changed the fantasies associated with the bodies and the technology. • In the postmodern situation classic ‘reason’ cannot be assumed as representative of all the human rationalities.

15. Human and non-human alligment • In a postmodern sensibility the bondaries between human and non-human are blurred and agency need to be reframed as a property of an action-net. • The metaphor of technological translation can bring agency back, where drifting was hidding it.

16. Technology in modern and postmodern representations • The movie Metropolis can be taken as the representation of the modern fear of the power of science and technology. The she-robot is the symbol of ambivalence. • Blade Runner can be taken as representative of postmodern fears. The androids are superior to humans but live shorter. Aliens become human and the boundaries between human and non-human are eroded.

17. The translation metaphor • in the translation model a command is obeyed – if it is obeyed – and an innovation or idea is adopted because it is ‘passed’ from actor to actor via translation agents who have their own interest in performing the operation (Latour, 1989)

18. THE OVAL BALL • A technology, like an oval ball, needs to be passed from one player to another along “a chain” of people that may act in a number of ways: they may take it, pass it on, or drop it altogether. The technology/ball receives the force to be passed from the interest and motivation of each player. What we are interested when we look at a rugby match is not so much the ball itself as much as the process of taking the ball forward, the choreographies and strategies that the collective uses to take the ball to the goal.

19. TRANSLATION IN SPACE AND MEANINGS • Translation is both the movement of an entity in space and time as well as its translation from one context to another. Any translation is the result of the active work of an array of heterogeneous entities that in the process find a place or are locked into place. The set of entities that enter into the translation (not only the rugby players, but also the grass, the lights, the referee, his whistle, the poles marking the goal, the wind that deviates the ball, etc) are called both action-net and actor-network

20. AN EXAMPLE OF TRANSLATION • A case-study of e-health will illustrate how a group of General Practitioners which should have used a new tool, were de facto excluded by its use, but appropriate the new technology inventing their own use of it.

21. Discussion The end product of a drift is an unwated and unexpected result. A monster for those who created the technology. A fated event: a prodigy and a demom. The end product of a translation is the active appropriation of a technology which has been put in social use. We are already cyborg.