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Have you seen lars von trier's "Antichrist"?
ReplyDeleteI recall reading Modest Witness with a degree of scepticism; I doubt whether Boyle thought of himself as "modest" because Boyle seems to have been at the centre of whatever action was going, in Elizabethan times. Thinkers think about what's going on around them, and Boyle was born into a world of the supernatural we can only dimly grasp from our utilitarian perspective. One of the things which is easy to grasp is that without the Royal interest in money and power there would be no Greenwich observatory, no interest in astrology, and no Edmund Halley, Isaac Newton or Hooke, Flamsteed, Oldenburg and the others. Haraway, perhaps driven by ingrained American contempt for British institutions, doesn't seem to get that.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth herself had great interest in science" that "proved" she could head a church of England. Since she was interested, her subjects were as well.
"Our realm and subjects have been long wanderers, walking astray, whilst they were under the tuition of Romish pastors, who advised them to own a wolf for their head (in lieu of a careful shepherd) whose inventions, heresies and schisms be so numerous, that the flock of Christ have fed on poisonous shrubs for want of wholesome pastures. And whereas you hit us and our subjects in the teeth that the Romish Church first planted the Catholic within our realm, the records and chronicles of our realm testify the contrary; and your own Romish idolatry maketh you liars; witness the ancient monument of Gildas unto which both foreign and domestic have gone in pilgrimage there to offer."
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/elizabeth1.html
Gildas was a 5th century priest who wrote about the fall of Rome's colonies in England. She needed those kinds of histories to justify her grip on power. And all the other stuff produced by Boyle and his contemparies.
Elizabeth I was an interesting person who remade herself into an icon that could be worshipped - the Virgin Queen. Like Haraway in the Cyborg Manifesto, she attempted to place herself outside "salvation history" so she could rule it. A lot of the stuff her subjects, like Boyle, said was to satisfy the political imperatives of Elizabethan England, truly a land under intellectual siege from conservative viewpoints, and ignoring the political dimension of those histories makes for dull reading.
Anonymous: Yes, I have seen *Anti-Christ* and thought that it was an amazing film. Lars von Trier's opening and closing scenes were extremely poetic and stunningly beautiful. The rest of the film perfectly portrayed pain and grief. I think that the way he shifted the 'monstrosity' (if you like) from the female to male psyche was brilliant.
ReplyDeleteSteve: I guess, like Haraway, I was interested in the feminist aspects of women being left out of the 'witnessing' process and thus the knowledge system. What I focussed upon here was just a small amount of the overrall book. It was before I began my PhD and was the piece of writing I undertook to be accepted in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. I was accepted to do my PhD there, but they could not find me a supervisor. So I walked back into my old Department Art History and Cinema and changed my PhD into investigating the posthuman. Like your points about the Elizabethian times, however, don't know that Haraway actually 'ruled' anything, but she is definately a significant theorist who will be remembered for her influences.