[Xmca-l] Re: The Ideological Footprint of Artifacts

[Annalisa Aguilar]

It occurred to me that there is a dialogical manifestation here emerging (or...merging?) on this list on the fracturing/converging notions of ideology, which may be, on a sunny day, themselves ideologies of ideologies! 

I am of the ideology that science is not a rendering of pure truth, but through acts of discovery, a rendering of human knowledge of the world as it is (objective knowledge out there, but perhaps as yet unknown to humans, women and men alike), as we have found it so far, and how we have been able to explain it. These explanations cannot be articulated without cultural practices, as scientists not only work in labs (as depicted in the rendering of Dr. Frankenstein, mad, and unbalanced), but they work in the world (in acts of describing as Darwin did, a naturalist), and they also work together (when forming scientific communities of practice, either by discipline or by schools of thought (and why we say "school").

Oddly I've been reading Feyerebend lately, who has been called the Enemy of Science, but I think not, as much of what he said, ends up to have developed into the way scientists think about themselves and of sciences. That apparently he was something of a fortune teller who was dismissed summarily, as many renegades of thought tend to be treated (ad hominum).

It made me wonder if the word "ideology" (and its friendly adjective counterpart, "ideological") is something like the knife. A knife can be useful for cutting a rope of bondage, whittling to pass the time, or retrieving a slice from a loaf of bread. But it can also be used as a weapon, to harm another person, or in the abstract, groups of others to stab, dismember, alienate, and, that nice cliché, mince words. 

Perhaps a cliché is an ideology that has become far too conventional that it makes us groan, if you are groaning, but I think it's more about the pun, an puns always cause groaning, or maybe "growning."

Of course, to continue with my metaphor, to cut someone's heart out is an act of violence, when done with a knife. But then a surgeon is still doing a greater good if he plans to transplant a heart to save the dying patient, never sure if the patient will survive the surgery on the table or the operation overall.

So it seems to be a matter of context and also motivation or intention how one *should* use the word itself. 

But then maybe the identification of *should* is that shadow that David means. That from the inside of the ideology, the *should* means "why wouldn't you do it any other way?" Whereas from the outside of the ideology the *should* is taken as an authoritarian missive meaning, "you should to this…or else."

Even on a cloudy day the sun does shine, and if not for the sun we couldn't see the clouds, even if we can't see the sun, unless it is night, of course, where there are no shadows, unless of course there is moonlight!

On that happy note of exceptions,

Kind regards,

Annalisa