A Deep Text and a Simple Text: Compare and Contrast.
1.
IMMUNITY CAN ALSO BE CONCEIVED
in terms of shared specificities; of the semi-permeable self able to engage
with other (human and non-human, inner and outer), but always with finite
consequences; of situated possibilities and impossibilities of individuation
and identification; and of partial fusions and dangers. The problematic multiplicities of postmodern
selves, so potently figured AND repressed in the lumpy discourses of
immunology, must be brought into other emerging Western and multi-cultural
discourses on health, sickness, individuality, humanity, and death.
______ from Donna J. Haraway, Biopolitics
of Postmodern Bodies, SIMIANS,
CYBORGS, AND WOMEN: THE REINVENTION (New
York: Routledge, 1991), p225.
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2. WALK
A FEW STEPS AWAY FROM THE FACULTIES OF SCIENCE, engineering, and medicine. Walk
towards the faculty of arts. Here, you will meet
another world, one where falsities and
lies are manufactured in industrial quantities. Here, some professors are
hired, promoted, or given power for teaching that reason is worthless,
empirical evidence unnecessary, objective truth nonexistent, basic science a
tool of either capitalists or male domination, and the like. Here, we find
people who reject all the knowledge painstakingly acquired over the past 5
million years. . . . This fraud has got to be stopped, in the name of
intellectual honesty. Let them do whatever they please, but not in schools,
because schools are supposed to be places of learning.
We
should expel these charlatans from the university.
______ Mario Bunge, professor of
philosophy and head of the Foundations and
Philosophy of Science Unit at McGill
University in Montreal. The quotation
is taken from his lecture at the conference "The Flight from Science and
Reason" sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences on 31 May - 2 June
1995.
For
an example of what Professor Bunge had in mind, see Text 1 above.
Ralph A. Raimi
December 10, 2004