Creatures of Prometheus: Gender and the Politics of Technology by Timothy V. Kaufman-OsbornReview by: Donald BeggsPolitical Theory, Vol. 27, No. 5 (Oct., 1999), pp. 716-719Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/192278 .

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BOOK IN REVIEW

CREATURES OF PROMETHEUS: GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF TECHNOLOGYby Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. xi + 292 pp. $22.95 (paper)

For all its soaring obscurity, Romanticism exposed many of the Enlighten- ment's limitations and liabilities in understanding nature and culture. To see mechanical causality as nature's only way and instrumental reason as cul- ture's best way distorts-and often damages-knower and known, ends and means. We should instead see persons as ongoing projects embedded in rela- tional wholes, not just as rational animals; we should see languages as expressive media and fecund resources, not just as representational tools.

With a Romantic fervor guided by a reluctantly postmodern pragmatism, Creatures of Prometheus seeks to expose the Enlightenment's insidious resi- dues among theorists such as Elaine Scarry, Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, and Richard Rorty. To see these harmful distortions, Kaufman-Osborn argues, we must first remember that our world is a web whose filaments are habits and practices. We arise and develop as we do, and we make what we do and use things the way we do, because of our shifting places in that vast web. Taking "artifact" in the most general sense possible, so that practices as well as teapots count, Kaufman-Osborn insists that persons are artifactual effects of cultures' webs and conversely. Why, then, do Enlightenment-type problems persist? Because we have failed to attend to the implications of the fact that artifacts are agents as much as agents are artifacts. This core equivalence rests on a Jamesian belief in the underlying "ontological continuity (but neither the identity nor the reducibility) of nature, experience, and language" (p. 148). All existents form a "mutually constitutive relational totality" (p. 141), and any "distinction between human and artisanal artifacts is analytic" (p. 152), not representational, and so has no ontological import.

Some readers may worry that so thick a "speculative ontology" (p. 155), a "pragmatist reformulation of Nietzsche's relational ontology" (p. 178), is ill suited to the human-scale and concrete collective problems that pragmatists since Dewey have urged us to focus on. Because Kaufman-Osborn's objec- tive is to polemicize against abstraction, he is very sensitive to its corrosive effects. His humanizing tactic is to cycle through numerous narratives,

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mostly ancient myth and drama, but sprinklings of sometimes acrid auto- biography find their way in too. So this book is not political theory in the usual sense of arguing about justice or postliberalism. While Prometheus swarms with dense ideas, it is also richly populated with gods and mortals whose antics are intended as political illustrations.

Supporting both the ontology and the polemic is the view that experience- James's "buzzing and blooming confusion"-is meaningful prior to any articulation. Experience in this sense lights the ontological way between real- ism (and other essentialisms) and radical constructionism (and various ideal- isms), the twin progeny of Cartesianism (each enshrining one half of the object-subject dichotomy). As an antirealism, pragmatism sails free of the naive conundrums of realism. And Kaufman-Osborn's social-constructionist pragmatism avoids the discursivism of radical constructionism because it "is ultimately grounded in something other than itself' (p. 145). As the stuff of experience, the intelligibility of relations is never exhausted by their articula- tions. So, when intelligible moments of experience are discursively torn from the buzzing relational whole, their "ground in nature," then only some of their possibilities can be articulated. The constant Cartesian danger is in taking our accounts as complete, believing that reality is cut-and-dried. But while the book's positive theses depend on affirming the continuity of nature, experi- ence, and language, all of its significant critical claims tacitly deny that conti- nuity (as I shall explain more fully below). And this curious fracture even manifests itself explicitly, as when Kaufman-Osborn quotes approvingly James's own denial of the continuity claim: "concepts are not parts of reality" because the former are fixed and the latter always fluid (p. 157).

So it comes about that in critiquing others, especially their distinctions, Kaufman-Osborn repeatedly charges that their concepts are not merely lim- ited in this or that respect but that they have succumbed to the Cartesian dan- ger of "abstracting language." They tend to make a "simple equation of avail- able discursive means with . . . experience" (p. 161); they conflate distinctions with experience itself. Even to refer to the impact of politics on technology, or vice versa, is a Cartesianism others fall prey to because they "take for granted the adequacy of the discursive distinction between the poli- tics and the technology" (p. 63). But "adequacy" to do what?

Is it Cartesian of Elaine Scarry to say that chairs are either animate or not (p. 45)? To answer this question, we should learn whether she requires that predicate, or perhaps all predicates, to exclude the middle necessarily. Or does she use such exclusion only in some language games or in some mixes of them? Kaufman-Osborn does not pursue the quarry to the ground: it is suffi- cient to observe that she uses the distinction between animate and inanimate to find a "Cartesian residue." But even Dewey recognized legitimate uses of

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718 POLITICAL THEORY / October 1999

the law of the excluded middle. Rorty and Wittgenstein are said to be Carte- sian to the extent that they think languages can help us to get things done, as tools do (p. 119). But it is one thing to say, against Herder and other Roman- tics, that language is never more than a tool, and it is quite another to say, as any anti-essentialist should, that sometimes languages work like tools. If we sometimes have good reason to wish logic to constrain our discourse, or we sometimes wish "pass the brick" to bring a brick, and if these are "Cartesian residues" or even "residual Aristotelianism in Cartesianism" (p. 109), I can- not see how we perpetuate Enlightenment excesses.

In ascribing simple confusions and complacency to others, Prometheus sets up a series of straw men. None of the authors criticized would disagree that "experience ... is neverjAlly exhausted by ... our articulation" (p. 157, emphasis added). In discussions of gender and technology, even tacit claims of completeness, tidy boundaries, and so on are literally rare. Nevertheless, to Kaufman-Osborn, the objects and relations others describe appear to them "as if they were determinately bounded and so self-contained. But that appearance, the tacit claim of existing articulations to completeness and finality, is always belied by the web" (p. 166). But focus sufficient to expose harmful "Cartesian residues" is not established, even roughly, by contrasting it to pretensions of "completeness and finality." The root problem in all this is Kaufman-Osborn's distinction between "representational" ("ontological") and "analytic" ("functional") distinctions. Because of the way he interprets continuity, he denies that representational distinctions can be instantiated. But this means his distinction is vacuous and functions only to set up straw men. When he says that we "all too often abstract from" the web (p. 136), he must mean only that we all too often engage in discourse. That seems to me to be a symptom of what Socrates in the Phaedo called misology, a disgust with discourse, which is itself a precursor to misanthropy.

Since persons, including their gender, are artifacts of the web, and since "the real is ultimately a complex political product" (p. 9), then, Kaufman- Osborn argues, technology is always "implicated" in gender and vice versa. And if genders are politically charged artifacts, what then? Well, things and characteristics, teapots and gender, are social constructions. Unfortunately, bringing this commonplace to our attention yields only the conclusion that others should produce detailed accounts of those mutually fraught relations that are the web's gender and technology. This recommendation is the book's stated political purpose (pp. 28 If).

With this, the "Cartesian-residues" trope turns on itself. Kaufman-Osborn wishes to avoid the mistake of making either large or concrete political claims in these matters since such articulation would take him to the brink of "pernicious abstraction" (p. 280) from the web of experience. So he thinks

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the most he should attempt is to recommend that others study these problem- atic processes. It would not have been superfluous for an author in the early 1980s to announce that her purpose in writing a book about gender and the politics of technology was to encourage detailed studies of their reciprocal effects. But now such work appears regularly.' Is it plausible that few such studies engage in "nuanced explorations" and that many of them trade, even unwittingly, in "determinate essences" (p. 280)?

In Plato's Protagoras, Socrates's dialectic of distinctions contends with Protagoras's rhetoric of mythologizing. Hoping to establish an advantage, Protagoras tells the story of Prometheus stealing fire and wisdom in the prac- tical arts (entechne sophia) from Hephaestus and Athena and then giving them to humankind. Later, seeing that these were insufficient for political life, Zeus sent Hermes (god of boundaries, e.g., distinctions) to mortals to give them justice and shame that they might live in cities. Prometheus sub- stitutes Protagoras's Prometheus for Hermes as source of the art of politics (p. 204). This error symbolizes for me the incipient misology mentioned a moment ago.

-Donald Beggs Arizona State University

NOTE

1. Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calver, eds., Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Every- day Life (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1997).

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