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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not a tale of modern science. Instead, the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creature shows that the premodern, alchemical dream of animating lifeless things returns after science has studied its “realities of little worth.” If Frankenstein speaks to us today, it is because today’s technosciences carry forward the alchemical dream. Whereas science requires a calm and peaceful state of mind, Victor’s technoscience – then and now – is driven by a supernatural enthusiasm. Accordingly we may find that even the supposedly ordinary nanotechnologies and materials sciences of our day and age are not “befitting the human mind” – long before one seeks to create artificial life. 

Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine provides an extended critique of the notion that technoscientific facts should function as impartial arbiters in international conflicts. Chapter 6, “The Geographic Production of Knowledge”, draws on this overarching motif to explore its significance for broader research on knowledge and expertise. In particular, it highlights the need for researchers to materially alter the process of research in order to enable more heterogeneous landscapes for knowledge production. Returning to the themes of internationalism, landscape, and symmetry from chapter 1, this chapter also critically draws on the work of iconic poets and social justice activists like Mahmoud Darwish, Audre Lorde, and Nawal El Saadawi. It explores the following questions: How can researchers reflexively reshape landscapes in order to allow for more socially just forms of knowledge? What are the challenges to solidarity and cooperation due to geographical imbalances of power? The resulting analysis returns to the overall notion of geographic production, while also indicating a further layer of reflexivity for critical theory: the practice of material reflexivity, or awareness of one’s own situated position in landscapes with respect to power asymmetries—asymmetries that include international and economic hierarchies within academia itself.

Chapter 3 explores the implications of narratives stemming from the explosion of Brazil’s VLS satellite launch rocket in Alcântara in 2003. The explosion killed twenty-one technicians on the launchpad but the official explanations have left many unsatisfied. The chapter examines interpretations of the explosion and analyzes three implicit imaginaries of progress and national development: the nationalist, the neoliberal, and the redistributive. The importance of the launch to the Brazilian space program, the event’s gruesome outcome, the opacity of its causes, and the uncertainty surrounding its investigation have made the event a metonym for different groups’ ideas about the nation-state’s possible and desirable futures. This chapter notes that right-wing nationalisms have been largely ignored in the scholarship in Latin America. It also argues that science-and-technology studies have done a poor job of analyzing the relations between technoscience and inequality. And the chapter shows how the utopias of spaceflight are themselves inflected by inequality. Globally dominant nations and corporations most often claim to represent all of humanity in the dream of spaceflight. For aspirational powers, such as Brazil, however, claims to stand in for all of humanity are rare, and spaceflight is more often conceived as a project of convergence or profit.

Focusing on “Science in Action,” published in 1987, this chapter discusses the key concepts of Bruno Latour’s anthropology of science, e.g. “technoscience,” “inscription device,” “immutable mobiles,” and “centres of calculation.” It points out connections between Latour’s interest in scientific imagery and similar interests in media studies and the history of art. At the same time, it draws attention to important role played in this context by the criticism of linguistics in authors such as Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Technologies of datafication exert their societal influence through a recurring modern fantasy of “honeymoon objectivity,” wherein technoscience might purify complex social problems and human biases to produce a stable grounding for judgment. Although fulfillment is constantly deferred, this fantasy enrolls society in a fast-expanding data market. Problems of criminal justice, political will, self-knowledge, and economic success are subordinated to the logic of surveillance capitalism and its search for meaning-indifferent, commercially recombinable data.