Another great piece of rhetoric from the queen of political rhetoric:
> In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant. > Hannah Arendt 1969)
As you can see from the quote, the title should be the __Rule by Nobody__ - but that does not read as well in title form. Forgive me.
In the Anthropocene, humanity is faced with a form of epistemological challenge that is not resolved within the euro-descendent cosmology that structures contemporary international trade, politics and academic enquiry. That challenge was anticipated by Nietzsche and discussed at length by Horkheimer and Adorno ([1944] 2006), Marcuse (1969; 1972[1955], 1978; 1991 [1964]) and Bahro (1977): the intellectual elite engaged in the production of organized scientific knowledge are the authors of the EE cosmology. As such, they are responsible, whether implicitly or explicitly, for valorising the current destructive dynamics of the Anthropocene. This implies a moral duty to make virtuous choices concerning the structure and content of the planet’s hegemonic cosmology. Haraway’s (1988, 2016) response, what she calls embodied objectivity, brings the discussion to a place that is compatible with Dewey's ([1929] 1958) epistemology and provides a basis for opening up the collective responsible for constructing this new EE cosmology, to a wider community. Both Dewey’s empirical philosophy and Haraway’s embodied objectivity resist the temptation to slip into a posture on one or the other side of what Cilliers (2005) calls the family fight between radical realism and radical relativism. Instead, they seek to formalise engagement with the inevitability of neuro- cognitive modulation in the act of observing (Dennett 1992). > So, I think my problem, and “our’’ problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness. Harding calls this necessary multiple desire a need for a successor science project and a postmodern insistence on irreducible difference and radical multiplicity of local knowledges. (Haraway 1988, 579)
# See also - Embodied Objectivity