Yaron Ezrahi

"Any stabilities are temporary and local. It is in these highly situated encounters that we all are producing knowledges, we are both subjects and objects to each other, neither subjective nor objective. " Excerpts from Traweek's essay in Choreographing History, a book nobody is going to read except you are a fan of one of the contributors.

Same with Yaron Ezrahi and Sheila Jasanoff. They are good writers and prominent scholars, but who is going to read their 400-page rambling on the instrumental functions of science in justifying political purposes in liberal-democratic states? Let alone the differences between the history of republicanism and the history of instrumentalism in Machiavelli's writings. I understand the differences between 1) spontaneous equilibrium, 2) educating free educated citizen in decentralized democratic state, and 3) generating science knowledge hat constrains and defends public action in centralized democratic state. But what is the point? I mean, who cares? When Cyndy asked Clark whom is/are Ezrahi writing for, Clark's first question is "his tenure committee". Then he noticed the negativity he just projected so he qualified the answer a bit. But the immediate answer is usually the most candid, revealing one. Yes, nobody cares about these stuff ok? Ezrahi and Jasanoff have years of experience and firm academic positions to afford writing in highly theoretical, esoteric terms, but it's not going to work for us, the young grad students who are building up the careers.

So gimme a break from deep-level theorizing, gimme a break from Knorr-Cetina's style of writing. Jasanoff's style is more of a middle ground. You can skip the body part and always manage to get by. This is a lesson for me. Read a book a day. Skim as fast as you can, and if you cannot get the points, don't worry. It's not your fault. Because noone else is gonna spend more time than I do on these lit. either (other than fellow grad students). It might reflect the shallowness of the material culture, it is true nonetheless.