This essay provides a cursory sketch of the circulation of science as a fetish object in critical theory—particularly by way of an attention to the conceptual popularity of science studies and various permutations of object oriented ontologies. It does so to identify how and under what terms scientific knowledge becomes a necessary site of interdisciplinary collaboration with the humanities, and challenges how these interdisciplinary trafficks disguise forms of epistemic priority ceded to the (hard) scientific method. Identifying in this movement a disavowal of racism in science’s conceptual repertoire and its ongoing claims to objective facticity, the essay criticizes contemporary recourse to science as the newest frontier in critical theoretical scholarship. In contrast to this, the essay poses a much more skeptical approach to the ethics and methods by which such projects develop and critically circulate.
Articles by Patrick Michael Teed
Patrick Teed is a PhD Candidate in the Social and Political Thought Programme at York University. Broadly speaking, his research projects focus on abolitionist theory, critical historiographies of racial slavery, anti-Blackness and settler-colonialism, and science and technology studies. His available essays can be found in differences, CR: New Centennial Review, TOPIA, Lateral, and Rhizomes. He is currently guest editing a special issue of TOPIA focusing on critical theoretical approaches to care and cure.
Review of Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory by Cristina Visperas (New York University Press)
In Skin Theory, Cristina Visperas identifies how the captive body in the postwar era is positioned as the ideal test subject. She does so through a thorough interrogation of Albert Kligman’s primarily dermatological human experiments at Holmesburg Prison to argue that racial capture enables the research enterprise. Suturing conversations in Black studies, science and technology studies, and carceral studies, each chapter reads objects in relation to these experiments to argue that grounding its brutal procedures was a visual culture enabled by the figurative uses of the skin.