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Liz and I attended the lecture on "standpoint matters," sponsored last Wednesday night by the Philosophy Department. Acknowledging that "archeology is always a little slow,"Alison Wylie (who is a feminist philosopher of science @ the University of Washington) gave a detailed account of the s-l-o-w accretion of feminist methodologies in archeology. She attributed the belated development to two anxieties: a fear of (popular stereotypes of --'70s radical/cultural) feminism, and a perception of objectivity as "value freedom."

Wylie met the latter objection by "reconceptualizing objectivity"; she actually enumerated 5 versions, types O1 through O4+, from a belief in the "really real" through the action of "interpreting epistemic virtues in context." Her finale involved taking "a feminist standpoint in gender archeoogy," and included references to many of the ideas we've been discussing in our class, such as Harraway's "situated knowledges."

So: all that was quite useful. Things got even more interesting during the question and answer period, when I told her about our course's moving on beyond standpoint epistemology to Barad's "agential realism." And then--Samantha, you should have been there!--she said that she had little patience with Barad's dismissal of the "staticness of standpoint," nor with her "far-out ontological theory: the agency of quarks has nothing to do with the sort of political agency that feminists care about." Not wanting to get into a private argument, I let things lay until the q&a ended. But afterwards, I went up to tell her about Liz's explanation of "causal agency"--the idea of cause and effect which connects the action of quarks to the actions of humans. She was impressed.

Me too. Thanks so much for our recent most illuminating discussions--I'm learning a ton from you guys!

(Quark: a character in the Star Trek universe)