A Further Decisive Refutation of the Assumption That Political Action Depends on the "Truth" and a Suggestion That We Need to Go beyond This Level of Debate: A Reply to Rosalind Gill

Abstract

Gill (1996 [this issue]) raises some important questions about the basis for political intervention. We are grateful for the opportunity to sharpen and clarify our argument (Grint and Woolgar 1995). In bare outline, the thrust of our argument was that many avowedly anti-essentialist arguments turn out to depend on a form ofessentialism. Consequently, rather than just continuing the program to specify antecedent conditions (gender or race bias, social or class interests) that give rise to the use and effects of technology, we might try to develop a thoroughgoing critique of essentialism. We proposed that a post-essentialist critique of the categories and conventions characteristic of technological agency, instrumentalism, and effectivity could provide the basis for more profound (radical?) political intervention. We also showed how resistance to this proposal stems from a misplaced distrust of relativism. Gill says that our post-essentialism fails to adequately acknowledge and theorize power and that, instead of eradicating determinism, post-essentialism merely entails determinism in a new form. To establish this argument, she makes three claims. First, she claims that we propose a version of understanding technologies as texts that give full sovereignty to the reader (user).