Being, Thinking, Writing 'With'

Nikki Sullivan

doi:10.5130/csr.v9i1.3583

Abstract

Once upon a time there were three women: they were known as ‘the woman in black’, ‘the grey-haired woman with the well-developed sense of humor’ and ‘the rather quiet woman with the capacity to shock’. These women, who had known each other for quite some time, were all physicists. They were also friends. As physicists, the woman in black, the grey-haired woman with the well-developed sense of humour and the rather quiet woman with the capacity to shock had learned, and now shared, ‘a specific vocabulary, grammar and rhetoric’. They knew what could count as a scientific observation, ‘what standards of accuracy in determining observations [were] possible, how the words of common language [were] restricted and refined for use in [their particular] scientific discipline’. They knew how to tell the ‘truth’. Rational knowledge and empirical evidence were no strangers to these women who were well versed in what could count as an argument. Consequently, it was said by some that these women constituted a microcosmic rational community.

Highlights

Time passed and their shared conviction that they were neither Gods nor lemmings, unique individuals nor anonymous parts of a seething mass, grew stronger and stronger until one day the rather quiet woman with the capacity to shock suggested getting together with a few other people she knew who seemed to be stuck on the horns of this particular dilemma
The good-time girl in each of them agreed that even in the unlikely event that they were all to wear the same outfit to the get-together that the rather quiet woman with the capacity to shock had organised, they’d be something other than clones, because you don’t have to be a nuclear physicist to know that no two women look the same in an identical frock, which is why haute couture remains exclusive to those with more money than sense
To cut a very long story short each decided that in her own way she would refuse the choice that others like Martin H. had posited between the authentic and the inauthentic, the individual and the mass, and immerse herself instead in the experience of the impossible, of the limit—a choice not uncommonly made by the heroine of fairytales as well as by the unconventional woman of science

Summary

Introduction

Time passed and their shared conviction that they were neither Gods nor lemmings, unique individuals nor anonymous parts of a seething (and somewhat unseemly) mass, grew stronger and stronger until one day the rather quiet woman with the capacity to shock suggested getting together with a few other people she knew who seemed to be stuck on the horns of this particular dilemma.

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Conclusion