TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 137 French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. By Paul Rabinow. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Pp. x + 447; notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. Technology and Culture reviewers are instructed to recapitulate a book’s thesis. Unfortunately, there is none here. Which is not to say that French Modern is neither informative nor interesting. It is rather like New Age music; pleasant and even interest piquing—but it never really goes anywhere. It says on the dust jacket that the book’s form is experimental and that “events such as epidemics, wars, strikes, and invasions are . . . used as narrative devices.” I think it came out the way it did because that is how the author had arranged his note cards. The book is stocked with obscure events and people such as the French-Malgache War and Joseph Gallieni, while there is not one mention of the two most important people of French urban design in the 19th century, Baron Haussmann and his client Napoleon III. I find that, well, queer in a book on 19th-century urban and social planning in France. At the same time, reading the book has the warm effect of visiting a village museum; it may be hard to tell what significance there might be in the false teeth of the town founder’s cousin, but the fact that someone has collected and displayed them for your delectation is not without charm. I did, however, enjoy the frequent use of isomorphism (a word I first saw in Abraham Maslow’s “Isomorphic Interrelationships be tween Knower and Known,” in Gyorgy Kepes’s Sign Image Symbol [New York, 1966]). Here is an example, and it is illustrative as well of how the text in general flows: “The use of statistical approaches to social problems posed the problem of finding forms through which to present this understanding, just as the century-long search for new architectural forms was perplexed about the norms of modern society that these forms were supposed to embody and represent.” Now it must also be said that all the above may well be like the tip of the iceberg and that the real, crucial substance here may be hidden, coded, or subcutaneous in some way that I am unable to understand. Paul Rabinow, everyone tells me, is an icon of Foucault, hermeneutics, and all the “structivisms” of recent times. He has written or edited numerous books in this area. The problem is that when I first began hearing about these schools of thought, around 1980, I found them morally repugnant and have avoided every opportunity for further initiation since. I simply advise you that this might be what this book is all about, really. David Clarke Dr. Clarke teaches technical management and design history at Southern Illinois University. His most recent book is Arguments in Favor ofSharpshooling (Portland, Oreg. : Timber Press). ...