TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 459 in remission; the electron flow still silently courses, waiting until we are up to our elbows in bread dough or motor oil. We fight back with answering machines (aka voice mail), but there is a trade-off as we find it harder and harder to reach out and touch someone else as well as be touched. The problem is that Ronell does not do this calmly at all; she also wants us to rethink the concept of a book. Thus the book—its language, typesetting, fonts, organization, all of its parts—is fractured and inside out in isomorphism to the schizyjangling of the telephone. The whole thing, wine and bottle, is art, not scholarship, and furthermore art as it is conceived in campus cauldrons in the late 20th century. If you like Lucas Samaras’s glue-smeared Polaroids, you might like this book; if your taste runs to Corot or early Derain you will hate it. B. Morgan and Pauletta Morse Dr. Morgan teaches electronic keyboarding and business law at Southern Illinois University. Her article, “The Electronic Learning Center,” appears in the American Technical EducationJournal, Fall 1992. Dr. Morse teaches court reporting at SIU and has a special interest in teaching the deaf, who would love to be bothered by ringing phones. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits. By Andrew Ross. New York: Verso, 1991. Pp. 275; notes, index. $59.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Technology, in this book, appears mainly as a prefix. Andrew Ross writes as a cultural critic engaged in the twin tasks “of renewing left traditions of technofuturism” and of encouraging fellow cultural critics not to be typecast as “technophobes” (p. 7). More particularly, he examines how “technocratic elites” (p. 9) have molded public thinking about the future and how various challenges to “rationalist technospeak” (p. 120) in popular or alternative cultures have both resisted and echoed the dominant rhetoric. The longest and most substantial chapters are the first and last, which deal respectively with New Age science and with the cultural significance of contemporary weather consciousness. These essays are also the most engaging, perhaps because of their resonance with Ross’s own experience (he tells us that an ex-spouse had “New Age devotions” [p. 27] and that he has long been obsessed with the weather). In between are chapters on computer hackers, on technocracy in early science fiction, on cyber punk in recent science fiction, and on varieties of postwar futurist speculation. While often thoughtful and well-informed, Strange Weather lacks coherence. The book is more a collection of essays than a series of chapters developing an extended argument. Themes reappear but 460 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE are not fitted together into a strong line of reasoning. Other sources of the book’s shapelessness are deeper and more instructive, however. They involve not personal limitations—Ross is obviously intelligent and perceptive—but limitations inherent to the type of cultural studies he practices. Because Ross wants to demonstrate the validity of cultural studies in dealing with matters scientific and technological, the inherent limitations of his version are worth some reflection. Like many practitioners of cultural studies, Ross takes justifiable pride in an interdisciplinary approach that challenges outdated, overly rigid boundaries of scholarship. Too often, though, being interdisciplinary has meant adopting a particularly bombastic rhetor ical style—a style in which history, textual analysis, sociology, anthro pology, and so forth are raided for evidence and concepts, with the resulting assemblage being welded into a wide-ranging critique held together primarily by the masterful voice of the author-critic. This intellectual style may work for a few supremely self-assured French men, but for many other scholars it too easily results in windy superficiality. Instead of any meaty research or analysis, we are served a salad of secondary references dressed with quotations from Marx, Foucault, Geertz, and other usual suspects. Ross is certainly not the worst offender, but some of the tendencies are there. In the first chapter of Strange Weather, for example, he presents many interesting topics for research—the origins of modern “communications ideol ogy,” or the ethnographic profile of New Age believers...