Strange Weather

...Technologies are social processes of organization, in one form or another, and the sacralized passing of a healer's hands over the body of a patient is just as much a technological process as the demonized use of external hardware like CAT scans or electroencephalograph machines...

...So far so good...

...Readers frustrated by Ross's occasionally melodramatic prescriptions may still appreciate the verve and wit he brings to his analysis of countertechnocultures...

...But there is a richer legacy of spiritual humanism too important to be brushed aside, as he does in writing of New Age: "Without any alternative [Left] politics of social individualism it is no surprise to find that people will opt for spiritualist solutions for problems encountered in a materialistic culture...

...His concluding discussion of "weather citizenship" and the Weather Channel is sufficiently brilliant to overcome skepticism of his claim that "the way in which we talk about weather patterns of change and repetition is fundamentally linked to the dialectic of change and constancy that lies at the heart of a developed capitalist culture...

...But like many of the humanists he disdains, Ross exaggerates the pervasiveness of technocultural modes of expression...

...Ross views fundamentalism and "noninstitutional cults" as inevitable symptoms of "the bankrupt cultures of state socialist, capitalist, and scientific materialism," but ignores the persistent mysticism and theologizing in many works of contemporary "science fiction," including the towering example of the late Philip K. Dick (author of The Divine Invasion, Vintage, 1991), whose absence from this study is incomprehensible...

...Ross's sharp treatment of such subacademic topics is characteristic of the new cultural studies...

...In fairness, one countercultural tradition of great moment to many of my acquaintance—the light-traveling, voluntarily poor hipster swinging to the mystical rhythms of jazz and Beat literature—was dispatched to a position of cultural marginality in Ross's previous book, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989...

...A leading practitioner of "cultural studies," Andrew Ross dismisses the humanist critique of technological sprawl as irrelevant and soft-headed, though dangerous when in service of "the interests of white masculine power...

...Yet while Ross is not responsible for the ideological crisis of the post-Marxist Left, his dismissal of humanism is unsatisfactory in its limited scope...

...These scholars show greater sensitivity to the interaction between cultural producers and consumers than their somewhat haughty Marxian forebears...

...In his ruthless critique of sentimental qualms about technology, Ross bravely echoes the call of historian Donna Haraway for "a new sense of realism about our cyborg condition" whereby the nature of human-machine interaction can be aggressively contested by "progressives" rather than feared or loathed...

...like those that have come before, they seem to revel in the overheated discourse on their social meaning (see such playful hucksters as "Queen Mu" and "R.U...

...Serius," editors of the new cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000...

...Ross argues that the New Age movement's concern with the environment and "small-scale...

...Ross sees the social meanings of science and technology as part of a larger struggle for "radical democracy," and persuasively argues that a Left cultural politics that dismisses technoculture is doomed to extinction...

...Yet I will at least suggest the possibility that Dorothy Day, for one, had transcended Left cultural politics when she wrote, in 1946: "We are anxious to talk about machines that turn men into machines, about decentralization, about striking at the roots...

...cooperative communitarianism" presents a critique of multinational conglomerates and their destructive technologies...

...The book's ideological trajectory is somewhat vague...

...Though religious radicalism is surely part of the cultural processes Ross describes, it also points to a more truly global consciousness than "progressive citizenship" has dared envision...

...Progressive" may describe Ross's personal politics, but in the context of his relentlessly incisive hermeneutic it stands as a quaint mantra rather than a concrete ideology, although his affinity for a "green" insurgency is evident...

...Cultural studies," a hot new academic discipline, emerged in the wake of conventional Marx ian scholarship's failure to make any sense of the politics of popular culture in England and America...

...q Commonweal 28 February 1992: 27...

...Yet as Ross candidly admits, this school has demonstrated less charity toward such middlebrow "taste cultures" as New Age "pseudoscience," an interpretive task he assumes bravely, if with characteristic ambivalence, evaluating the countercultural potential of "brain machines" ("designed to balance the left and right brain in holistic synchrony"), biofeedback, and a wide range of holistic therapies that undermine the privileged status of "official" science and medicine...

...James T. Fisher As an undergraduate I took a course on "Religion and Science," in which one of the main texts was T.S...

...Those of us intimidated by video games have much to learn from his discussion of teen-age "hackers" and the cyberpunk genre of science fiction that emerged in the 1980s...

...Though the creators of these subcultures are trapped in webs of contradiction— hackers challenge the elitist control of information technologies yet emulate the entrepreneurial energies of corporate capitalism, while cyberpunk utopias "expose a baroque edifice of adolescent male fantasies"—the author demonstrates genuine sympathy for these bearers of technohistorical change...

...Works like Strange Weather have a depressing tendency to make a reader sheepish for raising questions about technology and personhood that are regarded as mere atavisms by most cultural critics...

...Although Ross is mainly concerned in this book with "weird science" (New Age medicine, cyberpunk science fiction, futurology, the Weather Channel), he would also have us view normal science, and its technological fruits, as "a fully cultural process, soaked through with social meaning that only makes sense in the context of familiar kinds of behavior...

...In this respect Strange Weather attests to a continuing gulf, not between science and the humanities but between ways of imagining our common destiny...

...A new generation of academics fond of interdisciplinary work recast contemporary social history in terms of the protopolitical "resistance" to capitalism and mass culture located, for instance, in the subcultures of rock 'n' roll, car-customizing (workers negating the logic of mass production), and English football club "fanzines...

...But New Age has also exalted a "holistic opposition between 'nature' and 'technology' [which] is quite groundless...

...Cyberpunks and hackers are really just so many subcultists...

...Every time the professor alluded to Kuhn's notion of "normal science" (that research conducted within the bounds of an established theoretical "paradigm"), he looked out the window and gestured at the laboratory buildings situated on a hilltop across the sluggish Raritan River, where normal science surged onward, grandly indifferent to humanists and their nervous concerns about the arrogance of "scientific objectivity" and its truth claims...

...its cultivation of the personal offers "a politics of identity and subjectivity that has not been entirely subsumed by the New Right's picture of individualism, aggressively protective of its privatized will to consume...

...Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions...