Book Announcement: Hawking Incorporated - Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject
Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the
Anthropology of the
Knowing SubjectHélène Mialet
These days, the idea of the cyborg is less the stuff of
science fiction
and more a reality, as we are all, in one way or another,
constantly
connected, extended, wired, and dispersed in and through
technology. One
wonders where the individual, the person, the human, and
the body
are—or, alternatively, where they stop. These are the
kinds of questions
Hélène Mialet explores in this volume, as she focuses
on a man who is
permanently attached to assemblages of machines, devices,
and
collectivities of people: Stephen Hawking.
Drawing on an extensive and in-depth series of interviews
with Hawking,
his assistants and colleagues, physicists, engineers,
writers,
journalists, archivists, and artists, Mialet reconstructs
the human,
material, and machine-based networks that enable Hawking
to live and
work. She reveals how Hawking—who is often portrayed as
the most
singular, individual, rational, and bodiless of all—is
in fact not only
incorporated, materialized, and distributed in a complex
nexus of
machines and human beings like everyone else, but even
more so. Each
chapter focuses on a description of the functioning and
coordination of
different elements or media that create his presence,
agency, identity,
and competencies. Attentive to Hawking’s daily
activities, including his
lecturing and scientific writing, Mialet’s ethnographic
analysis
powerfully reassesses the notion of scientific genius and
its
associations with human singularity.