Post #1124018

2026-04-08 13:08 UTC

Some disparate ideas that share a common thread: In &#39;The Queer Art of Failure&#39;, Halberstam advances a notion of queer forgetting as a way of interrupting the continual renewal of heteronormative power relations (including an implied break with intergenerational trauma). In his latest &#39;Doomsday Machines&#39; newsletter, Alex Wellserstein discusses a 1995 academic paper, &quot;A relevant and provocative argument from the sociology of nuclear technology can be found in Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi’s “Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1995.3 The argument that MacKenzie and Spinardi make is about the nature of knowledge and forgetting, and its possible relevance to nuclear weapons.&quot; He goes on to discuss &#39;tacit knowledge&#39;, as a distinct category from book knowledge, in that it&#39;s learned through muscle memory.

Replies (1)

@celesteh@post.lurk.org 2026-04-08 13:09

Then Wellerstein continues, "As a whole, 'nuclear weapons' aren’t even just the weapons themselves, but the entire large technical system that is required for them to exist and be sustained. Obviously many of the technical details of these systems can be, and are, written down. But MacKenzie and Spinardi argue that much of their production must also be in the form of tacit knowledge, locked up in the heads and hands of the people who build and maintain them." And the final bit of the thread is in Joel Baden's Book 'The Composition of the Pentateuch', which discusses how several conflicting oral versions of the torah were compiled into the first five books of the bible. In that compilation, it was the goal that _nothing_ be forgotten, so the stories loop back on themselves and form contradictions, as every element is included chronologically, even if relates a specific event differently than what it said only a sentence or two earlier.

Open ##2477826