NEONATAL FOOD AND THE POLITICS OF THEORY - SOME QUESTIONS OF METHOD

The nurses on an intensive care ward for new-borns feed babies with fo od and doctors with information. Showing that this is so is one of the ways in which scholars working in humanist traditions of social analy sis, such as symbolic interactionism, reveal the politics of hospital relations. However, semiotics, along with similar 'non-humanist' theor etical traditions, is no less political. neither, as is sometimes sugg ested, does it necessarily side with the strong. Here we demonstrate t hat semiotics implies another style of political theory - one in which the relevant axes of different are not primarily between groups of pe ople, but between ways of ordering the world. Thus the differences bet ween two modes of feeding or of calculating the contents of a bottle c an be understood as both 'political' and 'technical' matters.