News & Events: Events, Conferences and Workshops
The Stuff of Politics: Technoscience, democracy and public life
University of Oxford, 7th - 10th December 2006
Please Note: This event has finished. For information on our current seminar series please see our Events, Conferences and Workshops listing.
Organisers: Sarah Whatmore (School of Geography, Oxford University Centre for the Environment) and Bruce Braun (Department of Geography, University of Minnesota)
Introduction:
This workshop brings together science studies scholars and political theorists in an effort to draw questions of science and technology more fully into political theory, and to bring political theory to bear more consistently on our understanding of scientific practices and technological objects. It is premised on the belief that recent developments in science studies and political theory have resulted in their convergence around some pressing common questions, including the question of the company assembled in the name of the 'common' itself, understood in terms of the socio-material worlds through which we collectively live. From mobile phones to stem cells, the potency of technological objects and nonhuman agents in the fabric of political association and social conduct is increasingly clamorous in academic and public life. While science studies and political theory have much to offer each other, their points of common interest have been left implicit rather than thoroughly explored. With a few notable exceptions, neither field has engaged in sustained ways with the insights and challenges posed by the other.
Each field brings a unique set of concerns to these conversations. Science studies, for instance, has increasingly taken as its concern the public life of science and technology. Through detailed empirical studies, often ethnographic in method, science studies scholars have explored the composition of social, biological and technoscientific assemblages - in sites as diverse as laboratories, law and media - and insisted that we understand these assemblages to constitute dynamic conditions within which new understandings of the human, citizenship and politics are emerging. In part, this has meant taking nonhumans - energies, artifacts and technologies - into account in the analysis of how collectivities are assembled, understanding these less as passive objects or effects of human actions and intentions and more as active parties in the (re)making of social collectivities and political associations. In part, it has raised important questions about the position of scientists as 'representatives' of nonhuman constituencies and their role in making public policy. Much of this work has carried a sense of urgency, as scientific knowledges and technological objects have become increasingly controversial in public life, and as science, technology and politics appear to be ever more tightly intertwined in the everyday experience and social governance of processes as varied as bio-technologies, digital communications and intelligent environments. Yet, while 'citizenship', 'democracy', 'representation' and 'politics' are constantly invoked in this literature it is not always clear to what these terms refer, which traditions in political theory inform them, or where these traditions might need revision.
Since its inception political theory has also concerned itself with the composition of collectivities, whether understood in terms of sovereigns and citizens, publics, communities or nations. At least since the time of Hobbes and Spinoza it has understood collectivities - nations, peoples, and the state, or the relation between sovereign and multitude - in decidedly materialist terms, as a question of their ongoing assemblage rather than as primarily theological or philosophical questions. Thus, for many political theorists citizenship, publics, state institutions and democracy, are understood to be the outcome of politics and power, and are to be studied as such. It is here that we see a yawning gap, but also the possibility for convergence between science studies and political theory. A yawning gap, because modern political theory explains collectivities as coming about by means of a 'social contract' that binds humans to one another by the force of words alone. The effect has been to cast anything nonhuman out of the political fold, or to relegate it to the status of resources or tools, entering political theory only to the extent that it has instrumental value but not in terms of its constitutive powers. Science studies, on the other hand, has had a great deal to say about the everyday technoscientific practices and nonhuman objects that are party to the assemblage of common worlds, but has had far less to say about key concerns of political theory: political legitimacy, democratic citizenship and public life.
The objective of this workshop is thus to bring together some leading international scholars in science studies and political theory to dwell together for an intensive moment on the gap between these fields, with the purpose as a group to begin to sketch the outlines of more fully materialist theories of politics.
Stated as a series of questions, the workshop seeks answers to the following:
- Of what are collectivities and collective actions made? At what sites, through what practices, and including which actors? How do nonhumans, including technoscientific objects, contribute to the composition of common worlds?
- How is the more-than-human company involved in the re-assemblage of social and political life to be addressed in theory? How do we register the affectivity of nonhumans in political life?
- What challenges does the inclusion of nonhumans hold for democratic theory? Conversely, how might democratic theory inform how we think about and practice technoscience? How is that which becomes included or excluded from collectivities determined? What sorts of institutional forms and political practices might be imagined to bring science and technology into democracy?
- How is technology part of the art of government? Conversely, how should we think about governing technology?
- What is the relation between technoscience and its publics? Is the traffic between science, technology and publics unidirectional, moving from the laboratory to public life and never the reverse? Or, are publics active in the making of science and technology? If so, how? For instance, what is the role of everyday practices of use and improvisation in the development of technology, and with what consequences for the politics of knowledge and claim to 'speak for' others?
- What theoretical and philosophical traditions best provide intellectual resources for thinking the composition of common worlds? How might we need to revise or re-read political theory to bring the hidden masses back into the picture?
Format
The workshop is hosted by the Oxford University Centre for the Environment, School of Geography and will be held 7-10 December 2006, at Worcester College, University of Oxford. Participants will be asked to prepare a paper (up to 10,000 words in length) on the workshop topic to be circulated in advance of the meeting. Paper presenters will be asked to provide an abstract for their paper by March 1st 2006 in order to allow the organizers to pair papers and allocate commentators; and a full draft of their paper by October 1st 2006 in order for them to be circulated to commentators and other participants. Participants will be expected to address the workshop topic from their own area(s) of expertise, drawing on their own research and writing.
At the workshop, two papers will be discussed per 150 minute session. Each session will pair a paper by a science studies scholar with one by a political theorist. Each pair of papers will be discussed first by two readers, one drawn from other paper-givers and the other from invited commentators; then by the group as a whole; after which authors will be given an opportunity to respond; rounded off by an open discussion. Given the residential nature of the workshop and the restricted number of participants, it is anticipated that productive discussions and exchanges will carry on informally over mealtimes and outside the working sessions and we have sought to maximize these opportunities in the timetable.
Keynote addresses by prominent scholars in the field will begin and end the workshop. A panel will also be convened on the last day to draw together major themes that have emerged during the workshop. Well in advance of the workshop we will circulate a short bibliography consisting of key texts that have informed debates in both fields. It is the intention of the organizers to seek publication for the proceedings of the workshop with University of Minnesota Press.
Schedule:
Thursday 7th December
Arrival & registration in Oxford by 17.00
17.30 - 18.30 Introductions and housekeeping
19.00 - 21.00 Welcome meal (hot buffet in College)
Friday 8th December
9.30 - 10.30 Organisers' preamble and orientation
10.30 - 12.00 Opening address
buffet lunch
13.00 - 15.30 Session # 1
tea break
16.00 - 18.30 Session #2
19.30 - 21.30 College hosted dinner
Saturday 9th December
9.30 - 12.00 Session #3
buffet lunch
13.00 - 15.30 Session #4
tea break
16.00 - 18.30 Session #5
19.30 Group meal at local restaurant
Sunday 10th December
9.30 - 11.30 Panel Session
coffee break
12.00 - 13.00 Closing address
buffet lunch
Departure 14.00 onwards
Participants:
The workshop is intended to bring together scholars from science and technology studies and from political theory with a shared interest in technoscience and/or the composition of social collectivities. Invitees come from a range of disciplines, work in different traditions and move in varied circles. Whilst the impact of their published work is such that we are all likely to be variously aware of that of some others in the group, we hope that the workshop will be a gathering that generates new intellectual conversations, ideas and networks. We will be joined by a number of discussants drawn from Oxford and other UK universities, who will also be full participants in the workshop.
Invited participants include:
mediator/organizers
Bruce Braun, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota
Sarah Whatmore, Oxford University Centre for the Environment, School of Geography
paper presenters
Karen Barad, Feminist Studies and Philosophy, UC-Santa Cruz (STS)
Queer Causation: Experimental Meta/physics and the New Materialism
Andrew Barry, OUCE, University of Oxford (opening speaker)
Jane Bennett, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins (PT)
Vital Force, Materiality, and Stem-Cells
Mark Brown, Department of Government, California State University-Sacramento (PT)
Democratic Politics and the Co-Production of Scientific and Political Representation
William Connolly, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins (PT)
Circuits of Perception
Rosalyn Diprose, Department of Philosophy, University of New South Wales (PT)
The Political Technology of RU 486
Lisa Disch, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota (PT)
'Faitiche'-izing the People: What Radical Democracy might learn from Science Studies
Andrew Lakoff, Department of Sociology, UC-San Diego (STS)
The Political Techniques of Preparedness
Noortje Marres, Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam (STS)
Front-staging non-humans: Beyond a clandestine politics of things, challenges of discursification
Annemarie Mol, Department of Political Theory, University of Twente (STS)
Bodies in theory: Political actors of various physical kinds
Isabelle Stengers, Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Université Libre de Bruxelles (STS)
Including non humans: Opening the Pandora Box?
Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick (closing speaker)
session commentators
Gail Davies, Department of Geography, University College London
Paul Giles, Rothermere Institute, University of Oxford
Chris Gosden, Pitt-Rivers Museum, University of Oxford
Beth Greenhough, Dept. of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London
Dan Hicks, Dept. of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol
Steve Hinchliffe, Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University
Derek McCormack, OUCE, School of Geography, University of Oxford
Lois McNay, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford
Valérie November, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne
Tiziana Terranova, Department of Sociology, University of Essex
Gay Hawkins, School of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, University of New South Wales
Organizers:
Bruce Braun is Associate Professor in Geography at the University of Minnesota. He is author of The intemperate rainforest: nature, culture and power on Canada's west coast (Minnesota) and co-editor of Remaking reality: nature at the millennium (Routledge). He is currently working on a book on emerging scientific and political practices around biosecurity, entitled Molecular geographies: configurations of the human and the animal in an age of biosecurity. more...
Sarah Whatmore is Professor of Environment and Public Policy at the Oxford University Centre for the Environment. She is the author of Hybrid geographies: natures cultures spaces (Sage) and co-editor of Using social theory: thinking through research (Sage). She is currently leading an interdisciplinary research project on Environmental knowledge controversies: science, democracy and expertise looking at the socio-political articulations of flood modelling, and writing a book entitled Eloquent materials: the witness of matter in science and law. more...
Abstracts for The stuff of politics: technoscience, democracy and public life. Worcester College, University of Oxford 7-10 December 2006
Copies of the papers are now available online. Access is restricted to workshop participants only.
Karen Barad
(Feminist Studies and Philosophy, UC-Santa Cruz)
Queer Causation: Experimental Meta/physics and the New Materialism
This paper experiments with diffraction patterns produced in reading critiques of representationalist politics in queer theory and critiques of representationalist epistemologies in science studies through one another. Performativity, as an alternative to representationalism, has different valences in these nearly orthogonal sets of discursive practices. And while drawing analogies between what may appear to be the case for subjects on the one hand and for objects on the other would only serve to produce an artificially flattened map of a complex changing manifold of subject-object intra-actions, reading for resonances in attending to the specificity of these differences can produce productive insights concerning the differential co-constitution of subjects and objects. At the center of this investigation are the crucial meta/physical notions of space, time, matter, and causality.
In Politics of Nature, Bruno Latour argues for an experimental metaphysics that is the effect of rather than the foundation for a new parliamentary democracy that includes the participation of nonhumans as well as humans. In this paper I consider several active research projects in experimental meta/physics being conducted in the US and Europe and examine their implications for thinking about naturalsocial phenomena. One important outcome is the queering of traditional understandings of causality. This finding is read back into the interference patterns produced by taking the insights of science studies and queer theory seriously, which brings to the fore some important questions for thinking about the politics of naturecultures. Among the issues that are foregrounded are questions concerning the possibilities for responsible collective political engagements among humans and nonhumans, including concerns raised by queer theorists regarding the limits of a politics of inclusion.
Jane Bennett
(Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University)
Vital Force, Materiality, and Stem-Cells
In the first years of the 20th century in America, there was a robust public debate about the uniqueness - or not - of "life." On one side are the materialists, for whom both organic life and inorganic matter were "physico-chemical" mechanisms. Against them, the vitalists contend that life was utterly different from matter, and that there must exist a non-material "vital force" responsible for animating matter. The vitalists, with their notion of elan vital (Bergson) or entelechy (Driesch) see themselves as defenders a moment of freedom from the determinism of mechanistic causality. Some vital force must be providing the impetus for morphological changes-in-state, as these occurred in the embryo, in personality, and in history. Fundamentally, the debate was about how to understand the process of becoming -- the becomings of natural as well as cultural wholes.
My paper explores the philosophical and political stakes of this debate, a debate which has returned in the controversy about stem-cell research. The most vocal vitalists today are Christianist defenders of the "culture of life" like George W. Bush. For Bergson and Driesch, however, the question of matter - of its nature and structure, about how much, if any, of the vitality of organisms can be attributed to materiality - always remained an open question. I revisit the old and new version of the debate because I am interested in how different figures of "materiality" function in political theory. My claim is that the idea of matter as inert - which haunts vitalism as much as it haunts many materialisms -- makes a political difference: inert matter, the other to life, will not be able to provoke attentive respect for nonhuman nature and it will impede the emergence of a more ecological way for humans to think, eat, and endure. My overall aim, then, is to mine the vitalisms of Bergson and Driesch for elements that could contribute to a non-mechanistic materialism whose "materiality" is itself vital, lively, and in possession of an agentic capacity.
Mark B. Brown
(Department of Government, California State University-Sacramento)
Democratic Politics and the Co-Production of Scientific and Political Representation
This paper presents elements of a theory of democratic representation encompassing both science and politics. Scholars in science and technology studies have frequently challenged the modern divide between scientific and political representation. Perhaps most promising in this regard has been work on the "co-production" of science and social order. The diverse projects in this vein share the view that neither science nor society can be fully understood either by itself or as a mere product of the other. Research on co-production thus embraces a principle of methodological symmetry, exploring how scientific and political representation are mutually constituted through historically situated relations among humans and nonhumans and their various spokespersons. This contextual, constructivist approach is echoed in recent work on the concept of representation in democratic theory. Rejecting the skeptical attitude toward representation prevalent among participatory democrats, some scholars have argued that representative democracy does not threaten vibrant participation but in fact requires it. Representative government both fosters and depends on a critical public sphere that should be understood as part of, rather than existing prior to, political representation. Because constituent interests and opinions are usually inchoate or in conflict, representation is not usefully understood as the "faithful translation" or "making present" of constituents. Political representatives, not unlike scientists, engage in various practices of mediation. They elicit, educate, anticipate, and aggregate constituent perspectives and opinions in the process of representing them. Such practices of mediation, moreover, are themselves mediated by technological devices, material structures, scientific claims, and social institutions. Democratic societies are institutionally differentiated, and different kinds of institutions (e.g., legislatures, courts, bureaucracies, NGOs, laboratories, universities, etc.) represent humans and nonhumans in different ways. Representatives might "act for" or "stand for" their constituents; they might represent substantively, formally, or symbolically; they might be elected or randomly selected, appointed or self-appointed, etc. A theory of democratic representation thus requires an account of the specific form or forms of representation associated with particular institutions. This also means that "democratic representation" resides not in any particular institution but in the sum total of institutionally mediated relationships among humans and nonhumans and those who speak for them. The overall structure of these relationships, I will argue, has a distinctly political character. Democratic representation creates an always provisional framework through which citizens strive to govern their ever-changing common world, including those features of it associated with science. This suggests that the symmetry principle central to the idiom of co-production should not be allowed to obscure certain normative and conceptual differences between science and politics. These differences are in part artifacts of past processes of co-production, but they are no less real for that. In this respect, a theory of democratic representation that includes both science and politics depends on a complementary theory of the relationship between them.
William E. Connolly
(Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University)
Circuits of Perception
In this paper I draw Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze into a conversation about the politics of perception, and then consider the results of those encounters in the light of some recent films and work in neuroscience. MP teaches us about the intersensory character of perception and the critical contribution we make to the experience of depth. In doing so he shows us how to perceive things is also to experience oneself to be an object of visibility. You are not just a potential object, but it is "as if" you are actually being observed by things as you perceive them. This insight suggests the need to link the phenomeonologist of normal perception to Foucauldian explorations of discipline, surveillance and the potential politics of denormalization. I will argue that there are lines of thought in each tradition which encourage a deepening of the conversation between them. As we proceed down this road it may become more clear that and how the shape of perception itself must be moved and modified in specific ways, including the subtle organization of affect within it. Through insights from neuroscience, Deleuze's exploration of film, and a couple of recent films we may better understand how to work on the circuits of perception as they work on us. This essay, of course, is written under the shadow of the Bush administration in the United States, where illegal modes of surveillance have reached new levels of intensity.
Rosalyn Diprose
(School of Philosophy , University of New South Wales)
The Political Technology of RU 486
"No pill has divided Australia like RU486 [the 'home abortion pill'] since the oral contraceptive pill was introduced in the 1960s" (Sydney Morning Herald 16 February 2006). The difference is that, while debate about that other pill raged across the world, the Australian government stands almost alone in blocking the licensing of the drug thereby precipitating the debate. This paper explores how and why such a tiny instance of medical technology could have such political power. It does this by examining how medical technology might be located within two reformulations of the political: Foucault's and Agamben's notions of biopower and biopolitics and what we might call deconstructive phenomenological formulations of political community developed from Arendt through to Nancy. These two trajectories in reformulations of the political are usually seen as being, if not incompatible, certainly in tension enough to divide the theoretical field. Better locating where medical technology might fit into each model not only brings the two closer together but also helps to explain what neither alone easily can: how a pill can disrupt the political.
That RU486 erupted into the sphere of political does confirm Foucault's and Agamben's reformulation of the political in terms of biopower: the idea that modernity is characterized by a bio-politics of regulatory controls and complexes converging on bodies and with the "power to foster life or disallow" life in the interests of maintaining the "biological existence of a population" (Foucault HS I 137- 138). That this is a politics that sees a collapse of the classical distinction between zoe (the human being as living being in the realm of government of the household) and bios (human being as political subject in the public sphere) (Agamben Homo Sacer), explains how the Australian government has, in the past 10 years, so easily mobilised 1950's 'family values' and self-surveillance of bodies in the home as the basis of not just the health of a population, but also of national security in general. In this context, its attempt to maintain its ban on RU486, rather than allowing its licensing to follow the more usual path via decisions of the Therapeutic Goods Administration, is just the latest in a series of exercises in political determinism that exhibit the biopolitics Foucault and Agamben describe.
But what these reformulations of the political in terms of biopolitics cannot so easily explain is how the reintroduction of RU486 into the sphere of socio-political debate not only mobilised a wave of resistance to political determinism (other government policies have similarly "divided Australia" but without shifting the political terrain), but a wave of resistance that succeeded in pushing the debate in Parliament to a rare conscience vote and, even more rare, a vote that the Prime Minister and Minister for Health lost. That a pill could come closer to toppling a government than any official or expressly human opposition has in recent years might be better explained in terms of the second trajectory in recent reformulations of the political: the deconstructive phenomenological idea of the political as the sphere of community devoted to the welcome, disclosure, or exposure of the new, alterity, or the stranger (or what Arendt calls "natality" and what Nancy calls "singularity"). On this model of political community, political or biological determinism would put in jeopardy the normative force of liberal polities as the preservation of a sphere for the welcome of the strange and the stranger. Resistance to such determinism and/or totalising government would therefore be inevitable. But again there is a shortfall in the explanation here: why would RU486 in particular become a site of successful resistance given that it is a technology that would be usually viewed (by the 'pro-life' lobby for example) as preventing the expression of the new and given that this second reformulation of the political has not been explicitly concerned with including the non-human in its vehicles for the expression of alterity, 'natality' or singularity?
Viewing RU486 as itself an event that expresses natality by bringing together bodies, affects, and meanings in new ways would explain its political power peculiar to the Australian context. But this requires challenging the view of technology as a human fabrication lying between mere formless matter and human creative thinking (including political thinking). That is what this paper will attempt to do by integrating elements from both reformulations of the political outlined above.
Lisa Disch
(Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota)
'Faitiche'-izing the People: What Radical Democracy might learn from Science Studies
In their recent work, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers propose that scientists, like politicians, practice "representation" in what Latour calls the "its ancient political role": which is "re-presenting, that is, presenting again, the questions of the common world" (Latour 2004, 41, 248; cf. Stengers 2000, 87). To propose this likeness is to utter an absurdity in the terms of the modernist world view (which Latour calls variously the 'Modern Constitution' or 'Modern Settlement') which cleaves the problem of representation in two. There is, on the one hand, "epistemology seeking to know on what condition an exact representation of external reality is possible," and, on the other hand, "political philosophy seeking to know on what condition a representative can represent his fellows faithfully" (2004, 55). In contrast, Latour and Stengers propose to view science and politics as working in a single "assembly of beings capable of speaking" and to define the "lab coats"-akin to politicians-as "the spokespersons of the nonhumans" (2004, 64). What? A return to animism? An anthropomorphisation of nature? No. A defense of representative democracy against none other than itself.
There is an irony in the Modern Constitution that Latour perceptively identifies. The modern break with nature purports by way of speech (the social contract) to give birth to human autonomy through political freedom; it forecloses this emancipatory moment before it arrives, however, by grounding it on the ontological distinction between nature and society. This distinction deals science an epistemological trump card: "indisputable speech, a previously invisible form of political and scientific life that made it possible sometimes to transform mute things into 'speaking facts,' and sometimes to make speaking subjects mute by requiring them to bow down before nondiscussable matters of fact" (2004, 68).
By their insistence that science and politics both represent in the "ancient" political sense, Latour and Stengers mean to counter the governmentalist fiction of facts that speak for themselves and experts who transmit them. They propose a more pragmatic picture of science, one in which scientists design an experimental apparatus to "stage" a phenomenon as a "reliable witness" (Stengers 2000, 84; 1997, 88). This staging, or mediation, is where science and politics, the laboratory and the assembly, connect. In forging the connection in this way, Stengers and Latour manage at once to extend the capacity for speech to things while withdrawing that of "voice" from humans. Latour underscores this double move, writing: "we do not claim that things speak 'on their own,' since no beings, not even humans, speak on their own, but always through something or someone else" (2004, 68).
This is what makes their argument so captivating: Latour and Stengers unfold a conception of representation that takes its definition from the assembly but its practice from the laboratory. The upshot is the surprising normative claim that politics should take experimental science as its model in the practice of representation. Once we understand that scientists, like politicians, are spokespersons, then we can see that they actually do a better job of communicating with their constituents. Latour writes, "we [moderns] actually know how to consult nonhumans better than humans!"(2004, 170). Once again, it is "voice" that has misled us: "On the pretext that humans are endowed with speech [i.e. with spontaneous expression], politicians…imagine that one can speak of them in their place and without ever truly consulting them-that is, without ever finding the risky experimental apparatus that would allow them to define their own problems themselves instead of simply answering the question asked" (2004, 171). This essay traces this line of argument through Stengers and Latour, and considers what political theorists of radical democracy have to learn from a theory of political representation premised on these core concepts of "spokespersonship," "reliable witness," and experimental risk.
Andrew Lakoff
(Department of Sociology, UC-San Diego)
The Political Techniques of Preparedness
As a number of analysts have shown, contemporary citizenship is both political and technical: membership in the polity involves access to the extensive, widespread infrastructures - such as water, electricity, communication and transportation- on which modern life depends. Such dependence on what we might call "vital systems" also fosters new forms of vulnerability. Threats to the operations of these systems may come from a number of sources: natural disasters, terrorist attacks, technical malfunction, or novel pathogens. The prospect of such catastrophic threats structures political intervention in a number of domains. In this paper, I describe some of the political techniques that have emerged to identify and manage such threats. Specifically, I focus on the development and implementation of the "National Incident Management System" (NIMS) in the U.S. The NIMS is a means of determining when a given event should trigger a temporary recomposition of governmental response structures. It is best understood as a technique of preparedness: that is, a way of anticipating what will be required in the event of emergency. The prevalence of such techniques - and the assumption of their necessity - suggests an answer to the question: to what extent can a technical system generate a novel political demand?
Noortje Marres
(Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam)
Front-staging non-humans: Beyond a clandestine politics of things, challenges of discursification
The role of non-humans in the organisation of social and political life has been characterised in science and technology studies (STS) as both crucial and relatively unobtrusive. It has been argued that the effects of things like bridges and medicines on the distribution of roles among human actors can be so great, precisely to the extent that such entities operate in the background of social life. However, non-human entities also play parts in political life that do not fit the description of a 'backstage' role performed in relative obscurity. Indeed, recent work in STS has proposed that the ontological turn characteristic of research in this field can be made productive for the study of more overtly political process. Taking up this proposal, this paper explores how non-humans can be appreciated as constituent elements of the affairs that politics is about. It develops the argument that to adequately account for the role of non-human entities in politics, practices of issue making must be taken into consideration.
In doing so, one problematics will be addressed in particular: when considering processes of the politicisation of non-humans, the question arises anew of how the ontological dimension of politics can be kept in view. It is tempting to conceive of issue formation as involving the 'discursification' of non-human entities, and hence, their 'de-materialisation'. To explore how and why this temptation can be resisted, I turn to the work of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, and in particular, his concept of "the problematic situation." This notion not only enables an understanding of 'issue making' as a constitutive moment of politics. It also makes it possible to describe such moments as playing out in an ontological dimension: as a particular dramatisation of social-material connections that have become problematic to one another. Drawing on the work of Dewey, political issues can thus be characterised in socio-ontological terms. To conclude, I will tentatively explore what such a conception of issues might mean for political theory, especially for its inherited investments in legitimacy as an ideal.
Annemarie Mol
(Department of Philosophy, University of Twente)
Bodies in theory: Political actors of various physical kinds
Emancipatory discourses want patients to position themselves as citizens in the consulting room. As people, that is, who, instead of following their patriarchal doctors' prescriptions, decide for themselves. As free men. However, it is questionable whether importing a civic vocabulary from political theory into the consulting room is wise. Whether it is what 'patients' might best strive for. For what comes along with 'the citizen' are quite particular bodily repertoires. Three of these will be presented here: the muscular body to be mastered; the desiring body to be silenced; and the body caught in deterministic, causal laws, from which a true citizen must escape so as to be free. In the outpatient clinic for people with diabetes (where the author observed consultations) the body is predominantly enacted in an entirely different way, i.e. as an half-open feed-back system in constant metabolical exchange with its surroundings. This metabolic body cannot be mastered and need not be silenced. Instead of trying to escape from it, it is wiser to learn to inhabit it from the inside. All of which means that turning the patient into a citizen would entail a great loss. Might, instead, political theory not come to appreciate that human beings eat, drink, excrete and secrete? This is what I will argue. That instead of importing decisive actorship into the consulting room, we import the reality of metabolism into political theory.
Isabelle Stengers
(Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Including non humans: Opening the Pandora Box?
What counts as a nonhuman, and how have it counting? Can we define any unifying category that would give a positive meaning to what is not human without putting humans at the very center, a category that would collect the Web, the aviary virus, cars, tornadoes, the warming climate, chimpanzees in the lab or in the wild, illicit or legal drugs, neutrinos, but maybe also Gods, Goddesses, djinns, and even the obsessive insistence of fragmented ideas for a demonstration that may keep a mathematician awake? As soon as Man leaves the organizing center of the scene, the scene is not enriched but seems to disappear as such, no longer one scene, but an indefinite number of diverging matters of concern.
My proposition will not be a solution, as we face a question, not a problem that would be concrete enough to be described in terms of possible solutions. The question of a "democratic theory" that would include nonhumans is the opening of a Pandora box the very closing of which may have been the condition for such a theory, when even Gods were trusted to private life, with no legitimate intervention in public debates. What I will try, with the theme of the ecology of practices, is not an alternative theory, but a partial grasp that may help creating appetite in front of the confusing situation we face when dealing with the disparate populations of nonhumans.
My proposition is to take "concern" as the starting point. Concern is relational, processual and empirical. We do not know, and we have no category to discriminate illegitimate and legitimate concerns. The fact is that some nonhumans become matters of concern for some humans, and the dynamics of emergence of such matters of concern is what politically matters and that no theory can a priori frame. Concerns are related to the way a human group is able, or may become able, to present itself on what become then an "ecological scene", populated by disparate protagonists, not by enlightened citizens thinking about the common good. Concern immediately implies the question "how". The concerns relating to virus, tornadoes and chimpanzees are quite different. But also the "same" nonhuman can enter into diverging concerns. This principle of divergence is what I will use to define a "practice". Practices, as actively diverging" are related to the concept of "minority", in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari. "Everybody should be concerned with X" should then be the prohibited political statement.