Stengers, I. (2010). Cosmopolitics I. R. Bononno, (Trans.). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.
*Note: I write about books for a number of reasons. Most often, it’s to share my thoughts or to critique them. In this case, I’m writing as part of an effort to figure out what it (the book) meant. The following post is my attempt at working my way through the first part of an extremely dense and complex monograph. I make no claims to have gotten any of it “right.”
For the past week I’ve been reading book one of Cosmopolitics book one. No, that wasn’t a redundancy. Rather Isabelle Stengers, a Belgian philosopher of science, wrote seven books originally published in French. Those books are being rereleased in English in a two volume series Cosmopolitics I and II. I just came out, II next year.
So, I regret to admit that my recent foray into Cosmopolitics is my first encounter with Stengers. It seems I should’ve known her before. She’s published a couple of important books in philosophy of science and has notably coauthored with renown physicist Ilya Prigogine before releasing Cosmopolitics. I’ll have to go back and check them out when I have more time.
As I mentioned, Cosmopolitics is a seven book (in two volume) collection. In the preface, Stengers says they can be read in any order, though she recommends consecutively as they constitute a step-by-step argument. So, following her advice, I began at the beginning with Book I: The Science Wars. I’ll start off by saying that with a name like that, I was expecting something entirely different. While the themes addressed certainly mirrored many of the issues prominent in the famed Science Wars of the 1990s, there were no overt references to the Sokal Hoax or any of the surrounding events that typically trigger the use of the term “Science Wars” in Anglo-American discourse. (Of course, it’s not lost on me that Stengers is neither Anglo nor American.)
In any event, the bulk of Science Wars is devoted to introducing Stengers’ idea of an “ecology of practices” as the recommended mode of inquiry for philosophy of science. An ecology of practices studies the complex and dynamic relationships among various modes of practice in and around science. The ecological/relational metaphor comes with an attendant focus not so much on the internal regimes of justification—a focus common to much of philosophical/epistemological science studies—but rather a focus on the ways different practices present themselves to one another. In Science Wars, this focus is most thoroughly investigated through Stengers’ notion of “reciprocal capture.” Stengers defines this as a “symbiotic agreement” or a “dual process of identity construction” (p. 36) wherein conflicting practices develop a mutually beneficial relationship. Much of the discussion of this concept focuses on the production of worth, so I understand reciprocal capture as a means whereby different practices reinforce the (perceived) value of one another. (That last sentence was definitely me free-lancing. I’m not quite sure Stengers would put it that way.)
While the ecology of practices focuses on modes of presentation and justification among practices, it does not do so to the exclusion of issues within practices. Borrowing Latour’s notion of a “factish,” Stengers calls on philosopher of science to interrogate science under the rubric of becoming through focusing on the processes of (arte)fact creation. For Stengers’ the creation of factishes is grounded in the management of practical and ontological constraints which she dubs obligation and requirement. These constraints seem very different from the ideological or genre constraints commonly studied by rhetoricians of science. At this point I’m going to attempt to sum up what Stengers means by constraints, but I’d be lying if I implied that I understood the concept entirely. Stengers is working with very complex ideas and elucidating tremendously subtle varioations. Nevertheless, I’ll attempt it:
- Factishes carry with them an interpretive obligation—that is because of the practical event (experiment) that created the factish, one is obliged to interpret said fact according to that practice/disicipline.
- Experimental practice requires the ability to render its object a factish or rather an object that can be factishified.
- Requirements are addressed to phenomena, obligations to experimental practices.
Clear as mud? I’m very intrigued by these ideas and I hope I’ll understand them better as I progress through the text. In addition to ecologies of practices and constraints Stengers deploys a number of other important concepts of particular interest to rhetoricians. I’m not going to go into them in too much detail here, because there’s a bigger issue at stake (about which more in a second). But, he work make liberal use of Derrida’s reinterpretation of Plato’s pharmakon which introduces an important level of discursivity into Stengers’ work. Additionally, she offers us a truly fascinating concept—which I have yet to totally make sense of: the “nonrelativist sophist.” In fact, Stengers argues for a nonrelativist sophist as identity for philosophical inquirers. I hope to find out more about this one soon.
And now one last issue for this post. I was very excited at the outset when exploring this notion of an ecology of practices. It seemed another excellent metaphor with which I could elaborate my sense of technoscience. However, Stengers argues for precisely the opposite:
“That is why the term “technoscience” does not reflect the interweaving of scientific and techno-industrial development but announces the radicalization of a critical position that the distinction between a “disinterested science” and a “dominating technology” can no longer science. Here, I am attempting the opposite.” (p. 76)
In fact, Science Wars is beset with argumentative attempts to recouperate binaries. Despite the ecological metaphor, Stengers views the various practices of science and technology as distinctly different from one another—and not just different, but also having different levels of worth. “not all are created equal” is a recurrent refrain in the book. At various places, she distinguishes between:
- Science vs techno-industrial practice
- Fact vs artifact
- Physics vs. other sciences
And these distinctions appear to be qualitative. At first, I just wanted to accuse her of being a back-sliding modernist, but that would be unfair. While, I am certainly yet to be convinced, Stengers’ arguments are thoughtful and compelling. Furthermore, her arguments are definitely not mere restatements of the modernist case. Rather, her treatment of these binaries is a reinterpretation of them—in light of postmodernity.
Before reading this book, I was somewhat embarrassed to admit that even though I’d published two articles which rely heavily on actor-network theory, I’d not yet read Reassembling the Social. Now that I’ve finished the work, I’m much less concerned. I find that I have much more scholarly/theoretical affinity for the Bruno Latour of Pandora’s Hope or We Have Never Been Modern that I do for the Latour of Reassembling the Social. Latour’s introduction to ANT takes great care to distance ANT sociology (or as he would prefer “sociolology of associations” or “associology”) from critical approaches to power and hegemony. In fact, he specifically objects to any attribution of power or exploration of influence that cannot be directly traced to discrete actants. Certainly, this approach is in keeping with Latour’s vision of a flat ontology wherein all actants hold equal status as subjects/objects/agents/etc. And while I certianly support the symmetrical ontology and agency of human and non-human actants, I think the “flatness” of Latour’s ontology elides the possibility of emergent phenomena. Even Latour admits that all actants are essentially black boxes, that is, they are constellations of elided articulations of other actants. The scalability of this model should allow for black boxing intensely large constellations of actants, e.g. the military-industrial complex or the medical-industrial complex. This is how I would understand attributions of power to “hidden” forces within a Latourian idiom. However, Latour does not seem to be with me on this issue. He’s, perhaps, too empirical. He will admit know attribution of influence without a directly observable articulation and corresponding result. 
The Body Multiple is a brilliant ethnographic (actually praxiographic) exploration of atheroscleroses in a Dutch hospital. You probably noticed that I typed “atheroscleroses” instead of “atherosclerosis.” That’s very much intentional. Mol’s inquiry explores the multiple different atheroscleroses that emerge from different sites of practice within the hospital. She investigates these different diseases (read different diseases not different manifestations) through multiple ontologies theory. This approach argues that different ontologies (again plural) emerge from different sites of practice. So the reality of atherosclerosis in the out-patient clinic is different from its reality in the pathology lab and still different from its reality in the surgical ward. Nevertheless, these ontologies still coordinate across different sites of practice through the coordinating activities involved in treating individual patients. I can’t say enough good things about this book and I’m very grateful to Christa Teston for pointing me in the right directions. You should check out her 
Harmon’s Prince of Networks is a work of philosophy aimed at philosophers. More specifically, it seeks to introduce metaphysicians to the collected works of Latour. Harman argues that Latour is, perhaps, the greatest metaphysician of our age and a great travesty has occurred in that he is not recognized as a philosopher at all. Despite being somewhat overly genuflectional, Prince of Networks is a thought-provoking and engaging read. It is divided into two parts: 1) a summary of Latour’s major writings on metaphysics and 2) a critique and extension of his metaphysical theories. Part one focuses on Irreductions, Science in Action, We Have Never Been Modern, and Pandora’s Hope. Through these chapters and the subsequent exploration of Latour’s thought in the second half of the book, Harman argues that Latour’s primary and truly innovative contribution to metaphysics is the invention of a secular 
Finally, I turn to Complexities- another engaging work of STS that I’m pretty sure I was made aware of thanks to Christa Teston. 
Andrew Pickering’s (2010) The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future offers readers a thorough and detailed view into this history of cybernetic science. This history focuses on and is presented through a series of professional biographies of six prominent British cyberneticians who conducted most of their work during the first half of the last century (Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R.D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask). Pickering’s narratives explore the major cybernetic experiments and inventions of these figures while interrogating the personal, professional, and cultural contexts surrounding each experiment/invention. Along the way Pickering identifies a series of key themes that constitute core issues for both cybernetics discourse and its historical study. These themes include: ontology, design, power, the arts, selves, spirituality, the sixties, altered states, and the social bases of cybernetics. The broad scope of these themes offers readers an enactment of Pickering’s subtitle. His “sketch of another future” is meant to provide the reader with a view of what a nonmodern world might look like. (Pickering’s use of the term “nonmodern” capitalizes on and extends Latour’s sense of the term from his 1991 We Have Never Been Modern.) Indeed, in Pickering’s own words, The Cybernetic Brain is devoted to two primary goals:
