Worlds in the making: social sciences and the ontopolitics of knowledge

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Acknowledgements

The research that led to this article was carried as part of an International Fellowship at the BMBF-Project “Universality and the Acceptance Potential of Social Science Knowledge”, Institute of Sociology, University of Freiburg. I thank the BMBF for sponsoring the project under the “Freiraum für die Geisteswissenschaften: Europa von außen gesehen” funding initiative and focus. I am also truly thankful to Wiebke Keim, Ercü Çelik, Veronika Wöhrer, Christian Ersche, Maren Eichmeier, Jose Gabriel Jimenez and the co-fellows of the project for their invaluable intellectual and personal support throughout the development of this research. Finally, I am deeply indebted to Sanjay Seth and David Martin for their generous and constructive comments on an earlier version of this article and for their marvellous editorial work. Any mistakes are mine.

Notes

1. Gabriel García Márquez, Cien Años de Soledad, Madrid: Cátedra, 1967.

2. Lars Gyllensten, Nobel Prize in Literature 1982, Award Ceremony Speech, 1982. Available at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/presentation-speech.html (accessed 16 August 2012). For an interesting and international introduction to magical realism, see Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

3. Nobel Foundation, Nobel Prize in Literature 1982. Available at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/ (accessed 16 August 2012).

4. Gabriel García Márques, ‘Nobel Lecture: The Solitude of Latin America’, 1982. Available at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture.html (accessed 16 August 2012).

5. See Encarnación Guterrez, Manuela Boatcā and Sergio Costa (eds), Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000; Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000; Sanjay Seth, ‘Reason or Reasoning? Clio or Siva?’, Social Text 78, 2004, pp 85–101; Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘A Critique of Lazy Reason: Against the Waste of Experience’, in I Wallerstein (ed), The Modern World-System in the Longue Durée, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004, pp 157–198; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and the Ecology of Knowledge’, Theory, Culture and Society 26, 2009, pp 103–125; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. It should be noted that, while the notion of ‘postcolonial’ is used throughout this text, its purpose is not that of describing a well-delimited, unified and stable referent with which such notion could be identified. As the reader will note, it will be used to address a number of writers and thinkers that would otherwise feel the need to draw more precise contrasts among their practices. Rather, ‘postcolonial’ is here mobilized as a highly risky abstraction from a very heterogeneous assemblage of disciplines and practices that can be hardly addressed as a unified group. Thus, they shall not be confused with the concrete practices in relation to which they were elaborated. At the same time, however, as Whitehead would argue, that is what abstractions ultimately entail: risky constructions that come at the price of omitting part of the truth of process yet may become potential lures for experience. It is in this spirit, that is, as a practical risk, that I will speak of ‘postcolonial’. On abstractions see Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, New York: Free Press, 1985.

6. Seth, ‘Reason or Reasoning? Clio or Siva?’, pp 85–101.

7. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p 101.

8. Sandra Harding, The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, New York: Routledge, 2004.

9. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p 101.

10. Barry Hindess, ‘Been There … Done That’, Postcolonial Studies 11, 2008, pp 201–213; Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Eurocentrism and Its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science’, New Left Review I(226), 1997, pp 93–107; Immanuel Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power, New York: New Press, 2006.

11. Walter Mignolo, ‘Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom’, Theory, Culture and Society 26(7–8), 2009, pp 159–181, p 160.

12. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1920/2004, p 28.

13. See Whitehead, The Concept of Nature. See also Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, New York: Free Press, 1967. On the question of the one and the many see William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth, Milton Keynes: Watchmakers Publishing, 1907/2011.

14. Annemarie Mol, ‘Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions’, in J Law and J Hassard (eds), Actor-Network Theory and After, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1999, pp 74–89; Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000; Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Whitehead, Process and Reality.

15. See for instance: Warwick Anderson, ‘Postcolonial Technoscience: Introduction’, Social Studies of Science 32(5–6), 2002, pp 643–658; Warwick Anderson, ‘From Subjugated Knowledge to Conjugated Subjects: Science and Globalisation, or Postcolonial Studies of Science?’, Postcolonial Studies 12(4), 2009, pp 389–400; Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998; Sandra Harding, Sciences from Below Feminisms, Postcolonialisms, and Modernities, Durham and London: Duker University Press, 2008; Ashish Nandy, Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988.

16. García Márquez, ‘Nobel Lecture: The Solitude of Latin America’.

17. Isabelle Stengers, ‘Beyond Conversation: The Risks of Peace’, in C Keller and A Daniel (eds), Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms, New York: State University of New York Press, pp 235–256, p 251.

18. A value related to the ‘exceptionalism’ through which Western modern sciences are usually presented. See Harding, Sciences from Below.

19. Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, p 89.

20. Isabelle Stengers, ‘Pensar a partir de la cuestión de la eficacia’, in S Mancini (ed), La Fabricación del Psiquismo, Buenos Aires: Araucaria, 2008, pp 269–284.

21. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p 310. For a more extended discussion about ‘recalcitrance’ in the social sciences, see Martin Savransky, ‘Of Recalcitrant Subjects’, Culture, Theory and Critique, forthcoming.

22. Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science.

23. Wallerstein, European Universalism, p 27.

24. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p 98.

25. Wallerstein, European Universalism, p 28. The notions of ‘practical rationality’, ‘humanity’ and ‘the laws of logic’ have been two common categories upon which to ground universalist positions. For two famous examples see Margaret Archer, ‘Sociology for One World: Unity and Diversity’, International Sociology 6, 1991, pp 131–147; Gannath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

26. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, p 310.

27. Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson, Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, London: Routledge, 1996.

28. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘From the Postmodern to the Postcolonial—and Beyond Both’, in E M Boatcā Gutierrez and S Costa (eds), Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, pp 225–242, p 234.

29. Latour, Politics of Nature, p 33.

30. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, p 3

31. William James, A Pluralistic Universe, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1909/1996.

32. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p 21.

33. James, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, p 75.

34. James, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, p 76.

35. Stengers, ‘Beyond Conversation: The Risks of Peace’, p 248.

36. James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth, p 77. See also Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

37. Anderson, ‘Postcolonial Technoscience’, p 643. See also Anderson, ‘From Subjugated Knowledge to Conjugated Subjects’; Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, London: Routledge, 2004; Seth, Subject Lessons.

38. Mol, ‘Ontological Politics’, p 76.

39. Mol, ‘Ontological Politics’, pp 74–75.

40. Seth, Subject Lessons. For other relevant examples which unfortunately cannot be discussed here, see Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008; Marianne Laet and Annemarie Mol, ‘The Zimbawe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology’, Social Studies of Science 30, 2000, pp 225–263; Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt.

41. Seth, Subject Lessons, pp 62–63.

42. Seth, Subject Lessons, p 63.

43. Isabelle Stengers, ‘Reclaiming Animism’, E-flux Journal 36, 2012, pp 1–10, pp 3–4.

44. Tobie Nathan, L'influence qui guérit, Paris: Odile Chacob, 1994; See also Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

45. Isabelle Stengers, ‘Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualisms’, Subjectivity 22, 2008, pp 38–59, p 48. See also Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, London: Continuum, 1977/2002.

46. Stengers, ‘Pensar a partir de la cuestión de la eficacia’, p 273.

47. See Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999; Ulrich Beck, ‘The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach’, Common Knowledge 10, 2004, pp 430–449; Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; Latour, Politics of Nature; Bruno Latour, ‘Whose Cosmos? Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck’, Common Knowledge 10, 2004, pp 450–462.

48. For relevant contributions to this debate see Gurminder Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and Sociological Imagination, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; Harding, Sciences from Below; Srikanth Mallavarapu and Amit Prasad, ‘Facts, Fetishes, and the Parliament of Things: Is There Any Space for Critique?’, Social Epistemology 20, 2006, pp 185–199; Amit Ray and Evan Salinger, ‘Jagannath's Saligram: On Bruno Latour and Literary Critique after Postcoloniality’, Postmodern Culture 18, 2008. Available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v018/18.2.ray.html (accessed September 2012); Matthew Watson, ‘Cosmopolitics and the Subaltern: Problematizing Latour's Idea of the Commons’, Theory, Culture and Society 28, 2011, pp 55–79.

49. Latour, ‘Whose Cosmos? Which Cosmopolitics?’, p 450.

50. Mariam Fraser, ‘Experiencing Sociology’, European Journal of Social Theory 12, 2009, pp 63–81, p 76.

51. Gurminder Bhambra, ‘Sociology after Postcolonialism: Provincialized Cosmopolitanisms and Connected Sociologies’, in E Gutierrez, M Boatcā and S Costa (eds), Decolonizing European Sociology, Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, pp 33–49, p 40.

52. Latour, ‘Whose Cosmos? Which Cosmopolitics?’, p 453.

53. Latour, Politics of Nature, p 124.

54. Latour, Politics of Nature, p 18.

55. Watson, ‘Cosmopolitics and the Subaltern’, p 59.

56. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, p 356.