THE POLITICS OF THEORY

Abstract

This essay explores the politics of theory and how theoretical analysis in science and technology studies might inform real-world conduct. I focus on objects and projects that can serve as ‘ontological theatre’ for a nonmodern perspective – that both evoke and act out the ontology that I associate with my analysis of ‘the mangle of practice’. These are my models for ‘producing another world’. In conclusion, I contrast this proposal with Latour's political articulation of actor-network theory: Latour aims to reassemble the social at the meta-level of political representation, without modifying our mundane practices, while I am concerned here with possibilities for systematically transforming the latter.

Keywords:

• social theory
• STS
• politics
• cybernetics
• Latour
• Heidegger

Acknowledgements

I thank Fred Turner, Peter Danholt and the editors of this issue for comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. These examples are discussed at length in my forthcoming book, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, where I discuss examples ranging over psychiatry, brain science, robotics, biological computing, complexity theory, theoretical biology, management, politics, spirituality, the arts, music, architecture and education (Pickering forthcoming b). For a partial (in both senses) survey of the STS literature that assembles a broader range of examples than the present text, see also Pickering (2008a).

2. See Pickering (forthcoming a) for continuations of Ashby's work into contemporary work on complex systems, theoretical biology and architecture.

3. See Pickering (forthcoming a) for a discussion of contemporary work on adaptive architecture.

4. This style of split-level accounting in Latour's work goes back at least to the discussion of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ mechanisms in science in Latour (1987). It is, of course, a very familiar way of conceiving the political as a sort of superstructure added on to a productive base.

5. In general I would argue against the split-level image of the world and the base-superstructure model that goes with it (as Latour also does, in other contexts). We should see conventional politics as part of the cultural assemblage we inhabit, not as some sort of autonomous controller (see Pickering 1995 for the general form of the argument).

6. In Latour's case, we can note that he has always been more concerned with meta-level issues of representation than with ground-level material practices (Schmidgen n.d), so it is perhaps not surprising that his politics of theory focusses on the former. Riis (2008) documents very nicely the parallels between Latour's writings on science, technology and society and Heidegger's analysis of technology and enframing, despite their different tones of voice and political evaluations: ‘In the end, Latour's philosophy of technology appears as a mirror image of Heidegger's’ (2008, p. 297). We can thus read Latour as arguing that enframing is not as bad as Heidegger made out, while I am trying to set out an alternative to it. In a detailed, insightful and generally sympathetic essay review of Latour's Politics of Nature (2004), Jensen (2006) includes an interesting section entitled ‘Experimenting and Moralizing’, which, like the present essay, notices the moralizing and intolerant tone of Latour's discussion of the politics of theory. ‘[O]ne crucial aspect of collective life seems, in fact, to be closed off from negotiation [in the politics of nature]. That is [Latour's] new constitution itself… [H]e suggests that failing to take seriously his directives entails losing “the chance to become civilized” (p. 180). Such formulations give a particular, and I think unpleasant, flavor to the statement… that “Against the norm dissimulated in the politics of matters of fact, then, we had to be even more normative.”… [E]verybody seems to be invited into the realm of political ecology, except everybody who seriously disagrees with Latour… These groups are not viewed as “enemies,” later to become friends, but as “others” that may be ignored without loss… The weakness of Politics of Nature is its overt and covert self-privileging, and its (at times) moralizing rhetoric’ (Jensen 2006, pp. 119–120).

7. I thank Carol Steiner for this accusation.

8. Foucault (1988b) is the place to start thinking about technologies for policing and enframing the self.

9. It was also a centre of counter-cultural political activity in London (Pickering 2009).