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SCA
Culture @ Large 2007
presents:
Professor
Isabelle Stengers
(Philosophy of Science, Université Libre de Bruxelles)
"Civilizing
Modern Practices"
Friday, November 30th
10:00-11:45am
SCA
Chair: Marisol de la Cadena (UC Davis)
Discussants:
Mike Fortun (RPI), Penny Harvey (U Manchester), Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro),
and Veena Das (Johns Hopkins U).
Isabelle
Stengers is among the most influential scholars of
Science and Technology Studies, one who, to use a Benjaminian
phrase,
makes philosophy out of science. Thinking through the
notion of ‘practices’—and observing their ecologies—her
concepts are original reflections on diverse (and divergent)
knowledge practices. Her work occupies a productive
space at the interface between Science Studies and
other culture-nature
practices,making a bold and strong contribution
to studies of politics, feminist scholarship, and cultural
analysis. Among those inspired by Stengers are
Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway. In turn, she draws
inspiration from Alfred North Whitehead, Deleuze and
Guattari and the
neo-pagan witch Starhawk, whose work she has translated
into French. Few of her very numerous publications
in French have been published in English: Power
and Invention (1997) and The Invention of Modern
Science (2000) (both by Minnesota
Press). Most recently Stengers has contributed an inspiring
piece, “The
Cosmopolitical Proposal” where she uses the Deleuzian
figure of the idiot to perform what she identifies as “slowing
down” reasoning “to arouse a slightly different
awareness of the problems and situations mobilizing us.” She
teaches Philosophy of Science at the Free University
of Brussels.
Stengers'
Paper Abstract:
The proposition that modern practices are
to be civilized obviously implies a peculiar meaning of what
it is to be civilized. The meaning I adopt is the ability
to present oneself in such a way that the presentation does
not entail that the one who is addressed will be defined
in contrast by an inferiority or a lack.
This entails for instance that when modern scientific practitioners
do present their practices as objective, rational or respecting
the facts, they are not civilized. Civilizing modern practices
should not however mean that all practices should be recognized
as being all practices only, a proposition closely associated
to what has been called the science wars. I will rather try
to address practices as divergent, none being like any other.
Again this entails a peculiar meaning for practices, a meaning
that, I will show, is neither descriptive nor normative,
and address what is causing a practitioner to feel and think
as irreducible to a matter of belief.
Finally I will claim
that as diverging both from each others and from common sense,
practices cannot be generally unified, either in the name
of a (human) common ground or a (ideal) common aim. Each
connection has the nature of an event, what Gilles Deleuze
called a mariage contre nature. A cultivation of
such connections corresponds to the perspective of what can
be called an ecology
of practices.
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