Frankfurt Kitchen STS

The main theme of the summer term is ‘topology’, and we thought it would be helpful to start by discussing Michel Serres’s take on it. For the first session we’re going to read various excepts (Ch1; pp. 57-62; pp. 93-107) from Michel Serres’s conversation with Bruno Latour, and a short commentary on Serres by Steven Connor.

This is the last meeting of the Winter term, and this time our special guest will be Tahani Nadim from the Natural History Museum in Berlin. We’re going to continue our discussion about relational ontologies with the help of Marsha Rosengarten’s HIV Interventions (particularly the last two chapters.)

To what extent is ontology a good and helpful term for STS scholars? Isn’t it too ‘philosophical’? Do we necessarily have to engage with philosophy, when we explore (even advocate) a shift from epistemology to ontology? If we do, what are the possibilities of productive engagement? These are some of the questions we’re going to discuss with the help of Manuel DeLanda’s chapter about social ontology.

Reference: DeLanda, M. (2006) Deleuzian social ontology and assemblage theory, in Fuglsang, M., & Sørensen, B. M. (eds.), Deleuze and the Social. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 250-266.

In this meeting we’ll continue our discussion with the help of various texts from the special issue of SSS about the (alleged) turn to ontology in STS. Among other things, we will compare and contrast different ways of relating to the empirical through Setve Woolgar & Javier Lezaun’s and John Law & Marienne Lien’s papers.

In the previous meeting we talked about performativity in an economic context. We did this with the help of Stephen Collier and a written exchange between Judith Butler and Michel Callon. Many of us had the feeling that there was a disconnect between Butler’s and Callon’s texts: in her discussion of performativity Butler somehow missed Callon’s point about the importance of materiality, while Callon somehow missed Butler’s point about critique. Butler argued that it was not enough to say that markets are effects of ongoing performances, one also needs to think about how they could be performed differently – not only by economists, but also by scholars who study them and write about them. If this is a political point, then it’s concerned not simply with epistemology (who knows better how markets work?) but with ontology (what kind of an economic reality is being performed, and how are we implicated in its performance?). The main theme for this week’s – and perhaps this term’s – discussion is going to be ontological politics; background reading is Mario Blaser’s recent article in Current Anthropology.

What about critique? How is the economy performed, and how could it be performed differently? A discussion with Stephen Collier (background reading: an exchange between Judith Butler and Michel Callon in a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy and a recent paper of Stephen’s)

The affective turn – what is it, and how is it relevant for STS? (We read Lisa Blackman & Couze Venn’s introduction to a special issue of Body & Society)

Temporalities, affect, and different ways of enacting the future (Vincanne Adams, Michelle Murphy and Adele E. Clarke: ‘Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality’)

How does the concept of performativity help us better understand what’s going on in our field? And how does it help better understand our own knowledge making practices? We’ll be looking for answers with the help of Natasha Myers’ ‘Performing the protein fold‘

To start the discussion, we’re going to read Stefan Helmreich’s ‘An anthropoligist underwater’