Another Science is Possible by Isabelle Stengers
Author:Isabelle Stengers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509521845
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-01-08T00:00:00+00:00
Slowing down …
The right to ‘slowness’ is not an end in itself, nor does it refer to the way some researchers ask to be ‘left alone’ so they can continue to think of themselves as entitled to privileged treatment. Rather, in the sense I have outlined here, slowness, like speed, has a meaning which links researchers to all those who know that the imperatives of flexibility and competitiveness condemn them to destruction.
The stakes inherent in such destruction may evoke the period of the enclosures, when peasant communities were not only robbed of vital resources, but also separated from what held them together. With the commons privatised, what was destroyed was practical know-how, along with collective ways of acting, thinking, feeling and living. If capitalism today seems to be getting along very well with modern States, it is because both are rooted in this kind of destruction. The democratic individual, the one who says, ‘It’s my right …’, is the one who takes great pride in an ‘autonomy’ which, in fact, hands back to the State the responsibility for ‘thinking through’ the consequences. A strange liberty it is not to have to think further than one’s own immediate interests. As for capitalism, it is running free in a world exposed to its redefinitions, all of which intensify our dependency on modes of production that presuppose and entail, as with the enclosures, a form of ‘progress’ that destroys all possibility of collective intelligence – as research institutes, in the wake of so many others, are discovering today.
To speak of destruction is to speak of a resistance that can only exist alongside what American activists call ‘reclaiming’ – recuperating, healing, becoming capable once again of linking with what we have been separated from. This ‘recuperation’ process always begins with the jolting realisation that we are well and truly sick, and have been for a long time, so long that we no longer recognise what we are lacking, and think of our sickness, and whatever sustains it, as ‘normal’. What I have tried to do, in relation to the particular case of scientific research and evaluation, is to start thinking about what is lacking, about the way this lack makes us sick. We may well be critical and lucid, but we are crucially incapable of resisting what is destroying us (like those users who are incapable, as individuals, of not abusing a common resource).
Knowing that one is sick creates a sense of the possible. We don’t know what the strange adventure of the modern sciences could have been, or could yet be, but we know that doing ‘better’ what we are already in the habit of doing will not be sufficient for learning. It is a matter of unlearning an attitude of more or less cynical (‘realist’) resignation, and becoming sensitive once again to what we perhaps know, but only as in a dream. It is here that the word ‘slow’, as used in the slow movements, is adequate. Speed demands and creates an
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