Isabelle Stengers

Comparison as a Matter of Concern

The question of universalism and relativism is often taken to be a matter of critical reflexivity. This article attempts to present the question instead as a matter of practical, political, and always-situated concern. The attempt starts from the consideration of modern experimental sciences. These sciences usually serve as the stronghold for universalist claims and as such are a target of relativism. It is argued that the specificity of these sciences is not a method but a concern. To be able to claim that they have not unilaterally imposed their definitions on the phenomena they study is the leading concern of experimenters and should be understood in terms of the following achievement: the creation of a very particular “rapport” that authorizes claiming that what is operationally defined “lends itself” to this correlation. Linking knowledge production with a creation of rapports entails a pluralization of sciences along with the pluralization of modes of concern associated with the rapport. However, resisting unilaterally imposed definitions is not enough, since with the coming “knowledge economy” the questions that this article raises will soon be part of a romantic past. Thus it concludes with a speculative touch, which may be a requiem, relating the creation of rapports with an ecology of practices akin to William James’s always-under-construction pluriverse.

Comparative Relativism: Symposium on an Impossibility

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Levi-Strauss’s analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison’s history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry.

Accepting the reality of Gaia: A fundamental shift?

1. Thinking the Anthropocene Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil and Francois Gemenne Part 1: The concept and its implications 2. The Geological Turn: Narratives of the Anthropocene Christophe Bonneuil 3. Human Destiny in the Anthropocene Clive Hamilton 4. The Anthropocene and the Convergence of Histories Dipesh Chakrabarty 5. The Political Ecology of the Technocene: Uncovering ecologically unequal exchange in the world-system Alf Hornborg 6. Losing the Earth Knowingly: Six grammars of environmental reflexivity around 1800 Jean-Baptiste Fressoz Part 2: Catastrophism in the Anthropocene 7. Anthropocene, Catastrophism and Green Political Theory Luc Semal 8. Eschatology in the Anthropocene: From the chronos of deep time to the kairos of the age of humans Michael Northcott 9. Green Eschatology Yves Cochet Part 3: Rethinking politics 10. Back to the Holocene: A conceptual, and possibly practical, return to a nature not intended for humans Virginie Maris 11. Accepting the Reality of Gaia: A fundamental shift? Isabelle Stengers 12. Telling Friends from Foes in the Time of the Anthropocene Bruno Latour 13. A Much-Needed Renewal of Environmentalism? Eco-politics in the Anthropocene Ingolfur Bluhdorn 14. The Anthropocene and Its Victims Francois Gemenne Epilogue 15. Commission on Planetary Ages Decision CC87966424/49: The Onomatophore of the Anthropocene Bronislaw Szerszynski

The universe: A birth far from equilibrium?

The scientific world is, as I have often repeated, a shadow world, shadowing a world familiar to our consciousness. Just how much do we expect it to shadow? We do not expect it to shadow all that is in our mind, emotions, memory, etc. In the main we expect it to shadow impressions which can be traced to external sense organs. But time makes a dual entry and thus forms an intermediate link between the internal and the external. This is shadowed partially by the scientific world of primary physics (which excludes times arrow), but fully when we enlarge the scheme to include entropy. Therefore by the momentous departure in the nineteenth century the scientific world is not confined to a static extension around which the mind may spin a romance of activity and evolution; it shadows that dynamic quality of the familiar world which cannot be parted from it without disaster to its significance.—Arthur Eddington,The Nature of the Physical World.

Reinstituting Nature—A Latourian Workshop

Didier Debaise, Pablo Jensen, M. Pierre Montebello, Nicolas Prignot, Isabelle Stengers and Aline Wiame Debaise: Faculte de Philosophie et Lettres, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; Jensen: Institut des Systemes Complexes, Universite de Lyon, France; Montebello: Departement de Philosophie, Universite de Toulouse II, France; Prignot, Stengers and Wiame: Faculte de Philosophie et Lettres, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

The Need for a Public Understanding of Sciences

This chapter addresses the question of general (non-specialized) science education in terms not of a required scientific literacy but with reference to the need for a transformation in the relation between scientists and a democratic society. Such a transformation, it is argued, is less conditioned by a general discourse about the relative, value-laden character of scientific knowledge than by an appetitive interest for both the uncertainty and challenges of science in the making and the controversial socio-technical situations where diverging scientific arguments and facts confront each other. Taking into account scientists’ deeply ingrained distrust of ‘public opinion’, the need for the development of connoisseurship is emphasized. Finally it is shown why not only a democratic society but scientists themselves need today the mediation activity of interested but critical and demanding connoisseurs.

Sciences Were Never "Good"

This piece is an answer to the responses of Helen Verran, Steven D. Brown, and Brit Ross Winthereik to the author’s article, “Comparison as a Matter of Concern.” She acknowledges the difficulty of her respondents to accept her claim that the sciences may be destroyed as many practices before them have been. She opposes, however, an “adaptationist” or “transformationist” perspective, in order to emphasize that, if the sciences are to survive, a radical mutation would be needed. She emphasizes that what is at stake is not a “good science” threatened by its alliance with industry. The recruitment of powerful allies has been part of the scientific enterprise since its beginning. What is at stake is the collective fabric of sciences as characterized by Bruno Latour in terms of “links and knots.”

Do We Know How to Read Messages in the Sand

Let us begin by making a rather obvious remark: the meaning of the question of ’what we do not know’ varies according to whether or not the word &dquo;yet&dquo; is explicitly or implicitly included. It comes as no surprise that it should be in physics, the science in which, ever since Galileo and Newton, the quest for knowledge has been so amply and unexpectedly rewarded, that we find the most dramatic examples of both possibilities: one in which theory points to knowledge not yet acquired, knowledge which is still to be conquered, but which, once attained, should constitute its final triumph; and one in which &dquo;we do not know&dquo; may be taken as the conclusion of established knowledge. We do not (yet) know how to unify the four fundamental forces of interaction in a single theory, and yet that eventuality is already being called the theory of everything (TOE). Since interaction is the principle on which physics now bases all its explanations, and since physical explanations are in principle valid for everything that exists, the unification of the forces of interaction must therefore be the science of the

Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse

Capitalist enterprise is transforming the world, reshaping the registers of what Felix Guattari (2000) has called the three ecologies: namely those of the environment, of social relations, and of h...

Zeit und Zeiten

Mehr als drei Jahrhunderte lang ist in der Physik behauptet worden, die Zeit sei im Grunde ein geometrischer Parameter, mit dessen Hilfe die Entfaltung der einander folgenden dynamischen Zustande beschrieben werden konne. In diesem Sinne hat Emile Meyerson die Geschichte der modernen Wissenschaft als fortschreitende Verwirklichung einer, wie er meinte, grundlegenden Kategorie der menschlichen Vernunft dargestellt. Das Mannigfaltige und Wandelbare muste auf das Identische und Dauerhafte reduziert, die Zeit muste eliminiert werden.