Martin Savransky

A Decolonial Imagination: Sociology, Anthropology and the Politics of Reality

While the recent proliferation of sociological engagements with postcolonial thought is important and welcome, central to most critiques of Eurocentrism is a concern with the realm of epistemology, with how sociology comes to know its objects of study. Such a concern, however, risks perpetuating another form of Eurocentrism, one that is responsible for instituting the very distinction between epistemology and ontology, knowledge and reality. By developing a sustained engagement with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s work, as well as establishing possible connections with what has been termed the ‘turn to ontology’ in anthropology, in this article I argue that in order for sociology to become exposed to the deeply transformative potential of non-Eurocentric thinking, it needs to cultivate a decolonial imagination that may enable it to move beyond epistemology, and to recognise that there is no social and cognitive justice without existential justice, no politics of knowledge without a politics of reality.

Worlds in the making: social sciences and the ontopolitics of knowledge

In December 1982, Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the now classic Cien Anos de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), among many other novels and short stories, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.1 In the award ceremony, Professor Lars Gyllensten, who presented the laureate and his work, emphasized the quality of the work as an exemplary case within the so-called magical-realist tradition: ‘In his novels and short stories’, Professor Gyllensen argued, ‘we are led into this peculiar place where the miraculous and the real converge. The extravagant flight of his own fantasy combines with traditional folk tales and facts, literary allusions and tangible—at times obtrusively graphic—descriptions approaching the matter-of-factness of reportage.’2

Of Recalcitrant Subjects

This paper problematises some of the assumptions underlying efforts in Governmentality Studies (GS) to theorise the production of subjectivity. By focusing on the GS literature about the role of the ‘psy-disciplines’ in the contemporary production of subjects, and by engaging in discussion with a heterogeneous series of authors such as Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres, it is argued that there are methodological, epistemic and ontological assumptions underpinning GSs work that result in: (1) a reduction of the material multiplicity of vectors at work in the production of subjectivity; (2) a reproduction of the subject–object distinction also common in conventional accounts of psychology and psychotherapy; and (3) the conceptualisation of ‘governable subjects’, who are nothing but epiphenomena of their vectors of production. The problematisation of such assumptions allows for the possibility of rethinking the formation of subjectivity, that is, of encountering recalcitrant subjects who may resist specific forms of subjectification, and also ask new questions, thereby potentially resulting in unexpected, novel forms of subjectivity. Finally, the notion of ‘ecology of questions’ is offered as an alternative exploration of the production of subjects.

What is nature capable of? Evidence, ontology and speculative medical humanities

Expanding on the recent call for a ‘critical medical humanities’ to intervene in questions of the ontology of health, this article develops a what we call a ‘speculative’ orientation to such interventions in relation to some of the ontological commitments on which contemporary biomedical cultures rest. We argue that crucial to this task is an approach to ontology that treats it not as a question of first principles, but as a matter of the consequences of the images of nature that contemporary biomedical research practices espouse when they make claims to evidence, as well as the possible consequences of imagining different worlds in which health and disease processes partake. By attending to the implicit ontological assumptions involved in the method par excellence of biomedical research, namely the randomised controlled trial (RCT), we argue that the mechanistic ontology that tacitly informs evidence-based biomedical research simultaneously authorises a series of problematic consequences for understanding and intervening practically in the concrete realities of health. As a response, we develop an alternative ontological proposition that regards processes of health and disease as always situated achievements. We show that, without disqualifying RCT-based evidence, such a situated ontology enables one to resist the reduction of the realities of health and disease to biomedicines current forms of explanation. In so doing, we call for medical humanities scholars to actively engage in the speculative question of what nature may be capable of.

How It Feels to Think: Experiencing Intellectual Invention

This article explores some aspects of what happens, and what can happen, in the complex practice we commonly refer to as “thinking.” Of all the practices involved in the messy processes we call research, “thinking” is perhaps the most pervasive and widespread. Yet, it also remains the most opaque. Thinking happens, but it is seldom spoken about. The theories we normally engage with never say how they come about. Surely, philosophers of various traditions have dedicated countless pages to the question of what thought is, and some social scientists have recently attempted to theorize “methods” of theorizing in research. Such accounts, however, tend to remain at odds with the hesitant, playful, and profoundly eventful experience of thinking-feeling in and through research. The experience, that is, that thoughts often think other thoughts, that they happen to us, and that thinking therefore involves an art of learning to confer on ideas the capacity to make us think. In this article, I seek not to make grand claims about the nature of thought, but to make perceptible the dramatic and perplexing experience that thinking can constitute. In so doing, I draw on the work of philosopher of heuristics, Judith Schlanger, whose central aim has been to come to terms with the adventure of what she terms “intellectual invention.” The task is to open up a different—if never fully transparent—conversation about how it feels to think.

A careful biomedicine? Generalization and abstraction in RCTs

Abstract This article takes up biomedical and public health concerns about the difficulty of generalizing or extrapolating measurements of efficacy produced by the method of the randomized control trial (RCT) to wider populations. While explanations for the difficulty may be deduced from social studies of science that reveal the contingent and situated nature of trial findings, new conceptual tools are required to allow for the practical value associated with the possibility of their extrapolation. We argue that Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of ‘abstraction’ can provide an alternative appreciation of some key aspects of the processes of knowledge-production of RCTs to enable a recasting of the problem of generalization. By proposing that generalization depends on relevant abstractions, we direct attention to the situated forms of care that this calls for. After showing the conceptual difference that the process of abstraction makes for understanding and extrapolating the situated nature of a research finding, we offer an interpretation of possible forms of care at work in efforts to devise Ebola adaptive trials. The example is offered as one possible basis for a reformulation of the logic of generalization.

The lure of the possible: On the function of speculative propositions

Is another future possible? So called ‘late modernity’ is marked by the escalating rise in and proliferation of uncertainties and unforeseen events brought about by the interplay between and patterning of social–natural, techno–scientific and political-economic developments. The future has indeed become problematic. The question of how heterogeneous actors engage futures, what intellectual and practical strategies they put into play and what the implications of such strategies are, have become key concerns of recent social and cultural research addressing a diverse range of fields of practice and experience. Exploring questions of speculation, possibilities and futures in contemporary societies, Speculative Research responds to the pressing need to not only critically account for the role of calculative logics and rationalities in managing societal futures, but to develop alternative approaches and sensibilities that take futures seriously as possibilities and that demand new habits and practices of attention, invention, and experimentation.

On the Problem of Attachment: Living Economies and the Ecology of Late Capitalism

A global economic crisis and the imminent prospects of a time of environmental catastrophes may have been the price we had to pay for our modern habits of bifurcating the world into clear-cut, distinct spheres, but the ancient wisdom inherent in the shared etymology of the concepts of ‘economics’ and ‘ecology’ seems finally to be resurfacing in some critical factions of the cultural memory of the West. This wisdom is one that teaches us that, despite what the modern tradition would have us embrace, it is not that economics answers questions of markets, money and the State, while ecology responds to questions of nature, sustainability and the survival of the living. Rather, by bringing the question of the “eco” to the fore, namely, of the oı̈kos or habitats that humans and other-than-humans form as they are simultaneously brought into forms of fragile coexistence, what lies at the centre of both economics and ecology is the perplexity of a shared problem. Namely, the problem of attachment—the question of the enduring yet fragile and dynamic patterns by which beings of different kinds become bound and unbound to and from each other. Conceived in this way, ‘ecology’ can no longer be restricted to nature but opens up the possibility of cultivating an integral ethos, a mode of attention to, and care for, the fragile patterns, densities, and textures that bind beings and relations Science as Culture, 2015 Vol. 24, No. 4, 526–531, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2015.1079606