Alcune riflessioni sul 10° anniversario di Tecnoscienza
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17454
How can STS move towards a greater pluriversality? How can we question the taken for granted of STS scholarship and geopolitics, so as to engage across radically different worlds? Thinking through a decade of Tecnoscienza and bridging the articles published in the 2010 and the 2019 volumes, the contribution reflects upon possible lines of future STS inquiry.
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2038-3460
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Lucy Suchman
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Tecnoscienza
Some reflections on the 10th anniversary of Tecnoscienza
Text.Serial.Journal
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11
Anniversary Reflections
2020-11-12
2023-06-26
2020-11-12
2023-10-12
15-22
TS
Lucy Suchman
2020/11/12
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17454
15
Lancaster University
2038-3460
1
Tecnoscienza
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Some reflections on the 10th anniversary of Tecnoscienza
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17454/16302
11
                                                           Anniversary Reflection
                                                                                     15




Alcune riflessioni sul 10° anniversario di
Tecnoscienza
Lucy Suchman
 Lancaster University



     Abstract: How can STS move towards a greater pluriversality? How can
     we question the taken for granted of STS scholarship and geopolitics, so as
     to engage across radically different worlds? Thinking through a decade of
     Tecnoscienza and bridging the articles published in the 2010 and the 2019
     volumes, the contribution reflects upon possible lines of future STS inquiry.

     Keywords: STS; pluriversality; feminism; more than human relations;
     Tecnoscienza.

     Submitted: May 30, 2020 – Accepted: 30 June, 2020

     Corresponding author: Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University, Dept. of
     Sociology, Bowland College, Lancaster. LA1 4YT, United Kingdom. Email:
     l.suchman@lancaster.ac.uk




1. Introduction

    How can STS (an STS multiple) be part of wider transitions from uni-
versal knowledge projects to projects in articulating pluriversality?1 The
answer to this question cannot, obviously, be a prescription for what ‘we’
all should be doing. Rather, answering needs to be part of an ongoing,
collective conversation in which we locate ourselves as speakers/writers,
not once and for all but always in relation to the discussion at hand. Our
discussion here engages with the 10th anniversary of the journal Tecnosci-
enza, established initially as a forum that invites contributions from STS
scholars for whom Italian (once the imperial voice of Renaissance Eu-
rope) is their native tongue, or those who have undertaken the work of
gaining fluency in that beautiful language. This itself is a step towards
greater pluriversality, asking different readers to make the effort of be-
coming multilingual or risk missing out.
    While the dominance of English as the lingua franca of academic pub-
lishing continues, there are at the same time shifts in centres of gravity

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
11 (1) pp. 15-22 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                2020
16                                                            Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

within STS that challenge monolingual futures for the field. The flourish-
ing of Tecnoscienza is indicative of an expanding range of STS scholar-
ship and associated journals, which support regional networks of research
and publishing in (inter alia) Latin America (Tapuya, published in Eng-
lish but inviting supplemental translations in Spanish and Portuguese)
and East Asia (EASTS), as well as across Europe (Science and Technolo-
gy Studies) and Scandinavia (STS Encounters, published in Danish and
other Nordic languages as well as English). In a less hegemonic future,
these networks could open new possibilities for researchers not only to
think and work but also to write in first languages, leaving those of us
who are monolingual English speakers feeling (at last!) increasingly on
the outside. At the same time, this transition is not an easy one, as is evi-
dent in the fact that, while the majority of the journal’s contributing au-
thors continue to be located in Italy, Tecnoscienza shifted to English only
submissions in 2016. The politics of language are integral, in sum, to
thinking about our field’s pasts and transforming its futures.
    Where else might we begin in taking Tecnoscienza’s 10th anniversary
as an occasion to think about STS? How about the cover of Vol. 1, No. 1,
a human/machine designed by Zaven Paré? The human, as is so often the
case, is figured as/by a face (in this case without a mouth), suspended on
what is evidently the machinic body that supports and animates it. The
editors’ description of the art installation of which this device is part is el-
oquent, conveying the poignant effect of multiple of these identical phan-
tasmatic subject/objects, inchoately murmuring, generating sounds that,
while originating from human bodies, diffract through these machines
and the gallery space to engender an affective return to the bodies that
the installation incorporates as its audience.
    Ten years later, the cover of Vol, 10, No. 2 presents a self-driving car,
bedeviled by a salt circle; “By reproducing a “No Entry” road marking,
the circle confuses the car’s vision system into believing it is surrounded
by no entry points, and entraps it” (Redazione Tecnoscienza 2019). A
work of installation artist James Bridle, “Autonomous Trap 001 (2017)”
joins the human/machine as another fetish object of automated autono-
my, this time centering automobility. Bridle himself embodies a transdis-
ciplinarity indicative of the future of STS, as an artist/scholar capable of
configuring the hardware and software of this “research vehicle.” The re-
search being conducted by Bridle is a simple suggestion for a non-violent
act of sabotage, a countertechnology to the investments of Google, Tesla
and other contenders for the displacement of driving labours, and a move
towards demystification that demonstrates the fragility of the car’s senso-
ry coupling with its surrounding environment.
    As a device for navigating the rich range of topics evident in work
published over Tecnoscienza’s first decade, I’ll stay with the somewhat
arbitrary strategy of thinking through Volumes 1 (2010) and 10 (2019),
about generative lines of future STS inquiry.2
Suchman                                                                   17


2. STS of Translations

     Following translation – as the work of making commensurable, with
its inescapable losses and frequent betrayals – is a founding/ongoing STS
project. Within the material-semiotic framing of STS research, translation
refers to processes by which entities, beings, knowledges and practices
from one location are re-rendered in order to be intelligible and practica-
ble within another. The inaugural issues includes stories of raw milk dis-
pensers (Piccioni 2010), the stabilisation of furniture (Parolin 2010), the
“retranslation” of images in experimental psychology (Gianelli and Mon-
tanari 2010), and the “recombinant typicalities” of breadmaking with
“reconfigured ‘natural’ yeast” (Mongili 2010). In Volume 10, the case of
the “translational imperative” to move findings from animal models to
humans (Lowe et al. 2019, 6) considers the question of who suffers, or is
sacrificed, on behalf of whom as an integral moral/ethical thread, for both
biomedical practitioners and STS scholars. Reminding us that care is a
longstanding topic for STS (cf. Lynch 1988), the current moment brings
new questions and normative prescriptions regarding multispecies trans-
lation, and adds further layers of nuance to critical STS accounts regard-
ing “material flows and conceptual transformations” from bench work to
clinical treatment, laboratory to market (Lowe et al. 2019, 11). Recognis-
ing that the traffic of natureculture flows in multiple directions, extending
and deepening our field’s tracings of the politics of translation begins to
open up possibilities for “doing difference” differently (Verran 2013), in
support of more radical transformations in the geopolitics of knowledge
making.


3. STS of Ordering

    Perhaps more than any other field of social research, STS has attended
to the material practices through which social ordering is enacted. In Vol
1, Coletta (2010) directs us to the performative agencies of street names,
taking the mundane artefact of city signage as a guide to recovering the
administrative lifeworlds that assign material-semiotic orderings to the
urban landscape. Ventura (2010) examines relations of urban lighting and
road surfaces through the case of Palermo’s Piazza Politeama, showing
daily cycles of transition in the piazza’s symbolic and practical character
affected by naturalcultural changes in illumination. Ten years later, as I
write these reflections in the moment of the pandemic of Covid 19, we
find ourselves subject to extraordinary reconfigurations of social space
aimed at managing and disciplining mobility/contact. These new orders
of mobility governance intersect with ongoing, and intensifying, techno-
political regimes of population management through border control. An-
imated by discourses of in/security, b(ordering) at once promotes fear
18                                                                Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

from invading ‘aliens’ (as human and viral actors/actants are deliberately
conflated), and promises to conquer the threat through fortification and
containment (Andersson 2020). Technopolitical regimes at the border
engaged in what Pelizza (2019) has characterised as “processing alterity”
are enabled through the expansion of computational infrastructures; the-
se systems reanimate longstanding imaginaries of omniscient/omnipotent
control based on translational technologies of sensing and datafication.


4. Sensing STS

    From Volume 1, STS is a resource for critical data analytics as both
method and object of research, troubling dominant tropes of research in-
to computationally-enabled sociality, e.g. “online community” (Pelizza
2010), in favour of attention to the noncoherence and ephemera that es-
cape the computational system’s normalising designs. By Volume 10, rela-
tions of datafication and knowledge-making take STS into multiple do-
mains. Zampino (2019) follows the case of self-tracking as a mode of on-
tological choreography, not only in the clinic but in everyday life cycles.
Bodily agencies are complicated in a matrix of expert knowledge and be-
havioural management on one hand, incorporation of new possibilities
for self-knowledge of the body on the other. The politics of knowledge
making are critical here, specifically questions of who configures relevant
measurement devices in the service of whom, further complicated by the
ways in which a device’s design is at once normatively prescribed and
never determining of its use and significance (see also Roberts et al 2019).
Measuring devices do not render their signs independent of the body that
“learns ‘to be affected’”, to be moved by those signals (Zampino 2019, 33,
citing Latour 2004). The direction of movement, as Yli-Kauhaluoma
(2019) reports, may be less about changes aimed at health and well being
than about new routines developed in the service of the smooth operation
of sensing devices themselves.


5. Feminist STS

   In Volume 1 Castiello’s (2010) review of Meeting the Universe Half-
way (Barad 2007) anticipates my own reflections on relations between
Barad’s writings and ANT (Suchman 2011 which, my apologies, should
have cited Castiello!). Castiello observes:
     Questi due movimenti – verso il reale e verso una nozione di realtà non
     rappresentativa bensì performativa e in divenire – costituiscono, proba-
     bilmente, la cifra di una convergenza di interessi, seppur con le debite
     differenze, tra il dibattito inerente ai STS e le teorie femministe (2010,
     115).
Suchman                                                                         19
   [These two movements – towards the real and towards a notion of reali-
   ty which is not representative but rather performative and in a process of
   becoming – constitute, probably, the sign of a convergence of interests,
   albeit with due difference, in the debate between STS and feminist theo-
   ries].

    Delineating lines around and between things is, as we know, a practice
of making difference. It follows that responsible knowing requires atten-
tiveness to the reiterative, material-discursive practices through which ob-
ject boundaries are drawn, and to the constitutive relations – and exclu-
sions – that boundary making enacts. This includes, of course, the figures
of STS and feminist theories themselves, each becoming, however conten-
tiously, in relation to the other.
    A decade later Sciannamblo (2019, 80) returns to the question of what
we might mean by STS as an “ethico-onto-epistemic practice,” adopting
an admittedly unwieldy conjunction introduced by Barad to signal the in-
separability of ethics, knowing and becoming. Sciannamblo prefaces her
empirical discussion of instances of writing research with a thoughtful
and extensively referenced précis of debate regarding how STS is impli-
cated in its own theoretical/empirical arguments regarding the performa-
tivity of knowledge claims. This is a discussion that has at its best com-
bined clarifying critique (rather than critique in the service of territorial
claims or one-upmanship) with transformative reconceptualisations of re-
lations between research methods and their objects, the material and the
discursive, knowledge and world making.


6. More than human STS

    By Volume 10 the multiple realities of climate change compel atten-
tion from STS researchers, not only to associated technosciences but in-
creasingly also to wider publics and multispecies relations. Inspired by
Callon (1998), DelSesto (2019) takes people-plant interactions as a site
from which to examine what he identifies as the logic of constraints that
frame the socio-spatial architectures of the Anthropocene, and the over-
flows that open that logic to alternative paths towards transitions to sus-
tainability. As he traces the disconnection of social life from nature, Del-
Sesto centers “the ongoing design of people-plant interactions as a prac-
tice that can work from the inside-out to unfold new political capacities”
(2019, 101). The prison garden, for example, enacts a kind of counter so-
cio-spatial logic, wherein “a certain kind of energy … exists – of uncer-
tainty, openness, and possibility” (ivi, 108). Without over-representing
the agency of such spaces within wider political economies of mass incar-
ceration, DelSesto argues that their local effects are powerful, and are
echoed in diverse configurations from urban gardens in reclaimed ‘va-
cant’ lots, to therapeutic gardens inside institutions like hospitals or long-
20                                                             Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

term care facilities.
    Giardullo et al. (2019) take the movement for a global energy transi-
tion from finite fossil-based to renewable zero-carbon systems as critical
for sustainable human/more than human relations. Read in a moment of
pandemic, the toxicity of globalisation as a political economic project, in-
volving the opening of commercially-based flows accompanied by re-
newed commitment to the containment of (mostly forced human migra-
tion), is as an index of the wider transition of which remaking energy
sources is a key element. Crossing boundaries in order to connect the
dots leads this discussion into a plethora of multi-scalar (both temporally
and spatially) and interrelated themes.


7. Coda

    A crucial question for us as STS-informed scholars/activists is just
what worlds are presupposed, assumed, reiterated in our reading, writing,
and practice? Who do our words reference, when, where, and under
what circumstances? Too often the worlds of reference remain implicit,
comprising the taken for granted settings and networks in which we our-
selves are located. For many of us writing from Anglo/Euro/US worlds,
unmarked figures (of the human, the consumer, the actor, the citizen)
stand in for the specificity of those we actually have in mind. We need to
expand our capacity to acknowledge radical difference, including the
specificities of our own locations and associated onto-epistemological
conditions, and the histories, politics, economies and discourses that hold
those differences in place. At its best, careful scholarship in STS helps
with that work, as it draws from and builds upon the accumulating ar-
chive of writings/insights that comprise the field, elaborating or reconsid-
ering our collective ideas as they are reiterated and mobilised anew in a
next story, analysis, and argument.


References
Andersson, R. (2020) How Fear Infected the Border, in “New Internationalist”,
   523(1), pp. 35-36.
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the En-
   tanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
Callon, M. (1998) An Essay on Framing and Overflowing: Economic externalities
    revisited by sociology, In M. Callon (ed.), The Laws of the Markets, Oxford
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Castiello, R. (2010) Meeting the Universe Halfway. Feminist debate and Actor-
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Coletta, C. (2010) Giving name to streets, giving streets to names. Organising ur-
Suchman                                                                         21
   ban space following toponymy practices, in “Tecnoscienza”, 1(2), pp 5-32.
DelSesto, M. (2019) Forming and Opening the Socio-spatial Logic of Constraint,
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Giardullo, P., Pellizzoni, L., Brondi, S., Osti, G., Bögel, P., Upham, P., and Cas-
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   Science Studies, in “Body & Society”, 10(2-3), pp. 205-229.
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   in “Tecnoscienza”, 10(2), pp. 5-30.
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Pelizza, A. (2019) Processing Alterity, Enacting Europe: Migrant Registration and
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22                                                                Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

     “Tecnoscienza”, 2(1), pp. 21-30.
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   za”, 1(2), pp. 91-120.


Verran, H. (2013) Engagements between disparate knowledge traditions: Toward
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    1
      Mignolo (2018, x) characterises the pluriversal as working counter to the
power differentials introduced by colonialism and its companion modernity, with
their associated investments in the unity of Western technoscientific knowledge
systems.
    2
      My apologies to all of the bountiful scholarship left out of this brief survey,
for which I refer readers to the archives of Tecnoscienza!
