Our Science, Technology and Society list publishes books that examine the social, political and economic implications of developments in science and technology.
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Science, Technology and Society
Addressing mountains as earth beings, the performance Climatic Dances/Danzas Climaticas by Amanda Piña problematizes the discord between Indigenous cosmologies and dance practices in Latin America and the Western art system, which the Austrian/Chilean choreographer links to a wider culture of extractivism. This chapter reads her work through A.N. Whitehead’s theory of value and analyses it using concepts drawn from Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers, Steven Shaviro and Alessandro Questa. It thus derives from the performance an approach towards non-extractive aesthetics in the face of ecological collapse.
This chapter argues that a new aesthetic paradigm requires a new paradigm of aesthetic education. I elaborate what this paradigm looks like in Whitehead’s work, starting with his educational writing and moving through his meditations on abstractions and ‘aesthetic significance’ in Modes of Thought (1968, first published 1938). Throughout, I show how Whitehead turned to aesthetics to combat what he saw as the primary intellectual evil of his age: the problem of disciplinary specialization, which he regarded as the institutional manifestation of the modern habit of letting nature bifurcate. Arguably, this problem is with us more than ever, with the added danger that many disciplines – those that fall short on research-based metrics – are in the process of being cut from the university entirely. Whitehead’s notion of aesthetic education, framed to address this threat but made ever harder to grasp because of it, forces us to ask: how can we justify and institute modes of thought that fall outside the ‘knowledge factory’ model of the modern research university?
The present socio-ecological crises demand that we develop new ways of knowing and new kinds of action but also new ways of experiencing and feeling. To explore this demand, and inspired by A.N. Whitehead and Félix Guattari, this book outlines a ‘new aesthetic paradigm’: a generalized aesthetics acknowledging the primacy of aesthetic experience across all entities, phenomena and processes in order to sensitize contemporary knowledge practices to the nature and import of the present crises’ aesthetic dimensions. The book departs from the dominant understanding of aesthetics as a realm of human privilege and follows the transformation of our understanding of cultural and knowledge practices when predicated on aesthetic experience and feeling. This involves two interrelated assertions that upturn the prevailing understanding of aesthetics. First, aesthetics precedes and cannot be separated from knowledge: feeling and knowing are indivisible. Second, the ‘social’, typically seen as the source and cause of aesthetics, is itself the upshot of aesthetic processes. Taking up the proposition of generalized aesthetics, the contributors, from disciplines including cultural studies, design, English, law, geography, performance, philosophy and sociology, address how such an understanding of aesthetics plays out when confronted with environmental, technoscientific and ‘social’ matters of concern and care.
The chapter considers Whitehead’s notion of eternal objects as a task of ‘adventuring amid physical experiences in this actual world’ (1978: 256). The reason for doing so is to address a specific environmental problem: namely, of communicating the existence of nuclear waste buried underground for the (at least) 100,000 years that these materials pose a threat to organic life. To engage with the problem of communicating over more-than-human-time horizons, the chapter considers an unlikely genealogy of eternal objects existing between Whitehead and formal practices of nuclear waste management. Focussing on the eternal object of the colour red, and particularly its expression in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the chapter concludes by arguing for the need to understand eternal objects as an infinite quality of nature with a capacity to produce alternative evaluations – a line of thinking of relevancy to future studies and social science engagements with nuclear waste futures.
Isabelle Stengers’ thought revolves around a strange demand: we must take care of our abstractions. She finds this demand in Whitehead’s philosophy, which she takes up in a singular and original way. Taking care of our abstractions implies two things: First, to diagnose our contemporary experience, the abstractions that govern our ways of thinking and have contributed to the modernist legacy. Second, to explore other modes of abstraction that would enable us to deploy the multiple forms of experience in a different way and reweave the links broken by the incessant bifurcations of modern thought. This question of abstraction, as I have tried to show in this chapter, is at the heart of aesthetic questions, where it implies both a resistance to the bifurcation between nature and experience, fact and value, and existence and aesthetics, opening up a new field on the varieties of aesthetic experience in nature.
This chapter examines how the Anthropocene becomes perceptible as a speculative geological future through the medium of the technofossil. Invoking plastics, Styrofoam and other artefacts particular to the recent past, the technofossil is generative of a novel aesthetic remarkably successful at facilitating a sensitivity to geological deep time in the present. I develop an account of how the technofossil was invented, how it unfolds as an appropriation of palaeontological techniques, and how geologists draw on fossils as at once an impartial practice (the evidence is ‘set in stone’) while at once speaking ‘on behalf’ of technofossils to advance entirely political speculations about the future as well as contemporary society. The technofossil therefore unfolds as a speculative, forensic aesthetics.
Adopting, as its starting point for the engagement with more-than-human aesthetics, a discussion of the concept of the machinic ‘high’ to be found in the work of Félix Guattari, this chapter proposes an ‘ethico-aesthetic’ engagement with networked digital technologies. It considers the affective texture of human–computer interaction from a point of view that stresses the compulsive, even addictive dimension of media engagement but insists in particular on the complex ‘machinic’ configuration of technological systems. The concept of the ‘pathic’, derived from existential psychiatry, rewired in the work of Félix Guattari in the service of an environmental thinking that emphasizes the delicate nature of processes of morphogenesis, becomes a key operator in the chapter for exploring the productive ambiguities of data-driven forms of subjectivity.
In a present marked by planetary crisis, a radical rethinking of aesthetics is necessary. This inspirational collection proposes a new way of thinking about aesthetics as fundamental to cultivating more liveable futures.
Drawing on the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Félix Guattari, the book develops aesthetics as central to all more-than-human forms of experience, including knowledge practices. Each contribution invites readers on an adventure to explore how this broader view of aesthetics can reshape areas including biomedicine, geological forensics, nuclear waste, race, as well as arts and education.
This is an agenda-setting contribution to understanding the significance of aesthetics in science and technology studies, as well social and cultural research more broadly.
