Interstitial Politics: Thinking in Catastrophic Times

Abstract

Recent editorials in Science, Technology & Human Values have invited us to expand alternative ways of doing Science and Technology Studies (STS) that respond to the here-and-now of planetary life. This paper relays these calls for these catastrophic times by considering the manner in which philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has approached this problem. Proffering an extended reading of the mutations of Stengers's thought in the last decade, it argues that one of the lessons of her work is to connect the planetary catastrophe to the devastation of our knowledge-practices and the depletion of our imaginations, and to give to the catastrophe that marks the present the power to transform our ways of thinking in common. Resisting the mobilizations engendered by the question “what is to be done?”, Stengers wagers on the generative capacities of interstitial practices to regenerate forms of collective intelligence, forms capable of protecting knowing and thinking practices from capture and experimentally reactivating the imagination even amid catastrophe. In so doing, the paper proffers a mode of imagining critical STS as an accomplice to collective experiments everywhere elaborating capacities to learn, for their own reasons, through their own means, how to pose their own questions.