Paper long abstract:

In STS the capacity to act has been typically conceptualised as a precarious achievement, rather than as an inherent ability attributed to persons, institutions, devices, or other pre-given entities. Having said this, STS scholars have been more comfortable conceptualising agency this way in the context of the natural sciences, innovation and design, and market economy, than in the context of politics. This is all the more surprising, given that in STS rendering agencing processes visible has long been considered a political intervention in its own right. This paper is an attempt to shift the attention of STS scholars to situations that are explicitly political. More specifically, it examines the conditions of possibility of doing politics by drawing on two sets of materials: preliminary empirical data about a hunger strike that involved 23 illegal immigrants in Brussels in 2012, and political theoretical works that discuss hunger strikes as acts of challenging the logic of sovereignty. Our aim with an interwoven analysis of these two sets of materials is to show how physical bodies become political during a hunger strike, how different ways of enacting the physical-political body suggest different agencing processes centred around the figures of the citizen and the activist, and how the figure of the hunger striker as a non-activist non-citizen may challenge some widely held assumptions - both in STS and in political theory - about what it is to do politics in a liberal democracy.