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Short abstract

The talk brings STS work on alterities into conversation with the Frankfurt School‘s critical theory and Foucault‘s analytics of government. It will draw out similarities and differences to develop a concept of possibility that integrates relational, performative and experimental aspects.

Long abstract

The programmatic STS formula ‘It Could Be Otherwise’ invites further exploration of the concept of the possible. The interest of STS scholars in the emergence of ‘empirical ontologies’ is grounded in a sense of alternatives, enabling the reconstruction of how that which was not comes into being. STS traces the instantiations and figurations of the possible, analysing the processes that ‘quietly determine the limits of the possible by both narrowing down certain options and opening the possibility of creating different, and maybe better, worlds’ (Ballestero 2019: 5). In recent years, STS has increasingly developed a sensitivity to ‘not quite realised realities’ (Law and Lien 2012: 363). The initial focus on enactments led to the reproduction of prevailing practices of Othering, rather than to their destabilisation and undermining. As Law and Lien emphasise, it is important to ‘attend not just to ontologies enacted, but also to their shadowland of alterities’ (ibid.: 373).

The talk brings STS work on alterities into conversation with the Frankfurt School‘s critical theory and Foucault‘s analytics of government. While the former traces mechanisms of concealment and inhibition in the present to argue that better futures are possible, Foucault takes a very different stance. He replaces the stigma of deficit with the power of possibility. His problem is not the restriction of possibilities but their proliferation: the extensification of capacities and the accompanying intensification of power. The talk will draw out similarities and differences to develop a critical concept of possibility that integrates relational, performative and experimental aspects.