Animals and Technoscientific Developments: Getting Out of Invisibility

Abstract

The essays in the section “Animals in technoscientific developments” have been collected from the submissions to the 3rd European Conference of Critical Animal Studies that I organized in Karlsruhe on 28–30 November 2013. The aim of the conference was to stimulate critical scholars to engage on the multifaceted relationships between animals and technosciences, an underresearched topic. Technoscience has become an important concept in the current debate on the epistemic and normative changes taking place in how scientific and technological research is currently being conducted. Although there are different modes of describing technoscience (and thus different interpretations of whether it is a “new” mode of knowledge production and when it started), generally speaking the term refers to a means of developing knowledge in which it is not possible to separate the scientific from the technological (cf., among others [20, 38]). In contrast to the “traditional mode of doing science,” in which scientific objects are relevant because there are facts about them, technoscience looks at the deep entanglements between theoretical representations (science) and technical interventions. Technoscience is, therefore, interested in things as configurations of different interests [2]. The animal turn in humanities, realized through the establishment of human–animal studies (HAS) and critical animal studies (CAS) over the past two decades aims at integrating animals in scholarly and (social-) scientific inquiry and liberating them from the ontological status of objects [14, 52]. Animals should be no longer perceived as mere metaphors or symbols but individuals in flesh and blood and involved in different mechanisms of knowledge productions and practices [41]. Critical perspectives on animals are shifting the focus of the inquiry from the insistence in looking for the capacities of animals to the complexity of interspecies relationships, critically challenging the idea of human domination and human exceptionalism (among others [63, 49, 52]). Since the inquiry on technoscience shows the hybrid nature of knowledge and its producers, and thus fundamentally challenges differences between nature and culture, it works implicitly for the reconsideration of the idea of human exceptionalism, which is defined as “the premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies” ([43]:11). As technoscience points out the interdependence and inseparability of science and technology and society, its inquiry cannot but embrace a rejection of the transcendental human subject who is external to socionatural entanglements and thus stresses the need to develop relational ontologies. The animal turn works toward revealing the profoundly interrelated nature of humans and animals. Therefore, the fact that technoscience indicates a different Nanoethics (2015) 9:5–10 DOI 10.1007/s11569-015-0224-3