Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices

Isabelle Stengers

doi:10.5130/csr.v11i1.3459

Abstract

Prepared for an ANU Humanities Research Centre Symposium in early August 2003, these notes may be considered as a comment on Brian Massumi’s proposition that ‘a political ecology would be a social technology of belonging, assuming coexistence and co-becoming as the habitat of practices’.

Highlights

Let us start with a not-so-simple example, since it follows the path along which I encountered this idea of ecology—that of scientific practices and, more physics
The way physics presents itself the way it defines ‘physical reality’, is by way of persistent but freely floating theologico-political claims referring to the opposition between the world as understood from that an intelligible point of view and the world as we meet it and interact with it
As a result of defining ‘physical reality’ as the objective and beyond our merely human fictions, physics claims for itself a exclusive position of judgement over and against all other ‘realities’, including those of all other sciences. It is a position practitioners do not know how to leave, even when they wish to. It is a question of ‘habitat’; they feel that as soon as they leave the secure position of claiming that they ‘discover’ physical reality beyond changing appearances, they are defenceless, unable to resist the reduction of what they are producing to simple instrumental recipes, or to various human fictions

Summary

Introduction

Let us start with a not-so-simple example, since it follows the path along which I encountered this idea of ecology—that of scientific practices and, more physics. The ecology of practices has this ambition, and this is one of the reasons why I choose an open reference to the wisdom of naturalists who have learned to think in the presence of ongoing facts of destruction—with nothing beyond to justify it—who are able both to feel that the disappearance of any species is an irreparable loss, which makes our world poorer, and to accept the loss of so many species.

Results

Conclusion