This article reviews recent work in socio-historical technology studies. Four problems, frequently mentioned in critical debates, are discussed – relativism, reflexivity, theory, and practice. The main body of the article is devoted to a discussion of the latter two problems. Requirements for a theory on socio-technical change are proposed, and one concrete example of a conceptual framework that meets these requirements is discussed. The second point of the article is to argue that present (science and) technology studies arc now able to break away from a too academic, internalistic perspective and return to the politically relevant “Science, Technology & Society” issues that informed much of this work more than a decade ago.
De Jesus P. (2018) Thinking through enactive agency: Sense-making, bio-semiosis and the ontologies of organismic worlds. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17(5): 861–887. https://cepa.info/5701
According to enactivism all living systems, from single cell organisms to human beings, are ontologically endowed with some form of teleological and sense-making agency. Furthermore, enactivists maintain that: (i) there is no fixed pregiven world and as a consequence (ii) all organisms “bring forth” their own unique “worlds” through processes of sense-making. The first half of the paper takes these two ontological claims as its central focus and aims to clarify and make explicit the arguments and motivations underlying them. Our analysis here highlights three distinct but connected problems for enactivism: (i) these arguments do not and cannot guarantee that there is no pregiven world, instead, they (ii) end up generating a contradiction whereby a pregiven world seems to in fact be tacitly presupposed by virtue of (iii) a reliance on a tacit epistemic perspectivalism which is also inherently representationalist and as a consequence makes it difficult to satisfactorily account for the ontological plurality of worlds. Taking these considerations on board, the second half of the paper then aims to develop a more robust ontologically grounded enactivism. Drawing from biosemiotic enactivism, science and technology studies and anthropology, the paper aims to present an account which both rejects a pregiven world and coherently accounts for how organisms bring forth ontologically multiple worlds.
Gentzel P. (2017) Praktisches Wissen und Materialität: Herausforderungen für kritisch- konstruktivistische Kommunikations- und Medienforschung [Practical knowledge and materiality: Challenges for critical-constructivist communication and media research]. M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft 65(2): 275–293. https://cepa.info/6015
This paper analyses the paradigm of constructivism, relating it to current theoretical and empirical developments within social science. I am meeting the demand for describing social and cultural phenomena beyond correspondence-theoretical approaches by critically discussing various forms of constructivism and elaborating on the epistemological position of ‘The Social Construction of Reality’ (Berger & Luckmann). I argue that Berger and Luckmann are epistemologically ‘unscrupulously’ and, subsequently, show analytical weaknesses. This critical discussion forms the backdrop of an unfolding of the position of practice theories and a discussion of their innovative potential to social science research. In this context, the question of how to deal with media as artefacts and technologies is evaluated. I discuss this relationship and analyse it from a communication studies point of view, by means of two prominent analysis concepts, namely the ‘actor-network-theory’ of Bruno Latour and the ‘boundary objects’ approach of Susan Leigh Star from the field of science and technology studies. Finally, I outline central theoretical challenges and analytical perspectives for communication and media research.
This paper aims to enrich our understanding of the history and substance of cybernetics. It reviews the work of three British cyberneticians – W. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask – paying attention particularly to the materiality of their practice – the strange and fascinating devices and systems that were at the heart of their work – and to the worldly projects they pursued – scientific, technological, artistic, organizational, political and spiritual. Connections are drawn between cybernetics and recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, in the hope of illuminating key features of both. The paper concludes by suggesting that the antidisciplinary impulse of contemporary science studies might find inspiration in the work of cyberneticians – that theory does not have to remain confined to the realm of theory.