Abstract
TechnoScienceSociety (TSS) denotes the birth pangs of a new era, while signposting the importance of STS in this context, and the changes to STS in turn that it demands. This paper argues that grappling with TSS and a politics thereof demands a shift broadly from the default epistemo-politics of critique or post-structural criticism, but also going beyond work, inspired by actor network theory, on ‘ontological politics’. The paper considers some of the key problems with the conception of ontological politics vis-à-vis the predicament of an emerging TSS before a brief discussion of an alternative perspective, of complex power/knowledge systems (CP/KS) within an onto-politics of situated practical wisdom (phronesis). Finally, we illustrate the arguments by analysing, using this alternative perspective, a key case study of contemporary TSS: the ongoing attempts of innovation towards a transition in urban mobility system in China.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
I thank one of the anonymous referees for helping with this formulation.
- 3.
By ‘strategic’ I mean not means/end calculative reasoning but the more circumscribed and itself processualized, complexified sense of intelligent, productive but limited self-conscious guidance of conduct implicit in Foucault’s discussions of power/knowledge and ‘government’ as the conduct of conduct in a world of uncertainty.
- 4.
For instance, note how this onto-politics affords a spectrum of emergent strategicness as differences in degree not kind, e.g. for higher mammals.
- 5.
I thank an anonymous referee from the idea of productive “conceptual poverty”.
- 6.
Where the terms in bold and underlined respectively go together.
- 7.
These scenarios are also now available at: http://steps-centre.org/2016/blog/four-scenarios-of-future-urban-e-mobility-in-china/ (accessed on September 20, 2017).
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Tyfield, D. (2020). Mobilizing the Emergence of Phronetic TechnoScienceSocieties: Low-Carbon E-Mobility in China. In: Maasen, S., Dickel, S., Schneider, C. (eds) TechnoScienceSociety. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43965-1_13
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