Relacionalidades humano-artefactuales: lecturas de otra filosofía de la técnica

Abstract

Every epistemology refers to ontology. Relational ontologies question disciplinary knowledge and bet on multi-agential overlaps and entanglements between human beings and artifacts. This article interlinks some bets arising from a feminist, neomaterialist and posthumanist philosophy of technics, which I regard as a dialogical compost for technoscience: I connect Karen Barad’s agential realism and its category of intra-action with Lucy Suchman’s notion of interdependence, Judy Wajcman’s proposal of a technofeminist co-constitution with María Puig de la Bellacasa’s matters of care, and all, of course, with Donna Haraway’s response-ability. That is, I regard all these bets as sympoietically intertwined, and generative of each other. Far from being static, apparatuses reconfigure the world given by Barad’s material-discursive intra-actions, performativities open to rearticulations, relationalities that produce phenomena in the dynamic agency of the world. Suchman aims to understand this mutual constitution of agency between humans and artifacts in their dynamic and interdependent relationships, while identifying the differences and particularities that distinguish the specific assemblages of humans and non-humans. Aware to these sociomaterial practices, Wajcman sustains the mutual constitution of gender and technoscience from what she calls technofeminism. For Puig de la Bellacasa, the interdependence between humans and artifacts is assumed from a commitment to care practices coupled with the sociotechnical relationships of things, human and non-human. Haraway exhorts us to response-ability in practices attending to situated technological projects and their people. In a relational material-semiotic world it is necessary to think with situated relational categories. In any case, it is about feminist epistemological policies committed to the present, of intertwined configurations, affinities and articulations to continue with the problem of thinking about technoscience for other possible worlds.