The advantages of uncertainty? Toward new principles for
cooperation between divergent practices from ‘above’ and ‘below’
Saurabh Arora
Science Policy Research Unit, and STEPS Centre, Sussex
I am going to tryto exploit the recognition that uncertainty, of various kinds, characterises all practices of knowing, aiming to
– Pluralise what/who is considered as capable of knowledge production
– Propose new terms of engagement between modern scientific and other diverging practices
– Flag the centrality of ‘common words’ and their inventors to facilitate this engagement
Ingredients1. Complexity and difference
2. Practices: understanding agency relationally
3. Uncertainties, in knowledge production (and use)
4. Socio-ecological resilience: distributed, democratic and connected
• A risky masala mix!
Complexity and difference• Natural/social world complicated and
complex
– Exceeds human understanding: all our knowledges partial and situated (Haraway 1991)
• Plural ways of making knowledge, differently
– Produce complementary rather than substitutable knowledges
– Knowledge produced in activities that are not ostentatiously knowledge-making: doing knowing (Stirling 2015)
Practices I• Action as a relational process (“action is
overtaken”: Latour 2005)• All action collective, even when it appears
individual– Distributed in webs of humans and nonhumans– Avoiding methodological individualism
Practices II• Action not simply the implementation of
ideas/intentions, nor always the following of rules
– Ideas encounter material friction as they are enacted
– Rules are bent (improvised) or circumvented as often as they are followed
• Collapsing the structure-agency dichotomy
– Structural inequalities (e.g. of gender and caste) performed within everyday practices
Uncertainties• Distinct from risk that is calculable based
on an event’s probable occurrence (Callon et al. 2009)
• Possible (future) states of the world unknown
• Ignorance: the ‘unknown’ unknowns;
• Indeterminacy: causal chains unidentified; outcomes unpredictable (Wynne 1992)
• Feature of knowledge as ‘output’ and of its practices
Socio-ecological resilience• The sum of various distributed and
decentralized initiatives always more than its parts
– Contributing practices of citizens, households, street vendors, small farmers, ‘traditional’ medical practitioners etc.
• Democratic: capacity to raise voice (of dissent) by the most marginalized
• Connected: cooperative engagement between different practices
Cooperative engagement: how?
• All practices present to each other as ‘minority practices’
– Applies especially to modern scientific practices that have historically disqualified practices branded irrational (e.g. ideological, shamanic, magical, religious, affective)
– Minority practices not the same as practices of minorities
– ‘Minority’ here is a category of doing-knowing (relational process) rather than of people or entities
What are minority practices?
• They admit vulnerability, uncertainty, indeterminacy and ‘lack of control’
• They do not identify with a general (or normal) model that they were the first ones to ‘discover’
• They present themselves to the world from the vantage point of their ignorance
Terms of engagement• Minority practices (modern scientific and
vernacular) engage with each other on the basis of
– Commitment, to sharing cognitive and moral authority
– Tactfulness, by taking each other’s “self-determination” seriously
– Learning from each other, in ways that do not subsume the other practice
– Affinity, built not on commonality of characteristics between practices but rather on their irreducible difference
For learning together• Invention of mutually accessible ‘common
words’ (a shared language)
– That “resist time and space” and produce relevance in settings that are as yet unformed (Stengers 2011: 327)
• Construction of abstractions
– Centrality of philosophy for the ‘free creation of concepts’ and of literature (including bards and storytellers) in an ecology of minority practices