In the latest Public Culture, Arvind Rajagopal argues that media studies has long been dominated with the American concerns that gave birth to the field: media as object, and therefore, media use, media effects, media reception. Key concepts tend to take form from the dominant American research cases and other global cases and insights tend to be no more than supplement, unable to to supplant the dominance of the American frames of analysis. The insights, then, “tend to migrate to other fields.”
He points to how the concern with democracy and empowerment as obvious examples of American cold war political values smuggled in as theoretical questions posed of media. This question came up last year at femtechnet as a concern with whether the politics of handing someone a camera and giving them a “voice” really counts as a critical project anymore in the age of youtube and self-performance as brand building. Biella Coleman’s IR14 keynote argued that Anonymous’ political value is precisely in the tactics of invisibility they employ here in the age of big data and PRISM. The politics of invisibility couldn’t be more different from a politics of voice, or politics of recognition. Not to say these modes are invalid, but that the question ought to be open. We oughtn’t just hand people video cameras to tell their stories and assume that is a priori awesome or important.
Empowerment, the other project Rajagopal refers to, is wholly co-opted in America. And I’m not sure it ever wasn’t, if Barbara Cruikshank’s argument is to be believed. Cruikshank’s Will to Empower argued that empowerment comes out of 1960s US state projects to domesticate roiling civil unrest into a safer form.) So what should critical and political projects that we embed ourselves in look like now? What kinds of politics are people articulating athwart and through media in different parts of the world?
This argument is relevant not only to media studies, but also to STS. How are STS imaginations limited by the way the field focuses on science and technology? Science and technology are historical categories that delimited the bounds of the civilized, modern world. Technology, for example, came into being as a form of boundary work, purifying the “useful arts” of those skills and knowledges practiced by women, colonized people, and American black people. So purified, technoscience can have masculine modest witnesses and builders of industrial and patentable achievements. STS, like media studies, is an object-oriented field.
So can we look at the kind of cultural work science and technology do in the contemporary world? Itty Abraham explains the implications well in his piece The Contradictory Spaces of Postcolonial Technoscience. In India, he argues, science exists “as myth, as political slogan, as social category, as technology, as military institution, as modern western knowledge, and, as instrument of change.” Abraham argues that postcolonial science studies can’t be an “indigenous” science studies project, but rather needs to take into account the global relationalities of unequally distributed scientific and technological eminence. Then we can begin to see science and technology as categories that are themselves contingent and the product of social processes. Seeing them as contingent, we might be able to see them otherwise. Worry less about epistemology and ontology, more about social categories and how they change, or legitimacies of technoscience and their effects. Then we may be able to respond to Laura Foster’s #4s2013 call to decolonize innovation by examining technoscientific moorings and smuggled humanisms… (Notice I didn’t say “answer” the call. No answers here. Just ways to proceed.) Patent laws make assumptions about what kinds of people actually “intend” to invent, or whose practices actually count as discovery rather than common sense. In India, celebrations of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and policies to stimulate small-scale rural entrepreneurs cast halos upon one another in a way that isn’t exactly STS but depends, in India, on the myth of technoscience.
What do you see as the limits of STS as an object-focused field?