After Representation: Science Studies in the Performative Idiom

Abstract

Studies of science are usually addressed in a representational idiom which takes it for granted that the defining characteristic of science is its production of representations of nature. Here I advocate the move to a performative idiom which thematises the agency of machines and human beings. This move leads to a temporally emergent and posthumanist analysis of scientific culture and practice, and promises an antidisciplinary synthesis of the science-studies disciplines, spanning an impure sociology of science, a displacement of the traditional philosophical problematics of realism and incommensurability, and a historiography of science centered on performative intertwinings of science, technology and society.