Speculative Media and Epistemic Change

• In Event: Media Studies Interruptions of STS - I

Abstract

Scholarship on the epistemological entanglements of culture and technoscience has formed two distinct paths. STS has investigated epistemic virtues, sociocultural imaginaries, and epistemic things, trying to account for culture and mediation in the creation of scientific knowledge (Daston and Galison, Jasanoff, and Rheinberger). Meanwhile, media studies has considered the influence of media technologies on epistemology, as in media ecologies, technological determinism, and media epistemologies (Kittler, Mcluhan, and Postman). These paths converge on a shared question about a set of feedbacks between media technologies, epistemic assumptions, and technoscientific change. For example, when science fiction author William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace,” he drew on existing technologies (arcade video games) but speculatively reworked them, feeding the agenda for a host of technoscientific, medial, and epistemological changes.

This talk will begin by discussing the necessary convergence of these STS and media theories. We will then present a case study of a media object, namely biologist C.H. Waddington’s “epigenetic landscape,” a visual image that has for 60 years recurred in scientific disciplines from stem-cell biology to developmental psychology. Closely following this one thought experiment through its material context and discursive ramifications, we claim that in order to effectively track the relationship between mediation, epistemology, and technoscience, a new shared vocabulary is required. As a first step, we propose using the term ‘speculative media’—media that afford speculative modes of thinking about the world both materially and semiotically—as a potential interruption of STS methods that centers mediation as a crucial aspect of technoscientific change.

Authors

• Katherine Buse, Dept of English / STS at UC Davis

• Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, University of California Davis