Platform Cosmologies: Enabling Resituation

2019

In Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Vol. 24 (2019), eds.: James Trafford and Peter Wolfendale, 26-36.

This paper looks at the relation between scientific knowledge and normative pragmatics from the point of view of (mutable) cosmological milieus that map out a sense of purposefulness, as argued by Bentley Allan. Cosmological consequences are drawn out in light of the model of the Stack, as postulated by Benjamin Bratton, through the lens of Haraway’s “situated knowledge” through which new modes of governance and self-understanding emerge, demanding an adaptation of strictly human-centered political theory. The reciprocal dynamics of the interface are explored as a distributed site, not only for the invention of narrative, non-homogenizing meaning from the “totality” of the Stack, but equally as a site of intervention to guide and weight otherwise the non-linear causal forces of our complex, interconnected condition.

Patricia Reed, "Platform Cosmologies: Enabling Resituation", in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Vol. 24 (2019), eds.: James Trafford and Peter Wolfendale, 26-36.