Powers, in the Singular

“To pose the problem of ‘scientific concepts’ is, immediately, to pose the problem of their power.”

—Isabelle Stengers and Judith Schlanger

For many Anglophone readers, the interest of Isabelle Stengers’s now extensive writings will have been shaped—in part, at least—by a critical tradition of thinking that finds in the sociological and cultural study of science a welcome set of intellectual tools for denouncing the pretentions to a foundedness in scientific truth of socio-political domination. Informed by arguments about the instrumental qualities of scientific rationality, the social and cultural construction of knowledge, and the links between intellectual practices and domination, this is a tradition of thinking which in many respects finds its raison d’être in its capacity to call into question, and in its flair for suspicion. Pointing, often quite rightly, to the unreflected social and cultural determinations of rationality, what matters about science in this tradition is that it is, or has become, “technoscience,” constituted through its relationship with and deployed in the service of inequality, injustice, and illusion.

There is something of an irony in this. Not in the least because whilst Stengers is a staunch advocate of addressing the politics of knowledge practices, throughout her writings she has also been assiduous in developing a properly experimental approach to thinking that actively combats any position that, in its appeal to “the truth,” explicitly or implicitly seeks to have the last word.¹ Forms of critical thinking that claim an all-terrain power to judge, even in the deconstructed acknowledgement that the conditions of possibility for such a power are at the same time the conditions of its impossibility, call forth from Stengers the kind of laughter that she associates with a humor that she explicitly contrasts with an ironic stance, whose provenance within the Western canon has all to frequently been made a central feature of criticism.²

In the light of this trajectory shaping the contexts of reception of Stengers’s writings—which might find its variants in critical theory, the sociology of science and/or cultural studies, to name but three—her recurrent thematization of power presents an interesting and useful test case for addressing the challenge that her work presents. For whilst power is a quite explicit point of reference in her thinking, one of the remarkable characteristics of the way in which Stengers develops her approach to it is to be found in the manner in which she seeks to deploy it as a concept without its cortège of connections to the modern habits of thought that her work seeks to combat. Of course, considering the immanence of power relations to knowledge is not a trait unique to Stengers—Foucault is a significant figure here, and a problematic of power was arguably a common feature of much of the Francophone philosophy of the period during the formative period of Stengers’s trajectory as a philosopher.³ However, there are a number of traits to Stengers’s treatment of power that mark it out here as worthy of close consideration.

Singularity and Multiplicity

Perhaps one of the most interesting features of the way that Stengers addresses the links between scientific knowledges and power is her manner of connecting it with a focus on the singularity of the practices in which she is interested. Arguing that problematizing the success of scientific rationality necessarily entails posing the problem of the power of scientific concepts is a link that is made very clearly in her 1988 publication with Judith Schlanger, Les concepts scientifiques: Invention et pouvoir, where she argues that

[t]o pose the problem of the power of scientific concepts instead of taking it for granted, whether through the rationality of the world or the scientific undertaking, implies … an intrinsic and non-hierarchizable diversity of scientific undertakings, which corresponds to the diversity of problems posed by what the scientist deals with. From this point of view, physics becomes, not a model science but a singular science, a science singularized by its objects, which are, as a first approximation, isolatable.

(Stengers and Schlanger 59)

Indeed it is precisely the singularity of the achievement...