Article:

Wirksamkeit verpflichtet. Herausforderungen einer Ökologie der Praktiken

The article introduces Isabelle Stengers' proposal of an Ecology of Practices starting from a number of reflections concerning established presuppositions and presets in science studies as well as in media theory with respect to Non-European practices. We claim that adequate ways of dealing with relations between salvation and healing, with supposedly ‹solely› psycho-imaginary as opposed to physiological, causally justified procedures of healing, requires us to take on a metarational attitude. Being sensitive with respect to the situatedness of each practice, such an attitude calls for the suspension of skeptical habits of judgment and allows for an engagement with the net of obligations and exigencies entertained by each particular practice-milieu. We show to what extent an attitude that could inspire future research in the history of science as well as media theory inherits pragmatist thought as developed by thinkers such as William James or Alfred North Whitehead. Protagonists of Science Studies like Isabelle Stengers or Donna Haraway a.o. take up this philosophical tradition today, in order to 1. investigate efficacies in concrete milieus, and thereby 2. situate their own research as a practice that is neither one of innocence nor of quick judgment.