Ontology has recently gained renewed attention in science and technology studies and anthropology (e.g. Gad, Jensen and Winthereik 2015;Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de Castro 2014;Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). Yet, it has a considerably longer pedigree than these recent debates might lead one to think. Experiments, of course, have long held the attention of sociologists, historians, and philosophers of science (Collins 1985;Gooding 1990; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). And infrastructures have been the focus of sustained inquiry in the sociology and history of technology (Bowker 1994;Hughes 1983). Once these terms are put into conjunction, however, each gets a somewhat different inflection. The following note briefly explores the conceptual purchase of considering infrastructures as ontological experiments.
Keywords experiments; infrastructures; practical ontologies
Practical OntologiesAlthough the term ontology has only recently been subject to sustained discussion, it has long operated as a kind of undercurrent in STS. We find ontological traces, if not the word itself, in Bruno Latour's (1988) "Irreductions." Early on Michael Lynch and Joan Fujimura both recognized that actor-network theory was something more and different than another social theory. While Fujimura (1991) approvingly referred to ANT as defining a new ontology, Lynch (as cited by Latour (1999a: 19) proposed, somewhat mockingly, to rename ANT as ARO-actant-rhizome-ontology-with reference to the Deleuzian inspiration he discerned behind Latour's formulations.In turn, Latour's work inspired Charis Cussins' [now Thompson] work on ontological choreography in infertility treatment (Cussins 1998). Simultaneously, Andrew Pickering (1995) was writing the ontological manifesto The Mangle of Practice, and the question of how to get into view "new ontologies" (Pickering 2008) has been on his mind ever 1 Casper Bruun Jensen,
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