Epistemic Practices on the margins : aesthetics as thinking-with

Kurzfassung/Abstract

“One of the many contributions of new materialisms and Actor-Network Theory was to show that practices of knowledge production (and distribution) tend to “objectify” what or whom those knowledges were actually about, possibly even more so when concerned with those relegated at “the margins”. As a consequence, one could even argue, reminding Michel Foucault’s work on knowledge, that these practices fixate and inscribe the possible relation between the knower and the known in balances of power, domination and alienation, denying the so-called “objects of inquiry” any kind of agency. Following the theories of William James and Alfred North Whitehead, but also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it will be argued that the inclusion of aesthetic practices in the making of philosophy and sociology — a posture investing the importance of experience as prehension — could make it work as a “proposition”, a “lure for feelings”, where knowledge can be produced according to different modes, leading to understand research as “thinking-with” rather than a thinking about. In this, the understanding of knowledge also moves from an explanatory device to an “addition to reality”, an intensification of experience. In other words, it will be asked to which extent the very practices of knowledge production within sociology can be thought in relation to the multiplicity of actors engaged, through the sensible. In this, the posture taken also becomes ethical (reminding Félix Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm), critical, and political, because it implies to work with others, humans, non-humans and more-than-humans, and more importantly, including those at the margins. Because, as Donna Haraway argues: “It matters which thoughts think thoughts, it matters which knowledges know knowledges.” (Haraway, 2016, p. 35).”