Intractosoma: Toward an Epistemology of Complexity Based on Intra-acting Bodies

  • Sainath Suryanarayanan University of Wisconsin-Madison
Keywords: politics of knowledge and ignorance, feminist epistemologies, complexity, human-nonhuman relations, body, posthuman

Abstract

In this essay, I argue for an epistemology of complexity that is centered on intra-acting—always already interacting and becoming—bodies. I utilize analyses of the politics of knowledge concerning honey bee declines and gene-environment interaction research to outline a feminist-oriented epistemology in terms of multisensorial corporealities that I call “intractosoma.” I argue that re-organizing the production of observation, reduction, and difference along the lines of an intractosomal epistemology of complexity would lead to a more accurate understanding of complex phenomena, and entail a different politics in which the constructed distance between observers and observed can no longer absolve observers of “response-ability.” By shifting the locus of concern to always already enmeshed bodies, I seek to open analyses to a plurality of observers with their associated blind-spots and power dynamics, and a multiplicity of forms of knowing and becoming, beyond instrumentation, computation and quantification.

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Author Biography

Sainath Suryanarayanan, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Sainath Suryanarayanan is Assistant Scientist of Biology & Society at the Morgridge Institute for Research and in the Department of Community & Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Suryanarayanan’s recent work, in collaboration with Daniel Lee Kleinman and supported by the National Science Foundation, has appeared in a variety of journals including Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology & Human ValuesPolitical Power and Social Theory, Issues in Science & Technology, Insects, and The Guardian (UK).

Published
04 Dec 2016
Section
Considering Concepts