Enacting technoscience: art & science from the contemporary metaphysics perspective

In the article the assumptions, strategies and possibilities of Art & Science (A&S) are considered through the prism of three types of metaphysical thinking. These types are defined by the answers to the question: why is there something rather than nothing. Thus, the analysis of classical metaphysics makes it possible to identify the basic assumptions of many A&S projects. These assumptions are borrowed by art from the public self-presentation of science and from Western common sense: there is an autonomous and definite nature, it is successfully known and mastered by science. So nature is nature, and nothing more. These assumptions are disputed by post-Kantian transcendental ontology. It opens up for A&S the opportunity to reflect upon the givenness of nature in the experience mediated by science, namely the constitution of science’s own objectivity, the social and political factors involved, as well as naturalization processes that turn scientific objects into nature things by way of erasing their origin. Nature is in the eye of the beholder. Empirical metaphysics (a number of projects from STS) sheds light on laboratory practices of nature enactment and the role of non-human actors in these processes. Nature is not only in the eye of the beholder, but also in the hands of the doer. It is assembled gathers, among other things, from the tissues of society, politics, culture, so does not oppose them from the outside. Among other things, this move allows us to define Art & Science as the enactment or performance of technoscience, since the laboratory-technical aesthetics inherent in this art is a reenactment of the part of the technoscientific network of practices and actors.

In conclusion, by means of Pierre Bourdieu’s critical sociology, a hypothesis is formulated explaining why an alliance with STS may be problematic for A&S artists, and why posthumanism and new materialism are assimilated in this art in a cliched form. The technoscientifically formed world requires technoscientific enlightenment based on STS and philosophy, and A&S in alliance with them can be its art.