The Disobedient Animal in the Socio-Bio-Technical Environment: Between STS and Animal Studies

Abstract

Animals and technologies have much in common. Within technological and biological determinisms they are endowed with unquestionable power over the social; but within social constructivism they are reduced to instrumental functions and cultural symbols. However, after all these operations we still claim: “They are different”. The boundaries between nature, technology, and society remain immutable. However, science and technology studies (STS) and posthumanism attempt to blur these boundaries. Researchers suppose that technologies are not the functional and apolitical embodiment of rationality which we are accustomed to perceive them as. Each technology has its own destiny. Depending on the environment, it can resist the developer’s design, acquire cultural meanings and practices, not function at all, or even take part in the distribution of power relations, becoming a legitimate actor in social processes. This approach blurs the boundaries between the social, the technical, and the natural. The article brings the logic of STS to animal research. Previously, animals were exclusively part of nature, and scientific knowledge made them controllable and predictable. Instead, at the intersection of STS and animal studies, animals also become legitimate actors in social processes—they have agency, mutability, and the ability to transform other actors—people, technologies, etc. It can be assumed that such hybridity becomes possible in a high-tech environment such as the urban space. Within this language animals even in nature can be presented as not just as a biological, but also a social and even technical, subject. The technological (society, science and cities) and the natural are no longer opposing poles—they are a heterogeneous socio-bio-technical environment.