ABSTRACT
This talk was an early attempt to extend the posthumanist vision in science studies which I developed in The Mangle of Practice (1995). The aim was (a) to move beyond the laboratory and (b) to make the picture more accessible through discussion of two examples: the paintings of Willem de Kooning and the US Army Corps of Engineers’ attempts to control the Mississippi River. I emphasise that both the paintings and the river architecture emerged in medias res, in a symmetric and transformative back-and-forth entanglement of people and things, a dance of agency. I also note that the conventional disciplines and everyday thought and practice draw a dualist veil over this coupling. Thus, the question of the politics of becoming arises: how might we act to remind ourselves that we live in the thick of things? The talk ends by pointing to distinctively posthumanist paradigms in the arts, music, spirituality, engineering and the sciences of complexity.
