ABSTRACT
I have tried to persuade my readers that several apparently counterintuitive claims should have the status of matters of fact—that is, crucial points of contingent stability for possible sociotechnical orders, attested by collective, networked, situated practices of witnessing. Witnessing is seeing; attesting; standing publicly accountable for, and psychically vulnerable to, one’s visions and representations. Witnessing is a collective, limited practice that depends on the constructed and never finished credibility of those who do it, all of whom are mortal, fallible, and fraught with the consequences of unconscious and disowned desires and fears. A child of Robert Boyle’s Royal Society of the English Restoration and of the experimental way of life, I remain attached to the figure of the modest witness. I still inhabit the stories of scientific revolution as earthshaking mutations in the apparatuses of production of what may count as knowledge. A child of antiracist, feminist, multicultural, and radical science movements, I want a mutated modest witness to live in worlds of technoscience, to yearn for knowledge, freedom, and justice in the world of consequential facts. I have tried to queer the self-evidence of witnessing, of experience, of the conventionally upheld and invested perceptions of clear distinctions between subject and object, especially the self-evidence of the distinction between living and dead, machine and organism, human and nonhuman, self and other as well as of the distinction between feminist and mainstream, progressive and oppressive, local and global.
