ABSTRACT

During the last few decades, Science Studies has tried to redefine the concept of nature according to our present period, its knowledge and technologies. 1 This task has not only meant a reshaping of our understanding of scientific disciplines related to nature, like biology or physics, but it has also provoked some social, cultural and political debate. In general terms, we could consider that these consequences have been channeled through two main perspectives, one that can be labeled as “global” or “totalizing,” and another one that can be understood as “particular” or “differential.” 2 However, constructing the argument from the opposite perspective, it is also true that most of the socio-cultural preoccupations posed by Science Studies have been reflected in contemporary society. If Michel Serres or Edgar Morin posed the question of constructing a consciousness of the unity of the Earth, its ecological biodiversity and our anthropo-biophysical status within it (what they call the becoming of the Planetary Age and our terrestrial destiny), then nothing fuels these perceptions more than the social consciousness of totality inspired by our Digital Culture—from the data transmission during the Cold War to mass media and the Internet. 3 Likewise, if Donna Haraway or Peter Sloterdijk have posed the question of redefining the contemporary subject and its environment in terms of human and non-human being, then the present anxieties of the contemporary subject—with his or her techno-scientific consciousness dissolved in fluxes of data, genes and memes—feed this contemporary metaphysics. 4