ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, I proposed that to understand the ageing society we should focus on the knowledge making practices, tools and technologies, and the knowledge making institutions that underpin it. The suggestion was that the challenges set by the ageing society are best addressed by focusing not only on the demographic, economic and socio-cultural consequences of ageing, but specifically on the relationship between science, technology and ageing. I argued that whereas science and technology are usually seen as solutions to the issues brought to bear by the ageing of populations, science and technology have been implicated in the making and managing of the ageing society from the outset. Once we focus on the knowledge infrastructure of the ageing society, all that appeared solid and stable turns uncertain and contested. This means that instead of finding in science and technology the unwavering foundations upon which a new organisation of the ageing society should be built, we find more questions than answers. These questions, I argued, are not an accident: they are constitutive of the ageing society itself. Taking these questions seriously entails researching the role of science and technology in society. This is best done by drawing on the scholarly traditions developed within Science and Technology Studies (STS). In this chapter, I explore how STS can be deployed to understand the ageing society. The chapter critically reviews an emerging literature on science, technology and ageing to argue for a perspective that is methodologically committed to opening up the social and technical worlds of ageing. Rather than critically juxtapose present situations with idealised forms of getting older, I suggest that it is possible to use STS concepts and methods to show how ‘it could have been otherwise’ and also bring them to bear on the ways in which it has been otherwise. Such emphasis on the composite, the multiple – on ‘the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself ’ (Foucault, 1991: 82) – requires some attention to the conceptual apparatus used in this book. This conceptual investigation is necessary because it makes public circulating but often tacit assumptions about the nature of the ageing process and how it relates to scientific practice and technological innovation. In particular, it enables
us to interrogate the centrality of agency in the relationship between science, technology and ageing. In a context where older people are increasingly urged to engage with science and technology in order to enhance their health and involvement in economic and cultural spheres, where ‘active ageing’ is the order of the day, it makes renewed sense to investigate how agency and activity are related in theories about innovation and ageing. However, the chapter proposes that rather than investing in a generic attribution or recovery of agency in older people’s engagement with technoscience, we should be more sensitive to the less than coherent way, the sometimes inconsistent way, in which power is distributed in these engagement processes. This, in turn, means we must pay special attention to the tropes, the literary devices we use to describe the nexus between science, technology and ageing, looking beyond the literature that explicitly focuses on such a topic. The chapter first addresses the more contemporary explorations of this nexus to then investigate how two main figures have dominated academic thinking about technoscience and ageing: one emphasising unidirectional, technologically determined changes in the nature and experience of human longevity and ageing, and the other viewing technology as having differentiating, phased effects on those experiences. The chapter recommends the figure of the patchwork as a way to think through the pragmatic, emerging, diverging complexity of the nexus between technoscience and ageing.
