Decolonial Dances with Isabelle Stengers: Pseudo-Deleuzian “Ontological Choreography”

The Belgian philosopher of science and trained chemist Isabelle Stengers is famous for her creative conception of “cosmopolitics,” an ontological pluralism and a practicing scientist’s pragmatic compromise between reductivist orthodoxy and postmodern(ish) solipsism. In Stengers’ cosmopolitics, each science’s reality-claims are limited by its history, disciplinary guardrails, and laboratory or field constraints on the production of new “factishes” (Bruno Latour’s term for entities, such as neutrinos, discovered in history but retroactively timeless). One implication of Stenger’s cosmopolitics for the human sciences (exemplified by anthropology) is that every encounter between a researcher and a subject is, and should be approached as, a kind of dance. In Stengers’ recent Making Sense in Common, she repeatedly describes the staging of such scientific dances as “ontological choreography,” seeking a coalition of progressive members of the “commons”: a cosmopolitical dance of all beings.