Emil Henrik Flatø

Within the larger effort in science and technology studies and beyond to conceive of politics as a struggle revolving around things, the “issue” has gained prominence as a practical tool – responding to the complex analytical needs arising from what Marres calls the “socio-ontological sensibility” in the field. In this paper, I will illustrate how spatial analytics permeates the language of thing-politics and “issues”, which stands in contrast to a patchy understanding of how “issues” have contingent, temporal existences. The tendency to appropriate John Dewey’s mechanistic conception of the lives of issues proves a point in case for the pitfalls of neglecting temporality. As an alternative, I will consider the emergence of the climate issue as a matter of priority in the particular intellectual environment at M.I.T. in 1969-72, where young branches of expertise – management, socio-technical engineering, cybernetics – became influential at the nexus of science, politics and public spheres. While these circles were directly involved in the construction of climate as a global object of concern and inquiry, they were at least as momentous in shaping how the particular form of futurity implied by climate change would be addressed as a question for knowledge. The exercise generates novel perspectives on the temporal features of the issue itself, the unfolding of issues in time, and the changing historical meaning of issue-oriented technopolitics. But most importantly, it raises questions about the research agendas that arise from analyzing thing-politics more as a strictly spatial than a spatiotemporal process.

*German for "compulsion to move", is a situation found in chess and other turn-based games wherein one player is put at a disadvantage because they must make a move when they would prefer to pass and not move. (Oxford Dictionary) Our multi-disciplinary work session will explore how a non-human centered approach towards the use of technology can help us to tune in with our companion species and environments. As Anna Tsing understands environments to be open-ended assemblages of non-humans, living and non-living, entangled in ways of life, sound can connect. Additionally depending on the point of observation sound can be received, propagated, and perceived. The attempt to tune-in with our environments opens possibilities to critically discuss questions of listening, talking, and connecting with all our companions, living and non-living. Listening not only includes to care for each other, but foremost to eavesdrop on other species to prevent threats.The perception of sounds also poses paradoxical challenges: Even though sound is omnipresent, we have problems to understand. Miscommunication and distortion happen constantly. Can listening become once again one of the main assets to learn about our environment? The access to vast archives of data allows the interpretation of planetary sounds using machine learning. But will this prevent further misunderstandings? How can we actively teach these systems to avoid a too strong human-centered-perspective and allow to think as a connected network resonating on Earth.

The stream “Approaching Time-Things”, which participates at STREAMS 2021, is dedicated to time that matters, times that take material form, that you can touch; an inquiry into time as an observable phenomenon. In other words, we want to challenge the truism that time is impossible to grasp or represent. Kicking off a trailer in July, the organizers will host a virtual conversation with the philosopher Michelle Bastian, who has spent more than a decade blazing new trails in critical time studies and more-than-human temporalities. In Bastian’s thought, time appears in surprising places. Time-keeping, she has argued, may be more ethical with reference to the fate of leatherback turtles on a warming planet, than in the contemporary, international time regime measuring seconds through shifts in the cesium atom. Currently working on the temporal lessons of phenology – “nature’s calendar,” or the study of recurring nonhuman events and their interactions with climate – Bastian is adamant that time is not intangible at all. Is time that hard to grasp? Tune in on August 5th, 14.00–15.00 CET as we reflect on this critical issue. We will also be considering why time has been so abstracted throughout modern Western history, and what role this abstraction plays in the grand temporal imaginaries of modernity. Finally, what kind of colonial notions of seasonality makes some Australians of European descent sport fake Christmas spruces in mid-summer?