truth

I wrote a text to track the strategies that were used to build “truth”. Then I deleted it. Which truth?
If:

If:

Knowledge, or what we understand as truth, has been evolving and changing with society, as well as the way of understanding it. With progress, knowledge that had always been local and close began to be classified and hierarchized. Thus, knowledge became a symbol of power and was reserved for a small number of people we called “experts”. Slowly we relayed the responsibility of the idea of truth to science and technology, to that which could offer us reliable facts. But these are not only objects of measurement but tools of a social and political nature. What we consider to be a "matter of fact”, is deeply influenced by a whole social construction. [3]

I wrote a text trying to discover which kind of logics were used to build “truth” and the I deleted it. So now I’m just here with an announcement:

Don’t you know? Your apparatus of truth no longer works, we don’t want your experts. We don’t want your statistics because we are here every day, we have touched it with our own hands, we have smelled what you cannot see. We don’t trust your credible, trustworthy, well-to-do witnesses. We drift. Credible people don’t drift, they always want to be right, they have been trained to always give the correct answer.
You call us fools. We don’t rely on their idea of truth of white, powerful, privileged men. All the myths have told us that we need you, so we’ve built our own ones. Let’s take back all the wrong answers. We tried to make sourdough, but we got distracted and mold came, so now we are allies with putrefaction and fermentation. We are allies with wombs, we are also allies with you, but you still don’t know.
You call us fools? We don’t want to be right. We give our opinion when no one have asked, we speculate with mud. We do together, we grow together. We are that piece of ground you hit with when you stumble and fall. Don’t worry, we are soft, we are ready: ready to give support, ready to receive you, to cuddle you.
We spilt from the Petri dish of your laboratory and now we are everywhere, they made our own film. We wanted to go and watch it but they didn’t let us in, how strange is that?

We defend together with Barad and Bohr that the agencies of observation are inseparable from that which is observed. Matter and meaning do not pre-exist, but rather are co-constituted via measurement intra-actions between the apparatus' and the measured object materiality’s. In other words, ways of studying and representing things have world-making effects. [5]
The invention of the microscope, for example, revealed a whole microbiological world previously unknown to us, since we were unaware of its existence. The discovery radically transformed our conception of the planet's biosphere and revealed a whole series of complex and interlinked relationships between organisms, not only between microbes, but also between microscopic and macroscopic life.
Which other things are we failing to observe because we do not have the right tools? Which approach to the environment would we have with other devices?

If measurements are world-making, let’s change the apparatus, the point of view. What if instead of measuring the reality from a constructivist and productivity approach we would do it from the affection and the unknown?

Let’s get hold of technoscience in order to create new shared and collective knowledge. In times of crisis, we need new styles of thinking, new narratives. Let’s take profit from a turbulent present to reconfigure realities, decentre our anthropological point of view and establish alliances between species.

As a species, we cling to the familiar, comforting conformities of the mainstream. However, “convention” penetrates more deeply that we tend to admit. Even if we lack a proper name for and knowledge of the history of any specific philosophy or thought style, all of us are embedded in our safe “reality”. Our outlooks shape what we see and how we know. Any idea we conceive as fact or truth is integrated into an entire style of thought, of which we are usually unaware. Call the cultural constraints “trained incapacities”, “thought collectives”, “social constructions of reality”. Call the dominating inhibitions that determine our point of view whatever you wish.

Reality is an active verb.

While a dozen civil wars were raging, Boyle chose a method of argument - that of opinion - that was held in contempt by the oldest scholastic tradition. Boyle and his colleagues abandoned the certainties of apodeictic reasoning in favour of a doxa. This doxa was not the raving imagination of the credulous masses, but a new mechanism for winning the support of one's peers. Instead of seeking to ground his work in logic, mathematics or rhetoric, Boyle relied on a parajuridical metaphor: credible, trustworthy, well-to-do witnesses gathered at the scene of the action can attest to the existence of a fact, the matter of fact, even if they do not know its true nature. So he invented the empirical style that we still use today.

We don’t trust in your methods anymore.

“People is scared of you!”, they said. “Monster!” they said - And they ran away. We only wanted to go to the cinema.

What do you do when your apparatus of truth production no longer works?

Doing theory requires being open to the world’s aliveness, allowing oneself to be lured by curiosity, surprise, and wonder. Theories are not mere metaphysical pronouncements on the world from some presumed position of exteriority. Theories are living and breathing reconfigurings of the world. The world theorises as well as experiments with itself. Figuring, reconfiguring. […] All life forms (including inanimate forms of liveliness) do theory. The idea is to do collaborative research, to be in touch, in ways that enable response-ability.

Remember: we speak the language of stones, we change the shape of your lungs. Our apparatus is an invitation to start to speculate together.

[1] Donna Haraway, /The Companion Species Manifesto/, (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 6.
[2] Lynn Margulis, /Symbiotic planet/, (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 2-3.
[3] Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, /Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds/ (Minneapolis: Unversity of Minnesota Press, 2017), 30.
[4] Steven Shapin, 'Pump and circumstance: Robert Boyle's literary technology', in /Social Studies of Science/ (1984), quoted in Bruno Latour, /We Have Never Been Modern/ trad. Catherine Porter, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993), 18-19.
[5] Karen Barad, “What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice.” /Infrasonica/, (Apr. 2020).
[6] Karen Barad, “On Touching - The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1).” in /Power of Material / Politics of Materiality/, ed. Kerstin Stakemeier and Susanne Witzgall, (Munich: Diaphanes - Misceallenous, 2018), 154-155.