Andrew Pickering — Taking Other Worlds Seriously

Andrew Pickering opens his essay "Taking Other Worlds Seriously" with a provocation that is simple on its surface and radical in its implications: that there is no single, universal way of engaging with the world. There are instead many different ways — many different practices, many different forms of attention, many different kinds of knowledge — each one stabilized within its own context, its own history, its own set of relationships between human and nonhuman actors. What we call objective knowledge is not a view from nowhere but a view from somewhere — from a particular island of stability, a particular configuration of practice and materiality that has, for the time being, held together.

This is the starting point of Pickering's broader framework, and it is worth staying with it before moving further. The image of islands of stability is important. Pickering is not saying that all knowledge is arbitrary or that nothing is real. He is saying something more careful and more interesting: that the stable configurations within which knowledge is produced — the laboratories, the instruments, the concepts, the trained bodies, the institutional arrangements — are achievements. They have been built up over time through a particular kind of work, a particular kind of tuning between human projects and the resistances of the material world. And they are, for that reason, genuinely plural. Different traditions of practice, different communities of inquiry, different ways of inhabiting the world produce different islands of stability — and from within each island, different things become visible, different questions become askable, different realities become available for engagement.

This is not relativism. It is a recognition that objectivity — the reliable, reproducible, intersubjectively shareable knowledge that science produces — is always local before it is universal. It is stabilized within a particular practice before it can travel beyond it. And when it travels, it does not do so as a pure representation of an independent reality but as a set of techniques, instruments, and trained capacities that must be re-enacted in each new context.

The mangle of practice

Pickering's account of how knowledge is produced is built around what he calls the mangle of practice — the dynamic, unpredictable, open-ended process through which human and nonhuman agencies engage with one another in the course of scientific work. In the mangle, human intentions and projects encounter the resistances of the material world: instruments behave unexpectedly, phenomena refuse to appear on cue, the world pushes back against what researchers want from it. Scientists respond by accommodating — adjusting their practices, their concepts, their instruments — until a temporary tuning is achieved: a configuration that holds, that produces reliable results, that can be built upon.

What emerges from this process is not a representation of a pre-given world but a new configuration of human and nonhuman agency — a new island of stability, with its own particular shape, its own particular reach, its own particular blindnesses. Knowledge, on this account, is always the product of a specific practice rather than a view from outside practice altogether. It is performative in the precise sense: it does something, it produces effects, it intervenes in the world rather than merely reflecting it.

This has a direct consequence for how we understand the relationship between different forms of knowledge. If all knowledge is produced within and through specific practices, then there is no neutral vantage point from which to rank or adjudicate between them. Different practices produce different islands of stability — different ways of engaging with the world that are each, in their own terms, real and reliable. The knowledge produced within a Western scientific laboratory and the knowledge produced within an indigenous ecological practice are not competing representations of the same underlying reality, one more accurate than the other. They are different enactments — different ways of bringing forth different aspects of a world that is itself multiple and inexhaustible.

Taking other worlds seriously

This is what Pickering means by taking other worlds seriously. It is not a gesture of liberal tolerance toward difference but a genuine epistemological claim: that the world is not singular and pre-given, waiting to be represented by the most accurate possible mirror, but plural and emergent, brought forth differently through different practices of engagement.

The implications of this are far-reaching. In research, it means that the question is not which method produces the most objective representation but which practices of engagement open up the most generative and honest relationships with the realities being inquired into. In politics and ethics, it means that the flattening of plural worlds into a single universal framework is not progress but a form of impoverishment — a loss of the different ways of knowing and inhabiting the world that different traditions and communities have developed. In everyday life, it means that the forms through which we organize our attention, our relationships, and our practices of making and doing are not neutral channels but active participants in shaping what kinds of worlds become available to us.

The trajectory

The movement from the representational to the performative idiom is, in this light, a movement toward greater honesty about the situated, enactive, practice-embedded nature of all knowledge — and toward a genuine openness to the plurality of worlds that different practices bring forth. It is a trajectory that is already underway in many fields and traditions: in science studies, in indigenous epistemologies, in contemplative and somatic practices, in the arts of ecological attention.

Re-rooting takes this trajectory seriously not as an abstract philosophical position but as a practical commitment. The inquiry here is not conducted from a position of detachment, producing representations of a change that is happening elsewhere. It is itself a practice — a particular way of attending, engaging, and bringing forth — that participates in the realities it is inquiring into. In Pickering's terms, it is an attempt to find and inhabit a different island of stability: one in which knowing, doing, and living are held closer together, and in which the plurality of worlds is a resource rather than a problem to be resolved.