24
*
*
*
Stengers takes Latour’s Parliament and specifies it in The Invention of Modern Science,
clarifying that a Parliament challenges particular problems in an effort to open up how particular
environments can or could be, that these Parliaments already exist in a variety of settings, and
that they rely upon democratic and immanent argument to invent the political links within
environments to then change and build them otherwise. These moves add to Latour’s Parliament
of Things in important ways, clarifying—at least somewhat—what goes on in the Parliament and
what its goals are. But Stengers also inflects the Parliament in particular problematic ways,
limiting the expansive nature of the Parliament and placing utopian expectations upon the
Parliament’s workings.
First, Stengers limits Parliamentary participation to humans only. For Stengers, “only
humans have seats in [the Parliament], are seated there, but these humans are defined not as free
subjects, characterized by their convictions and ambitions, but as representatives of a problem
that engages and situates them.”
48
These are humans as assemblages, located within problems
that extend far beyond the Parliament and that animate and constitute them as representatives.
These are, admittedly, different humans from the rational actors we are told to imagine humans
to be. They are not first and foremost humans that come together to rationalize or bond together
in a “dynamic of intersubjectivity. On the contrary, they have to invent links within disparity,
they have to bring into existence rhizomatic prolongations that refer not to a general interest
stronger than any of them but to new interests provoked by their coming together.”
49
These
humans, as problematic assemblages, are coming together to address a particular problem by
creating “rhizomatic prolongations,” that is, extended networks of relations among previously
48
Stengers, 155.
49
Stengers, 155.
Convention