The Concept of Stability

The term “stability” is a recurrent theme in these readings which I initially found slightly disconcerting. For example, within the context of comparing co-production to the mangle, Pickering offers that “combination of human goals and practices and material potentialities” go into it, and what comes out is a “somewhat unpredictable transformation of both inputs, reconfigured into a newly stabilized field of action for further ‘dances of agency’ between humans and machines” (Pickering paraphrased by Jasanoff, 24). Jasanoff goes onto describe how the comparison to the mangle is problematic. I suppose there is a small amount of room for fluctuation within the concept of stability (being the ‘dances’ portion of the quote) and she picks up on this, but I find it interesting that she doesn’t explicitly complicate the term itself and all that it implies.

And again in describing Anderson’s persuasive treatise on nation-making (and maintaining): “A successful nation has to be able to produce the idea of nationhood as an emergent, intersubjective property; without this connection of belief, it remains a hollow construct, ruling without assent, and hence unstably” (Jasanoff, 26). It has been argued that the oscillation from Democratic to Republican regimes in the United States has created a certain political “stability”. Would we say that this is beneficial for our society? As policies created one day are typically systematically crushed when a new administration is ushered in. What about visions that believe in a new form of that same country, but different. Competing versions of what it means to be a particular nation are constantly in flux. The power relations within a said nation-state along with international dynamics, and market-based interests in most countries obviously shape who comes out on top, but a singular national identity is never fully achieved. Though certain themes of course cross the aisle in terms of American identity.

In her discussion of sugar cane and resistances to colonial influence, Jasanoff argues, “The Uba cane and its hybrid successor stabilized – indeed naturalized – different regimes of colonial knowledge and power, whose rules they at once incorporated and made invisible” (32). With this statement I begin to see what she implies by stability. By coupling the words stabilized and “naturalized” she thus depicts the way in which stability is employed for a particular purpose to solidify perspectives of power. Though with this and later passages I begin to understand more clearly by what the author views as stability, I am dubious of the concept. By what terms is stability defined? Clearly in the above sense it is defined by most “powerful actors”. I would have liked to read the result of the sugar cane exchange for the native growers and if they continued to produce the Uba strain for their own usage, or if their knowledge of that plant dissipated over time.

Stabilization, still seems to imply a measure of “life of it’s own” attitude. Once a product “stabilizes”, that marketing departments (i.e. human beings, among other actors/influences) aren’t constantly re-shaping the way it is perceived in society so as to maintain alleged stability. (page 38). In comparing ecosystems to the concept of stability, as systems mature, more energy is required to maintain their state as opposed to creating new growth. The theory that ecosystems reach a stable state has been contested and I would agree with this in terms of social systems.

This notion of stability can be also tied to the well-trodden critique of Western reductionist science in reducing everything to a “predictable” knowable pattern of movement (which will also be explored again in Scott next week). The Carson article pointed to a level of reliability of human inputs. Additionally, a lecture I attended this week with a former energy industry executive lamented the engrained habits of engineers who think about solving energy problems in a fixed manner. While stressing the importance of reliability in electrical service, I couldn’t help but ponder how “stable” a system which depends on geopolitical upheaval at every turn could possibly be.

It seems rather finicky to create an entire blog post about the concept of stability, but I think it is related to predictability, uniformity, standardization and all the rest. The idea that anything residing in the social realm is stable doesn’t necessarily cover-up other ways of seeing as much as downplays them in a broad sense. A lot more could be said on this topic, but space is limited. In this post I do not mean to portray Jasanoff’s view of stability as simple, but rather, to think about what the term itself implies within a societal context.