The main aim of the article is presentation and operationalization of the concept of the places of the future in the context of seed banks. The future is understood here as a category of collective imagination, which means that the predicted future is an essential element of the present. The anticipated futures act reciprocally upon the social practices, both at the individual and the institution levels. Although, due to social, natural, civilizational and other reasons, the future is not fully predictable, it is semi-open, not-completely closed, it is recognized in the form of systemic thinking, which can be defined as closed. The analysis of the case of seed banks allowed revealing the inevitable gap between the future and systematic anticipation practices. The seed banks established in the face of the anticipated threat of global hunger are a tool for negotiating a possibly beneficial to people scenario for the future, conducted with non-human actors, whose actions are of probabilistic nature.
The article examines a special ontogenetic relation that is established between the biological body and physical forces during the procedures of medical imaging. Until now it has been considered only as the creation of a simple form of representation. Medical imaging procedures are special processes in which organic and inorganic matter is entwined, resulting in partial transformation of beings and creation of a new whole. In the text these entanglements will be considered in the context of the concept of ‘the phenomenon’, which is part of the agential realism’ ontology, established by the American researcher Karen Barad. Her approach to agency directs thinking about relations between different beings in posthumanistic and performative perspective. This relationship is illustrated by many artistic post-media projects that often use medical and biometric data to address important social problems (terrorism in the Diane Covert’s project) and diversity of living creatures on Earth (projects of Albert Koetsier).
The paper questions the compatibility of critical realism with ecological economics. In particular, it is argued that there is radical dissonance between ontological presuppositions of ecological economics and critical realist perspective. The dissonance lies in the need of ecological economics to state strict causal regularities in socio-economic realm, given the environmental intuitions about the nature of economy and the role of materiality and non-human agency in persistence of economic systems. Using conceptual apparatus derived from Andrew Brown’s critique of critical realism and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, the paper refuses ontological nature/society dualism employed by critical realism, and stresses the role of non-humans in practical production and reproduction of socio-economic networks on the one hand, and in broadly defined ecological economic research on the other hand.
CS
Příspěvek poukazuje na neslučitelnost ontologických předpokladů ekologické ekonomie s teoretickým rámcem kritického realismu. Ekologická ekonomie totiž potřebuje předpokládat existenci kauzálních pravidelností ve společnosti a ekonomice, nakolik musí zůstávat věrná svým před-teoretickým intuicím o povaze ekonomiky, rovněž jako o roli materiality i ne-lidských aktérů pro existenci ekonomických systémů. V článku se pracuje s konceptuálním aparátem oponenta kritického realismu Andrewa Browna a s teorií aktérů-sítí Bruna Latoura. Na tomto základě pak článek odmítá ontologický dualismus přírody a kultury. Závěrem pak článek upozorňuje na dvojitou roli ne-lidských aktérů v praktické produkci/reprodukci společensko-ekonomických sítí a v široce pojatém ekologicky ekonomickém výzkumu.
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