How to Bring the Social Sciences into the Post-Planetary Age
Résumé
This presentation will make two interrelated claims. First, we will highlight the problems and the limits of traditional social science methodologies with respect to thinking about astroculture– the relationship between human beings and outer space. In particular, it will bring out the ways in which these methods are either of limited use, or are even actively stultifying, when studying the human relationship to objects and information that is derived from situations located outside of immediate embodied experience of human knowers (which is the prevailing epistemic condition with respect to the majority of our robotic activities in space). Second, the presentation will suggest an alternate way forward towards thinking about social science in space, highlighting the importance of thinking about the intersections between the logics of information, classical, or terrestrial and embodied epistemologies, and logics of belief. The aim of the presentation is thus to illustrate why existing methodologies are mostly inadequate for thinking about the relationship between society and the extra-terrestrial, and to gesture towards alternative approaches that offer better epistemic prospects for understanding our post-planetary condition.