Intimate Entanglements: Affects, more-than-human intimacies and the politics of relations in science and technology

This Sociological Review monograph extends conversations and debates started much earlier between Daniel and Joanna, at Un/Knowing Bodies (Latimer & Schillmeier, 2009), at the Radicalisation of Care workshop that took place in Barcelona 2014, and finally at a sub-plenary panel of EASTT/4S 2016, which offered intimacy as a provocation for thinking about STS by other means. The story of our gathering together with the scholars in this collection Intimate Entanglements around the notions of ‘intimacy’ and ‘entanglement’ is thus complex, and in a sense enacts one expression of collaboration as ‘being alongside’ (Latimer, 2013) difference in partial and intermittent connection; it is (we hope) a very productive example of becoming intimately engaged through juxtaposition and indirection (Latimer, this volume).
這本《社會學評論》（Sociological Review）專輯延續了 Daniel 與 Joanna 在更早之前開始的對話與辯論，包括在 Un/Knowing Bodies（Latimer & Schillmeier, 2009）、2014 年在巴塞隆納舉辦的「關懷的激進化」（Radicalisation of Care）工作坊，以及最後在 2016 年 EASTT/4S 的次全會小組討論中，以親密為挑釁，以其他方式思考 STS。因此，我們與這本文集《親密糾結》中的學者圍繞「親密」與「糾結」這兩個概念聚集在一起的故事是複雜的，在某種意義上，它闡述了合作的一種表達方式，即「並行」（Latimer, 2013）在部分和間歇性連接中的差異；（我們希望）它是一個通過並置和間接（Latimer, 本卷）變得親密參與的非常富有成效的例子。

To start with, the extent of the difference between the disciplinary bodies at work here is worth noting. For example, Daniel is trained in social psychology, which has a long history of attention to affect, and STS, which does not; Joanna read English literature, was a nurse for 10 years, then trained in sociology, ethnography and STS. Apart from STS and ethnography, our common ground has been care, older people, and ageing. While our coalescence around the idea of intimacy brings together differently situated experiences and theoretical engagements, both our histories have exposed us to the affective as both sometimes acknowledged as central to world-making, and at others as unacknowledged, misunderstood, or even dangerous. This meant that both of us were unhappy with the relative absence of attention to affect and care in sociology, particularly in STS, albeit with some exceptions, for example feminist technoscience. How each of us has evolved to become interested in intimacy illustrates some of this context.
首先，值得注意的是在這裡工作的學科組織之間的差異程度。舉例來說，Daniel 受過社會心理學的訓練，而社會心理學長期以來都很關注情感，STS 則不然；Joanna 讀過英國文學，當過十年護士，之後接受社會學、人類學和 STS 的訓練。除了 STS 與人類學之外，我們的共同點是照護、老年人與老齡化。儘管我們圍繞著「親密關係」這個概念的共通點，匯集了不同的經驗與理論參與，但我們的歷史都讓我們接觸到情感，有時情感被認為是創造世界的核心，有時卻不被承認、誤解，甚至是危險的。這意味著我們兩人都對社會學中，尤其是 STS 中，相對缺乏對情感與關懷的關注感到不滿，儘管有一些例外，例如女性主義的技術科學。我們每個人是如何發展到對親密關係感興趣的，這說明了其中的一些背景。

Daniel’s interest in exploring the qualities of the intimate in science and technology started in mid-2000, when it emerged as a deeply moving and contested terrain in the study of telecare arrangements for older people (López Gómez, 2015; López Gómez, Callén, Tirado, & Domènech, 2010; López Gómez & Domènech, 2008; Sánchez Criado, López Gómez, Roberts, & Domènech, 2014). On the one hand, the service needed these technologies to be so intimately incorporated into a person’s daily life that, in an emergency, pressing the alarm button of a pendant hung around the neck was a more natural reaction than calling a relative with whom the person had daily chats. On the other hand, despite the efforts of service providers, users ended up arranging the technology in very unexpected ways, and in many instances these arrangements were even disruptive of the ‘normal’ functioning of the service. Tinkering with the system in everday life was an intimate matter not only because it took place in the home, but because the way the users arranged the technology and became attached to it was indeed a trial of strength, of both their own ageing condition and their identities beyond, as well as a way to test the suitability of their mode of living according to a different sort of moral, social and medical standard.
Daniel 對探索科技中親密性特質的興趣始於 2000 年中，當時在老年人遠距照護安排的研究中，親密性成為令人感動且具爭議性的領域 ( López Gómez, 2015; López Gómez, Callén, Tirado, & Domènech, 2010; López Gómez & Domènech, 2008; Sánchez Criado, López Gómez, Roberts, & Domènech, 2014)。一方面，這項服務需要將這些技術與人們的日常生活緊密結合，以至於在緊急情況下，按下掛在脖子上的墜子上的警報按鈕是比打電話給每天都會聊天的親人更自然的反應。另一方面，儘管服務提供者努力不懈，使用者最終還是以非常意想不到的方式來安排科技，在許多情況下，這些安排甚至擾亂了服務的「正常」運作。在日常生活中對系統進行修補是一件親密的事情，不僅因為它是在家中進行的，也因為使用者安排科技並對其產生依戀的方式確實是一種力量的考驗，既考驗了他們本身的老化狀況，也考驗了他們之外的身分，同時也是一種依照不同的道德、社會和醫學標準來考驗他們的生活模式是否適合的方式。

The material and affective were deeply intertwined in this contested territory of the intimate. Quite strikingly though, STS concepts such as domestication, appropriation, translation and co-production (Michael, 2012) turned out to be too mechanistic and were poorly equipped to grasp the ethico-political and ontological implications of studying this contested (and slippery) territory of the intimate. Drawing on the work of other STS scholars coming from social psychology (Brown & Capdevila, 1999; Michael, 1996) or working on care and disability (Moser, 2006; Schillmeier, 2008; Winance, 2006), we wanted to approach affect and subjectivity in material-semiotic terms. This helped to expand the post-social turn to the domain of the psychological, and as a result contest some of the dichotomies that limited our questions. However, it was quite difficult to make the uncanniness and stickiness of the intimate relevant for STS. We can now do it, however, as a result of important contributions: firstly, studies of care such as Joanna’s (Latimer, 2000), beyond and within STS (e.g. Mol, 2002; Mol, Moser, & Pols, 2015; Pols, 2012), started shifting the material-semiotic repertoire to make it appropriate not to follow engineers and scientists, in constant dispute, but to appreciate care practices (López Gómez, 2019); secondly, because affect became an important issue in following the composition of human and non-human assemblages in knowledge-making (e.g. Gomart & Hennion, 1999; Latour, 2004; Latimer & Miele, 2013); and thirdly, because care came to matter as a political and material performance in science and technology (e.g. Martin, Myers, & Viseu, 2015; Pols, 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, 2012). For Daniel, this monograph is in fact a way to keep enriching this tradition in STS, but also an opportunity to confront it with the ‘old’ and still too elusive question of the intimate. In doing this, the hope is that the ‘uncanniness’ and ‘stickiness’ of the intimate can indeed contribute to unsettling some of the normative shortcuts that the current turn to care is producing and push us to think not beyond, or together with, but, as Joanna has suggested (Latimer, 2013) alongside multiple and troubling Others.
在這片有爭議的親密領域中，物質與情感深深交織在一起。儘管如此，諸如 「馴化」（domestication）、「挪用」（appropriation）、「轉譯」（translation）和 「共同製造」（co-production）（Michael, 2012）等 STS 概念（STS concepts）卻顯得過於機械化，無法掌握研究親密關係這一有爭議（和濕滑）領域的倫理政治和本體論意義。汲取其他來自社會心理學（Brown & Capdevila, 1999; Michael, 1996）或研究照護與殘障（Moser, 2006; Schillmeier, 2008; Winance, 2006）的 STS 學者的研究成果，我們希望從物質-半透明的角度來探討情感與主體性。這有助於將後社會轉向擴展至心理領域，並因此對限制我們提出問題的一些二分法提出質疑。然而，要讓親密關係的不可知性與粘性與 STS 相關是相當困難的。然而，由於一些重要的貢獻，我們現在可以做到這一點：首先，對於關懷的研究，例如 Joanna 的研究（Latimer, 2000），超越了 STS，也在 STS 之內（例如，Mol, 2002; Mol, Moss, 2000）。Mol, 2002; Mol, Moser, & Pols, 2015; Pols, 2012），開始轉移物質-半語彙，使其不再跟隨經常爭論的工程師和科學家，而是欣賞關懷實踐（López Gómez, 2019）；其次，因為情感成為跟隨知識製造中人類和非人類組合的一個重要問題（e.例如：Gomart & Hennion, 1999; Latour, 2004; Latimer & Miele, 2013）；第三，因為關懷成為科學與技術的政治與物質表現（例如：Martin, Myers, & Viseu, 2015; Pols, 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, 2012）。 對 Daniel 來說，這本專書其實是一種不斷豐富 STS 傳統的方法，同時也是一個機會，讓我們可以面對親密這個「舊」且仍然太難捉摸的問題。在這樣做的過程中，我們希望親密的「不可思議性」與「粘性」能夠確實有助於打破當前關懷轉向所產生的一些規範性捷徑，並促使我們不是超越或與他人一起思考，而是像 Joanna 所說的（Latimer, 2013），與多重且令人不安的他人一起思考。

For Joanna, ‘intimacy’ emerges in relation to the intimacy of reading and studying literature, as entry into the other worlds and lives that poems, plays and novels draw us through, and in which the affective dimension is made to matter. It also emerges as an epistemological problem in the contrast between her experience of being a ‘practitioner’ – first as a nurse and then as a sociologist – and representations of how practitioners ‘know’ and ‘understand’ in these domains. Specifically, she has been concerned with how ‘care’ and knowledge-making are both subject to continuous and far-reaching attempts to disrupt possibilities for the affective, the embodied and the relational to be seen as essential to how knowledge is accounted for, or even as critical to, the very institutions that have a duty of ‘care’. Here, institutions do not just include the obvious ones – medicine, nursing and health care services – but universities, research institutions, disciplines, science itself – institutions with a responsibility to care for truth, justice, and freedom. Thus, for Joanna, knowledge-making and care go hand in hand – curiosity, as Foucault (1989) argued, is care.
對 Joanna 來說，「親密感」出現於閱讀與研究文學的親密感，如同進入詩歌、戲劇與小說所引導我們穿過的另一個世界與生活，其中情感的層面是重要的。在她作為「實踐者」的經驗（首先是護士，然後是社會學家）與實踐者在這些領域如何「認識」和「理解」的表述之間的對比中，它也作為一個認知論問題而出現。具體來說，她一直關心「照護」與知識製造兩者如何受到持續且影響深遠的嘗試所影響，這些嘗試破壞了情感、體現與關係被視為知識如何被解釋的關鍵，或甚至被視為對肩負「照護」責任的機構的關鍵。在此，機構不只包括明顯的機構 - 醫學、護理與健康照護服務，也包括大學、研究機構、學科、科學本身 - 有責任關懷真理、正義與自由的機構。因此，對 Joanna 來說，製造知識與照顧是相輔相成的 - 正如 Foucault (1989) 所說，好奇心就是照顧。

Yet in her early experience of nursing, of learning sociological argument, and of medicine and the ‘natural’ sciences, intimacy was confined to the sexualised, the domain of private life, to the sensuous domain of the body and its affects, and was seen as outside of knowledge-making, or at most as ‘technologies’ of intimacy – constituted as a relationship to be claimed by nurses in the fight for recognition as professionals with a knowledge base (Savage, 1995). Giddens (1992), emphasising the emancipation of women and the emergence of ‘sexual plasticity’, locates intimacy in dyadic relationships between individuals as a part of the self-reflexive project characteristic of late modern detraditionalised, global risk societies – the space of retreat through which to accrue some sense of self-identity. But this bracketing of intimacy has, historically, made it difficult for intimacy to be a subject of importance in professional and scientific lives. Menzies Lyth (1960), a Kleinian psychoanalyst and co-founder of the Tavistock Clinic, in her study of a nursing service in the late 1950s, showed how the intimate aspects of nurses’ and patients’ work together were intensely problematic, with emergent forms of organisation aimed at repressing rather than confronting the intimacy afforded by doing nursing and being nursed. Organisational arrangements such as task-orientated work allocation, depersonalisation, categorisation and denial of the significance of the individual, detachment and the denial of feelings, were all mechanisms understood by Lyth as a ‘social system’ that had arisen as a ‘defense against anxiety’ – the anxiety arising from the profound affects of the intimate aspects of nursing and being nursed. This repressive regime had many negative consequences, including inefficiencies in service as well as the intensified levels of tension, distress and anxiety experienced by nurses and patients alike. What Lyth in these early days did not capture was how, in the processes she describes, it was intimacy that was being organised out – that intimacy as an effect of how relations between persons, bodies and things are done is itself being denied any life; and what Giddens, amongst countless others, does to intimacy by locating it in dyadic, sexual and love relations between individuals is to drain it of its broader importance. This may account for the absence of the affective dimension from mainstream STS.
然而，在她早期的護理、社會學論證、醫學與「自然」科學的經驗中，親密關係被限制在性化、私人生活的領域、身體與情感的感官領域中，並且被視為知識創造之外，或最多是親密關係的「技術」--由護士在爭取被認可為具有知識基礎的專業人士時所構成的關係（Savage, 1995）。吉登斯（Giddens，1992）強調婦女解放和「性可塑性」的出現，將親密關係定位在個人之間的二元關係上，作為晚期現代化、全球風險社會特有的自我反省專案的一部分，也就是藉以累積某種自我認同感的撤退空間。但是，從歷史上來看，這種對親密關係的遮蔽，使得親密關係很難成為專業與科學生活中的重要議題。Menzies Lyth (1960)，一位克萊因式的精神分析學家，也是塔維斯托克診所的共同創始人，在她對 1950 年代後期的一項護理服務的研究中，顯示了護士與病人在一起工作時的親密關係是如何產生了強烈的問題，新興的組織形式旨在壓抑而非面對從事護理工作與被護理時所提供的親密關係。組織安排如以任務為導向的工作分配、非個人化、分類和否認個人的重要性、疏離和否認感受，這些機制都被 Lyth 理解為一種「社會制度」，它的出現是為「防禦焦慮」--焦慮來自護理和被護理的親密關係的深刻影響。 這種壓制性的制度帶來了許多負面的後果，包括服務效率的降低，以及護士和病人所經歷的緊張、困擾和焦慮程度的加劇。Lyth 在早期並沒有捕捉到的是，在她所描述的過程中，親密關係是如何被組織出來的──親密關係作為人、身體與事物之間關係的一種結果，本身被剝奪了任何生命；而 Giddens 與其他無數人將親密關係定位在個人之間的二元關係、性關係與愛關係，所做的是剝奪它更廣泛的重要性。這可能就是主流 STS 缺乏情感維度的原因。

In contrast, as she grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, Joanna was exposed to shifts in disciplinary possibilities, and the problematisation of the dominant. Her work attempted to show that how care is conducted includes the marginalisation and invisibilisation of the affective and embodied dimensions of care, including knowing and understanding, because they are so easily rendered as merely ‘subjective’, ‘private’, ‘unscientific’, ‘unprofessional’, and as such, hard to account for. Through her collaboration with other scholars concerned with care and affect, including Daniel and some of the other researchers in this monograph, she has become increasingly confident that exploring the affective dimensions of care and of the scientific life is important for sociology, precisely because they are dangerous: the association of the affective, and especially the intimate, with emotion and bodies means that a focus on the intimate dimensions of how care and science are done can disrupt and even perhaps transform the very relations that position the affective dimension as unprofessional and ‘subjective’, as not really relevant to how knowledge, care and science are done. As she discusses in her conversation with Marilyn Strathern (this issue), this includes helping sociology to find new ways to argue and to write, as well as to know, that are not simply routed in the oppositional. Thus, her hope is that attending to the intimate in how care, knowledge-making and science are done may even be able to help transform the politics that entangle care, science and research, and even STS itself. This is not to suggest for one moment that the intimate has only a positive value – rather it is to ask the question ‘how can the intimate become both topic and resource for sociological research?’ Here, she has in particular thought about the ordering of relations in care, science and medicine in terms of relational extension as attachment and detachment between persons and things, the human and the non-human. This has helped her situate care, medicine and science as as much a part of life as anything else we make or include and exclude (see e.g. Latimer, 2007, 2011, 2018; Latimer & Munro, 2006).
相反地，Joanna 成長於 1960 和 1970 年代，她接觸到學科可能性的轉變，以及主流學科的問題化。她的工作嘗試顯示，照護的進行方式包括將照護的情感與體現層面邊緣化與隱蔽化，包括認識與理解，因為這些層面很容易被渲染為只是「主觀的」、「私人的」、「不科學的」、「不專業的」，因此難以解釋。透過與其他關心照護與情感的學者合作，包括丹尼爾與本專書的其他研究者，她越來越有信心，探索照護與科學生活的情感層面對社會學來說是重要的，正因為它們是危險的：情感，尤其是親密，與情緒和身體的關聯，意味著對如何進行照護和科學的親密層面的關注，可以打亂甚至可能改變那些將情感層面定位為非專業和「主觀」的關係，這些關係與如何進行知識、照護和科學無關。正如她在與 Marilyn Strathern 的對話（本期）中所談及的，這包括幫助社會學尋找新的方式去爭論、寫作，以及去認識，而不只是簡單的對立。因此，她希望，關注照護、知識製造與科學的親密方式，甚至可能有助於改變糾纏於照護、科學與研究，甚至 STS 本身的政治。 這並非表示親密關係只有正面的價值，而是要提出「親密關係如何成為社會學研究的主題與資源」這個問題。這有助於她將護理、醫學和科學視為生活的一部分，就像我們製造或包含和排除的任何其他東西一樣（參見 Latimer, 2007, 2011, 2018; Latimer & Munro, 2006）。

Our current project creates a new opportunity to bring these questions into play in thinking about how to do STS by other means. Asking them in relation to other literatures, cases and problems within and beyond STS has led us to consider that the epistemic and ethical-political dimensions of the concept are the most crucial. This monograph is thus an attempt to collectively respond to two interconnected challenges.
我們目前的專案創造了一個新的機會，讓我們可以在思考如何以其他方式進行 STS 時，將這些問題帶入其中。根據 STS 內外的其他文獻、案例與問題提出這些問題，讓我們認為這個概念的認知與倫理政治層面是最重要的。因此，本專書嘗試共同回應兩個相互關聯的挑戰。

The first could be described as a shift that begins with an attempt to make intimacy relevant to science and technology and ends with an exploration of the socio-material constitution of intimacy and its more-than-human constituencies. It is thus an ontological challenge.
第一種可以說是一種轉變，從嘗試讓親密關係與科學和技術相關開始，到探索親密關係的社會物質構成及其超乎人類的成分結束。因此，這是一個本體論的挑戰。

The second challenge is to reclaim and reinvent the politics of relations that the making of intimate entanglements in science and technology embeds and reproduces. It is thus an ethical, political and epistemic response to these politics of relations, and therefore poses not just conceptual but also practical challenges to the ways we do research.
第二個挑戰是，如何回收與重塑科學與技術的親密糾葛所包含與再生產的關係政治。因此，這是對這些關係政治的倫理、政治與認知上的回應，因此不僅對我們進行研究的方式提出概念上的挑戰，也是實際上的挑戰。

The scientific ethos reproduces the differentiation between public and private spheres, and relegates intimacy to the private sphere, locating it as something that can potentially jeopardise scientific settings. Due to this positioning of intimacy, the space of affectivity we call intimacy has been generally obliterated and dispossessed of epistemic relevance in the study of science and technology. For a sociologist, it might be worth studying as a way to explain the social origins of scientific and technological pitfalls, but would hardly explain technoscientific breakthroughs. This is partly due to the Mertonian sociology of science, which Bloor (1991) characterised as the sociology of error, that defined science as a highly scrutinised and protocolised activity that must be rendered accountable and transparent to a community of peers in order to prevent any form of intimacy that could either introduce subjective and uncontrolled biases or lead to unethical doings.
科學精神再現了公共與私人領域的區分，並將親密關係歸入私人領域，將其定位為可能危害科學設定的東西。由於這種親密關係的定位，我們稱之為親密關係的情感空間，在科學與技術的研究中普遍被抹煞，失去了認知上的相關性。對於社會學家而言，它可能值得研究，以解釋科技陷阱的社會起源，但很難解釋科技突破。這部分是由於默頓的科學社會學將科學定義為高度審查與規範化的活動，必須對同儕社群負責且透明化，以防止任何形式的親密關係，以免引入主觀與不受控制的偏見或導致不道德的行為。

In response to this sociological approach to science and technology (S&T), ethnographers and ethnomethodologists of science and technology (e.g. Knorr Cetina & Mulkay, 1983; Latour & Woolgar, 1979/1986; Lynch, 1985; Pickering, 1992) have long held that there is a need for first-hand experience of the intimacies of these social worlds, and for immersion within them if their rationales and their social significance are to be understood. And yet there was in this work a lack of attention to the embodied and affective dimensions of how world-making in S&T is possible (Blackman & Venn, 2010). For example, in the early work of Actor Network Theory research, despite efforts to be symmetrical, affect plays a minor role in accounts of doing science and technology. The picture of science presented is usually dominated by strategies of interessement, which operate as an agonistic but disaffected struggle amongst different stakeholders (Star, 1990). Moreover, despite the description of the dynamics of science in action challenging the idea of a neutral, non-affected and non-situated science, intimacy seemed not to be seen as a relationship with methodological value. The agnostic ethos, overwhelmingly adopted in STS, could indeed be seen as a precautionary measure against the epistemic pitfalls of becoming too intimately entangled: that is, to reproduce, perhaps unwittingly, the repertoire of actors to which the analyst might be too attached (López Gómez, 2019).

It is in the tradition of feminist studies of technoscience (e.g. Davies, 2013; Despret, 2013; Haraway, 1988; Latimer & Miele, 2013; Martin, 1987; Pratt & Rosner, 2012; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011; Star, 1995; Stengers, 2010; Stone, 1996; Suchman, 2000) that intimacy has become relevant, and embodiment and affect acquire a central value. For example, in her biography of Barbara McClintock, Evelyn Fox Keller (1983) shows how doing scientific research in cytogenetics is partly about establishing an absorptive, sensitive attachment to the materials of enquiry, what McClintock called ‘a feeling for an organism’.

In this respect, the work of Despret (2004) also challenges the idea that affective relations are a source of bias and error; rather, she shows how they can be the source of truthfulness and relevance. To remove intimate attachments from the equation of science is, according to Despret, to misunderstand what experimental knowledge means, or what the value of objectivity is. For her, what experimental sciences are good at is building relations of trust and co-becoming in the experimental setting. There is an ethics of knowing which is fragile but crucial for ensuring that questions are made relevant not only to the scientists but also to the objects of enquiry, be they subatomic particles or laboratory mice.

Thus, technoscientific world-makings are not just socio-material practices, but affective and embodied processes, filled to the brim with moments of ‘being moved’ and ‘moving’. Moreover, as a quality and an effect of the ‘force or forces of encounter’ (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 2) intimacy in knowledge-making work involves more than human actors becoming attached, but more importantly mutually transformed (Candea, 2013). Natasha Myers (2015) discusses the way that research aimed at knowing and representing molecular processes involves bodies, human and non-human, as well as digital programs for modelling proteins. Illuminating the socio-material interactions necessary for molecular knowledge to happen, Myers describes the work of one scientist-modeller (Diane) as:

… actively handling the model through interactive molecular graphics programs that she can project herself ‘inside’ of and figure out ‘where she is’ with the structure. She achieves this intimacy with the model by dilating her corporeal schema to meet its form. Indeed, it seems as if she is able to morph the perception of her body enough that her own limbs become effective proxies for chemical structures. (2015, p. 110)

By reclaiming the epistemic value of affectivity, sensibility and embodiment in science and technology, scholars such as Natasha Myers are helping make intimacy a necessary affect of how science happens. For Myers (2008), scientists’ bodies are ‘excitable tissue for gathering up the energetics and movement of the world’, manifesting these ‘as perception, affect, and action’. Intimacy as affect and effect thus gains relevance not just as an object of but also as a means of enquiry.

Making intimacy central to enquiry, as both object and means, as Mariam Fraser and Nirmal Puwar (2008) argue, allows the sensory, emotional and affective relations underpinning research processes to become an ‘academically respectable’ subject rather than something that needs to be edited out of discussions of knowledge-making. For them, the notion of intimacy reveals the ‘affective properties of research labour’ (Fraser & Puwar, 2008), which it then becomes imperative to analyse because they ‘inform the making of knowledge’, ‘shape power relations’, and ‘enable or constrain the practical negotiations of ethical problems’ (Fraser & Puwar, 2008, p. 1).

Aligned with the aforementioned lines of enquiry, the articles in this monograph discuss how intimacy (for good or bad, intended or unintended) is a neglected affect of many different kinds of socio-material relations, in particular science and technology world-making practices. The articles engage with particular modes of doing science and technology with others: in ethnography, participatory research, scientific activism, interdisciplinary collaborations, and art-based and design-based research. Most of the authors have been involved in situations where science and technology is co-produced together with a wide array of actors: scientists of different kinds, technicians, architects and designers, artists, and various publics, from activists to users and patients. What the articles clearly show is that in these modalities of scientific and technological collaboration, the mobilisation and organisation of affects can be easily acknowledged by the majority of actors as a salient and troubling issue. In line with what happens in Menzies Lyth’s study of nursing discussed above, in these new technoscientific scenarios, setting out intimate entanglements is not only part of the job – if something relevant is expected to come from them – but it is in how this is organised that the politics of knowledge are played out. Thus, one might think that the less disciplined and more open the knowledge-making process in which we are involved, the more important, visible and challenging seem to be the intimate entanglements. That would explain why in contexts where disciplinary and academic knowledge is displaced, in favour of more open science and innovation systems, the epistemic values of friendship, trust or care are revealed as more crucial, but paradoxically are almost extinct and need to be reclaimed, as Latimer’s and Ramírez-i-Ollé’s contributions clearly show.

The second important aspect, however, is that while they preserve a sense of the potency of ‘intimacy’ as unsettling, subversive and even dangerous, the explorations in this monograph show how intimacy emerges as an effect of how relations are materially done and get done, and how these affective relations are actually ordinary and even essential to different kinds of world-making. The contributions clearly express the need to turn the taken-for-granted framing of intimacy as naturally bound to the interpersonal, corporal and private, into a contested issue: to open up what we usually think of as intimacy to other nuances, attributes, dimensions and constituencies. They show that the beings entangled, the materialities involved, the affects conveyed and the extension of the intimate not only come to matter when science and technology is critically analysed, but that they all challenge the traditional limits and geographies of the intimate. For this reason, this monograph centralises ‘intimacy’ not as a prefigured property of relations among the actors mentioned, but as an effect of material entanglements that may cross and reshape differences of kind.

Intimacy is thus revealed as a site of connection through which a sense of belonging and alterity might arise in relation to human and more-than-human others. Some of the articles explore intimate entanglements with a wide array of living beings, such as dogs (Motamedi Fraser), mice (Friese), nematodes, seasquirts and crustaceans (Latimer), hookworms, bed bugs and antibiotic resistant microbes (Giraud, Hadley Kershaw, Helliwell, & Hollin); and with earthly elements such as (polluted) air (Calvillo & Garnett) and soils (Puig de la Bellacasa). Other essays revolve around intimacies with ‘technical aids’ such as wheelchairs (Winance) or DIY ramps for disabled peopled (Sánchez Criado), or objects to which we are attached but are on the verge of throwing away (Callén Moreu & López Gómez). Spaces such as psychiatric wards (Kanyeredzi, Brown, McGrath, Reavey, & Tucker) or digital data (Calvillo & Garnett) are also aspects of the intimacies the monograph analyses. In contrast to the articles about animals, artefacts and objects, what becomes intimate in those on spaces and ecologies is more elusive: they are atmospheric and ecological forms of relatedness that go beyond the hic et nunc as they incorporate the potential, eventful and global.

In these explorations of the socio-material and more-than-human constituencies of the intimate, the authors are equipped with concepts such as abyssal intimacies (Friese, drawing on Schrader, 2015), word encounters, multi-species abundance, data intimacies, animatedness and atmospheres, to highlight, first, the materiality, affectivity and aliveness of the intimate entanglements with these more-than-human others; second, to reflect upon the kind of collectives we form with them; and lastly to raise epistemic and ethico-political concerns about contemporary technoscience that would not be possible with traditional imaginaries of the intimate.

Reclaiming the heterogeneous materiality of the intimate – intimacy is made of and with multiple entangled materialities – has important political implications in the context of science and technology because it not only counters the invisibilisation of affects and all the ‘intimate work’ usually associated with the emotional, domestic, even infrastructural (Star & Strauss, 1999), but also contests the ready-made framing of the intimate as naturally bound to the interpersonal, corporal and private, which is a way of making visible the politics of relations that scientific and technological settings silently enact. Bringing to the fore the more-than-human intimacies that configure the current modes of doing science and technology, we believe, is also a way to politicise them and even to offer a mode of resistance to the entanglements that emplace and position them.

Entanglement, as this citation from Stengers suggests, stretches the notion of the relational to incorporate a sense of how world-making – especially acts of taming, excavating, transforming, intervening, mining, colonising, growing, domesticating, clearing, building, enhancing – are each already entangled in and by alignments between politics and capital, science and technology, with each having their affects and effects on lives and the capacity to be alive, because of who, what and how they entangle. In this light – shifting towards spaces of affect which are deemed ‘ordinary’ (Stewart, 2007) but which usually occur in time/spaces that are ‘in-between’, either concealed from public scrutiny or recalcitrant to private appropriation, including sites of alterity and resistance – intimacy denotes being and becoming entangled, in and by socio-material relations.

Practices that organise intimacy in as a critical means of knowing, can transform understanding and help people resist the entanglement that emplaces them in dominant power relations (e.g. Kraeftner & Kroell, 2009; Tironi, 2018; Tironi & Rodriguez-Giralt, 2017). As well as examining how technologies of governing attempt to organise intimacy out in ways that are dysfunctional (as Menzies Lyth’s work, discussed above, showed), intimacy as an affect of particular socio-material distributions, attachments and detachments can recover something of what animates the assembling and reassembling of the social.

Berlant (2011), exploring the capacity for attachment to objects of desire to disrupt the depressing political ecologies of contemporary lives, suggests that such attachments can assert an alternative promise in the face of dominant versions of reality. Yet she stresses the cruelty of such attachments, in which promise and hope emerge not as lines of flight, but as what winds back to specific ‘institutions of the intimate’ (Berlant, 1998), those institutions that mould the force and aesthetics of our attachments with ‘tacit fantasies, tacit rules, and tacit obligations’ (Berlant, 1998, p. 287).

Thus, intimacy as both topic and means presses the political dimensions of knowledge-making to incorporate what is so easily othered. Raffles (2002) suggests that this othering is achieved partly by the way intimate knowledge has been ‘parochialised’, that is, ‘defined in contrastive relation to something that is supra-local’, universal and scientific. This has important consequences because ‘the place and the people bound to it both index and are reduced to signifying a particular phenomenon’ (p. 331). What is lost in figuring ‘intimate knowledge’ as localised is precisely the situatedness, relatedness, affectivity and embeddedness of the intimate in knowledge-making:

There is no universal against which intimacy is parochialism. It speaks symmetrically of researchers, field assistants, trees, and loggers. It insists both on the importance of the time and space of encounter (between people, and between people and non-humans), and on the decisiveness of the embodied, situated practices that take place there. It points to the ubiquity of affect as a mediator of rationality. And it draws attention to the embeddedness of social practice in relations of power. (Raffles, 2002, p. 332)

Thus, according to Raffles, intimacy can be foregrounded as a site for the social production of knowledge across the social, human and life sciences, as doing the political work of disentangling what dominates, especially through reworking human/nature and socio/technical boundaries. In addition, Raffles’ emphasis also makes visible, as well as overcoming, some of the embedded hierarchies of division which usually characterise the ways research and knowledge-making are performed and presented: not as co-production but as the effects, and critically the property, of some persons rather than others.

In this sense, then, a focus on intimacy as a quality of the way world-making is done and gets done is not a mere exercise in deconstruction. Rather, the relations that enact and co-create socio-material assemblages can also help collapse the divisions between objects and subjects, as a way to foreground the fragile nature of agency as an effect of human–non-human association, and avoid othering those Others whose associations deny agency, however emergent (Lee & Brown, 1994). This is important to help reveal the power dynamics in the making of science and technology: whose knowledges, for example, are being translated without their voices being heard (Star, 1990)? As Raffles suggests, paying attention to the intimate is also a way to make visible what is rendered invisible in science and technology – the work of the delegates of science, secretaries, laboratory technicians, lab animals, and all sorts of ‘domesticated’ inscriptions whose work is almost naturally attributed back to the central figure of the scientist, the author and the thinker. By putting affect in the centre of our methodological devices, this neutrality is challenged and the violence that these ‘translations’ and enrolments imply is not only perceptible but impels the researcher to a response (López Gómez, 2019).

Hence, the focus on intimate entanglement is a way of unconcealing the ethics and politics of relations (Martin et al., 2015). Through a situated and sensitive account of the various elements comprising intimacy as both subject and means, the authors make vulnerability, unknowingness and openness inescapable if entanglements are to be made visible. The articles also pose vital questions about how we become attached and even responsible for entangled human and non-human others, and explore what a ‘good’ response might be. In summary, a focus on intimacy as an emergent quality of relations that entangle and disentangle can privilege ‘subjugated standpoints’ (including the standpoint of embodied vision, care and affect), build ‘webs of connections’, and tell stories that help (Haraway, 1988, p. 584).

Each of our articles, as expressions of caring for and about what is usually concealed, offers examples of how a dominant politics of knowledge can be undone. Strathern discusses writing, thinking and researching as an effect of being formed and reformed by her entanglement with diverse others, but also as care. It is this care that enables a way to reveal and reimagine those concepts and ideas that underpin and dominate thought, and the practices and relations that flow from how things are thought, to see how the dominant politics of knowledge and relations can be undone. The condition of being always partially formed by others’ parts is indeed a way to reclaim a politics of relations that is usually elided in science and technology.

In her critique of recent policy drives towards interdisciplinarity and responsible research and innovation, Latimer reflects on the ethics of knowledge-making in the contemporary moment of science under siege. She reveals how both life and social scientists resist, or coexist, with the twin strategies of the industrialisation and managerialisation of knowledge. Latimer tells us how social scientists and life scientists gather together around their intimate attachments, in this case with animals and ‘ethical doings’, to come alongside each other, partially and intermittently. The article tells how such intimacy can both contribute value and protect what both social and life scientists care for and about: immersion, contemplation and collective endeavour. Specifically, she elaborates the idea of intimacy as a way to rethink interdisciplinarity and collaboration from the perspective of ‘being alongside’ (Latimer, 2013), as a counter-politics of knowledge and as a way to care for the tensions between them as ‘openings’ into each other’s worlds.

Sánchez Criado’s, Ramírez-i-Ollé’s and Friese’s articles also explore and extend ideas about how ‘being alongside’ can help open up different forms of relatedness with research participants, in ways that create openings for new understandings. Becoming intimately entangled with scientists, Ramírez-i-Ollé’s ethnography of a group of dendroclimatologists contests the image of science as disinterested and disengaged. She elaborates friendship in scientific methods and asks how academic friendship and being alongside are possible if intellectual work does not acknowledge and relate to contagion and mimesis and only prizes originality, authenticity, novelty and singularity? As Chiew and Barnwell (this monograph issue) suggest, doing science alongside others, through epistemic friendship, as Ramírez-i-Ollé would put it, demands that these values so deeply ingrained in modern intellectual work are unsettled. Moreover, it requires, as Motamedi Fraser (this issue) insists, consideration of the very practice of thinking as a collective achievement that overcomes any anthropocentric enclosure. For instance, she shows that as human–dog encounters with words are spaces where thinking is redistributed creatively, accounts in animal studies should also do justice to this situated distributedness and overcome ‘languagism’, the idea that dogs do not have language as humans do because they have no abstract symbolic capacity. In academic work, as Strathern says, we need constantly to remember the condition of being always partially formed by others’ parts: an endless exchange through which we are forever in debt. This is a condition of academic work but also of intimate entanglements with more-than-human others.

The contributions in this collection demonstrate that the politics of relations is not just an issue for scientists and academics. Borrowing Sánchez Criado’s (this issue) expression, we could say that the ‘how-to relate’ problem that the exploration of intimate entanglements in science and technology eliminates is also a crucial problem for all the actors implied in the co-production of science and technology. In this regard, the contributions can also be seen as attempts at doing environmental politics and politics of the social otherwise. Most of the contributions in this publication aim to elaborate the material-semiotic conditions under which environmental and social justice is possible, because they frame the way that issues such as soil exhaustion, air pollution, waste production, ageing societies, biodiversity or ableism become public concerns and how it is possible to politically intervene at a grassroots and institutional level and at different scales.

For instance, Calvillo and Garnett show that when air pollution is mostly addressed as a technical problem, knowledge practices can reduce the possibilities for political action. They demonstrate how public involvement, based on a means to reveal a body–person intimate entanglement with pollution, actually produces better and more accurate numerical data and makes these data more accessible and open, increasing the possibilities of raising awareness and supporting political action. Similarly, while dominant ways of doing ecological science stress the demise and extinction of diversity, Eva Giraud, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Richard Helliwell, and Greg Hollin invert this relation to focus on interspecies intimacies of abundance to reveal the consequences of previous strategies of eradication, as well as the proliferation of these interspecies entanglements as the effects of social inequalities and injustices. Furthermore, Ava Kanyeredzi, Steve Brown, Laura McGrath, Paula Reavey, and Ian Tucker show that if the lived-experience of a ward is assumed to be governed by environmental and interpersonal factors, the moods and feelings attached to the place are disregarded and the politics of daily life in these institutions is reduced to the logic of domination and resistance.

Thus, the authors situate their political and ethical concerns in the politics of daily life, especially in processes of attachment and detachment, inclusion and exclusion, and the entanglements of production, consumption and disposal. They are posing critical questions to the hopeful meta-narratives of resurgence, communal belonging, multi-species entanglements, sustainability, social inclusion and inclusive design, as well as to their apocalyptic counterparts. In addition, each article points to the uneven and troubling consequences intimacy brings about.

Ramírez-i-Ollé’s ethnographic experience clearly reveals that the kind of intimate entanglement we call friendship can become a site of potential misunderstandings and disappointments, and therefore something to be cautious about, but also a method of curiosity-driven flourishing. Friese illustrates this by paying attention to the replaceability of laboratory mice and animal technicians; she elaborates caring-about relations that might be otherwise disregarded, and which can unsettle animal rights activists’ consideration of technicians as torturers. Similarly, a closer analysis of the way in which the ecology of elements around a wheelchair, or the feelings, objects and spaces of a ward become attached and detached, displaces the usual narratives of power in which the deployment of prostheses, the design of environments for habitation, and the production of objectual attachments shape subjects in an agonistic tension between power and resistance. Ava Kanyeredzi, Steve Brown, Laura McGrath, Paula Reavey, and Ian Tucker show how, in a psychiatric ward, certain attachments can become atmospheric sensors or atmospheric transducers that transform the ward into something threatening and uninhabitable or a good place to live. As a result of this, they propose the notion of an ‘ethosphere’, to appreciate the ethical work undertaken by patients of attuning to atmospheres to enact and contest certain values. Similarly, Winance’s essay shifts from describing the practices of adjustment conducted by disabled people and occupational therapists in wheelchair test centres, to the relational modalities that entangle them. Based on this, she shows how a wheelchair can be a prosthesis or an intimate and embedded part of oneself, with different normalising or abnormalising and enabling and disabling effects. Sánchez Criado’s ethnographic account of En torno a la silla (ETS) shows how the production of these heterogeneous assemblages of dis/ablement are not only processes of ‘habilitation’ but of political contestation of the very idea of difference and inclusion in accessibility. Through a re-description of ETS, an activist collective that performs disability politics through making, Sánchez Criado shows how the very possibility of a relation is what is at stake in their technical experimentations.

The harm and the good of intimate entanglements can also be seen when we move from the politics of the social to environmental politics, where care is situated as an ethical doing in ecological crises. Eva Giraud, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Richard Helliwell, and Greg Hollin look at the threatening abundances that certain intimate entanglements may produce for human life, which contrasts the focus on loss or the resurgence of life and ecological resilience commonly used to frame the consequences of the Anthropocene. Closer to these repertoires, Puig de la Bellacasa, Callén Moreu and López Gómez, and Calvillo and Garnett focus on intimate entanglements with soils, clutter and air – usually invisibilised and de-materialised as inert or manageable resources – as having the potential to ‘reanimate’ them and articulate new forms of communing with them. Callén Moreu and López Gómez, even, envisage a re-materialisation of waste management policies based on the idea of cultivating attachments with objects. However, as pointed to by Giraud et al. and Puig de la Bellacasa, these articles also acknowledge that these intimacies, despite their resurgence potential, can also lead, as has happened several times, to the emergence of localist, extractivist and exclusionary forms of belonging.

Thus, the exploration of intimate entanglements is a means for each author to challenge dominant assumptions and come up with an alternative politics of relations. By exploring forms of communing with hard-to-appropriate others, such as Puig de la Bellacasa’s re-animated soils, or developing how-to relations that question and construct non-assimilationist forms of accessibility, such as Sánchez Criado’s technologies of friendship, the authors here aim to respond to the harmful consequences of industrialism, human exceptionalism, speciesism and ableism. They cast political action as the production of new material-affective attachments that animate entanglements with other non-human beings. This politics of relations not only leads to the articulation of hybrid collectivities but endows them with atmospheric and topological qualities. The result is forms of communing that are not grounded in exclusionary processes of belonging but of ‘being alongside different kinds’ (Latimer, 2013), where the problem of relating, as Sánchez Criado suggests, is confronted ‘at the hinges of unrelatability’.

The contributions to this volume are practical propositions that take the form of expositions, performances, artistic pieces, drawings, methodological innovations, writing styles, new scientific gatherings and forms of collaboration. In fact, some of the articles are indeed material interventions. For instance, the essay by Calvillo and Garnett is derived from a design-based ethnography as they use the installation of an urban infrastructure designed by Nerea Calvillo as an ethnographic device to study how publics engage with air pollution. Similarly, the article by Callén Moreu and López Gómez on intimate objects draws on materials collected in an art-based research project, Objections. For them, what turns out to be a methodology to explore practices of discarding is in fact a form of intervention that seeks to cultivate new and re-animate old intimate attachments with about-to-be-discarded objects. In Sánchez Criado’s paper, En torno a la silla (ETS) is a methodological apparatus and an activist and maker collective. It is in the design process and testing of DIY technical aids that assimilationist imaginaries and ableist urban scripts are contested, while the relational conditions of these designs, the how-to-relate problem, is foregrounded as a relevant technical and anthropological problem for collectively thinking through.

In order to comprehend the role of intimacy in science and technology, but even more importantly, to get into the politics of relations that this entails, social scientists and their methodological apparatuses are repositioned by the articles in this monograph. For this reason, most of the reflections arise from deeply personal hands-on involvements in domains of practice that are intensely moving, compelling, controversial and even against the principles and values of some of the authors. Friese’s ethnographic engagement with animal technicians in a biological service unit is a very good example. Her analytical approach, the relationships she builds with some of the technicians and her own engagement in animal rights activism is unsettled when the replace-ability of animal technicians becomes intimately connected with the interchangeable and vulnerable lives of the laboratory mice. The authors in this monograph do not unfold the complexities of situations in a detached way, as if they were observing from outside, nor do they stick to stable epistemic or normative stances. They are intimately entangled with things that are troublesome and unstable. That is why these entanglements force the authors to hesitate, and impel them to explore other forms of relatedness. They are pushed to consider other ways of intimating, maybe according to different, and possibly new, politics of relations. As we have seen, in these situations, wondering how the beings we encounter in our research come to matter to us, what are the relevant questions, and for whom and how they matter, not only entails questioning rooted epistemic enclosures. It is also necessary to intervene in the production of the intimate entanglements in which we are caught when we do science and technology. For this reason, these contributions are not only ethico-political digressions that aim to reclaim the role of affect in the making of knowledge, but are indeed practical propositions for doing science and technology.

Whether through design or art-based materials, or through ethnographic relations, the articles engage in different modes of doing science and technology with others, and therefore become experimental attempts to cultivate and test friendship, animation, sensibility and even an art of the encounter as part of the ethos of the field. In doing so, what they attempt to do is to contest and reinvent the politics of relations that our intimate entanglements materialise in the way we engage with science and technology.