As I sit down in my scriptorium, the cogitator comes alive with a touch of my finger, its spirit has grown accustomed to in lengthy rituals of familiarization after it was first assigned to me. Eager to work, it presents me with chatter from the noosphere that still my flesh is too weak to perceive on its own. I calm it down, reassuring it that I have perceived its messages and warnings and will take care of them in time.
When trying to grasp the relations we have to machines and technology, it is easy to fall back on the dominant, modern narratives with which we have grown up: Technology is a tool that we shape and control. Scholarship in the Science and Technology Studies and the Sociology of Technology – among other fields – has shown that these narratives don’t fit the empirical research and also hinder the analysis of current sociotechnical relationships. Technological artifacts have thus become actors or parts of hybrid entities (Latour, 2019), partake in distributed action (Schulz-Schaeffer & Rammert, 2019) or have its boundaries to the human reduced to an ironical non-boundary in the figure of the cyborg (Haraway, 1995). These ontological shifts have given us different descriptions of sociotechnical relationships and yet, especially from the perspective of ethno- and technographic research, it is a challenge to break the silence of technological entities (Hirschauer, 2006).
The Imperium’s (and mostly the Adeptus Mechanicus’) seemingly strange relationship to technology we can find in Warhammer 40k Literature presents us with a different-than-modern sociotechnical ontology. I argue, that using this ontology as a diffraction apparatus (Barad, 2007), we can gain a tool to estrange ourselves from what is familiar and thus a new angle for the analysis of our own sociotechnical relationships.
Author bio
After finishing his Master’s Degree in the social sciences, Jan Gärtner is currently working as research associate for the University of Rostock’s chair of sociological theories. In his PhD-Thesis, he works towards an understanding of the sociotechnical construction of knowledge on the Planetary.
