Chapter 1: The Knitter in the Lab Becoming Sand in the Gearbox
To challenge the idea of one coherent robotic future is a technofeminist intervention into the idea of linear technological progress. I understand such an intervention in figurative terms as becoming the sand in the gears of what appears to be an overwhelmingly well-oiled machinery of ‘our’ robotic future. The picture of sand in the gears might at first glance seem like an undesirable disturbance and a very destructive endeavour. However, from my technofeminist, interventionist perspective, a second glance can reveal the productive and desirable effects of such a disturbance. In its disruptive momentum, to become the sand in the machinery of ‘our’ robotic future, means to take a break from technoscientific acceleration and its almost unlimited promises of improvement and optimisation of ‘our’ everyday lives. The sand causes a break that is involuntary and very material. At the same time, this break allows me to take up my knitting needles and yarn as tools for a queer use of the cobot. Furthermore, becoming sand in the gear is how I imagine the workings of Haraway’s figure of the cyborg—a figure that not only reclaims a technodriven term, but also relies on such moments of involuntary break with coherent and linear stories. These moments are the motor of technoscientific worlding because they bring the potentiality to intervene into linear stories. With Nina Lykke (2010, 39), “The cyborg mobilizes other, critical stories that have the potential to undermine hegemonic power and dualisms.” In this regard, I consider becoming sand in the gears as a cyborgian, technofeminist way of mobilising critical stories from within robotics. More precisely, if hegemonic narratives present collaboration as key to increasingly robotised futures, challenging human-robot collaboration (HRC) will work exactly in this way of mobilising different stories of relating and interacting between humans and machines. In addition, to fundamentally query current forms of
