Cori Hayden
Lucy Suchman
4S Rotterdam 2008
Panel proposal:
Mere innovation: Postcolonial and other ruminations on invention and
imitation
Co-organizers:
Cori Hayden (UC Berkeley) and Lucy Suchman (University of Lancaster)
Innovation is often defined through its distance from the old, or ‘the
same.’ As such, and by extension, it gains moral, political, and
technical force by its presumed and actively produced contrast with the
merely imitative, or the mere copy. Even in a moment in which U.S.
corporate models of innovation seem open to growing political and
technical critique, this contrast continues to operate. For example,
“open source” bioscience consortia, among many other Anglo-European
efforts to reengineer the infrastructures of research, development, and
distribution, actively fetishize innovation, at the expense of the mere
copy. (Many open source-inspired platforms, in other words, are justified
by their ability to help us build a better mousetrap). This panel seeks
to make ‘the mere’ interesting by drawing our attention to a range of
engagements with the idea of “the same, with a difference.” Among other
things, as Ivan da Costa Marques has argued, doing so opens to further
scrutiny the morally and politically charged line between innovation and
the copy which has long organized colonial and post-colonial iterations of
modernity and difference. It also opens up the space of ‘the copy’ (or of
imitation, similarity, and the substitute – not all the same thing) to
critical reflection, allowing us to examine the many kinds of
technical-political projects undertaken in their name. Our goal in
‘mere-ing’ innovation is thus not simply to reverse the moral charge– that
is, it is not to restore practices denounced as imitative to their
rightful place in the annals of invention, nor conversely to denounce
declared practices of innovation as (merely) something less impressive.
Rather, we seek to think empirically and historically about how sameness,
similarity, and difference are themselves at stake in a range of sites,
practices, and projects.
