Technography instead of ethnography? Bio-industrial ontology of the elektrichka, or Intertwining of human and nonhuman narratives

Abstract

While socio-cultural anthropology has always tended to move beyond its own boundaries, one can observe that this paper is prone to increasingly noticeable reevaluation of the place and role of “ethno-” in the methodology of non-human social research, particularly in the context of technics and infrastructure. The core concept is the “collective assemblage of enunciation” proposed by the French psychoanalyst F. Guattari in his late works: it may serve as a theoretical alternative to non-human subjectivity commonly synonymous to agency. Foremost, this schizoanalytic framework provokes the question of how subjectivity produces and thus highlights the non-representational affects of mutual interaction “human - machine”. Since the conventional ethnographic method seems to reduce the bio-industrial (between subject and technological regime) communication to constructionist representations whereas the anthropological paradigm of the ontological turn shifts the research focus to overcoming the modern/non-modern dichotomy, I refer to implications from cultural geography - namely, technography. Thinking not only about, but also with the machine (post-Soviet electric multiple unit or elektrichka, in my case) contributes to grasping the affective relationships between human and non-human entities in bio-industrial ontological space. The paper is based on technographical data collected during the field trip from Tyumen to Archangelsk on suburban trains which I undertook during July - August 2019.