by Alexandra Hofmänner and Loïc Riom //
August 26, 2021 – UniTobler, Bern: flipchart sheets, long lists organized in columns, dozens of colorful post-its with keywords, arrows connecting them in all directions. From the outside, this multiplication of notes might have seemed obscure. The aim was simpler: to lay things out, to take stock. What are we doing already? What should we be doing? What do we want to do?
The exercise was about shaping roles, coordinating efforts, imagining who should do what and when within the STS-CH board. In Madeleine Akrich’s sense, it was about inscribing—both conceiving scripts of tasks and responsibilities and recording them into shared documents. In short: organizing. As Bruno Latour so beautifully wrote, “to organize is always to re-organize.” This phrase captures the fragile existence of an association like STS-CH and the constant care required to keep it alive. It takes invisible work—meetings, meticulous minutes, long lists, agendas, hundreds of emails, guidelines, accounts, funding applications, forms—to make STS-CH exist and persist. “Contrary to celestial bodies, there is no inertia at all in an organization. You stop carrying it on: it drops dead,” Latour adds. And indeed, like many organizations, STS-CH has sometimes come close to that edge. The zigzagging—and sometimes U-turning—life of organization raises questions: What is STS-CH? What should it do? What are its goals? What are STS anyway? Looking back at that afternoon in Bern offers one possible way to answer these questions: through inscriptions, through mundane, sometimes tedious work. In other words, by answering them organizationally.