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Robotic Knitting
being automated, which are not, and in which ways? And, which subject positions are made im-/possible through those design decisions? Finally, how is it possible to make a difference? This set of questions orients my analysis towards human subjectivity and agency and how lines of differentiation in their powerful operations of valuing the one over the other are renegotiated. At the same time, I situate my critique in a specific laboratory setting and a practical engagement with one cobot technology. Through robotic knitting, as I will continue to show, I immerse myself in the enactment of HCI, and therefore also in the re-crafting of a future populated by cobots. Donna Haraway’s rich work is a companion to my approach: from her foundational work on how to playfully engage with the Cyborg (1985) as a figure of technoscientific processes of boundary re-/drawing between human, machine, and animal, as well as between nature, society, and technology, to her more recent work on staying with the trouble (2016) in multispecies assemblages. One key guiding aspect of her work is how she realises a playful engagement with dreadful earthly constellations through the tools of story-retelling and re-figuring. Both take seriously the complex ways in which discursive and material mattering are entangled. Thus, the remainder of this chapter builds the ground for retelling and re-figuring robotic futures through robotic knitting.
1.1
Discursive Certainties? Engaging with Cobot Discourses
In the following subsections, I will delve deeper into the idea of a robotic workforce, how this idea takes shape in different discourses, propels new forms of automation encompassing the not-yet automated spheres of human labour, and I will present selected strands of feminist and postcolonial critiques of these visions. Exploring different narratives and imaginations of (future) relations of humans and robots, I identify three storylines within the contemporary robotic scene. This division into three storylines is my analytical suggestion for grappling with the multi-layered dimensions of cultural meaning of the complex contemporary robotic imaginary. These storylines vary in the ways that sociotechnical relations of human-robot interaction are imagined, discussed, and critiqued. I differentiate between the storyline (A) of machines becoming workers; the storyline (B) of machines not only becoming workers,
