El Rio
In 1960, the Peruvian poet Javier Heraud wrote the poem El Rio (The River). I read this while on fieldwork in Lima, researching the digitalization of urban water infrastructure. This poem struck me because it described the trajectory of a river, flowing from the high Andes, downstream through pastures and towns, to finally pass through the large city and join with the ocean. On its path, the river breaks rocks, nourishes plants, and flows through bodies of animals and people, mixing with their blood. Although Heraud does not mention the river's name, I always imagined it to be the trajectory of the Rimac, Lima's primary water source.
Heraud wrote the poem from a first-person narrative, transforming the river into a body with thoughts that shares its story with us. In literature and poetry, playing with the position of the narrator is a relatively common practice. Narrators can be objects, animals, spiritual creatures, or even the dead. When it comes to telling a story, authors do not discriminate. However, in scientific writing, playing around with the position of the narrator is much less common. In many scientific disciplines, the narrator is even wholly left out, forcing the writer to make awkward sentence constructions in an attempt to avoid having to use 'I' or 'we' in describing their findings. Other strands of science, specifically anthropology and critical sociology, have accepted the presence of a narrator, acknowledging how the 'scientist' is telling a story through research papers as the novelist is in books. Nevertheless, also in those disciplines, we rarely experience the story told from a completely different perspective, for example, from the perspective of the river.
This is rooted in the positivist epistemology that dominated all scientific disciplines and continues to be a structuring force in many. The relationship between the scientific narrator, sometimes not even present in writing, and what is described is that of the objective researcher and the subject. The subject is observed, its properties and behaviour are analysed, and this is abstracted into a jargon-filled piece that only those who speak the language of the scientist can decode.
Positivist science has not only defined the relationships between the researcher and what is researched but also determined who is allowed to engage in research and which knowledge is considered 'scientific.' This implies clear dichotomies between science and non-science, the researcher as a person, and the natural, technological, or social as subjects to be researched.
As described in the previous sections of this thesis, different strands within the philosophy of science and technology have made a tremendous effort in overcoming the strict object-subject dichotomy and in opening up our thinking by critically engaging with the categories that we have created, as well as developing new research methodologies that provoke us to think through and with the thing we are analysing. Heraud, far ahead of his time, already deployed what we in research now refer to as 'following the thing' as a way to think through the river. In this poem, we do not only follow the river as it moves through different landscapes; the river itself describes its trajectory for us.
While my thesis is not narrated from the perspective of an object, I have been inspired by this art and scholarship in my theoretical and methodological approach. Theoretically, this is reflected in the relational approach that acknowledges the active participation of human and non-human entities in shaping the city. Methodologically, this is primarily reflected in the different points of view included in this research and the engagement with actors and sources outside of academia. From the starting point that I wanted to understand digitalization from its 'source' to final product, this research jumps between describing the emergence of water governance approaches from knowledge systems to analysing the implementation of digital technology by SEDAPAL and residents and continues with thinking about how we can design it ourselves. Finally, in my writing, it is also reflected in the fact that as a researcher, I am an active agent in the research and present in the narrative.
