Ontologies for Developing Things

Transcription

1 T R A N S D I S C I P L I N A R Y S T U D I E S Ontologies for Developing Things Making Health Care Futures Through Technology Casper Bruun Jensen SensePublishers

2 Ontologies for Developing Things

3 TRANSDISCIPLINARY STUDIES Volume 03 Series editor Jeremy Hunsinger, University of Illinois, Chicago Jason Nolan, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada Editorial board Megan Boler, University of Toronto, Canada Geoffrey C. Bowker, Pittsburgh University, USA Timothy W. Luke, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Wendy Martin, Claremont Graduate School, USA Helga Nowotny, Wissenschaftszentrum Wien (Science Center Vienna), Austria Joel Weiss, University of Toronto Scope Transdisciplinary Studies is an internationally oriented book series created to generate new theories and practices to extricate transdisciplinary learning and research from the confining discourses of traditional disciplinarities. Within transdisciplinary domains, this series publishes empirically grounded, theoretically sound work that seeks to identify and solve global problems that conventional disciplinary perspectives cannot capture. Transdisciplinary Studies seeks to accentuate those aspects of scholarly research which cut across today s learned disciplines in an effort to define the new axiologies and forms of praxis that are transforming contemporary learning. This series intends to promote a new appreciation for transdisciplinary research to audiences that are seeking ways of understanding complex, global problems that many now realize disciplinary perspectives cannot fully address. Teachers, scholars, policy makers, educators and researchers working to address issues in technology studies, education, public finance, discourse studies, professional ethics, political analysis, learning, ecological systems, modern medicine, and other fields clearly are ready to begin investing in transdisciplinary models of research. It is for those many different audiences in these diverse fields that we hope to reach, not merely with topical research, but also through considering new epistemic and ontological foundations for of transdisciplinary research. We hope this series will exemplify the global transformations of education and learning across the disciplines for years to come.

4 Ontologies for Developing Things Making Health Care Futures Through Technology Casper Bruun Jensen IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM/BOSTON/TAIPEI

5 A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: (paperback) ISBN: (hardback) ISBN: (e-book) Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands Printed on acid-free paper The cover is an excerpt from the painting Miscommunication (2010) by Danish artist Sanne Bruun Rosenmay ( All Rights Reserved 2010 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments and Reading Guide... vii Preface... xi 1. An Amodern Disposition: On Performativity, Practical Ontology, and Intervention Researching Partially Existing Objects: Ontologies for Developing Things The Birth of a Future-Generating Device: On Electronic Patient Records and Expectations Traveling Standards Citizen Projects and Consensus Building at the Danish Board of Technology: On Experiments in Democracy Infrastructural Fractals: Re-Visiting the Micro-Macro Distinction in Social Theory Sorting Attachments and the Multiplicity of Usefulness Power, Technology and Medical Sociology: An Infrastructural Inversion Established Sentiments, Alternative Agendas, and Politics of Concretization Bibliography Index v

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8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND READING GUIDE This book is the result of research that began while I was a Ph.D.-student at the Department of Information-and Media Studies at the University of Aarhus, Denmark between Originally, Finn Olesen and Randi Markussen introduced me to science and technology studies and they, as well as, Andrew Pickering inspired me to start these studies. And engagement with members of the emerging now flourishing STS environment in Denmark, especially Peter Lauritsen, Christopher Gad, Brit Ross Winthereik and Signe Vikkelsø, continued to provide inspiration. My philosophical interests were nourished as a visiting researcher at Don Ihde s Technoscience Research Seminar, at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and in ongoing conversations with Evan M. Selinger. Later, my constructivist tendencies (and capabilities, such as they may be) were strengthened as a research fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University, under the supervision of Barbara Herrnstein Smith and through discussions with Geoffrey C. Bowker, Steven D. Brown and Isabelle Stengers. One of the recurrent themes of the book is the normativity and politics of constructivist STS. This topic was the focus of two workshops, one in Amsterdam, one in Aarhus, and a special issue of Science as Culture that I organized and edited with Teun Zuiderent-Jerak. I d like to thank him, as well as the participants in the workshops and Nina Boulus for their inputs and thoughts. Finally, I would like to thank Jeremy Hunsinger for his encouragement and the staff at Sense Publishers for their assistance. Many chapters have been presented in different formats and to different audiences. Chapter one An Amodern Disposition: On Performativity, Practical Ontology, and Intervention was originally published as A Non-Humanist Disposition: On Performativity, Practical Ontology, and Intervention in Configurations vol , Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter two, Researching Partially Existing Objects: Ontology for Developing Things was first published in the Center for STS-studies at the University of Aarhus working paper series no. 4. Reprinted by permission of the Center for STS- Studies at the University of Aarhus. Chapter three The Birth of a Future-Generating Device was first presented as An Experiment in Performative History: The Electronic Patient Record as a Future- Generating Device, at the Public Proofs: Science, Technology and Democracy, 4S/EASST 2004, Ecole des Mines de Paris, August It was published in a significantly different form as An Experiment in Performative History: The Danish Electronic Patient Record as a Future-Generating Device. Social Studies of Science. Vol. 35 No. 2, Copyright Sage Publications 2005, by Permission of Sage Publications Ltd. The current version draws additionally on presentations made at the conference for the Danish Association of Science and Technology Studies, Århus, June 2008 and at the 4S/EASST conference Acting with Science, Technology and Medicine, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, August vii

9 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND READING GUIDE Chapter four Traveling Standards was presented as The Standardisation Debates on Danish Electronic Patient Records: Handling a Differend in Practice, at the EASST 2002 conference Responsibility Under Uncertainty, University of York, UK, July 2002 and at the Infrastructures for Digital Communication graduate conference, University of California, San Diego, January It was first published in the Center for STS-studies at the University of Aarhus working paper series no. 8. It is reprinted by permission of the Center for STS-Studies at the University of Aarhus. Chapter five on Citizen Projects and Consensus-Building was presented at the workshop at Science Studies and Sociology, University of Madison, Wisconsin, February 2003 and at the workshop on Technologies of Nature-Politics, held at the Center for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo, February It has been published as part of the EU-frame program STAGE in R. Hagendijk, P. Healey, M. Horst and A. Irwin (eds) Science, Technology and Governance in Europe: Challenges of Public Engagement. Stage (EU FP5: contract HPSE-CT ) Final Report, February 2005 and in Acta Sociologica. Special issue on Science, Power, and Democracy.Vol. 48 No Copyright Sage Publications 2005, by Permission of Sage Publications Ltd. Chapter six Infrastructural Fractals was first published Infrastructural Fractals: Re-visiting the Micro-Macro Distinction in Social Theory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Vol. 25 No Reprinted by permission of Pion Ltd, London. Chapter seven Sorting Attachments and the Multiplicity of Usefulness integrates discussion from the paper Sorting Attachments: On Interventions and Usefulness in STS and Health Policy, Practices of Assessment and Intervention in Action-Oriented Science and Technology Studies, Amsterdam, April 2005 and published as Sorting Attachments: Usefulness of STS in Health Care Practice and Policy. Science as Culture Vol. 16 No. 3 (Special issue: Unpacking Intervention in Science and Technology Studies , reprinted by permission of Routledge, and the paper Description as Inquiry and Experimentation: On the Multiplicity of Usefulness in/of Ethnographic Practice. prepared for the What is the point of description panel convened by Marilyn Strathern for the Description and creativity: Approaches to collaboration and value from anthropology, art, science, and technology conference, King s College, Cambridge, U.K., July 3 5, Chapter eight, Power, Technology and Social Studies of Health Care: An Infrastructural Inversion was originally published in Health Care Analysis Vol. 16 No , It is reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science+ Business Media. Finally, chapter nine, Established Sentiments, Alternative Agendas and Politics of Concretization was presented at the Department for the History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz. It was published in Configurations Vol. 14 No Reprinted by permission of the John Hopkins University Press. viii

10 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND READING GUIDE The book is organized as follows: Chapter one provides an analytical background and introduces several key concepts relating to amodern, nonhumanist studies of science and technology. Chapter two offers a brief (anti-)methodological discussion of how to study ontologies for developing things. Chapters three to six are empirically oriented towards processes and controversies relating to the development of electronic patient records (EPRs) in Denmark. Chapter three gives a brief historical account of the EPR and analyzes the emergence of this technology as a future-generating device. Chapter four considers questions of standardization and their entwinement with social, political and economic issues. Chapter five follows the EPR as it became an object of democratic debate and inquiry at the Danish Board of Technology. Chapter six revisits some of the previously encountered empirical scenes and offers an argument that the researcher might make better sense of them by avoiding the loaded categories of micro- and macro-studies, instead tracing infrastructural fractals. Chapter seven and eight are based on empirical work conducted at a Canadian hospital. In chapter seven I make use of experiences as action-oriented researcher in order to articulate the job of the contemporary social researchers as one of sorting attachments. This chapter critically engages the question of how STS (and other social sciences) might be useful and relevant. Chapter eight uses material from a technology implementation project to consider the role of power and its relation to technology in social studies of health care. Finally, chapter nine, offers a kind of incomplete synthesis of the main analytical themes that have run through the book. Rather than becoming useful or relevant, but also instead of criticizing the powerful, or giving voice, the chapter argues that studies of ontologies for developing things, should be conducted in a way so as not to hinder becoming. ix

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12 PREFACE There is a certain genre of books that issue an invitation to the reader to a particular field or area of study. These Invitation to X books promise to open up a hitherto unexplored vista of learning. The author acts as a guide, or better yet as an insider, welcoming the reader into their inner circle: stick with me kid, I ll show you around. Invitations come, of course, with strings attached. To accept such an invitation is to agree to the assumption that the author has a privileged perspective, that they can provide an overview of matters as they actually are from the perspective of those who are able to see them properly. Backstage: exclusive. This book offers no such invitations. One of its central tenets is instead no promises. This is to say that whilst this is certainly an inviting text, which welcomes the reader into a habitable world, rich in possibilities, there is no pretence that this is a neutral guidebook for the perplexed. In part this is because the field which the author describes Science and Technology Studies (STS) does not really lend itself to rapid survey. Emerging from the ashes of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, a discipline that now only exists in the kaleidoscopic afterlife given to it by Malcolm Ashmore s The Reflexive Thesis, STS is the point where philosophy, anthropology and sociology meet together in the shadow cast by the exact sciences. As such, writing in the STS is typically a prime candidate for what Marilyn Strathern refers to as blurred genres. Her contrast case, which the text approvingly cites, is with complex trajectories. It is one of the many accomplishments of this book to exemplify this elusive distinction. What STS lacks in terms of clear disciplinary foundations is more than made up for by a certain kind of modishness. This is clearly evident in the work of the best known representative of STS, Bruno Latour, who is also one of the most renowned stylists in contemporary social science, and with whom a significant proportion of this book is both explicitly and implicitly in dialogue. Casper Bruun Jensen, too, demonstrates impeccably good taste and discernment in his choice and use of theory. Readers in search of discussion around concepts-de-jour like performativity, the turn to ontology, assemblages, cyborgs will find immediate gratification in what follows. But at the same time, the text is marked by a kind of classicism. Longstanding debates around the micro-macro distinction, the practicality of social science as a vocation and the nature of power are revisited. This is done not because the author promises finally! to offer a neat resolution, but because these debates take on a new tenor and importance in the course of following the particular objects and relations which form the bulk of the research in this text. The text is a sort of key change where the melodies of social scientific enquiry are intensified and refreshed. It is traditional in social science to operate in a mode of last person standing. One obliterates ones potential rivals and interlocutors as part of the ritual of laying out the groundwork. This tendency towards total critique makes for a good spectacle, but perhaps not for a very satisfying resolution. There is very little blunderbuss critique on offer here. In fact, the text for the most part follows xi

13 PREFACE Isabelle Stengers call to respect established sentiments. This much misunderstood phrase makes it sound as though analysis ought to confine itself to commentary or elaboration in this case of current technological advances in public medicine. But as Casper Bruun Jensen shows it is best understood as recognition that any critical engagement with an object of study cannot begin with a questioning of its right to exist. Whatever our views might be of the viability or the ethics of an Electronic Patient Record and with the rapidly advancing field of medical informatics, it already is, it has a concrete existence and set of capacities which are not negated by any supposedly critical discourse. The question is rather what can be connected to (and indeed disconnected from) the mass of relations and actors for which the term electronic patient record is shorthand. A rejection of total critique does not, however, mean a refusal to judge. There are incisive discussions of contemporary work and strong positions taken on what it is to do STS in a performative mode. Judgement and evaluation are not idle reflective matters but central to how this texts lives, how it breathes. If, as Latour declaims, existence is action, then for a text to exist it must endeavour to persist through selecting, connecting and acting in concert with the scholarly, professional and public worlds into which it is cast. From a performative perspective, no text, no body, no actant can survive on its own. Its merits are to be judged on the basis of the particular kind of existence which means a web of relations it can fashion for itself. Performativity is central to what Casper Bruun Jensen occasionally refers to as non-humanist STS. The choice of prefix is interesting. Anti-humanism, for example, defines a critical attitude to the supposed legacy of the European humanist tradition. Whilst many of the writers discussed in the text have a relationship to this critical move, it does not figure as a substantive issue here. Similarly, post-humanism, concerns itself with the decidedly unnatural state of the human brought about by technological change. Again, despite strong affinities with the general shape of the argument, the text does not dwell on this often hackneyed debate. So why non-humanism? The term recognises that the human subject no longer occupies what Foucault by way of Velasquez described as the place of the king. It also takes for granted the interdependency between people and things. The difference concerns instead what follows from this recognition of complexity. Questions of social justice, of creating and fostering liveable lives remain despite the lack of sovereign subject to whom these questions might typically be referred. Non-humanism then promotes the ethical and the evaluative, it asks which kinds of assemblies of relations between people and things we wish to support, what kinds of lives are worth living (where the category of life is not reserved for humans alone). In this sense non-humanism might also be called alternate humanism insofar as it carries forward the experiential and emancipatory dynamic of humanism beyond its established confines. Non-humanism is a practical matter. Drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers, Casper Bruun Jensen uses the term experiment to refer to the making and breaking of connections. In this sense any newly proposed arrangement of relations such as that between patients, doctors, nurses and medical technologies is an xii

14 PREFACE experiment, an attempt to explore what these actors can jointly do to and with one another when they are brought together. Make one further step: what the analyst does is not so much describe an experiment, but add a further element to that weave of relations. Description becomes part of the experiment, it opens it out in a further direction and expands further its capacity to connect. If this is so then the bar is raised for what counts as adequate description. Gilbert Ryle famously demonstrated that in order to capture what is at stake in the simple gesture of a winking eye a thick description of the myriad social relations that might potentially be enacted in that moment was necessary. Ryle s example is properly philosophical in the sense that is concerns no-one in particular in a space outside of any definite cultural or historical location. When thick description is applied to actual empirical cases as demonstrated by Clifford Geertz the practical difficulties of this philosophical parlour game become rapidly apparent. Just how thick should the description be? Where does one start? When can one stop? The task that STS scholars such as Casper Bruun Jensen set themselves makes the questions even more urgent, since the field they enter is no longer clearly bounded by geography or by social relations. The electronic patient record is an actor (or rather endless strings of actors) that displays a kind of topological complexity in terms of social relations. Social topologies, complex trajectories, technological realities and imaginaries: this is the stuff of STS. Amongst this shifting array of actors and actions one is hard pressed to locate the winking eye that can serve as cornerstone for analysis. What is done instead is to propose a variety of starting points. These are not chosen at random, but rather carefully selected, or, we might say, invented, on the basis of sorts of connections and vectors they afford. The method is to always multiply and expand the empirical object, to treat it as a crystal which reproduces, but also complexifies its structure as it grows at its edges. In so doing analysis becomes one of those edges. The empirical object acts through the analysis, which becomes part of its existence. In this book Casper Bruun Jensen does not just describe, he winks back at the technologies engaged. He conducts analysis as though it were a process of invention, repeated over and again on the field until it grows connections on every side. We might call this a work of thick invention. It is a set of experiments which thinks with and through its object, which seek to create a form of life with it. The book does not it cannot promise what the outcome will be. That is in our hands as readers and fellow experimenters who can take and tinker with this fine text as we see fit. Professor Steven D. Brown, University of Leicester, UK xiii

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16 CHAPTER 1 AN AMODERN DISPOSITION On Performativity, Practical Ontology, and Intervention How to turn an opposition into a possible matter of contrast? Obviously, this is not only a question of goodwill. My guess is that we may do so through the experimental extension of the specific risks that singularize each position. Giving a chance for contrasts to be created where oppositions rule implies producing a middle ground but not a medium or average mitigating differences. It should be a middle ground for testing, in order that the contrasts evolve not from tamed differences but from creatively redefined ones. (Stengers, 2002: 236 7) Science and technology studies (STS) today can be viewed as a relatively stable enterprise, with its own conferences, journals, professional organizations, and graduate programs. With Bruno Latour, one could talk about the black-boxing 1 of STS. Yet, characterising a study as in STS, does not determine its features very predictably because the field of inquiry, is heterogeneous as regards the assumptions, theories, institutional affiliations, methods, approaches, goals, and interests of its practitioners. For this reason Michael Lynch and Kathleen Jordan s term translucent box is probably more fitting (Jordan and Lynch, 1992: 207; also Ramsey, 1992: 284). Undoubtedly, this diversity and differentiation makes any one description of STS problematic. As has been argued, disciplinary looseness is often an asset, rather than a weakness for developing disciplines and practices (e.g. Clarke and Fujimura, 1992) that are inevitably shaped in the historically contingent interactions between multiple kinds of actors with different agendas and aspirations. The gesture of presenting the chapters that follow as a strong case of STS, by emphasising the coherent theoretical basis on which it is built thus reproduces an idea with which STS itself has regularly taken issue; that the unified position of a scientific community is necessarily a measure of the epistemological merit of that community, and therefore conveys, or at least ought to convey, additional credibility to the statements of its members. 2 Rather than unification, several debates that may be observed within and around STS bears resemblance to what Barbara Herrnstein Smith has called microdynamics of incommensurability. Their familiar frustrations are exemplified as follows: You can t argue with these people, says one. They don t play by the rules; they challenge every word you say. It s like talking to a brick wall, says the other. They don t hear a word you say; they keep repeating the same arguments (Smith, 1997: xii). Smith proposes that such stalemates are often not due to simple 1

17 CHAPTER 1 misunderstanding or to differences in vocabulary, but are rather symptomatic of systematically interrelated divergences of conceptualization, that emerge at every level and operate across an entire intellectual domain. (Smith, 1997: 131). Within and around STS, such divergences display themselves with especial vigor in relation to recently emerging agendas revolving around such notions as performativity and practical ontology, the activation of objects as nonhuman actors, and questions relating to the politics, normativity, interventionism, activism and usefulness of the field. Put together, the performative and ontological reorientation in the understanding of the content and stakes of STS can be seen as characterizing a amodern and non-humanist disposition (rather than an theory, for performative reasons, to which I will return); one which has been particularly (but not exclusively) inspired by post-structuralism and pragmatism. Criticisms of various aspects of such a disposition have been expressed particularly in terms of normative worries, and accusations of political abdication (e.g. Radder 1998, Winner 1993, Woodhouse et al 2002). In view of such criticism, I believe an important task lies in articulating the considerable potentials, in terms of both alternative conceptualizations and interventions that amodern, nonhumanists STS may hold for understanding the role of technology in contemporary health care organizations and in social life more broadly. This is a key issue in the following chapters. The aspiration to analyze these relations is captured in the book title Ontologies for Developing Things, for reasons that will hopefully become clear. The analytical disposition underpinning this venture, and some of its theoretical implications, are outlined in this chapter., which draws upon a range of ideas from writers such as Donna Haraway, Andrew Pickering, and Bruno Latour, which have various affinities with poststructuralists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Michel Serres. All of these people are not talking about precisely the same issues and they are not saying exactly the same things; it is not, therefore, my interest to try to integrate all of them in a common, eclectic framework. Instead, I take my cue from philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers who, in the introductory citation, wonders about how to turn differences or, indeed, antagonistic oppositions into productive intellectual contrasts. And she suggests that a solution could be found in experimentally processing sets of positions through each other. Productivity would be created at the middle-ground, where no position would be able to silence any other, and where differences would therefore have to be respected, rather than made to disappear (either by force or by consensus; which is often a more invidious force since it is rarely recognized as such). The latter qualification is important, because it emphasizes that tolerance of alternative perspectives is not necessarily, certainly not always, the ideal. Specifically, it means that in the following I am not prevented from noting and, indeed, going some lengths to stress amodern disagreements with a number of positions within STS and more broadly. This is due to the assumption that it is only by painstakingly working to clarify differences, rather than glossing them in the name of a pluralistic good-will that a serious evaluation of the possibilities, limits, and implications of amodern STS-studies can be attempted. In what follows, I concentrate in particular on the shift from a representational to a performative idiom for analyzing scientific and technological processes, and 2

18 AN AMODERN DISPOSITION the closely related switch from an interest in epistemology to a concern with understanding how ontologies are shaped through practical action. I present an analysis of what such changes entail in terms of theory, but this question immediately leads to a consideration of what they imply in terms of practice, politics, and intervention for, of course, the performative argument is that such distinctions cannot in general be upheld. I sum up by considering what one may and may not hope for from amodern STS-studies in practical terms. What follows may thus be seen as an experiment in the expansion of relevant resources for STS-theorising. The set of ideas outlined here are put to the test in subsequent chapters. Of course, whether they survive that test is for the reader to decide. In any case, rather than presenting a history of increasing theoretical sophistication, for example from Mannheim (1952) and Merton (1968) to Latour (1987) and Haraway (1989), via Kuhn (1970) and Feyerabend (1993), Bloor (1976), Collins (1985) and numerous other important figures, I offer here a kind of theoretical assemblage, drawing selectively on multiple figures without, I hope, unnecessarily disfiguring them in the process. THE PRACTICE-TURN IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES As indicated by the name science and technology studies, researchers in this field have been interested in closely investigating differing aspects and relationships in the extremely broad sphere of contemporary life which has to do with science and technology (e.g. Bowker and Star, 1999; Pickering, 1995) They have done so from numerous perspectives and with numerous approaches (e.g. Traweek 1993). One fairly generally acknowledged change that has occurred in these studies over the last decades, is from focusing exclusively on the content 3 of science to focusing on the intertwining of content with multiple practical and material aspects of laboratory life (e.g. Pickering, 1992; Schatzki, Knorr Cetina et al 2001). Obviously, the practical and material effects of scientific knowledge, the technologies whose invention it has enabled, and the many applications it has made possible, have been regularly taken as establishing the superiority of Western science over all other systems of inquiry. However, the practice-turn in recent socio-cultural inquiries into science and technology refers to a quite different phenomenon, which is in an important sense corrective to the received view: that if it works it must be true. For it has focused not only on material effects as they are enabled by scientific ideas, but also on the material, practical, and institutional aspects as they participate in the construction of scientific content. This change of emphasis, which has been driven by empirical inquiries into the way science is practically carried out, has been of consequence for discussions about epistemology and ontology. CHALLENGING EPISTEMOLOGY Epistemology is usually seen to concern itself with investigating the foundations of certain knowledge. This inquiry has been very generally premised on the idea of a split between the ideal and the concrete, and prioritized the abstract capabilities of the mind over the inadequacies of the body. It has also been recognized that scientific 3

19 CHAPTER 1 ideas are generated in the interaction with obdurate materials with unknown qualities, and for this reason a prominent concern of epistemology has been with purifying science from the many biases that could potentially invalidate its knowledge in this interaction. Epistemology thus tries to establish an ideal relationship between the level of scientific ideas and the level of their practical validation and application, and in this project it has consistently prioritized theory over practice. In contemporary epistemology this purification has been typically managed by invocation of the scientific method, which, if properly applied, has been seen as the guarantee of knowledge claims. In recent years claims pertaining to the absoluteness or universality of such claims have been toned down somewhat, and often the emphasis is now on securing the least fallible knowledge. Yet, the claim to be able to (unequivocally) determine what is least fallible continues to rely on an idea of an external standard, which allows one to measure and determine which kinds of knowledge are more and less secure. The classical epistemological ambition is regularly presented as a defence against the contamination of knowledge claims, for instance by the partisanship or local provincialism of their producers. The analytic philosopher Paul Boghossian, in a recent polemic against constructivism in general and Barbara Herrnstein Smith in particular (one, which, incidentally, vividly illustrates Smith s analysis of microdynamics of incommensurability), offers the following description: What matters to epistemology are three things: first, the claim that only some considerations can genuinely justify a belief, namely, those that bear on its truth, second, a substantive conception of the sorts of considerations that quality for this normative status observational evidence and logic, for example, but not a person s political commitments; and finally, the claim that we do sometimes believe something because there are considerations that justify it and not as a result of some other cause, such as because it would serve our interests to do so (Boghossian, 2002: 218) Another example is afforded by John Searle s The Construction of Social Reality, which has less interest in defending epistemology per se, yet leaves no doubt about the undiminished importance of such classical notions as evidence, objectivity, reality, and truth: Having knowledge consists in having true representations for which we can give certain sorts of justification or evidence. Knowledge is thus by definition objective in the epistemic sense, because the criteria for knowledge are not arbitrary, and they are impersonal (Searle, 1995: 151). Undoubtedly the understanding of what exactly counts as proper evidence, objectivity and truth varies between analytic philosophers, including Boghossian and Searle, as does, therefore, interpretations of what the scientific method would consist in, and how to properly make use of it. Certainly, analytic philosophers would also contend that the differences between the positions of Boghossian and Searle are substantial. However, what remains in the background of these debates is the assumption that traditional notions of evidence, objectivity, reality, and truth cannot be done without; not, at least, without inviting epistemological catastrophe. The challenge 4

20 AN AMODERN DISPOSITION posed to classical epistemology by STS-research has therefore been much more severe than internal epistemological quarrels. For in insisting on the participation of practical and material effects in the production of knowledge, these studies have problematized many of the key-distinctions and relations in epistemology; notably between knowledge and power and between (scientific) ideas and their (technical) concretizations. By doing so they have ineluctably challenged the central epistemological ambition to guarantee the possibility of formulating true, in the sense of reliably decontextualized, statements about the world. This challenge of constructivism is of wide-ranging ramifications for the conceptualization of science, technology, society and their interrelationships and, in this context, for articulating ontologies for developing things. PRINCIPLES OF SYMMETRY These ramifications are themselves variably reviewed depending upon the strand of STS-studies of one s adherence (such as, for instance, standpoint feminism, sociology of scientific knowledge, social epistemology, symbolic interactionism, cultural anthropological studies of science or actor-network theory). Many of these studies would in principle agree with the famous symmetry doctrine, formulated by sociologist of science David Bloor, which proposes that statements that we take to be true and statements that we take to be false should be accounted for with the same set of explanatory devices (Bloor, 1976: 243). But what is viewed as following from this doctrine is highly variable. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour accepted the general outline of Bloorian symmetry but extended, or generalized it (Callon, 1986; Callon and Latour 1992). Their suggestion was that, as well as symmetry between the truth or falsehood of statements, analysts need to be symmetrical with respect to the question of who acts in shaping the world. Famously, their suggestion was that not only humans act. It is as often the case that humans are acted on by other nonhuman actors. If this is the case the aspiration to offer a sociological analysis of science and technology is limiting, since society can offer no stable explanatory framework for scientific and technological development. Instead, generalized symmetry posits a situation in which society and nature is constructed in the same process. Contrary to what is sometimes imputed this has nothing to do with arguing that humans and technologies are somehow the same. Instead, generalized symmetry can be viewed as a methodical insurance policy against taking for granted any preconceived notion of who has the power to act. It thus multiplies the potentially relevant actors and force attention on their differences and relations. The aspiration is to thereby facilitate more nuanced analyses of how humans and things (broadly construed) together create, stabilized and change worlds. Analyses, in other words, that are sensitive to human and nonhuman activities as practical ontology: efforts to concretely shape and interrelate the components that make up the worlds they inhabit. Of course, general symmetry and its implied turn to ontology has not gone unchallenged. In the famous chicken debate between sociologists of science Harry Collins and Steven Yearley, reflexivist Steve Woolgar, and actor-network theorists Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, the former formulated one important 5

21 CHAPTER 1 version of the consequences of adopting a constructivist stance in the exploration of science. Collins and Yearley suggested a dualistic model, referred to as metaalternation, in order to account for how one could take seriously both the realist findings of scientific research and the constructivist findings of science studies research. The idea was that the sociologist ( promiscuously ) develops the ability to switch between different frames of reference, viewing each setting as displaying but one set of beliefs among many. (Collins and Yearley 1992: 301). Yet, according to Collins and Yearley, this was a merely analytical stance, for one cannot, presumably, be a constructivist in everyday life: In spite of this achievement, all of us, however sophisticated, can switch to modes of knowing that allow us to catch buses and hold mortgages. We all engage as a matter of fact in which we might call meta-alternation (302) According to Collins and Yearley one necessarily ceases to be a social constructivist the moment one enters the bus or pays mortgages, because one cannot doubt that it will safely carry one home from work. While social constructivism as intellectual endeavour is aligned with doubt and illusion (its job being to pull the veil from science ) one must be a realist in everyday life, and especially so with respect to objects of scientific inquiry. The stance of meta-alternation was defined in part to discredit the actor-network idea that non-human things such as scallops should be granted agency. It enabled Collins and Yearley to query how one could really acquire knowledge of nonhuman capacities, and it suggested that one could not, except by becoming a scientist: In any case, the complicity of the scallops (or whatever), if it is to play a part in accounts of this sort, ought to be properly recorded. How is the complicity of scallops to be measured? There is only one way we know of measuring the complicity of scallops, and that is by appropriate scientific research. If we are really to enter scallop behavior into our explanatory equations, then Callon must demonstrate his scientific credentials. He must show that he has a firm grip on the nature of scallops. There is not the slightest reason for us to accept his opinions on the nature of scallops if he is any less than a scallop expert than the researchers he describes. In fact, we readers would prefer him to be more of a scallop expert than the others if he is to speak authoritatively on the subject (316) In matters scientific, we have no better bet than taking at face value the pronouncements of experts since they, but not we, are the specialists in their respective areas. All this sounds quite humble. However, when it comes to explaining the means of achieving agreement on scientific matters, authority should be deferred to the sociologist of science, since this is his area of expertise. This model thus gives to the scientist with the one hand the epistemic authority (realism about non-humans), which it seeks to remove with the other (constructivism about scientists realism about non-humans). On the one hand the epistemological realist position of science is granted, but it is then doubled by the position of the sociologist, who is able to 6

22 AN AMODERN DISPOSITION show how realism is really the result of the open and negotiable work of scientists (but not of the open and negotiable work of natural entities). Although Collins and Yearley conclude that Of course we cannot claim epistemological authority either.we can only compete on even terms for our share of the world with all the usual weapons, (324) this share takes on significant proportions, as the final say in epistemic matters is conferred back to the sociologist who really knows how science works. Similar double-movements of endorsing radical (anti-)epistemological principles while refraining to acknowledge their implications at the time when they would apply to one-self, a strategy which Barbara Herrnstein Smith has referred to as cutting-edge equivocation, (Smith, 2002) are found in a number of STS-studies that claim to offer specific kinds of political leverage in their engagements with technological practices, such as the ability to criticize or resist the status quo. It is thus worthwhile considering in more detail what are the critical or political implications of general symmetry. To do so it is necessary to take a closer look at the relation between performativity and practical ontology. FROM EPISTEMOLOGY AND REPRESENTATION TO PRACTICAL ONTOLOGY AND PERFORMATIVITY In the view here presented and worked with in subsequent chapters it will be suggested that the challenge of generalized symmetry is intimately bound up with a move from an epistemological approach to one focusing on practical ontology, and from a representational to a performative idiom in the understanding of science. The gist of this change can be nicely summarized in a formulation of Bruno Latour, Essence is Existence and Existence is Action, (Latour, 1999: 179) but its philosophical history can be traced, at least in some of their interpretations, to Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus and Lucretius, to Leibniz and Spinoza, to Friedrich Nietzsche and A. N. Whitehead and, unsurprisingly, to different radical thinkers in recent French philosophy who, in effect, have worked to re-interpret several of the above-mentioned; I think here in particular of Gilles Deleuze (1983, 1990, 1993), Michel Foucault (1984, 1984a), and Michel Serres (1982, 2000). Essence is Existence. This is a claim which denies the purity of the ideal and refers all there is, in the first instance, to the material world. Existence is Action. But what exists? We do not know, at least not comprehensively, or not yet. But what this formulation suggests is that we can try to find out; for, often enough, action and activity is empirically observable. Not, however, as something simply out there. For as scientists well know it is only through an organized and co-ordinated effort, using multiple machines and other things as mediators, that different entities become able to reliably express themselves. The enabling by humans of such expressive displays can be characterized as events because of their unforeseeable character. 4 The implication of this view is that novel aspects of the world (in the shape, for instance, of new effects, particles, or phenomena) can be articulated in the laboratory only because of the constellation of the particular forces that constitute the given experiment by which they are shaped and through which they emerge. As such 7

23 CHAPTER 1 articulation takes place at the intersection of the (sets of ) forces, which we regularly categorize as observers, instruments, and the natural world, the distinctions among these forces and the properties that go with them themselves become problematic and are turned into topics for investigation, rather than taken for granted as resources in the investigation of science and technology. We have returned to the issue of generalized symmetry, for the implication of the discussion above is that STS needs to develop models and concepts to account for the fact that there are large differences between the effects of beliefs. In Callon and Latour s original formulations, the stabilization (legitimation, institutionalisation) of some set of beliefs and practices rather than others is crucially dependent on the successful delegation of actions and responsibilities to non-human actors, and their consequent practical re-definitions or translations. This move is related to Andrew Pickering s suggested emphasis on the performative dimension of science. As he explains, the representational idiom casts science as, above all, an activity that maps, mirrors, or corresponds to how the world really is (Pickering, 1995: 5). But, Pickering continues, there is quite another way of thinking about science; one, which starts from the idea that the world is doing things, and is therefore, first of all, full of agency. This idea is the starting point for a performative analysis of scientific practice, in which science is regarded a field of powers, capacities, and performances, situated in machinic captures of material agency. (7). For some time researchers in cultural studies, social anthropology, and qualitative sociology have told sophisticated stories about the artful work needed to successfully integrate the many different and sometimes contradictory exigencies of stabilizing social identities in multiple technologically mediated formations. In recent years these stories have been extended to also cover the social formations involved in techno-scientific production, and this has been one important strand in the depurification of contemporary understandings of science. But what happens when non-humans are added to the collectives to be described? Perhaps a first experience is one of increased complexity. Indeed, in some research in cultural studies and STS the delight in making visible complexity seems to overshadow the question of what productive differences such re-description could render pertinent. Another perspective would view the notion of complexity as a lure for feeling, with the capability of generating new, different and, perhaps, harder questions for us to answer about sciences and society. This is the proposal of Isabelle Stengers: As for the notion of complexity, it sets out problems we don t know a priori what sum of parts means and this problem implies that we cannot treat, under the pretext that they have the same parts, all the sums according to the same general method (Stengers, 1997: 12 3) In her suggestion, noticing complexity is the mere beginning of the process of understanding and transforming relations between the sciences and society. It is a necessary beginning, however, because relevant questions regarding a given situation can only be formulated if the situation has first been de-composed into enough divergent elements to prevent its simple evaluation. 8

24 AN AMODERN DISPOSITION POWER AND COALITIONS Today, most technological-social innovations affect things in much more varied modes than those anticipated by our questions, and thus create a gap between things, as they are implicated in it, and their scientific representation (Stengers, 2000: 158) Surely a lesson that has been well learned in the past century is that scientific innovations are effective in a multiplicity of ways, only a small number of which are anticipated (Fortun, 2001; Mackenzie, 1990; Perrow, 1999). Stengers is not the first, or only, scholar to point to the fact. In the domain of the human sciences, for instance, Michel Foucault, analyzed and described the multiple socio-political effects, for better and worse, of the invention of modern medicine, psychiatry, and criminology (e.g. Foucault, 1973, 1991). In this work he has pre-figured, as well as functioned as a tremendous inspiration for, research in STS and numerous other disciplines. In order to take up the challenge of Isabelle Stengers; how to respond inventively to the fact that non-human actors are increasingly brought to bear on our lives in ways we not only do not, but probably cannot anticipate, some of Foucault s sociopolitical ideas could prove useful. Foucault s political thinking was concerned, among other things, with how to cut off the king s head, (Foucault, 2001: 121) by which he meant constructing a mode of political analysis, which would not primarily be organized about the classical themes of sovereignty and law, and which would consequently not have to imagine that power comes from above. 5 Instead he would be interested in the play of power as instantiated in myriad microprocesses throughout the social field. In different analyses Foucault showed how sets of practices were slowly and painstakingly composed, not least through the stabilization of specific discourses, even though no common interests between their constituents existed prior to their engagements. Power (as efficacy of action) seemed thus not to be inherent in some actors (and not others), but rather to be always in the making. By considering socio-politics from this transformative viewpoint; as having to do with the composition of coalitions out of heterogeneous elements, rather than as having to do with stable formations with specific pre-defined interests and powers, Foucault could view the construction of disciplinary and institutional matrices as intentional but non-subjective, rather than enforced by the presumptively powerful (Foucault, 1990, esp. chapter two). This conclusion, based in historical analysis, also functioned as a practical heuristics in Foucault s own political engagements. Since, in Foucault s phrase power is everywhere, but inherently unstable and transformative (as it is shaped in the ongoing interactions between practices, discourses, institutions etc.) to resist specific functions of power, one must become as flexible as it is. In this case, what could be termed roughly as a coalition-based approach to political action makes sense, precisely because it is based on constellations of people, which temporarily take shape around a cause of concern. 6 As no overall political programme needs to be constructed for there to be resistance, no heavy bureaucratic apparatus mimicking power would be needed to oppose it. 7 9