The subtitle of that (seminal) work led me (and Latour, it seems) back to some choppy waters in Part I, in which Latour distinguishes ANT from social constructivism (starting on page 88, in a section entitled "Constructivism vs. social constructivism"). Latour outlines what it means to be "constructed" according to ANT, something very different than what it means in social constructivist modes of critique; and Latour hints that this is a distinction that he has maintained all along, going back to his work in Laboratory Life, which I myself have since turned to in order to try and parse it out. On page 91-2, Latour appears to be discussing the lumping of ANT with the so-called "strong programme" of what might be productively distinguished as social determinism (thought it's often referred to as "social constructivism") in science studies (though Latour explicitly uses social constructivism in the social sciences and humanities). Latour--if I'm understanding him--takes exception to this association:
On the one hand, it seemed easy enough to reclaim a sturdy meaning for this much maligned term construction: we simply had to use the new definition of social that was reviewed in the earlier chapters of this book.... 'constructivism' should not be confused with 'social constructivism'. When we say that a fact is constructed, we simply mean that we account for the solid objective reality by mobilizing various entities whose assemblage could fail; 'social constructivism' means, on the other hand, that we replace what this reality is made of with some other stuff, the social in which it is 'really' built. An account about the heterogenous genesis of a building is substituted by another one dealing with the homogeneous social matter which is built. To bring constructivism back to its feet, it's enough to see that once social means again association, the whole idea of a building made of social stuff vanishes. For any construction to take place, non-human entities have to play the major role and this is just what we wanted to say from the beginning with this rather innocuous word.
But obviously this rescue operation was not enough since the rest of the social sciences seemed to share a completely different notion of the same term. How could that be? Our mistake was that since we had never shared the idea that construction could mean a reduction to only one type of material, we produced antibodies against the accusation that we had reduced facts to 'mere construction' only very slowly. Since it was obvious to us that 'social construction' meant a renewed attention to the number of heterogeneous realities entering into the fabrication of some state of affairs, it took years for us to react in a balanced way to the absurd theories with which we appeared to be associated. Even though constructivism was for us a synonym for an increase in realism, we were feted by our colleagues in social critique as having shown at last that "even science is bunk'! It took me a long time to realize the danger of an expression that, in the hands our our 'best friends', apparently meant some type of revenge against the solidity of scientific facts and an expose of their claim to truth. They seemed to imply that we were doing for science what they were so proud of having done for religion, art, law, culture, and everything the rest of us believe in, namely reducing it to dust by showing it was made up....
No wonder that our excitement in showing the 'social construction of scientific fact' was met with such fury by the actors themselves!... The substitution of the social with other stuff seems to every actor a catastrophic loss to be adamently resisted--and rightly so! If, however, the word social is not used to replace one kind of stuff by another, but is used instead to deploy the associations that have rendered some state of affairs solid and durable, then another social theory might become audible at last.
How could there be, we wondered, such a divide in the basic duties of social science? This is why it slowly dawned on us that there was something deeply flawed not only in the standard philosophy of science, but also in the standard social theories used to account for other domains than science. This is what made ANT scholars at first look either too critical--they were accused of attacking 'even' matters of fact and of not 'believing' in 'Nature' or in 'outside reality'--or much too naive--they believed in the agencies of 'real things' that were 'out there'. In effect, what ANT was trying to modify was simply the use of the whole critical repertoire by abandoning simultaneously the use of Nature and the use of Society, which had been invented to reveal 'behind' social phenomena what was 'really taking place'. This, however, meant a complete reinterpretation of the experiment that we had conducted, at first unwittingly, when trying to account sociologically for the production of science.
Latour, then, distinguishes ANT from social constructivism in the social sciences and the humanities, as well as (it appears any way) the strong programme in science studies: in a footnote--No. 116--on page 93, Latour asserts that the critique made against ANT that it "attack[ed] 'even' matters of fact and of not 'believing' in 'Nature' or in 'outside reality'" was "offered during the 'Science Wars'." I have since realized that I've been hung up on this distinction between ANT and the strong programme for a while in reading the first part of Reassembling, but turning to Laboratory Life and putting it in context with some back story in the history of the philosophy of science, I think I might have a hold on it now. So I want to try to flesh out a bit how ANT in general and Latour's work in particular is distinct from social constructivism (or, alternatively, social constructionism--or sociological constructionism--or simple constructivism--or radical constructivism... an examination of any of these would be seemingly interesting).
First, some back story: in An Invitation to Social Construction, Kenneth J. Gergen points out that as early as 1929--when Karl Mannheim published his Ideology and Utopia--a competing notion that scientific knowledge is socially constructed had challenged the essentialism or naturalism of science, this idea that science is a neutral, value-free quest for Truth. Mannheim, for example, observed that theoretical committments on the part of scientists may be attributed to social rather than empirical motivations, that groups of scientists often emerge around theories and that disagreements over theories are therefore matters of group conflict, that what is taken for granted to be scientific fact is a byproduct of a social process. Mannheim's work was highly influential, and soon other social critiques of science followed: Ludwig Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science (1946), George Gurvitch's The Social Frameworks of Knowledge (1966), and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966) built up a tradition of socially critiquing science. Berger and Luckmann, for example, traced the scientist's interaction with the world to the social sphere, proposing that we are all socialized into "plausibility structures," conceptual understandings of the world and rational supports which help foster the belief that these structures are natural, that reality as we experience it should be taken for granted (from page 26):
I apprehend the reality of everyday life as an ordered reality. Its phenomena are prearranged in patterns that seem to be independent of my apprehension of them... The language used in everyday life continuously provides me with the necessary objectification and posits the order within which these make sense and within which everyday life has meaning for me... In this manner language marks the co-ordinates of my life in society and fills that life with meaningful objects.
To me, this sounds a whole lot like ANT, at least superficially (Berger and Luckmann, for example, include an account of how clocks have altered the way we experience time and order our lives accordingly), but this is part of the tradition that Latour seemingly is rejecting in Reassembling. Although he doesn't refer to him (or indeed, any of the names I have cited so far), Latour also appears to reject Thomas Kuhn's work along the same lines. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was at the center of the so-called "Science Wars", and indeed that work makes some interesting claims in terms of scrutinizing science as a social activity, and it interrogates (forgive me) the Enlightenment-inherited assumption that science is progressive, that with continued research and testing we will eventually arrive at the Truth (from 170: "Perhaps... scientific progress is not quite what we had taken it to be.... We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth").
For any one who wants a (vulgar) summary of what I think is relevant here, Kuhn asserted that scientists work from "...some accepted examples of actual scientific practice...[which] provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research"--these models are what Kuhn refers to as paradigms. Kuhn argued that science is a kind of puzzle-solving activity which is always subsumed in a belif system, the dominant paradigm ("normal science"). Removing the heretofore-present blinders of cumulative histories, disciplines could view thier histories in terms of these non-cumulative theoretical paradigms of "normal science," followed by accumlations of anomalies that are incommensurate with the dominant paradigm; once enough of these anomalies accumlate a critical mass is reached at which point a "scientific revolution" occurs, leading to new normal science. (It might be worth mentioning that Kuhn speculated that the social sciences--and certainly the humanities--are "pre-paradigmatic").
Kuhn argued for the social construction of scientific change and the consequent incommensurability of successive paradigms. Kuhn also emphasized the networks of interrelated commitments and practitioneers whose peer judgment provided consensus for establishing and elaborating theories. Again, Kuhn's work seems to echo rather than run against that of Latour's. But Kuhn doesn't have much to say about the actual social organization that is involved with a paradigm-shift; and his examples of paradigm-shifts are taken from classical science: the Copernican Revolution is the archetype example; and so Kuhn's examples cover centuries rather than the decade-to-decade or even year-to-year revolutions that occur in contemporary science. This acceleration or exhaustion might to similar developments that Latour outlines and this could thus be what distinguishes Latour's project from what has come before. Kuhn has lamented (much like Latour does above) the reception of his work, however; he included a postscript to the 1970 revision of Structure that made it clear that his work was received in a more radical light than he cared for (and maybe intended) and he has since expressed his regrets for this reception (see, for example, The Essential Tension, 1977).
Aside from the inclusion of networks, another possible bridge between Kuhn and Latour is Joseph Rouse's Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science. Rouse imagines a "radical Kuhn" who replaces "communities of practioners" with "communities of believers," thus foregrounding that competing theories are evaluated not by comparison to one another on their own merits, but rather with a "history is written by the winners" mentality (32). Rouse argues that science is to be understood as a field of practices rather than as what Latour himself (in Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society) refers to as "ready-made science," science already reified for textbook consumption. Latour (and Rouse) advocates "science in the making," the practice of scientific work itself, a process that is never predictable or controllable in advance (4). If nothing else, however, Gergen points out that these social determinist or contructivist arguments underscore the importance of interpretive communities in shaping heretofore naturalized scientific practices (35). But as Latour gestures, these arguments have often been taken to the extreme ("the absurd theories with which we appeared to be associated"), and so ANT and other modes of critique have increasingly sought to foreground the relational processes that emerge from actants (persons, objects, surroundings--Society and Nature). Rather than being constructed by social forces, science is the product of scientists, technologies, spaces, ideas, etc. acting as full participants in a complex relationships out of which mutual understanding is achieved.
Here we finally arrive back at the footnote (No. 305) that prompted me to write this out for myself (and any one else who might benefit): "the expression of inscription devices" that Latour casually mentions on page 223. In Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, these inscription devices are part of a larger process of conscriptioin that Latour discusses in terms of how a scientific fact is determined. Conscription (literally, "writing with"--an interesting gloss, but also think of conscription in terms of drafting soldiers) is the process of appropriating support for a preposed fact and silencing detractions from it. Any statement can be proposed as fact, but on its face it's not convincing--any number of objections can be raised. The problem of the scientist is to enlist support and silence dissent; and support is conscripted from four domains: allies, a social network of those who support one's interpretations, enlisted to do so through social practices within science; former texts, the established repetoire of "what is known" is drawn upon in a type of argument from authority; rhetorical devices [interesting for our purposes here], prestige forms that convey a "truth-telling capacity" such as the use of numbers, graphs, and arcane formulations that establish and reinforce the authority of the scientist by moving the reader further and further away from an understanding of what's being argued; and, finally, the inscription devices that Latour mentions in the footnote. Inscription devices are the machines and instruments used in science which produce non-linguistic representations to "write the world"--as long as science is accepted as truth, how these devices "measure the world as it is" stands in for the phenomenon itself.
"Scientific facts," then, emerge within actor networks that include both the social and natural world, both humans and technology and these facts are thus dependent on these networks. If one questions a scientific fact, one encounters a network of allies to defend it, a network of former texts that support it, as well as rhetorical and inscription devices that legitimate it as part of the assemblage. Each of these actants, then, is like a black box: if one tries to open it, to question its validity, one is directed to another black box and these black boxes exist in an interlocking assemblage of actants. Latour, it seems, wants to be careful here not to be associated with social constructivism because he does not question the reality of scientific facts, rather he wants to bring more reality to them("constructivism was for us a synonym for an increase in realism," 92)--to remove the mysticism from science and the claims that it is beyond scrutiny or interpretation or somehow above culture. If one substitutes "the social" for "science" (Latour was dealing with the social make-up of science) then one might see how, it seems, Latour wants to do away with Nature and Society, the categories "which had been invented to reveal 'behind' social phenomena what was 'really taking place'" (93). These categories collapse into each other when it's demonstrated that they actants from within each domain are interconnected in various assemblages.
This is how I've reconciled the history of social constructivism with ANT for myself, using Latour's words in Reassembling and elsewhere, but I may be way off. If so, I hope someone will help me out.
No comments:
Post a Comment