STS?!

= toward reenchantment... =

KF: What does sts gives us to work with in our projects, and what can say sts "is" when we describe it to others? Clearly, we all need to be reenchanted...
Here's a brief statement of what STS is that Mike helped me write for the revised STS handbook. Its flat and uninspired; it wasn't written for our purposes here, but hopefully it will get our conversation going:

//STS scholarship aims to develop methods, empirical data and theory to advance historical, philosophical and social scientific understanding of science and technology. STS is a multidisciplinary field of research with a history of continual growth and diversification. It includes historical studies of scientific and technological change; ethnographic accounts of laboratories, design studios, and of technoscientific knowledge and artifacts in broad cultural context; sociological and policy analyses of the organizational, legal and political-economic context within which technologies and sciences develop. STS research also examines the impacts of scientific and technological development, and efforts to improve the contributions science and technology make to social wellbeing. Environmental sustainability is a major focus in the RPI STS Department, for example, as are studies of biomedicine and public health, and studies of the social dimensions of information technology.//

I would first add, drawing on the readings that we did this week, that to be truly interdisciplinary, and to have any sense of what science and all forms of expertise "are," we will need to take the way we talk and write seriously, recognizing that knowledge is always rhetorical. As Traweek cautions, “Knowledge about rhetorical strategies and skill in developing them are limited; most academic have learned only one and are unconscious of the assumptions of the one they know; they assume that there is only one way to think and write carefully and precisely about social and phenomenal worlds.”

MF: I was recently enchanted by Jon Marks's (physical anthropologist, http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/) review in Nature Genetics of a book on eugenicist/geneticist Charles Davenport, which had a couple of great lines, including:

//Anything done by conscious humans is ipso facto cultural. In order for science to be a noncultural activity, it would have to be carried out by animals or robots; it would have to be effectively a nonhuman activity. The problem, consequently, is far more subtle and interesting than [Maynard] Olson’s mundane observation that Davenport “commingled science and social values.” So does he, so do I, and so do you. The problem is, how do we broaden the intellectual scope of what constitutes an education in human genetics, so that practitioners can be more attuned to those social values and more reflective and knowledgeable about them?//

That's a big part of what I think sts's "mission" is: broadening an intellectual scope -- of scientists, of what we think science is and how it is done. That mission then is one of restoring or recognizing the "subtle," which to me is a pretty hard demand. If the "problem" is "subtle" then so must our research methods be, our analytic methods and concepts, and our modes of writing. And the goal is not solving the problem, but something else: attuning practitioners, making them more "reflective." That too seems to call for something different than "here's what's wrong, do X and that will make it right..." But what is that something different?

Marks ends his review this way:

//We can now readily see that Davenport’s major failing was to read the prejudices of his culture, era, class, and self-interests into his science and then to read them back out. But that error is timeless and is effectively impossible to avoid. If you need me to specify any recent examples, you should be doubly embarrassed. And that is why we need historians.// Jonathan Marks, "The Long Shadow," Nature Genetics 40/11 (November 2008): 1267.

As a part of sts, "history" works differently than, say, policy (although I may just be working out the prejudices of my culture here). It re-presents the subtle, the complex. And just to push Marks on this: we need historians because this task of re-conceptualizing and re-forming the sciences is an impossible one, eternally returning. There is no solution, no way to purify or neutralize, or on the other hand, no way to socialize or value-ize the sciences in a way that solves the problem. Tragic, really....

ak: And I tend to prefer romance, so I’ll work the romantic. Things are tragic or romantic because of the feelings they render. I’ve often thought that tragedy and romance sit at opposite ends of a table, looking at the same glass, asking what remains and, what’s to come? I think tragedy has been over played in Western trajectories. Determining… Romance generates in ways that can be overdetermined. I like that.

I call romance into play because in my work I often feel caught in a bind, a romantic bind, of course. I think generating an STS that is useable for ourselves is critical. Yet I’m concerned with the way that STS is caught up with [|indexicality], a practice in grounding that, in the contextual constraints of academia, flies in the face of what I take STS to be—a project rather than a discipline, praxis not field. A dance even. I’d rather dance than index; I don’t need an index to move. Still, naming and positioning are important for securing jobs, getting tenure, publishing, funding, being understood… the list goes on. It seems like we need to index; that’s part of the game, right? That’s the way we know how to coordinate our moves with others on the dance floor. There are always instructions, rules. Indexing is a peculiar feature of interdisciplinarity; the very matter that interdisciplinarity speaks to and seeks to break away from. For me, this preoccupation with indexing dampers other moves, such as figuring out our god questions (I'm preoccupied with this right now), the questions that brought us here, bold, risky ideas about what science and technology and society can do. To what extent have we failed to grapple with and bridge the gap between STS and the romance or love or enchantment, the excitement that brought us to this interdisciplinary project? I am weary of fearing my undisciplined station, of being uncertain.

Shouldn’t we make STS accountable to ourselves first, so we don’t turn out like this guy. Maybe that’s alright for some, but not for me. If I’m going to spend fifty plus hours a week on anything—STS or otherwise—it better be something more than a “job”. I’m calling for a more personal engagement with STS because I think that, at its best, STS hints at deeper understandings of life. This is my romance. It’s what I need to make STS work for me. Right now, this includes getting up every morning and experimenting and playing with the world around me, like trying to grow tomato plants inside, teaching myself how to stand on my head, writing, singing, trying to cook something different once a week, taking pictures, posting them online, trying to say something about STS and not worrying about whether it’s right. I’ve always been afraid of making STS personal, but for now, that’s how it’s going to work for me; it's going to be personal. How does STS work for you?

Of course (of course), there is more here than making STS personal. The personal is just one bearing that I call upon. I also call on Elizabeth Wilson because she attempts to go between the horns of the bull, to smack the bull right in its head. [|Giving the bull a little hair-do], let’s say.


 * //“The analysis pursued in this book has been motivated by a sense that critiques premised on a primarily oppositional relation to sciences or premised on anitbiologism, antiessentialism, or antinaturalism are losing their critical and political purchase—not necessarily because they are wholly mistaken, but because they have relied on, and reauthorized, a separation between the inside and the outside, the static and the changeable, the natural and the political, the chromosomal and the cultural… What unites too many critiques of the sciences, despite the great diversity in their methodological and theoretical affiliations, is the conviction that natural or biological objects require an overlay of social, cultural, or metaphorical analysis in order to become politically viable… This book has been motivated by the conviction that critical positions that take as their first presumption the belief that biology requires critical supplementation from the “outside” have not only misunderstood the nature of the relation between the inside and the outside, they have also missed the power, subtlety, and productivity of the biological domain in its own right. It has been my argument throughout this book that such critiques are reductive of biological matter—that is, that political critiques of biological reductionism are usually themselves reductions or repudiations of biological politics.”//** (200-1)

I think Wilson does two things well in //Neural Geographies//. She probes and writes about cognition and neurology in a way that operates “in excess of the limits of presence, location, and stasis.” Her analysis stays honest to the situatedness of the thing (neurocognition) she is analyzing, moving, not forward or backwards, but expanding and contracting like the Earth does. The second thing she does well is tend to the space she speaks from, the places that provided her with analytic tools. Her project is governed by movement that interpellates indexes. She flows through those that exist, working to breed new ones.

Beyond indexicality, I think there are other ways—perhaps ways not yet invented—to ground STS, always remembering that the ground is moving. I’ve hung this on my key ring; is it on yours?

And just a note on the wiki… I think it’s an excellent space for de-centering “right” and “wrong”, for doing X, and then Q and F cubed. The wiki carries romance for me.


 * JC:** When I explain STS to most people "on the street," I tell them that my discipline studies the social implications of science and technology. This definition is extremely vague and always elicits a "so...what do //you// do?" or a “oh is that like X?” (X is usually something like “stem cells,” “genetic engineering,” “cloning,” etc.) In the former case, I just talk up my project to them, and in the latter, I say “yeah, some people study that, but I study…” The eventual result of either case is talking about my own research. I think this is very telling about what STS "should be."

The vague definition I give might help us outside our own walls by avoiding stepping on the toes of other scholars who claim our discipline as their own, but it doesn't directly help us intellectually. One of the things that I quite enjoy about STS is that it operates without knowing exactly what it is, leaving lots of room for everyone and everything. Our kind of STS spreads and grows outward, rhizomatically, from each of our works, and is connected to the works that came before it, and the ones that will follow. Because of this intense branching and budding, STS as a formal discipline is a little bit schizophrenic; it moves in and out of disciplines, rhetorics, sciences and discourses -- sometimes planned, and sometimes as a surprise. A breakthrough in this schizophrenia, to borrow R.D. Laing's terminology, requires (and as Ali says too) a personal exercise in situating ourselves and our projects within our own undisciplined discipline, and quite importantly, within other disciplines as well. We need to each choose our own boundaries, and avoid the breakdowns. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2h_eYOLGpU ) I think that if we make STS (and “ground” it) about our self-identity as “STS scholars,” we'll be better off. “What is STS” isn’t a question that can be answered like “what is biology?” (the study of life), but rather as an open, unanswerable, question.

Some people might really want to include specific scholars as “canonical STS:” Latour & Woolgar, Kuhn, or on (maybe) a good day, Bloor. However, these are authors that are in the history of the discipline, not necessarily in the definition. They dealt with the early methodology and epistemology of STS/SSK/Science Studies, and while we might cite them or think about them occasionally, our work is necessarily tangential or divergent from theirs.

LDAW: Perhaps part of why we feel drawn towards a dual identity of historian or anthropologist or sociologist AND sts scholar is because we can't really define for ourselves what STS alone contributes to the social sciences besides a more complex and layered study of techniques and artifacts intertwined with human life and values. (I believe that in itself is a sufficient reason for our discipline, but as Cluck pointed out, when describing it to others it feels somewhat unsatisfying.)

Also, I think we do not 'toot our own horn' enough -- which would involve the production of more performative work by STS scholars i.e. where is the STS textbook for high school students? the STS puzzle toy for pre-school/Montessori students? where is the documentary on the history of STS and citizen science in the USA? This would go towards establishing more of an STS culture or identity that is outside of 'us' so that it can react to and perhaps then incorporate others reflection on 'us.'

While I think that not having a true 'canonical STS' is entirely appropriate considering the youth of this discipline, it also works against the self-identity of an STS scholar. Since we live in a world where followers of a specific discipline can point to specific works that have formed and shaped it, not being able to do so leaves us instead pointing at the work of other disciplines which is again unsatisfying. Fortun discusses this a little in //Advocacy after Bhopal// where she says in the footnotes for the Introduction that "interdisciplinarians often .... find themsleves embedded within and thus responsible for multiple discourses...sensibilities of competence and accomplishment seem forever forestalled ad infinitum."

Basically I take her to mean that our strength, interdisciplinarity, which can often be exciting is also occassionally extremely frustrating. Luckily, all of us are very bright scholars and we are learning to deal with it.