Emerging+Narratives+db

I’ve been thinking a lot about methods lately. I want to spend a few paragraphs considering the current state of affairs for social scientists interested in science and technology as their objects of analysis. What kind of work is impossible in our current universities? What kinds of new institutions are necessary for breaking new ground in method as well as theory? Think of it as McLuhan-style probing of institutions of higher learning. I’m going to play with a lot of “what-ifs” and “for instances.” None of this is particularly actionable, nor am I even interested in proposing anything that would be recognized as “realistic” or even “pragmatic.” Mainly, I’m interested in stepping back, considering the state of our technosociety, and asking what kinds of questions need asking and what kinds of science is being //systematically// left undone.

In some ways, I’m asking the same kind of question your high school guidance counselor asked: “If money weren’t an issue, what would you do with your life?” Aristotle asked this question (towards much different ends), and Hannah Arendt reconsidered the question of the //vita activa// in her book //[|The Human Condition.]// Its also similar to the life Karl Marx hoped we would all live in a communist society:

“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he [sic] wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman [sic], herdsman or critic.” [1]

For academics, I always image the answers to these questions involve long stays in the field punctuated with lengthy sabbaticals where you can hold up in a comfortable personal library and read and write in ideal environments. No publish-or-perish pressures and no unreasonable teaching requirements. [2] Then again, if we live in a world of such abundance, perhaps many of us would be out of the job. What kind of Utopia would let an academic take a 3-year all-expenses-paid sabbatical to study world hunger? Perhaps it is the sabbaticals and lengthy field trips that produce a world without hunger, but I suspect that’s not the best way to solve that problem. (Many would say there’s no problem to solve, there’s only problems of power and resultant unfair resource allocations.) So lets say that a philosopher king comes to power and declares that all institutionally credentialed academics have the full resources of the world (after all, philosophy does not preclude nepotism) to solve the [|grand challenges facing global society]. [3] What would we do?

I love the idea of praxis, and I think it’s a good place to start. Unlike the two other “ways of life,” theoria (contemplation) and poesis (making), praxis means you go out into the world and start doing things. Its probably the most social way of being. You can make and contemplate in total isolation but doing will eventually require that you run into someone whether you like it or not. You might not have a full lay of the land, and there are probably some unavoidable [|unknown unknowns], but rarely does anyone ever act with exactly the right amount of information anyway. Praxis is learning by doing and I think if its done at the proper scale, it could produce great results.

Obviously we don’t want nuclear physicists screwing around with reactors just to “see what happens” but there probably isn’t much harm in tinkering with Arduino microcontrollers or trying to make a vegan alternative to cheese. This may sound like some kind of concession to the unknown: some things are just too risky and complex so lets go play with toys. That is almost the exact opposite of what I am proposing. What I am proposing is sort of like going back to an old save point in a video game. A time when the scientific community made a collective decision (to put it simply) about how they were going to go about conducting science. I’m suggesting we try out the other path.

In his //Mangle of Practice// Andrew Pickering offers an analysis of scientific action in what he calls the “performative idiom.” This means that instead of thinking about science as a collection of truths or a search for knowledge, we can think of it as a thing that people do: Science as a verb, instead of a noun. His case study is a history of early particle physics and the beginning of large-scale industrial science. Here he quotes the recently deceased [|Dr. Donald A. Glaser] a physicist who had no interest in what he called “big science.” He knew that in order to find the mysterious subatomic particles that make up the universe, (or just as importantly, to find them //first//) he would have to build a much larger machine than any small research group could operate. He wanted to find what could best be described as a more “humane” way of doing physics:

“There was a psychological side to this. I knew that large accelerators were going to be built and they were going to make gobs of strange particles. Buy I decided that if I were clever enough I could invent something that could extract the information from cosmic rays and you could work in a nice peaceful environment rather than in the factory environment of big machines… I wanted to save cosmic ray physics.” [4]

Social scientists find themselves in a similar predicament. The influential positions and the resources are in Big Social Science. It means writing Big Textbooks, editing Big Journals, and constantly applying for Big Grants. All of which, are becoming scarce and (in my opinion anyway) less wieldy. The answer isn’t exactly something called Little Social Science, but we do need to change our course away from seeking the big grants ([|they won’t be around for much longer anyway]) and start looking at ways to do our work that build social capital, not political or financial capital.

The anthropologist David Graeber has said about as much in his //Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.// Here he calls on anthropologists to focus less on High Theory and consider,

…what might be called Low Theory: a way of grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge from a transformative project. Mainstream social science actually isn’t much help here, because normally in mainstream social science this sort of thing is generally classified as “policy issues,” and no self-respecting anarchist would have anything to do with these.

Political and financial capital, [|in the Bourdieuian sense], means holding sway in large bureaucracies and producing documents and theories that are meant to [|assist governments and large non-state actors] do their work.

[1] From //[|The German Ideology]// (1854) [2] I think its safe to say that [|BlackBoard] would not be in the Academic’s Utopia. [3] The linked document is specifically for engineers, which I and Joseph R. Herkert have critiqued [|here], but we fail to note that these kinds of documents are –at least in theory- a great idea. Why don’t social scientists and philosophers even think to consider cataloging and outlining what they see as the grand challenges for all of humanity? [4] Quote from page 43 of Pickering, Andrew. 1995. //The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science//. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.