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Iconology: Image, text, ideology
0039-3681(94)00022-O
ESSAYREVIEW Representation(s) Hans- J&g Rheinberger * Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds), Representation in ScientiJic Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990) x + 365~~. ISBN o-262-62076-6 Paperback $16.95/&14.95. W. J. T. Mitchell, Zconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987) x + 226 pp. ISBN O-226-53228-3 Hardback, ISBN O-226-53229-1 Paperback g8.95. This essay review is dedicated to the memory of Paul K. Feyerabend. It is through his thought-provoking methods to work against METHOD that many of us have been taking a big step towards a culture of reflexivity in science studies during the past two decades. WHATEVER ESCAPE
one may seek, when it finally comes to what the sciences are about, it is representation. The sciences, so the story goes, aim at a specific, in the limit, ‘true’ representation of the world. This was the grand project leading to enlightenment: science’s duty is to represent the world as it is, in order to make its domination possible. The two accompanying metanarratives of how this project might be realized developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism claimed that true representation comes through the undisturbed, if aided, senses, and saw itself as based on observation. But then, how to dominate? Rationalism claimed that representation comes through embodied concepts, and thus saw itself as based on intervention. But then, how to represent? Since Kant’s critical attempt to avoid the conventionalist pitfalls of empiricism as well as the constructivist pitfalls of rationalism by grounding the possibility of experience on conditions of reasoning, philosophy has become uneasy This uneasiness has persisted till today, as has the empiricism and rationalism, between observation and induction and deduction. under various labels.
some transcendental with both solutions. distinction between experiment, between
*Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Wallotstrasse 19, D-14193 Berlin, Germany. Pergamon
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.. Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 647-654,
1994
Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. 0039p3681/94 $7.00+0.00
648
Studiesin History and Philosophyof Science
The two images generally have been picture and still oscillates between
associated
with the empiricist
construction, respectively. Talk these images: re-presentation
representation of and representation as.’ Two developments in the twentieth century notion of what it means to represent: quantum
and rationalist
model
about representation and re-presentation;
have had a lasting impact on our physics and semiotics. Physicists
and semioticians may forgive me this somewhat simple-minded and shorthanded account. With quantum physics, it has become clear that representation is not necessarily bound to the (visually dominated) space of our senses. Depending on the space of representation we choose in order to analyze a phenomenon, the phenomenon at issue may present itself in mutually exclusive manners. With semiotics, we have come to realize that all human action, including science, insofar as it is human action, is necessarily acted out in the dimension of symbolic orders. From quantum physics, we have learned that the “scientific real” itself, as Gaston Bachelard used to call it,2 is a function of the space of representation. From semiotics, we have learned that symbols take their meaning, not from the things symbolized, but from their relation to other symbols. Thus, from both sides, what has come into question is the counterpart of representation, that is, the referent. But can there be a representation without reference? Which is the same as to ask: can there be a reference without representation? Or, maybe, the reference is the representation (quantum physics)? Or, the representation is the reference (semiotics)? As Jean Baudrillard once put it: “We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model... Facts no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of the models....” With that, he concludes: “The very definition of the real becomes: that of lvhich it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. At the limit of this process of reproductibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that bvhichis alwa_vsalready reproduced. The hyperreal.“”
The representation.
The editors of Representation in Scientific Practice, Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, must have had a kind of feeling for this uncomfortable situation. “Our position is”, they state in their introduction, “that representations and objects are inextricably interconnected; that objects can only be ‘known’ through representation. Criticism necessarily involves competition between
in Science and in the Arts’, ‘Bas C. van Fraassen and Jill Sigman, ‘Interpretation Levine (ed.), Realism and Representation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 73-99. ‘Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984; originally 1934), p. 6. 3Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), pp. 31-32, p. 146.
in George 1993), pp. published
649
Representation(s) representations, Representation
not between representation in Scientific Practice is about
What makes the book so valuable
and an ‘actual object ‘.” (p. 13)4 this ‘inextricable interconnection’.
is that it does not make the case from merely
theoretical considerations, but from looking at how, in different sciences and under different circumstances, the business of representation gets enacted. That this approach has its price, may be expected. For case studies tend to come under an empiricist outfit: have a close look at the thing, and you will see what it really is. The antidote invoked against the delusions of immediacy is, again and again, reflexivity. That means, in the present context, to be aware of the representational devices involved in speaking about representation in scientific practice. The dominant group of the contributors to this volume is of sociologists. There are a few contributors with a background in philosophy, and two with a background in science. None of them is a professional semiotician, and none of them is a professional historian. Bruno Latour (Drawing Things Together) sets the stage. He radically cuts short the uneasiness about representation as correspondence, sketched above. For him, the problem of correspondence has become a non-issue. Latour takes representation as a particular kind of activity, as a process of inscription which results in a particular kind of thing, called “immutable mobiles”. They are characterized, not by what they depict, but by how they work. Immutable mobiles fix transient events (make them durable), and in doing so, allow them to be moved in space and time (make them available in many places). This is their power. For Latour, the relevant question is not how processes of inscription become shaped by social conditions, how science gets informed by society. His question is: how can processes of inscription transform society, how can society, politics and power, be made up from inscriptions? Instead of accepting “the idea that the stuff society is made of is somehow different from that of our sciences, our image, and our information”, we should realize that “the obsession with rapid displacement and stable invariance, for powerful and safe linkages, is not a part of our culture, or ‘influenced’ by social interests: it is our culture” (p. 64). Latour’s turn is crucial.5 First, representation is turned into inscription. With that, the question of correspondence is rendered insignificant. What is significant about representation qua inscription is that things can be made present outside their original and local context. It is this kind of re-presentation that 4This is what Nelson Goodman had to say on the topic: “The making of a picture commonly participates in making what is to be pictured. The object and its aspects depend upon organization; and labels of all sorts are tools of organization.” Nelson Goodman, Languages ofArt; An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976) p. 32. ‘See also Bruno Latour, ‘One More Turn after the Social Turn: Easing Science Studies into the non-Modern World, in E. McMullin (ed.), The Social Dimensions of Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame University Press, 1992) pp. 2722292.
6.50
matters.
Studies in History and Philosophy
This
is something
deliberately
different
from
just
of Science
a synthesis
of
semiotic, poststructuralist and social-constructivist initiatives (p. x), as the editors put it in their Preface. No one else has made this drastic move from ‘representation in scientific practice’ to ‘inscription us scientific practice’. Second, in Latour’s essay all three initiatives -- semiotic, post-structuralist, and social-constructivist are turned upside down. The semioticians’ paradigm, their obsession with language, is subverted. The graphematic materiality of inscription is made primary. The post-structuralists’ obsession with texts is subverted. It is not the textuality of inscriptions that matters, but their functionality as powerful things. Finally, the social-constructivists’ obsession with interests, influences and social fits is subverted. It is not society that makes up science, it is inscriptions, that peculiar hybrid kind of things that make up the crucial features of our society. Latour reminds us that it is not enough to ask to what sort of natural and social constraints the processes of scientific representation/inscription are subjected. He urges us to inquire why we so seldomly ask questions about how they give rise to innovation, about their openness, their ambiguity and their creative forces. If this were taken as a general reading frame, many brilliant observations and insights throughout the book would take a fresh meaning. They all could be read as micro-analyses of what it means to produce inscriptions. Such a reading would disregard their explicit statements about what they aim to show with respect to representation. Instead, it would concentrate on what surfaces inadvertently, once the optics have been shifted, when people begin to be driven by their working materials. In adopting this perspective we can, with Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, pay attention to the “distinctive surfaces” upon which representations are inscribed (p. viii). We can develop a sense for the “lateral, syntagmatic and reflexive relations between communicational ‘elements’ in seemingly anarchistic fields” (p. 2) and to the no longer strange observation that representations can represent
other representations
(p. 5). And we can concentrate
on the embodied
performance of experimentation with its “unanticipated contingencies” (p. 8). In short, we catch a glimpse of the creative possibilities inherent in the inscriptional process, and not simply of the constraints to be imposed if something is to be taken as a representation. We will not be surprised at all to see that constructivist accounts of scientific accomplishments tend to be mixed up with realist elements, and that sometimes representational devices work without mapping “onto anything at all” (‘Representation and the Realist-Constructivist Controversy’, Tibbetts, p. 79). We can stress with Klaus Amann and Karin Knorr Cetina that “seeing is work” (‘The Fixation of Evidence’, p. 90) and that, strangely enough, in that machinery of seeing, it is the image which integrates the
651
Representation(s)
series of related displays, not be astonished that, hypotheses
(representations)
“not the continuity of speakers” in laboratory talk, participants with facts
(reality);
that
(p. 92). We will do not match
they do not negotiate
about things, since their work is about producing them; and that in doing so, there is a “preference for disagreement” as an implicit strategy for producing novel, “not previously obvious”, features (p. 104). “In practice, it seems, participants prefer a principle of variation over replication” (p. 111). It will make sense to hear from Steve Woolgar that there is such a thing as an “interaction between produced documents” (‘Time and Documents in Researcher Interaction’, p. 134) and not just between scientists, and that, in this interaction, the experimental “trace is made to speak” (p. 135) that it carries a history along, the “drift of the trace” (p. 150). It will equally make sense to hear from Michael Lynch that the process of visualization is not between the eye and the object, but on an “externalized retina”, between graphic and instrumental fields “upon which the scientific image is impressed and circulated” (‘The Externalized Retina’, p. 154). We can agree that “for sociological purposes, the ‘real’ object is the representation in hand” (p. 1.54) and even go a step further and postulate that this holds for the actual purposes of the scientists as well. We can go with Francoise Bastide’s principles of iconography and agree that we use experiments “to make one see what is invisible” (‘The Iconography of Scientific Texts’, p. 189); that the techniques make visible, not the object itself, but the result of its action, “its trace” (p. 189); and that the readability of such traces depends on the number of semi-symbolic systems put into action (p. 202). We will not be surprised that the activity of bird-watching, that exemplar of visual observation, can be accounted for as an activity of reading field guides and writing lists (Law and Lynch, ‘Lists, Field Guides, and the Descriptive Organization of Seeing’, p. 269). Equally, we will not be surprised by the statement of a cognitive scientist (Lucy Suchman) that understanding is not the essence of communication; that interaction between people and machines (p. 312) can be characterized in much the same way as interaction amongst people, and that plans of intelligent actors do not control action in any strictly definable sense of the word, but, when it comes to in situ action, “you rely not on the plan”, but on embodied skills (p. 310). Representing then essentially means to place objects in a “shared space” so that one can point to them, change them, and move them out and in (‘Representing Practice in Cognitive Science’, p. 315). Finally, with Steven Yearley, we will not be astonished to realize that one and the same scientific activity can be accounted for by a scientist - why not by the historian of science too? - in quite different ways. For this multiplicity of meanings is only a narrative corollary of the basic condition of science: that it must set itself “the unforeseeable as an object” (‘The Dictates of Method and Policy’, p. 354).
652
Studies in History and Philosoph_v of Science
All that and more can be found when the scientific practice of representation is followed closely. Contexts, situated practices, local interactions abound. This orientation marks the shift from macro-sociological analyses to microsociological investigations. Yet what makes these analyses interesting is not the general social-constructivist framework into which many of them are embedded, but rather the subversive power deriving from the details of the iconographic and other representational practices they describe. The more they engage with details, ideological coherence disappears, and the displacing power of the inscriptions, the representations that are studied, the drift of the trace to speak with Woolgar, takes over. It is this clandestine subrogation of one discourse by another, this deception of the author(s) by their own text(s), to which we should pay attention. The deconstruction and erosion of picture theories of science and of scientific activity has its precedents in art theory and in literary theory. Students of the representational practices in science might therefore benefit from the reflexive art of a literary criticism which lives up to the most demanding standards of the field, such as W. J. T. Mitchell’s Zconofogll. The work starts from the basic reflexive paradox that “an image cannot be seen as such without a paradoxical trick of consciousness, an ability to see something as ‘there’ and ‘not there’ at the same time” (p. 17). Those engaged in science studies could at least learn from Zconology what it means to argue for a hard, rigorous relativism that regards knowledge as a social product, in the sense Paul Feyerabend has been advocating (p. 38). Mitchell does not cut short the age-old controversy of textual versus pictorial representation in painting, poetry and philosophy. His literary exercises on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nelson Goodman, Ernst Gombrich, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Edmund Burke and Karl Marx, argue that although there is no essmtiul distinction between different types of symbolic practices, e.g. writing and painting, nevertheless “there are always a number of differences in effect in a culture which allow us to sort out the distinctive qualities of its ensemble of signs and symbols” (p. 49). Images “are actor[s] on the historical stage” (p. 9). This is the reason why we need to regard “the proliferation of signs, all while we must recognize that in versions and systems with skepticism”, dealing with cultural history, they are the materials we inevitably have to work with (p. 63). There are good reasons to assume with Mitchell that Nelson Goodman’s seemingly most unpolitical conventionalist theory of symbols should be likely to bring about a revolution in our understanding of what it means to be a text and what it means to be a picture. Goodman’s distinction between “dense” and “articulate” signification allows us to conceive of hybrids of all sorts between picture and text, on the basis of a “grammar of difference” in which resemblance has disappeared as a criterion of evaluation, and which leaves
Representation(s) room for “innovation,
653 choice and unprecedented
to Ernst Gombrich, Mitchell conventional signs undercuts simply dismissal Lessing’s
by pushing
the
shifts”
(p. 71).6 With respect
shows that the distinction between natural and its own primacy, immemoriality and originality
distinction
to its extremes,
without
leading
to its
for that reason, on grounds deeply rooted in our Western culture.7 famous ‘Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting’, spatial and
temporal arts, upon Mitchell’s reading turns out to be a discourse on the laws of gender, on the proper behaviour of the sexes, and on the proper relation between nations in eighteenth century Europe. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, to follow Mitchell’s exposition, is not the abandonment of his early critique of ideology as camera obscura, but a matter of turning his critique from concepts to things. In reading these essays, we are reminded of the productivity of the good old dialectical principle that things do not usually bear their characters on their faces, that social relations may turn out to be things, just as much as things may turn out to be social relations. Social studies of science, we may conclude, should pay attention to the fact that it can never be taken for granted what it means to be social, and thoroughgoing epistemic studies should pay attention to the intricate manners in which the art of knowing is a social process ‘gone material’. Representation as text, image and fetish: this is the tripartite distinction around which Mitchell’s iconology of arts and literature revolves. There is an interesting similarity to be observed here with Peirce’s semiotic classification of signs: his symbols hold the place of the text, his icons that of the image, and his indices that of the fetish (whose materiality and causality, however, are peculiar). We might extend this trinitarian picture to the sorts of representation which we encounter in scientific practice, for they are conveniently classified into analogies, models and material realizations of articulations of traces. It is historically contingent and a matter of case by case evaluation as to which of them figures prominent within a given scientific situation. Note that I am speaking here of the function of representation within scientljk practice itself, and not about the problem of how we subsequently represent scientific things 6”This all adds up to open heresy. Descriptions are distmguished from depictions not through being more arbitrary but through belonging to articulate rather than to dense schemes; and words are more conventional than pictures only if conventionality is construed in terms of differentiation rather than of artificiality. Nothing here depends upon the internal structure of a symbol; for what describes in some systems may depict in others. Resemblance disappears as a criterion of representation, and structural similarity as a requirement upon notational or any other languages. The often stressed distinction between iconic and other signs becomes transient and trivial; thus does heresy breed iconoclasm. Yet so drastic a reformation was imperative.” Goodman, op. cit., note 4, pp. 230-23 1. 7”The Western idolatry of the natural sign disguises its own nature under the cover of a ritual iconoclasm, a claim that our images, unlike ‘theirs’, are constituted by a critical principle of skepticism and self-correction, a demystified rationalism that does not worship its own projected images but subjects them to correction, verification and empirical testing against the ‘facts’ about ‘what we see’, ‘how things appear’, or ‘what they naturally are’.” (pp. 90-91).
654
Studies irz History and Philosophy of Science
by graphical, linguistic and mathematical here again the three modes of representation,
means. We might easily recognize and we would have to follow their
trajectories as ‘immutable mobiles’ if we would like to avoid treating them on the level of theoretical and conceptual entities - a level which a long tradition of analytical science.
philosophy
has judged
to be the ‘Kampfplatz’
of philosophy
of
It is certainly debatable whether there is a preferential direction at all from analogy, to model, to trace-realization, or the other way round. This is not the place to discuss this question further. One might be inclined, from the viewpoint of a developed empirical science, to find the first direction the ‘natural’ one. Things might look different from the viewpoint of a pragmatogony of representation, such as the one Ian Hacking has sketched in the ‘Break’ of his shares elements with what Representing and Intervening,8 which certainly Edmund Husserl had to say on the origin of geometry.9 For Hacking, human beings are “representers” “people make representations.” However, he explicitly does not want to take representations as mental representations or as visual images in the first place. He wants to take them as physical objects which owe the character of “likenesses” to the process of their own replication. Here we are, back to Baudrillard: The concept of reality, says Hacking, as a second order concept, can only take shape before the background of such first order representations: as a reflection on the status of the replica - “The real [is] an attribute of representations.“‘0 The concept of reality only makes sense within the context of replication, and it only becomes a problem when alternative systems of representation come into play. To bring such alternative systems of representation into existence is what scientific activity is about, and this is why the question of reality - not of truth - as an attribute of representation will continue to stay at the center of the scientific enterprise. Both Lynch and Woolgar’s collection of papers and Mitchell’s essays go a long way to add insight into this basic problem in science studies.
‘Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 130-146. ‘Edmund Husserl, ‘Vom Ursprung der Geometrie’, in CoNerred Works, Vol. VI, ed. W. Biemel (Den Haag, 19.54), pp. 365-386. “Hacking, op. cit., note 8, p. 132, p. 136.
ESSAYREVIEW Representation(s) Hans- J&g Rheinberger * Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds), Representation in ScientiJic Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990) x + 365~~. ISBN o-262-62076-6 Paperback $16.95/&14.95. W. J. T. Mitchell, Zconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987) x + 226 pp. ISBN O-226-53228-3 Hardback, ISBN O-226-53229-1 Paperback g8.95. This essay review is dedicated to the memory of Paul K. Feyerabend. It is through his thought-provoking methods to work against METHOD that many of us have been taking a big step towards a culture of reflexivity in science studies during the past two decades. WHATEVER ESCAPE
one may seek, when it finally comes to what the sciences are about, it is representation. The sciences, so the story goes, aim at a specific, in the limit, ‘true’ representation of the world. This was the grand project leading to enlightenment: science’s duty is to represent the world as it is, in order to make its domination possible. The two accompanying metanarratives of how this project might be realized developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism claimed that true representation comes through the undisturbed, if aided, senses, and saw itself as based on observation. But then, how to dominate? Rationalism claimed that representation comes through embodied concepts, and thus saw itself as based on intervention. But then, how to represent? Since Kant’s critical attempt to avoid the conventionalist pitfalls of empiricism as well as the constructivist pitfalls of rationalism by grounding the possibility of experience on conditions of reasoning, philosophy has become uneasy This uneasiness has persisted till today, as has the empiricism and rationalism, between observation and induction and deduction. under various labels.
some transcendental with both solutions. distinction between experiment, between
*Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Wallotstrasse 19, D-14193 Berlin, Germany. Pergamon
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.. Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 647-654,
1994
Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. 0039p3681/94 $7.00+0.00
648
Studiesin History and Philosophyof Science
The two images generally have been picture and still oscillates between
associated
with the empiricist
construction, respectively. Talk these images: re-presentation
representation of and representation as.’ Two developments in the twentieth century notion of what it means to represent: quantum
and rationalist
model
about representation and re-presentation;
have had a lasting impact on our physics and semiotics. Physicists
and semioticians may forgive me this somewhat simple-minded and shorthanded account. With quantum physics, it has become clear that representation is not necessarily bound to the (visually dominated) space of our senses. Depending on the space of representation we choose in order to analyze a phenomenon, the phenomenon at issue may present itself in mutually exclusive manners. With semiotics, we have come to realize that all human action, including science, insofar as it is human action, is necessarily acted out in the dimension of symbolic orders. From quantum physics, we have learned that the “scientific real” itself, as Gaston Bachelard used to call it,2 is a function of the space of representation. From semiotics, we have learned that symbols take their meaning, not from the things symbolized, but from their relation to other symbols. Thus, from both sides, what has come into question is the counterpart of representation, that is, the referent. But can there be a representation without reference? Which is the same as to ask: can there be a reference without representation? Or, maybe, the reference is the representation (quantum physics)? Or, the representation is the reference (semiotics)? As Jean Baudrillard once put it: “We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model... Facts no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of the models....” With that, he concludes: “The very definition of the real becomes: that of lvhich it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. At the limit of this process of reproductibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that bvhichis alwa_vsalready reproduced. The hyperreal.“”
The representation.
The editors of Representation in Scientific Practice, Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, must have had a kind of feeling for this uncomfortable situation. “Our position is”, they state in their introduction, “that representations and objects are inextricably interconnected; that objects can only be ‘known’ through representation. Criticism necessarily involves competition between
in Science and in the Arts’, ‘Bas C. van Fraassen and Jill Sigman, ‘Interpretation Levine (ed.), Realism and Representation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 73-99. ‘Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984; originally 1934), p. 6. 3Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), pp. 31-32, p. 146.
in George 1993), pp. published
649
Representation(s) representations, Representation
not between representation in Scientific Practice is about
What makes the book so valuable
and an ‘actual object ‘.” (p. 13)4 this ‘inextricable interconnection’.
is that it does not make the case from merely
theoretical considerations, but from looking at how, in different sciences and under different circumstances, the business of representation gets enacted. That this approach has its price, may be expected. For case studies tend to come under an empiricist outfit: have a close look at the thing, and you will see what it really is. The antidote invoked against the delusions of immediacy is, again and again, reflexivity. That means, in the present context, to be aware of the representational devices involved in speaking about representation in scientific practice. The dominant group of the contributors to this volume is of sociologists. There are a few contributors with a background in philosophy, and two with a background in science. None of them is a professional semiotician, and none of them is a professional historian. Bruno Latour (Drawing Things Together) sets the stage. He radically cuts short the uneasiness about representation as correspondence, sketched above. For him, the problem of correspondence has become a non-issue. Latour takes representation as a particular kind of activity, as a process of inscription which results in a particular kind of thing, called “immutable mobiles”. They are characterized, not by what they depict, but by how they work. Immutable mobiles fix transient events (make them durable), and in doing so, allow them to be moved in space and time (make them available in many places). This is their power. For Latour, the relevant question is not how processes of inscription become shaped by social conditions, how science gets informed by society. His question is: how can processes of inscription transform society, how can society, politics and power, be made up from inscriptions? Instead of accepting “the idea that the stuff society is made of is somehow different from that of our sciences, our image, and our information”, we should realize that “the obsession with rapid displacement and stable invariance, for powerful and safe linkages, is not a part of our culture, or ‘influenced’ by social interests: it is our culture” (p. 64). Latour’s turn is crucial.5 First, representation is turned into inscription. With that, the question of correspondence is rendered insignificant. What is significant about representation qua inscription is that things can be made present outside their original and local context. It is this kind of re-presentation that 4This is what Nelson Goodman had to say on the topic: “The making of a picture commonly participates in making what is to be pictured. The object and its aspects depend upon organization; and labels of all sorts are tools of organization.” Nelson Goodman, Languages ofArt; An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976) p. 32. ‘See also Bruno Latour, ‘One More Turn after the Social Turn: Easing Science Studies into the non-Modern World, in E. McMullin (ed.), The Social Dimensions of Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame University Press, 1992) pp. 2722292.
6.50
matters.
Studies in History and Philosophy
This
is something
deliberately
different
from
just
of Science
a synthesis
of
semiotic, poststructuralist and social-constructivist initiatives (p. x), as the editors put it in their Preface. No one else has made this drastic move from ‘representation in scientific practice’ to ‘inscription us scientific practice’. Second, in Latour’s essay all three initiatives -- semiotic, post-structuralist, and social-constructivist are turned upside down. The semioticians’ paradigm, their obsession with language, is subverted. The graphematic materiality of inscription is made primary. The post-structuralists’ obsession with texts is subverted. It is not the textuality of inscriptions that matters, but their functionality as powerful things. Finally, the social-constructivists’ obsession with interests, influences and social fits is subverted. It is not society that makes up science, it is inscriptions, that peculiar hybrid kind of things that make up the crucial features of our society. Latour reminds us that it is not enough to ask to what sort of natural and social constraints the processes of scientific representation/inscription are subjected. He urges us to inquire why we so seldomly ask questions about how they give rise to innovation, about their openness, their ambiguity and their creative forces. If this were taken as a general reading frame, many brilliant observations and insights throughout the book would take a fresh meaning. They all could be read as micro-analyses of what it means to produce inscriptions. Such a reading would disregard their explicit statements about what they aim to show with respect to representation. Instead, it would concentrate on what surfaces inadvertently, once the optics have been shifted, when people begin to be driven by their working materials. In adopting this perspective we can, with Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, pay attention to the “distinctive surfaces” upon which representations are inscribed (p. viii). We can develop a sense for the “lateral, syntagmatic and reflexive relations between communicational ‘elements’ in seemingly anarchistic fields” (p. 2) and to the no longer strange observation that representations can represent
other representations
(p. 5). And we can concentrate
on the embodied
performance of experimentation with its “unanticipated contingencies” (p. 8). In short, we catch a glimpse of the creative possibilities inherent in the inscriptional process, and not simply of the constraints to be imposed if something is to be taken as a representation. We will not be surprised at all to see that constructivist accounts of scientific accomplishments tend to be mixed up with realist elements, and that sometimes representational devices work without mapping “onto anything at all” (‘Representation and the Realist-Constructivist Controversy’, Tibbetts, p. 79). We can stress with Klaus Amann and Karin Knorr Cetina that “seeing is work” (‘The Fixation of Evidence’, p. 90) and that, strangely enough, in that machinery of seeing, it is the image which integrates the
651
Representation(s)
series of related displays, not be astonished that, hypotheses
(representations)
“not the continuity of speakers” in laboratory talk, participants with facts
(reality);
that
(p. 92). We will do not match
they do not negotiate
about things, since their work is about producing them; and that in doing so, there is a “preference for disagreement” as an implicit strategy for producing novel, “not previously obvious”, features (p. 104). “In practice, it seems, participants prefer a principle of variation over replication” (p. 111). It will make sense to hear from Steve Woolgar that there is such a thing as an “interaction between produced documents” (‘Time and Documents in Researcher Interaction’, p. 134) and not just between scientists, and that, in this interaction, the experimental “trace is made to speak” (p. 135) that it carries a history along, the “drift of the trace” (p. 150). It will equally make sense to hear from Michael Lynch that the process of visualization is not between the eye and the object, but on an “externalized retina”, between graphic and instrumental fields “upon which the scientific image is impressed and circulated” (‘The Externalized Retina’, p. 154). We can agree that “for sociological purposes, the ‘real’ object is the representation in hand” (p. 1.54) and even go a step further and postulate that this holds for the actual purposes of the scientists as well. We can go with Francoise Bastide’s principles of iconography and agree that we use experiments “to make one see what is invisible” (‘The Iconography of Scientific Texts’, p. 189); that the techniques make visible, not the object itself, but the result of its action, “its trace” (p. 189); and that the readability of such traces depends on the number of semi-symbolic systems put into action (p. 202). We will not be surprised that the activity of bird-watching, that exemplar of visual observation, can be accounted for as an activity of reading field guides and writing lists (Law and Lynch, ‘Lists, Field Guides, and the Descriptive Organization of Seeing’, p. 269). Equally, we will not be surprised by the statement of a cognitive scientist (Lucy Suchman) that understanding is not the essence of communication; that interaction between people and machines (p. 312) can be characterized in much the same way as interaction amongst people, and that plans of intelligent actors do not control action in any strictly definable sense of the word, but, when it comes to in situ action, “you rely not on the plan”, but on embodied skills (p. 310). Representing then essentially means to place objects in a “shared space” so that one can point to them, change them, and move them out and in (‘Representing Practice in Cognitive Science’, p. 315). Finally, with Steven Yearley, we will not be astonished to realize that one and the same scientific activity can be accounted for by a scientist - why not by the historian of science too? - in quite different ways. For this multiplicity of meanings is only a narrative corollary of the basic condition of science: that it must set itself “the unforeseeable as an object” (‘The Dictates of Method and Policy’, p. 354).
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All that and more can be found when the scientific practice of representation is followed closely. Contexts, situated practices, local interactions abound. This orientation marks the shift from macro-sociological analyses to microsociological investigations. Yet what makes these analyses interesting is not the general social-constructivist framework into which many of them are embedded, but rather the subversive power deriving from the details of the iconographic and other representational practices they describe. The more they engage with details, ideological coherence disappears, and the displacing power of the inscriptions, the representations that are studied, the drift of the trace to speak with Woolgar, takes over. It is this clandestine subrogation of one discourse by another, this deception of the author(s) by their own text(s), to which we should pay attention. The deconstruction and erosion of picture theories of science and of scientific activity has its precedents in art theory and in literary theory. Students of the representational practices in science might therefore benefit from the reflexive art of a literary criticism which lives up to the most demanding standards of the field, such as W. J. T. Mitchell’s Zconofogll. The work starts from the basic reflexive paradox that “an image cannot be seen as such without a paradoxical trick of consciousness, an ability to see something as ‘there’ and ‘not there’ at the same time” (p. 17). Those engaged in science studies could at least learn from Zconology what it means to argue for a hard, rigorous relativism that regards knowledge as a social product, in the sense Paul Feyerabend has been advocating (p. 38). Mitchell does not cut short the age-old controversy of textual versus pictorial representation in painting, poetry and philosophy. His literary exercises on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nelson Goodman, Ernst Gombrich, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Edmund Burke and Karl Marx, argue that although there is no essmtiul distinction between different types of symbolic practices, e.g. writing and painting, nevertheless “there are always a number of differences in effect in a culture which allow us to sort out the distinctive qualities of its ensemble of signs and symbols” (p. 49). Images “are actor[s] on the historical stage” (p. 9). This is the reason why we need to regard “the proliferation of signs, all while we must recognize that in versions and systems with skepticism”, dealing with cultural history, they are the materials we inevitably have to work with (p. 63). There are good reasons to assume with Mitchell that Nelson Goodman’s seemingly most unpolitical conventionalist theory of symbols should be likely to bring about a revolution in our understanding of what it means to be a text and what it means to be a picture. Goodman’s distinction between “dense” and “articulate” signification allows us to conceive of hybrids of all sorts between picture and text, on the basis of a “grammar of difference” in which resemblance has disappeared as a criterion of evaluation, and which leaves
Representation(s) room for “innovation,
653 choice and unprecedented
to Ernst Gombrich, Mitchell conventional signs undercuts simply dismissal Lessing’s
by pushing
the
shifts”
(p. 71).6 With respect
shows that the distinction between natural and its own primacy, immemoriality and originality
distinction
to its extremes,
without
leading
to its
for that reason, on grounds deeply rooted in our Western culture.7 famous ‘Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting’, spatial and
temporal arts, upon Mitchell’s reading turns out to be a discourse on the laws of gender, on the proper behaviour of the sexes, and on the proper relation between nations in eighteenth century Europe. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, to follow Mitchell’s exposition, is not the abandonment of his early critique of ideology as camera obscura, but a matter of turning his critique from concepts to things. In reading these essays, we are reminded of the productivity of the good old dialectical principle that things do not usually bear their characters on their faces, that social relations may turn out to be things, just as much as things may turn out to be social relations. Social studies of science, we may conclude, should pay attention to the fact that it can never be taken for granted what it means to be social, and thoroughgoing epistemic studies should pay attention to the intricate manners in which the art of knowing is a social process ‘gone material’. Representation as text, image and fetish: this is the tripartite distinction around which Mitchell’s iconology of arts and literature revolves. There is an interesting similarity to be observed here with Peirce’s semiotic classification of signs: his symbols hold the place of the text, his icons that of the image, and his indices that of the fetish (whose materiality and causality, however, are peculiar). We might extend this trinitarian picture to the sorts of representation which we encounter in scientific practice, for they are conveniently classified into analogies, models and material realizations of articulations of traces. It is historically contingent and a matter of case by case evaluation as to which of them figures prominent within a given scientific situation. Note that I am speaking here of the function of representation within scientljk practice itself, and not about the problem of how we subsequently represent scientific things 6”This all adds up to open heresy. Descriptions are distmguished from depictions not through being more arbitrary but through belonging to articulate rather than to dense schemes; and words are more conventional than pictures only if conventionality is construed in terms of differentiation rather than of artificiality. Nothing here depends upon the internal structure of a symbol; for what describes in some systems may depict in others. Resemblance disappears as a criterion of representation, and structural similarity as a requirement upon notational or any other languages. The often stressed distinction between iconic and other signs becomes transient and trivial; thus does heresy breed iconoclasm. Yet so drastic a reformation was imperative.” Goodman, op. cit., note 4, pp. 230-23 1. 7”The Western idolatry of the natural sign disguises its own nature under the cover of a ritual iconoclasm, a claim that our images, unlike ‘theirs’, are constituted by a critical principle of skepticism and self-correction, a demystified rationalism that does not worship its own projected images but subjects them to correction, verification and empirical testing against the ‘facts’ about ‘what we see’, ‘how things appear’, or ‘what they naturally are’.” (pp. 90-91).
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Studies irz History and Philosophy of Science
by graphical, linguistic and mathematical here again the three modes of representation,
means. We might easily recognize and we would have to follow their
trajectories as ‘immutable mobiles’ if we would like to avoid treating them on the level of theoretical and conceptual entities - a level which a long tradition of analytical science.
philosophy
has judged
to be the ‘Kampfplatz’
of philosophy
of
It is certainly debatable whether there is a preferential direction at all from analogy, to model, to trace-realization, or the other way round. This is not the place to discuss this question further. One might be inclined, from the viewpoint of a developed empirical science, to find the first direction the ‘natural’ one. Things might look different from the viewpoint of a pragmatogony of representation, such as the one Ian Hacking has sketched in the ‘Break’ of his shares elements with what Representing and Intervening,8 which certainly Edmund Husserl had to say on the origin of geometry.9 For Hacking, human beings are “representers” “people make representations.” However, he explicitly does not want to take representations as mental representations or as visual images in the first place. He wants to take them as physical objects which owe the character of “likenesses” to the process of their own replication. Here we are, back to Baudrillard: The concept of reality, says Hacking, as a second order concept, can only take shape before the background of such first order representations: as a reflection on the status of the replica - “The real [is] an attribute of representations.“‘0 The concept of reality only makes sense within the context of replication, and it only becomes a problem when alternative systems of representation come into play. To bring such alternative systems of representation into existence is what scientific activity is about, and this is why the question of reality - not of truth - as an attribute of representation will continue to stay at the center of the scientific enterprise. Both Lynch and Woolgar’s collection of papers and Mitchell’s essays go a long way to add insight into this basic problem in science studies.
‘Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 130-146. ‘Edmund Husserl, ‘Vom Ursprung der Geometrie’, in CoNerred Works, Vol. VI, ed. W. Biemel (Den Haag, 19.54), pp. 365-386. “Hacking, op. cit., note 8, p. 132, p. 136.