Technoscientific Musings at WUSTL

While saving the document on which I began this blog post, I abbreviated “Cultures” of the class title to “Cult.” Unintentional, but I’m going to run with it. As Wikipedia has it, the term cult “usually refers to a social group defined by their religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or common interest in a particular personality, object, or goal. The term itself is controversial and has divergent definitions in popular culture and in academia and has been an ongoing source of contention among scholars across several fields of study.”

I do not make the claim that the subfields of science should be viewed as cults (though I don’t think I’d be the first). But what I value about the lens of ethnography used in this week’s readings is the way that it makes visible the very specific process of socialization (and to some extent indoctrination) into disciplines frequently held up as uniquely rational, scientific, and even beyond culture. As Traweek points out in physics education, to regard scientific activity as “supranational and supracultural” is the only way physicists can “maintain the stable communications network necessary for their work” (78). And on a smaller level, “to be fully conscious of the social and psychological forces at work in [the] postdoctoral phase would be debilitating…Social eccentricity and childlike egoism are cultivated displays of commitment to rationality, objectivity, and science” (91). What the authors of this week’s readings hope to point out, however, is that rationality and objectivity do not guarantee the same production of knowledge.

Cults often form around deities and belief systems; the object of worship in the sciences may be more empirically validated than that of a spaceship drafting behind the Hale-Bopp comet, but that does not mean that such a social group is not also a valid subject to conduct what Foucault, borrowing from Nietzsche, called a “genealogy.” “[W]hat is philosophy today – philosophical activity, I mean – if it is not the critical work of thought on itself? And if it does not consistent in the endeavor of knowing how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, rather than legitimating what is already known?” (Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 2, 8-9). Isaac Newton saw far by standing on the shoulders of giants; physicists and doctors do the same, but their views are still in some sense subjective.

I appreciated very much Good’s analysis of how medical students learn to think (and also to speak, to write, and to see). Good takes to tasks Foucault for his denial of the role of the subject in constituting consciousness, which Good feels “contradicts the centrality of persons and of intersubjective experience in the field research of the anthropologist” (69). Maybe ultimately the argument boils down to the fact that Good is clearly more comfortable speaking to people than Foucault; I happen to think that ultimate they’re looking at similar phenomena on different scales. Either way, what Good fulfills in his analysis is, if not a genealogy, at least a diagnosis (his own patient write up) of the ways that medical students come to understand medicine and the body - and by extension, how we might learn to think differently about medical education, rather than legitimating what is already known. For Good, medicine, as much as it purports to objectivity, is still an interpretive practice, “acts which quite literally shape and reshape the body” (80). This paradigm is antithetical to most medical practice, which operates by an reductio ad veritatem (I don’t know Latin – hope that’s correct), in which truth is gleaned once our level of analysis is on a level small enough to be invulnerable to the biases of human cognition. I’ve operated in a positivist academic framework for some time; I’m no longer sure where I come down anymore. I think it depends on the day.

Science is often held up as outside of culture. The objectivity of social sciences is constantly up for debate (Anthropology continues this debate within itself). But as this week’s readings make clear, science is not “supracultural”; its cultures and subcultures are as influential in shaping thought and behavior as any other group.