Can't stop pronouncing it luh-bore-uh-tor-ee in my head

tl;dr:
I didn't find Knorr helpful or interesting. Latour provides a good - if cherry-picked - case study of the importance of studying dynamic feedback between microlevel lab culture and macrolevel capital C Culture. Fullwilley does a fantastic job of using ethnography to illustrate how "knowledge" is produced at an individual level - and what impact that might have on broader society.

(5 minute reading)

What is the purpose of a lab? Where do its walls begin and end? Are its goals knowledge for the sake of knowledge? Or is the “power” created within them meant to have impact on the world? According to Knorr, a laboratory is a space which reconfigures natural and social orders. It “entails the detachment of objects from their natural environment and their installation in a new phenomenal field defined by social agents.” This doesn’t quite do it for me; at what point do we call any object manipulated by a human a lab object?

Nor did the discussion of lab objects as “signs” do all that much for me. With the advent of computing, nearly all academic work works by reconstructing the meaning and origin of representations – words included. It’s an interesting cultural reading, a la Barthes, but I’m not sure what application it holds to better understanding lab work. Perhaps Wittgenstein is helpful here:

“…Similarly the possibility of describing the world by means of Newtonian mechanics tells us nothing about the world: but what does tell us something about it is the precise way in which it is possible to describe it by these means. We are told something about the world by the fact that it can be described more simply with one system of mechanics than with another” (Tracatus 6.342)

I thought most of Knorr said was covered more fruitfully by Latour. According to Latour, most sociologists of science failed because they defined the laboratory too narrowly. Does Knorr do the same? Unfortunately for us, Latour doesn’t really define the laboratory either. Still, I found his discussion more thought provoking.

One of Latour’s main points is that focusing only on the micro-level negotiations between scientists in the laboratory meant that, traditionally, STS researchers failed to account for the content of science and the larger social implications of scientific discoveries. This latter point is critical: “Neither the historian nor the sociologist can distinguish the macrolevel of French society and the microlevel of the microbiology laboratory, since the latter is helping to redefine and displace the former" (158).

I’ve read Latour previously (The Pasteurization of France, Reassembling the Social); I have a love-hate relationship with him. His writing isn’t always clear. Often I find myself nodding along only to think back ten minutes later and be unable to clearly explain his points in plain language. He builds up straw men and satisfyingly tears them down before I realize it’s a straw man. Case in point, Latour’s treatment of the laboratory in this article. The very idea of a laboratory, particularly as we conceive of them today, is quite new. The model of science in which academics and researchers engage one topic in depth is also a recent phenomenon; prior to the 20^th century, one was more likely to see “renaissance-style” individuals (e.g. Newton, Galileo, etc. of mostly white European males) pursuing what was simply called science. The boundaries between what we call natural sciences were blurred. Latour implies that our (STS researchers?) conception of the laboratory never considered its societal implications. That may be valid for ethnographers solely focused on the social interactions in the lab, but I don’t think it’s how the public, institutions, or governments conceive of laboratory science.

I also think Pasteur is a bit misleading for a case study. The discovery of microbes was quite unique in the impact that it held on all forms of social organization. One quote from Pasteurization of France puts it a bit better than the article we read in class:

"There are not only 'social relations', relations between man and man. Society is not made up just of men, for everywhere microbes intervene and act…In all these relations, these one-on-one confrontations, these duels, these contracts, other agents are present, acting, exchanging their contracts, imposing their aims, and redefining the social bond in a different way" (1988: 35)

New forms of power (pg. 160) were generated as a result of the discovery of the microbe, most notably modern forms of sanitation and public health. Nikolas Rose writes eloquent in The Politics of Life Itself how our atomic understanding of disease now impacts the way we conceive of the individual: susceptible, at-risk, dying, etc. But tracing the vast majority of laboratory science into its impacts on the real world is more difficult. The discovery of antibiotics would make a useful case study for understanding how lab discoveries impacted science; the discovery of the 110^th antibiotic less so.

One final point to quibble with Latour about: "Certainty does not increase in a laboratory because people in it are more honest, more rigorous, or more 'falsificationist.' It is simply that they can make as many mistakes as they wish or simply more mistakes than the others 'outside' who cannot master the changes of scale. Each mistake is in turn archived, saved, recorded, and made easily readable again, whatever the specific field or topic may be" (164). I agree with Latour’s idea of inscription; it’s interesting to run with the thought that most advancement in science is simply the result of the ability to learn from mistakes documented through modern “inscription methods.” But to say that that is not “honest”, “rigorous”, or especially “falsificationist” misses the whole idea of the scientific method. Science proceeds precisely because there is a rigor to the mistakes, and because hypotheses can be falsified. The idea that only in the laboratory is one able to “inscript” through modern technology rings true, but it is not only through technology that science has become science. The practice of bloodletting, applying leaches, and folk herbal remedies would have benefited mightily from a randomized-control trial. One wouldn’t need more than a few sheets of paper for that.

--Jake