What makes us modern? This is a classic question in philosophy as well as in political science. However it is often raised without including science and technology in its definition. The argument of this book is that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology. This division allows the formidable expansion of the Western empires. However it has become more and more difficult to maintain this distance between science and politics. Hence the postmodern predicament - the feeling that the modern stance is no longer acceptable but that there is no alternative. The solution, advances one of France's leading sociologists of science, is to realize that we have never been modern to begin with. The comparative anthropology this text provides reintroduces science to the fabric of daily life and aims to make us compatible both with our past and with other cultures wrongly called pre-modern.

We Have Never Been Modern

The article subjects the assumptions and prescriptions of the ‘Corporate Culture’literature to critical scrutiny. the body of the article is devoted to teasing out the distinctive basis of its appeal compared with earlier management theory. It is seen to build upon earlier efforts (e.g.‘theory Y’) to constitute a self-disciplining form of employee subjectivity by asserting that ‘practical autonomy’is conditional upon the development of a strong corporate culture. the paper illuminates the dark side of this project by drawing attention to the subjugating and totalitarian implications of its excellence/ quality prescriptions. to this end, parallels are drawn with the philosophy of control favoured by the Party in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Specifically, the paper critiques the ‘doublethink’contention that autonomy can be realized in monocultural conditions that systematically constrain opportunities to wrestle with competing values standpoints and their associated life projects.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-6486.1993.tb00315.x

Strength is Ignorance - Slavery is Freedom: Managing Culture in Modern Organizations

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) makes babies and parents at once. Drawing on science and technology studies, feminist theory, and historical and ethnographic analyses of ART clinics, Charis Thompson explores the intertwining of biological reproduction with the personal, political, and technological meanings of reproduction. She analyzes the "ontological choreography" at ART clinics -- the dynamics by which technical, scientific, kinship, gender, emotional, legal, political, financial, and other matters are coordinated -- using ethnographic data to address questions usually treated in the abstract. Reproductive technologies, says Thompson, are part of the increasing tendency to turn social problems into biomedical questions and can be used as a lens through which to see the resulting changes in the relations between science and society. After giving an account of the book's disciplinary roots in science and technology studies and in feminist scholarship on reproduction, Thompson comes to the ethnographic heart of her study. She develops her concept of ontological choreography by examining ART's normalization of "miraculous" technology (including the etiquette of technological sex); gender identity in the assigned roles of mother and father and the conservative nature of gender relations in the clinic; the naturalization of technologically assisted kinship and procreative intent; and patients' pursuit of agency through objectification and technology. Finally, Thompson explores the economies of reproductive technologies, concluding with a speculative and polemical look at the "biomedical mode of reproduction" as a predictor of future relations between science and society.

Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies

In an unusual instance of lay participation in biomedical research, U.S. AIDS treatment activists have constituted themselves as credible participants in the process of knowledge construction, thereby bringing about changes in the epistemic practices of biomedical research. This article examines the mechanisms or tactics by which these lay activists have constructed their credibility in the eyes of AIDS researchers and government officials. It considers the inwlications of such interventions for the conduct of medical research; examines some of the ironies, tensions, and limitations in the process; and argues for the importance of studying social movements that engage with expert knowledge.

/pdf/the-construction-of-lay-expertise-aids-activism-and-the-4iz2sr421n.pdf

The Construction of Lay Expertise: AIDS Activism and the Forging of Credibility in the Reform of Clinical Trials

Replication is one of the most important tools for the verification of facts within the empirical sciences. A detailed examination of the notion of replication reveals that there are many different...

Shall we really do it again? The powerful concept of replication is neglected in the social sciences.

STEVEN SHAPIN and SIMON SCHAFFER, Leviathan and the air-pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Including a translation of Thomas Hobbes, Dialogus physicus de natura aeris, by Simon Schaffer, Princeton University Press, 1985, 8vo, pp. xiv, 440, illus., £43.00. In his History ofthe Royal Society ofLondon, published in 1667 as an explanation and defence ofmen who spent their time weighing the air and anatomizing beetles, Thomas Sprat threw out many striking analogies between contemporary politics and the activities he defended. The Society fitted perfectly with the spirit of reconciliation and tolerance supposed to characterize the Restoration: it forbade discussion of politics or religion; it limited dissent to matters about which agreement could be reached; it stuck to matters of fact; it promoted industry, sobriety, good judgment, and balance; it opposed enthusiasts, dogmatists, radicals, and sinners. Shapin and Schaffer have dilated and developed Sprat's analogies and metaphors with the persistence and prolixity of the Society's cynosure, Robert Boyle. Their argument may be distilled as follows. Boyle wished to set aside a "social space" (the term is theirs) for the cultivation of experimental philosophy; he also wanted to demonstrate to society at large how civic and religious dissent might be managed peacefully and productively; in fact, he wanted both, for, as Shapin and Schaffer claim, "solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order" (p. 332). They discern three "technologies" in Boyle's effort to establish his "experimental language" (p. 49), his "disciplined collective social structure" (p. 78), his "space . . . so securely bounded that dispute could occur safely within [it]" (p. 303), his "experimental form of life" (p. 314). The technologies were: the material, that is, experimental apparatus, of which the air-pump was the exemplar; the literary, or wordy descriptions of experiments performed, of the witnesses present and their reliability, and of the machines themselves; and the social, or rules of engagement in philosophical debate, the pre-eminence of the matter offact, and the down-grading or exclusion ofconjectures or theories about the causes and principles of certified phenomena. Withall, the experimental philosopher must be modest, open and flexible: "Till a man is sure he is infallible", Boyle wrote, "it is not fit for him to be unalterable." These "technologies" drew fire from the plentiful furnace ofThomas Hobbes, whom Shapin and Schaffer use as a detector of the aspects of Boyle's programme offensive to contemporaries who differed from him politically. Hobbes pointed out that the material technology leaked; that the literary technology, at least in respect ofthe testimony ofwitnesses, had no force ("no infinite number of grave and learned men" make certainty, "but authority"); and that the social technology misconstrued the nature of knowledge. By making the matter of fact, and not the underlying principle, the main object of investigation, one forfeits the chance at truth and certainty and has no reliable way to exclude serious and dangerous error. Boyle and his precious air-pump would be an ongoing peril as long as experimental philosophers waffled over the nature of the "vacuum". Hobbes knew from principle that a true void space, being immaterial, could not be; others not so guided, like the noisy Cambridge philosopher Henry More, and the demonstrator of witches, Joseph Glanvil, admitted the void, and imagined that Boyle's experiments proved the existence of spaces for angels and spirits to play in. Hobbes's dogmatism in natural philosophy was of a piece with his concept of the State. In philosophy, the force ofreason, working from sure principles in the style of Euclidean geometry, must compel assent; "who is so stupid", he asked, "as both to mistake in geometry, and also to persist in it, when another detects his error to him?" In the State, the King's authority should prevail over all dissent and dissenters in both civil and religious matters. Just here, loose talk about vacuums threatened the peace. For priests would set up as experts on the immaterial, and construct an independent base ofpower on the strength of their pseudo-knowledge, as they had in the past; and so bring about subversions and rebellions. The method ofcreating and certifying knowledge, and the problem of establishing social order, forced Boyle and Hobbes to sharply

/pdf/leviathan-and-the-air-pump-hobbes-boyle-and-the-experimental-4oh7aueiy7.pdf

J. L. Heilbron

Papers

Leviathan and the air-pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life