THE SCIENTIFIC GAZE
ADAM BRENTHEL
1
st
of
F
ebruary
2008
Culture and Media
School of Arts and Communication, K3
Malmö University
Supervisor Dick Kasperowski
History of Ideas and Theory of Science
Gothenburg University
AESTHETICS, VISUAL CULTURE, AND THE COSMOLOGY OF BIOSCIENCE
AESTHETICS, VISUAL CULTURE, AND THE COSMOLOGY OF BIOSCIENCE
The Scientific Gaze är en kulturvetenskaplig magisteruppsats som tar sig an
natur-vetenskapens praktiska vardag. Frågan som ställs är huruvida det finns en
gemen-sam naturvetenskaplig kosmologi som betingar ett visst sätt att betrakta bilder på.
Uppsatsen presenterar vetenskapliga bilder och redogörelser av fältarbete och på
så vis närmar sig texten praktikerna i tre laboratorier som i det vardagliga arbetet
tangerar det biologiska. De tre fältstudierna omfattar en grupp civilingejörer som
producerera biomimetiska material, ett projekt där fysiologer bygger en genetisk
fiskmodel och komparativa zoomorfologiska studier av ögats utveckling hos tidiga
ryggradsdjur.
Det teoretisk perpsektivet kan beskrivas som en foucaldiansk analys av visuella
tillängelsepraktiker, hur det går till när naturvetaren riktar sin blick mot en bild
och sedan fäller en naturvetenskaplig utsaga. Hypotesen som uppsatsen arbetar
ef-ter är att processen från att se till att säga står på en ontologisk föreställning som jag
kallar jag för en naturvetenskaplig kosmologi. Eftersom det är en Culture studies
analys görs inte skillnad på sant eller falskt, bra eller dålig forskning utan bara hur
dessa forskare förhåller sig till det visuella i laboratoriet.
Texten inleds och avslutas av genealogiska analyser av murala konstverk utifrån
tesen att ”sanningen är skön”. Naturvetare har ett sanningsbegrepp som skiljer sig
från många andras och detta skapar en viss sensibilitet ifråga om vad som är skönt
i världen och i konsten. Dessa konstfilosofiska analyser illustrerar både teori och
metod och de slutsatser som kan dras ut det empiriska materialet.
Fortsättning på pärmens insida.
THE SCIENTIFIC GAZE
Tack till....
Dick Kasperowski
för god mycket handledning,
under frihet och flexibilitet,
Cecilia Wendt
för många spännande
samtal om konst och ideologi,
Linda Erlandsson
mitt bästa bollplank,
Christopher Kullenberg
för kritiska samtal om texten,
Isadora Wronski
för cover layout,
Angelica Erlandsson
för korrekturläsning,
Ove Orwar och Dag Winkler
för tillträde till Chalmers,
Tommy Lindholm
för tidigare handledning och
många värdefulla litteraturtips,
Ola, Noomi, Lina, Yavuz
och Ilja för att jag fått
följa er så nära
och Mikael Johansson
för antropologiska metodråd
och uppmuntran i ämnet,
Ove Allerby och Bergt Persson
för muralorginalen och historien
kring muralen på Zoologen,
Lars Erik Ström
konstären bakom “Alkemi”
och till sist Ylva Gislén som
möjliggjorde handledningen i
Göteborg.
Den huvudsakliga slutsatsen
som kan dras ur det empiriska
är att föreställningar om ”vad
som egentligen finns” eller vad
som är sant till stor del skapas
av vad dessa forskare har för
handen. De vardagliga praktiska
sysslorna tycks skapa ett mentalt
rum som delas av alla de som
delar sysslor i laboratoriet. Detta
gemensamma mentala rum går
man in i så snart man diskuterar
sin forskning eller ett
uppkom-met problem, lika tillgängligt på
kafferasten som på laboratoriet.
Detta rum kallar jag för Space of
thoughts som kontrasteras mot
Place of practice som beskriver
vad som är för handen. Dessa
två lokalitetsbegrepp utgör två
analytiska nivåer som
strukture-rar texten.
Allt bildmaterial kommer från
fältarbetet och utgörs till stor del
inomvetenskapliga bilder.
Natur-vetenskapens speciella bildvärld
görs här tillgänglig för alla läsare
av uppsatsen, en bildvärld som
annars bara är tillgänglig för
naturvetaren själv.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
3
THE MURAL
3
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
10
BACKGROUND
10
Raising a question; C.P. Snow and the two cultures 11 Opening up science; Tomas S. Kuhn and paradigms 12
Bruno Latour and Science in the making 14
Laura Mulvey and the male gaze 15
Jonathan Crary and techniques of the observer 17
W.J.T Mitchell and the pictorial turn 17
THEORY AND METHOD
19
The Foucauldian tool-box 21
Field Method 23
Go-along 24
Aesthetics, ontology and epistemology 26
Problematizing theory and method 28
The feminist saving clause 30
CHAPTER TWO: THE ZOOLOGIST
31
The map 32
The laboratory work 34
Archaeology of the image 36
Discussing the images on the screen 38
The gallery and the production of thought space 40
Seeing through the specimen 42
Secondary spatialization 46
CHAPTER THREE: THE BIO-MIMETIC ENGINEER
49
Head of department and public understanding of science 49
Laboratory work, maps and landscapes 52
Moviemaking 57
Many jokes but no dramas in the laboratory 59
The clean room; Spectacle or panopticon 61
Popular science and real science 65
Science and Art 66
CHAPTER FOUR: THE PHYSIOLOGIST
70
The map 72
No artworks in the laboratory 74
The visible and the invisible 77
CHAPTER FIVE: ANALYSIS
82
Visual cultures of research groups, not laboratories 82
Cosmology of the biosciences 84
PLACES OF PRACTICE AND SPACES OF THOUGHTS
85
Staging and the apparatus 87
EPILOGUE
89
Prologue
The Mural
There is nothing behind the image; everything is there to be seen. This mural is used to show precisely that and to illustrate how aesthetics can be used to study conceptions of ontology and epistemology. How such conception of ontology form a specific sensibility among bioscientists to see things in a certain light, this sensibility condition aesthetic judgements and the visual culture of science. In this thesis I call this sensibility “the scientific gaze”.
Figure 1 shows a photo of the Department of Zoology taken from a nearby building to show the mural in its context.
This is the very first thing that visitors encounter as they approach the Department of Zoology, they will see it from far away, as the institution is located on a hill. It was the first thing I saw when I was looking for it and I knew right away that I had found the Department of Zoology, as anyone would know, since the mural is very zoological. When I asked people on the department about the mural very few knew the history of it and did not perceive of it as a piece of art but rather a signboard since it says “ZOOLOGY” on the left
side combined with the emblem of the university above. When I return to the mural to search for its history I find a sign with the company name of the entrepreneur who carried out the work, not the name of an artist. It turns out to be no single artist behind the mural but instead the results of a rather long discussion that took place between a committee of researchers and teachers at the department, the owner of the house and the company that did the actual work. When the building was renovated some ten years ago money was allocated to the artistic decoration of the building, this ambition is articulated by the Swedish National Public Art Council who promote site-specific public art and has been at work since 19371.
This is a some sense a site-specific piece of art, funded by the owner of the building, not produced by an individual artists but instead a negotiation between several parties; the owner of the building, the company how made it, the researchers who participated in the committee and now sees it everyday going to work and the Swedish National Public Art Council who wish to “promote the understanding of the importance of art to the good society” to
biologists. There is no single power behind the mural with a hidden message, but only the outcome of a discussion between the four parties, or four powers, leaving a manifestation (of a biological cosmology?) on the wall to be seen by everyone. Before performing an iconography of this piece of art I can only conclude that the history and the intentions of the mural are illustrative of the theoretical perspective in this thesis. This Foucaldian theoretical perspective is an attempt to problematize the allegedly unproblematic (some might say, it is only a decoration!), where the author, artist or researcher only is interesting as member of discursive formation and where power is exercised through words and images and not behind them, everything is there to seen, just look at the mural again!
1
“Its brief is to commission permanent, site-specific contemporary works of art and to purchase art for placement in governmental premises and with
government bodies (…) By means of publicity, educational and development
projects the Council is also entrusted with promoting an understanding of the importance of art to the good society and of encouraging progress in this field”. (www.statenskonstrad.se) (31st
Figure 2 shows a photo of the aquarelle original that was the final model for the mural. By courtesy of Akademiska Hus.
Starting in the lower right corner, following the line, we see fourteen rather compact yellow spheres with flags attached to the surfaces (representing fish egg, according to one researcher), then two fish (became three other fish in the actual mural), two blue chromosomes and three red chromosomes, five green spheres with yellow outgrowths, then a red and yellow DNA-helix, a flying bird, two circular DNA strings and a free part that might merge with another, last we find a planet, probably planet earth in the upper left corner. Every element is connected to the next one by a spiralling line, adjoining the simplest building block of life with planet earth. In the detail richness of the mural, exactness is missing; it is not possible for the spectator to judge what the spherical things are or what the spiralling line represents, except for the concrete animals. There is a conflict between naturalism and the graphical elements. The committee from the department insisted that animals should be a part of the motive while the artist/entrepreneur and the owner of the building wanted only “fictitious” elements to avoid “kindergarten-art”. Although some of the elements of the mural are “fictitious”, still, the message is clear; there is something that
adjoins every being on planet earth with planet earth itself in a holistic way. For the scientist the world should be approached in its smaller part that makes up the holistic whole and there is something that holds everything together, represented by the abstract line. Maybe the abstract line represents evolution and development, from the simple elements to the advanced DNA-helix and from water-living creatures to the flying birds in the sky, resulting in the verdant Earth with an extra-thick biosphere as symbol of the forces of life.
This mural is framed by the measures of the building itself, or maybe the mural eclipses the building, anyhow, the building and the mural cannot be separated and that should satisfy the Swedish National Public Art Council in their aim for site-specificity and that “a r t b e c o m e s a n i n t e g r a l a s p e c t o f n e w a n d r e f u r b i s h e d g o v e r n m e n t p r e m i s e s ”2
. It is like the building has been folded inside out in an attempt to show everything that is on the inside, it cries out a message to the spectator; there is nothing behind the image - this is all there is to see! We have nothing to hide in here!
The spectator will encounter the mural from beneath, looking up from the pavement below. The only elements that are reachable from this physical position are the smaller parts (in the lower right corner), as it is for the biologist who always has to dissect the whole to work with its smaller intelligible parts; the whole world is never graspable, always too complex. On the other hand, the mural encountered as a whole, when approached in the reproduction here for example, or from some distance, gives the spectator the possibility to see the world from outside. From this perspective the mural seems to put the spectator in the place of another planet or maybe a space shuttle as earth is seen from a great distance. I would say that it places scientific man in centre, as he is the only one who can perceive earth from space on his on terms. Also notice, it is not obvious that we see earth from the heliocentric perspective in the mural, not from the sun as centre of our solar system, Earth is shadowed as it is lit from the side by the sun. We see earth from a man made position. This is a shared theme in all elements with exception from the concrete animals that can be seen in nature without science and technology. The chromosomes, DNA-helix and the other building bricks of life are only perceivable for scientific and technological man with his modern knowledge and instruments. But very few of us see these building bricks on our own, we rely on science to show us them, and science seems very keen to do that, to assure us
2
w w w . s t a t e n s k o n s t r a d . s e (31st
that they really have found the building bricks of life, just look at the mural. Could the motive of the mural be seen as manifestation of the powers of science and technology to see and know every part of our cosmos and our bodies, from the smallest part of life to the universe itself? However, Man is missing in the motive; the only place for man is outside the mural as a spectator. There is no “culture” inside the motive, maybe in the same manner as many scientists perceive of science as a “culture of no culture”3
.
The mural is composed of a number of elements reproduced without any vanishing point or given horizon line that would be conventional when mimetically reproducing the world; some of the elements are mimetically presented in the composition. Instead there is the background with potentially five horizon lines reoccurring with even distances between them. This gives the impression of the mural being sliced in layers. Can these layers be interpreted as representing knowledge of different levels, on the molecular level, on the genetic level, on organism level, on ecological level and finally on the cosmological level? Every single level would then be as important as the other levels since there is no foreshortening and the circular DNA is about the same size as earth. In the end, the composition would be fragmented into dead tableaux without the spiralling line; this is bothersome as it is not obvious what the line represents, it holds equal sized elements together making the motive meaningful and the message clear. The line could be a horizon line that transects every element; does this make the line a “horizon of understanding”?4
In the process and discussion on how it would be carried there was another suggestion of the mural but the committee on the Department of Zoology rejected that suggestion, and it is interesting to ask why.
3 Traweek.
Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The world of high energy physicists.
4
Gadamer. Truth and Method.
Figure 3 show a photo of the first suggestion of the mural and was used as starting point for the discussion. By courtesy of Studio Draminsky.
It is easy to see resemblances between the final mural and this proposal from Studio Draminsky. The background and the spiralling line is there and the objects connected by the line are the in some sense the same but very different. These objects are more like Platonic forms5
that were the building bricks of cosmos for Plato,
5 The Platonic solids or
regular polyhedra are the tetrahedron, cube,
octahedron, icosahedron and dodecahedron. Plato’s cosmology is found in the dialogue Timaeus where these five figures are accounted for. The first four solids correspond to the four elements “it is of course obvious to anyone that fire, earth, water, and air are bodies; and all bodies has depth. Depth, moreover, must be bounded by surfaces and every surface that is rectilinear is composed of triangles”. The fifth element, the dodecahedron cannot be constructed in the from triangles as the other four can but from pentagons, “the fifth; the god used it for the whole”, this fifth element hold everything together. Cornford, F. M. (1956). Plato´s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato translated with a running commentary. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul LTD.
and Greek letters used in math and physics, maybe less in the zoology. In this version, the spiralling line in the mural would be the fifth, element the quintessence of a platonic world. Without having the possibility to test it, this proposal might have been accepted in the department of physics but was rejected by the committee of zoologists.I suggest that the difference between this proposal and the final mural illustrates the cosmological span in the biosciences I study in this thesis. This first aesthetic proposal did not resonate with the zoological cosmology. They preferred that cosmos was made up of animals and bio-molecular entities, note that Man is missing in both. Man observes cosmos but does not interfere.
This mural can be viewed as one possible representation of a biological conception of the world, at least as the image that zoology wants to display for the outside spectator. And, the biologists themselves seem to perceive of the mural as a signboard or advertisement rather than a piece of public art. It fits the building and the site so precisely that it becomes invisible as art. In the light of the theory of this thesis, the visual culture of this department overlaps with aesthetic choices and judgements in an illustrative way. Furthermore, tracing the story and preconditions for this mural is illustrative of how the images produced in the laboratories and visual culture will be approach; this is the Foucauldian method to problematize the allegedly unproblematic that will be used in this thesis.
Chapter One: Introduction
This thesis in Cultural Studies of Science will explore the relationships between the cosmology6
of bioscience (conceptions of ontology) and the visual cultures of three bio-scientific laboratories. Bio-scientific knowledge (epistemology) can in some situations be a mediator between cosmology and visual culture but this thesis does not make any claims to make difference between true and false, only to compare the visual culture of three laboratories and connect that to a tentatively shared cosmology of science. I study cosmology as the “shared ground on which this contest (of good and bad science) is waged, how they all can agree on what can be contested”7
. I will show how opinions of what good science is,
sometimes is expressed with aesthetic judgments and visual culture but otherwise will this thesis deal less with the epistemology of bioscience and more with the cosmology. When analyzing decorative images, artworks and judgments of taste I will approach it as aesthetics since it belongs to deliberate choices and less to an immanent visual culture. My main object of inquiry is the visual culture and this thesis will make the visual culture of three laboratories accessible. Many of the images produced and discussed during the fieldwork are included in this thesis, making the lexivisual picture world of bioscience available for the reader. The question that the thesis poses is if there is shared cosmology among the practitioner of these three biosciences, how it is shaped, and if this cosmology condition a particular way to apprehend the world.
Background
Visual culture is part of Culture studies, which is the study of how different groups relate to different cultural practices, artifacts and products. It is how meaning is negotiated, contested, displayed and produced in a cultural, social, economic and historical context. An anthropological concept of culture is used in Cultural studies,
6 From the Greek word kosmos, cosmology “means the theory of the universe as
an ordered whole, and the general laws that govern it. In philosophy, it is taken to mean that part of metaphysics which deals with the idea of the world as a totality of all phenomena in space and time.” In this thesis, where I use anthropological concept of culture, cosmology “emphasize classification and the classificatory principles which link the perceived order of the cosmos directly with the order of social life.” Bernard.
Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. (cosmology)
7
culture as “a whole way of life” (Raymond Williams) and culture as
“signifying practices” (Martin Jay) on many levels and fields. The
aim for the thesis is to explore if there is a shared conception of the world among practitioners of bioscience. Visual culture is not only the theory of images but how “visual meaning involves complex interactions between images and material artifacts, and the various practices of visual culture frequently rely on such interactions”8
. The analysis of the laboratory visual culture is my way to construe a contingent shared conception of the world. The fieldwork will be presented as three photo-philosophical montages9
reflecting the go-alongs performed in the laboratories and laboratory surroundings. These three laboratories, all three belonging to the biosciences, ranging from basic to applied research, could all be characterized as interdisciplinary, transcending the disciplinary boundaries of mathematic, physics, chemistry and biology. It is easy to bring them together under the obvious label of science but the question is if there is a shared conception of ontology that unites them on a mental or cognitive level?
Raising a question; C.P. Snow and the two cultures
One of the first to raise the question whether science could be viewed as a culture that on a social or cultural level is isolated from the rest of society was C. P. Snow in the 1950s. He approached the question by contrasting science to the humanities and arts. Snow says that science and technology is one culture and the humanities and art another culture that has difficulties to understand each other due to cultural differences, his focus lays on a social conflict between “intellectuals” and scientists. The conflict was articulated in a lecture that he held, later to become the book The Two Cultures10
. As a practitioner of science and with his social life among authors and artists, Snow claimed that science/technology and the literature/art was two separate realms that were mutually disinterested in each other due to lack of knowledge and contact surfaces. The problem was partially caused by the educational system where the different disciplines separate students early. But the
8
Rampley. Introduction in Exploring Visual Culture. p.2
9
In `The `Pédofil' of Boa Vista: A Photo-philosophical Montage' Bruno Latour presents his analysis of a fieldwork in Boa Vista as a montage of images. This is somewhat unorthodox in the humanities where images and text seldom occupy the same surfaces in this unproblematic way but belongs more to the natural sciences.
10
Snow. The Two Cultures.
approach that Snow deploy is too crude for this thesis; I will not compare the bioscience with the humanities or other sciences. I am not looking for differences between inside and outside of science but similarities within the biosciences. Nevertheless, science might turn out to be compiled by a number of different visual cultures with different cosmologies.
Snow’s text is a lecture and an articulation of a social situation but it does not contain methods for me to test my hypothesis. From a historical research perspective, it opens up to study science as a culture that is separated from the outside and that has lead many to try to bridge the gap. It is a text that claims that science is a specific culture in the anthropological meaning of the word but other theories and method is necessary to study this culture from the inside. A couple of years later another practitioner of science opened up science to be studied as dependent on social and cultural conventions, rules and conceptions of the world.
Opening up science; Tomas S. Kuhn and paradigms
Cultural differences within science can be approached with the Kuhnian concept of paradigms. Tomas S. Kuhn was one of the first to study the social aspects of science, he did it with an inside perspective. Kuhn was also he a practitioner of science with a PhD in physics but from the mid 1950s he taught in history of science at the University of California at Berkley11
. He published the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 that has been very
influential and could be called a portal work for Science studies. His contribution to science studies is the description of how science changes over time in what he described as revolutions. It is revolutions in the etymological meaning, not the political meaning of the word, “roll back” and begins from scratch with a new paradigm and not change due to a social revolutionary movement. Kuhn’s book is devoid of societal or ideological explanation of changes in science. For Snow, the old and the new paradigm are incommensurable, lacking the possibility to understand each other since a paradigm is a way to understand the world. The change of science is immanent to it. Even if his work mainly focuses on the structures of these revolutions and what causes them, there is much to find in the book on what unites scientist within a paradigm during what he calls normal science. According to Kuhn, no efforts are spared within a paradigm when it comes to forcing nature into conceptual models provided by education,
these conceptual models are indispensable for science to be operative, science has to be like this to be productive.12
The paradigm is a unit that cannot be reduced to its components but should be approached in the way the components are put in use in a conjugational system comparable to a language. Most of the work within a paradigm is dedicated to solve problems that are given by the paradigm; primarily problems that can be solved are articulated. Kuhn compares the problem within the period of normal science with a puzzle, and a puzzle has per se a solution, puzzles without solutions
are not a puzzle. Like scientific problems within a paradigm, problems have solutions; otherwise they are some one else’s problem or can be rejected as metaphysical or too complicated13
. The paradigm is also a conjugational system in the meaning that it provides rules and conditions for what problems that can be articulated. Though, even if these rules cannot be positively determined, they have a family resemblance, Kuhn referring to Wittgenstein.
Scientific education is a bringing-up and a disciplining process where the student learns the paradigmatic rules combined with concrete examples, this is a continuous process through under-graduate courses to doctoral education. The difference being that the problems become more complex but never transcends the paradigmatic rules. The paradigm precedes the rules.
Nevertheless, I will not use the theory of paradigms to approach the cosmology and visual culture of different scientists since Snow’s theory is focusing on the process of diachronic change instead of what scientist think and perceive synchronically. Even if Kuhn did not intend to open up science to be studied from the outside this is what was happened the years that followed with the development of Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) in what can be described as a critique of Kuhn. With Kuhn it became possible to discuss the scientific images from other perspective than rationalist and positivist perspectives. The social study of science is the branch of that development that touches the outskirts of this thesis with Bruno Latour as one of its strongest contributor.
12 Kuhn.
De vetenskapliga revolutionernas struktur. P. 18.
13
Kuhn. De vetenskapliga revolutionernas struktur. P.49
Bruno Latour and Science in the making
Bruno Latour is an indispensable theoretician when doing laboratory fieldwork due to his strives to among other things open up Black Boxes14
and unveil Ready Made Science to show how unproblematic facts and instruments once were Science in the Making15
. The sociologist Latour comes from the outside of science and walk right in to study it as close as possible, not only the policies that surrounds science or the number of publication and their impact rates but the actual content of science. Latour stays close to the practices performed in the laboratory and claims to avoid grandiose theory building and there is also reluctance in Latour to take on mentalist explanations.
“It seems to me that the most powerful explanations, that is those that generate the most out of the least, are the ones that take writing and imaging craftsmanship into account. They are both material and mundane, since they are so practical, so modest, so pervasive, so close to the hands and the eyes that they escape attention.”16
Latour shows how scientific “facts” becomes stabilized through processes that are both social and material, his descriptions tries to “avoid adopting the distinction between ‘technical‘ and ‘social‘”
but is better described as material-semiotic networks. The Latourian perspective can be an elucidating toolbox when I approach the empirical material that is both technical and social. Though, I focus more on the cultural signifying practices and less on social interactions in my analysis. Even if the two many times are inseparable I do not study social hierarchies or social backgrounds but have the broader culture studies approach to my material, nevertheless, sociology is part of culture studies.
Another important point to emphasize is that when using Latour
14
A black box is “a piece of machinery or a set of commands”, Latour lends
the concept from cybernetics and make his own to describe how scientific instruments and theories operate when they are socially unproblematic.
Latour. Science in Action. P.2.
15
Latour contrasts Ready Made Science to Science in the Making to show how scientific certainty has been accomplished. Ready Made Science is unproblematic and stable but once it was Science in the Making, uncertain
and debatable and always under-determined. Latour. Science in Action. In
Introduction.
16
Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing things together . In Representation in
in the analysis I make no difference between facts and non-facts. Latour studies how scientific fact arises and becomes stabilized, showing how facts are constructed, he still makes a difference between facts and non-facts. I make no such difference; instead, my focus is on the researcher’s relationship to visuality in general and laboratory images in particular.
Latour developed a theory of how a scientific images is distributed and used as it is turned into immutable mobile. In this
theoretical approach Latour turned away from the perception of the researcher to the materiality of the image.
“it is not perception which is at stake in this problem of visualization and cognition. New inscriptions, and new ways of perceiving them, are the results of something deeper. If you wish to go out of your way and come back heavily equipped so as to
force others to go out of their ways, the main problem to solve is
that of mobilization. You have to go and to come back with the
“things” if your moves are not to be wasted. But the “things” have to be able to withstand the return trip without withering away. Further requirements: the “things” you gathered and displaced have to be presentable all at once to those you want to convince and who did not go there. In sum, you have to invent objects, which have the properties of being mobile but also i m m u t a b l e, presentable, readable and combinable with one another.”17
The analysis and critique of images that this thesis is drawing on has more in common with feminist and poststructuralist theory from the 1970s and 1980s than with the social studies of science that Latour represents.
Laura Mulvey and the male gaze
When Laura Mulvey published the influential article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema“ in the cinema journal Screen 1975 she combined
psychoanalysis and political feminism and thereby produced a key text for feminist theory and cultural theory. In her own words; “A Political Use of Psychonalysis” for the “Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon”18
. Mulvey uses the Lacanian concepts of the symbolic and the imaginary to dissect Hollywood cinema, mainly from the 1950s
17
Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing things together . In Representation in
Scientific Practice. Ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar. P.6
18
Mulvey. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
but also from the 1940s and 1930s. She uses the famous Lacanian phrase “the unconscious is structured like a language” but rephrases it into a political question “how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of patriarchy?”19
Mulvey shows how Hollywood narrative cinema produces a male gaze immanent to the spectator (the audience), and when the active male drives the narrative in cinema, the spectator identify with this active male. When the woman enters on the screen the narrative is interrupted and she is looked at as an symbol in her erotic passivity, the male character often looks at here from a distance or hidden from her and the camera will adopt his subjective perspective. In this way the male character and the audience spectator will fuse to produce a male gaze within the audience. The audience feels pleasure when employing this active male gaze to look at the passive eroticized woman; she has been reduced to an image.
“Cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distances, editing) cinematic codes creates a gaze, a world and an object.”20
Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to explain the pleasure when using this male gaze, but she claims that other theories too could be used to light up the unconscious of patriarchal society. Psychoanalysis is just her toolbox.
This article, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, is
interesting in a number of ways for this thesis. It is noteworthy that the male gaze does not only belong to men. Also women in the audience will employ this gaze as it is produced by cinema as a apparatus in a patriarchal society. We are all inscribed in this apparatus, men and women. And, Mulvey notes that contemporary film (in the 1970s), how ironic and self-conscious it is, still restricts itself to the formal mise en scène that produce the male gaze. The
conclusion is that the apparatus itself must be challenged. There is no outside position. Secondly, this text establishes a connection between aesthetic pleasure and (cinematic) ontology by introducing a gaze. I will not use psychoanalysis but I will introduce a scientific
19 Mulvey.
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. P. 15
20
gaze when moving from aesthetics and visual culture to ontology. The more specific feminist critique of science was articulated by for example Donna Haraway, Helen Longino and Evelyn Fox Keller, who all belong to the canon in Science Studies but the thesis will relay more on Cultural studies and art theoreticians than classical Science studies theoreticians.
Jonathan Crary and techniques of the observer
Jonathan Crary discerns the observer in a historical context to discover the conditions that makes it possible to observe in the first place. Instead of doing a history of art he makes a history of the observing and the observer of art. Techniques of the Observer
does not take it as its objective to study the artwork or the “idealist notion of an isolable 'perception', but instead the no less problematic phenomenon of the observer. For the problem of the observer is the field on which vision in history can be said to materialize, to become itself visible”21
. By studying artworks, philosophical texts and scientific instrument that were used to entertain the observer in the nineteenth century Crary´s aim is to make visible vision itself and ask “How is the body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, whether social, libidinal, or technological? In what ways is subjectivity becoming as precarious condition of the interface between rationalized systems of exchange and networks of information?” The book does not answer these
questions but writes a history of vision that includes the body. Crary shows how the gaze of the observer of art is dependent on theories, knowledge and instruments; in doing so he prepares the soil for synchronic analysis that can be used for the study of the scientific gaze. Crary uses Foucault in an inspiring way to do a theory construction that makes it possible to unveil the preconditions for the gaze of the art observer.
W.J.T Mitchell and the pictorial turn
W.J.T Mitchell claims that philosophy has taken a “pictorial turn”
after the long engagement with text. Mitchell scrutinizes our relationship to images and what philosophy says of images by comparing images with text in order to find a grammar of imagery, an iconology. Mitchell’s works can be use to study the ideological foundations of the analysis of images reflexively. Mitchell is a
21
Crary. Techniques of the Observer. P. 5.
contemporary literary critic and cultural theorists “that attempts to put the relation of ‘word and image‘ and cultural politics in a larger perspective than contemporary anxieties about television and literacy (…) Iconology asked what images are, how they differ from words, and why it matters even to raise these questions”. There is
also a Picture Theory that “raises the same question with regard to pictures, the concrete, representational objects in which images appear. It asks what a picture is and finds that the answer cannot be thought without extending reflections on texts, particularly on the ways in which text acts like pictures or ‘incorporate‘ pictorial practices and vice versa”22. The picture world of science is a highly
lexivisual world where images are combined with text in a seemingly unproblematic way, Mitchell provides an analytical approach to this lexivisuality of science. But Mitchell avoids claiming that there is a final answer to what images are or that there could be reconciliation between image and text. “Its (picture theory) principal function is disillusionment, the opening of a negative critical space that would reveal how little we understand about pictures and how little difference mere ‘understanding‘ alone is to make”23
. Instead picture theory “ attempts to specify the relation between pictures and discourse understood, among other things, as a relation of power. And “any attempt to grasp ‘the idea of imagery‘ is fated to wrestle with the problem of recursive thinking, for the very idea of an ‘idea‘ is bound up with the notion of imagery.” Many of
the images I find in laboratory visual culture can be seen as “metapictures” as they are images of images or depictions of theory
rather than of a physical object.24 Mitchell makes it possible to go
beyond the images to ideology and theory as he not only problematizes the allegedly unproblematic but also provide a theoretical ground to discuss the relationship between image and text.
22 Mitchell. Picture Theory. P. 4 23 Mitchell. Picture Theory. P. 6 24
Theory and Method
The point of departure for this theory and method chapter is the analytical challenge of how to move between what I have chosen to call places of practice and spaces of thoughts25
. This is an analytical challenge since only what becomes manifest through the manifold of scientific practices is accessible and observable to field work, and discourse analysis, such as writing, illustrating and talking also are discourse practices. From the material that belongs to places of practice I will move to spaces of thoughts. The
introduction of the conceptual couplet of places of practice and spaces of thoughts is motivated by the difficulty to use latent and
manifest, subject and object, or unconscious and conscious, as they all too strongly dichotomize our understanding instead of recognizing the play between different levels. Besides, many of the dichotomy words connote psychoanalysis or Marxist theory. Even though Culture Studies is eclectic in its use of methods, I aim to avoid being too strongly associated with these theories since that influence the reading of the text in an unwanted way.
From the field observations in places of practice I will move to
the intangible space of thoughts where the signifying practice takes
place, as I will show. But places of practice also produce the spaces of scientific thoughts; they are inseparable from the Foucauldian approach I have chosen to use to problematize the allegedly unproblematic visual culture of the biosciences, at least seen from the bio-scientific vantage point.
This theory and method is not a Foucauldian remake but an
25 Place and space are two central concepts in this thesis. They are
implied to have something in common; that they are some kind of delimitation of locality, two ends of the same fibre or two isomers that reflects each other but exists in two different worlds, one tangible and
the other intangible. Drawing from de Certau “A place (lieu) is the order
(of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationship of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place)” Places are stabile, physical
and have a proper location, denoting geographical “real” locations; it is where practices are performed. Spaces on the other hand are intangible
loci of thinking. “Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations
that orient it (…) in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization (…) In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity of a proper” Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. P. 117
application of Foucauldian theory as a “toolbox”26
. Some of the main concepts that will be used to construct this theoretico-methodological apparatus are episteme, dispositif, discursive formation, power/knowledge and practices. Here I will explain how these analytical concepts will be put in use to answer my questions; how the cosmology of science (conceptions of ontology) and bio-scientific knowledge (epistemology) are connected to visual culture of the biosciences and aesthetics and how these four depend on each other when moving between places of practice and spaces of thoughts.
Figure 4 show an illustration of how the triplet of epistemology, aesthetics and ontology are related to visual culture.
To illustrate with images, as above, what can be said in text could be regarded as somewhat problematic for this thesis, since it is in part these kinds of illustrations of knowledge and thinking that I claim to be analysing. Though, this illustration is an image to add to all other images, yet this image stands to challenge the previous
26
Deleuze urges us to use theories as toolboxes in a discussion on theory and practice with Foucault. By interpreting the rest of the conversation,
Foucault seems to agree with Deleuze when claiming that “A theory is exactly
like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate. We don't revise a theory, but construct new ones; we have no choice but to make others.” http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze(31st
of January 2008) The cosmology of the biosciences (ontology)
Bio-scientific knowledge (epistemology)
The visual culture of the biosciences
ones in a quest of multiplicity. This diagram could also be used to contrast the traditional dichotomy of body-soul, flesh-spirit, instinct-reason or impulse-consciousness27
that the reader might think of when I use places of practice and spaces of thought in the
analysis of the empirical material. The diagram above does not directly translate into places of practice and spaces of thought as
they belong to different analytical levels in this thesis. What manifests itself in practice will not be reduced to an effect of a latent ontology or epistemology of bioscience. This is not a psychoanalysis that seeks to reveal and to reduce visual manifestations to the underlying structure but instead a Foucauldian “economy” to describe the mechanisms that binds visual culture-aesthetics, epistemology and ontology together in bioscience, I approach them as if they are dependent on each other. The result of this work is to find out how they are related. Visual culture stands in relation to aesthetics as everyday life relates to feast day. Visual culture is what surrounds laboratory life as way of doing things in an more or less unaware way when aesthetics are deliberate and conscious choices, expressions and judgments.
The Foucauldian tool-box
Some of the concepts mentioned above are introduced in Foucault’s earlier works, episteme and discourse formation for example, while the power/knowledge couplet as well as dispositif belong to his later works, beginning with The History of Sexuality. There are heuristic
reasons to introduce these concepts, even if they are problematic as they represent different analytical approaches but the advantages overweigh the disadvantages. Especially episteme which is a problematic concept due to its strong claims, when using the concept one are necessary claiming to give a foundation for all knowing in a given time, nevertheless, it is indispensable as a theory of “framework of thought”28
.
Foucault was reluctant to his critic’s attempts as well as to his sympathizer’s efforts to positively position him within a given philosophical tradition or school. Anyhow, there is a break that in
27
Foucault. Vilja att veta. P.
28
“This a priori is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of
experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provides man’s everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a
discourse about things that is recognized to be true” Foucault. The Order of
Things, p. 158.
some sense divides his production. This break could probably be positioned in more than one given place but that is the task for the historian and not for this thesis in Culture Studies of Science. The
break that directly affects my construction is the divide between the archaeological and the genealogical method. The two methods could be described to run parallel and tangent each other in choice of objects to study and how to problematize the seemingly unproblematic but are still not without difficulty translated into each other when it comes to methodology and analytical concepts. This complicates the use of Foucault as a toolbox for me.
The main problem is the bio-scientific cosmology, which I approached as if it depends on an episteme, but the empirical material can only be extracted from practices and institution bound up in a social apparatus (dispositif). The concept of episteme as bedrock for all knowledge in a given time is laid bare using the archaeological method, which stays void of practices and institutions, the discourse analysis, relies on historical texts alone. An episteme is a mental structure that underlies all possible knowledge in a given time and, it is a “zeitgeist”. If I use episteme as my only explanation of how the biosciences relate to the visual, then I make claims to explain every science’s relation to the visual in our time, when in fact I am only interested in the biosciences. The elucidation of dispositif as scaffolds for knowledge and power on the other hand, is extracted from particular practices and specific institutions and less from historical texts. So even if episteme and dispositif have a lot in common, both analysing the conditions for knowledge in a given time, this is done with different sets of analytical concepts and I will use concepts from both sets. However, to examine the effects in practice of what Foucault discovered through discourse analysis cannot be done with the same tools. The diachronic discourse analysis of historical texts will not apply to a synchronic analysis of visual culture today for obvious reasons29
. The knowledge/power structure for scientific perception still lie beneath discourse and practice, there is no reason to do a remake, but there
29 Foucault shows in
The history of sexuality: The will to knowledge how power is connected to knowledge and how power is used to produce knowledge. The problematics that his genealogy search to illuminate is the dispositif that upholds the power/knowledge couplet, this is done by writing the history of sexuality. Discourse analysis was appropiate for the diachronic account of power/knowledge disposotif, but to show it synchronically, other methods must be used, nevertheless, it can be the same dispostif that is found.
are many good reasons to use the Foucauldian toolbox to problematize the allegedly unproblematic.
Field Method
The field method used in this thesis is a psycho-geographical mapping30 combined with field work in the form of Go-alongs 31 where
the psycho-geographical map is used as a map for the Go-along, as if it were a map of place, when in fact it is a map of a mental space, in order to find correlations, similarities, differences between
places of practice and spaces of thoughts.
Psycho-geography has its origin in the Situationist movement and Lettrist International in the 1950s France, but the connection to Foucault should be made earlier as both Situationist movement and the Lettrist International shared an interest and a approach to the Imaginary with the Surrealists. Already the surrealists used psycho-geography but is was evolved by the Situationist movement. Foucault explains in an interview the importance of the surrealist Andre Breton for his own work. “The imagination is not so much what is born in the obscure heart of man as it is what arises in the luminous thickness of discourse. And Breton, a swimmer between two worlds, traverse an imaginary space that never been discovered before him.”32
Psycho-geography was for the Situationist movement a way to radically re-apprehend the physical environment with focus on the City. A way that tries to find the physical aspects that shape our mental experiences, i.e. it is a way to move from place of practice to spaces of thoughts as “Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”33
.
I use psycho-geographical mapping to enter the space of thoughts and imagination. On the fieldwork I bring paper for the experimenter to use to explain by drawing “how things really are”. These drawings can be used as maps, for example by asking “this carbohydrate that you drew here, where can we find it in the laboratory?” The psycho-geographical drawing has then become a physical map for me to use to find my way around the laboratory and study the relationship between
30 Debord.
Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. Les Lèvres Nues #6.
31 Kusenback.
Street phenomenology: The go-along as ethnographic research tool.
32 Foucault.
Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology p.
33
Debord. Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
places of practice and spaces of thoughts. To Foucault, the discourse
analysis of historical texts had a similar purpose. In the History of Madness Foucault explains the meaning of images and words for his
method; the essential for a constitution of knowledge is not the progression from observations to constructions of explanatory images or conceptions. On the contrary, it is the (mental) images conveyed through words, in their own power, that has initiated a formation of a structure for perception in which observations is made possible. The structure precedes the observation. This structure of perception is the dispositif in The History of Madness34
, analogue to Episteme in
The Order of Things35. The move from words to mental images are made
possible with discourse analysis in these works36
. Psycho-geographical maps are one of my ways to enter spaces of thoughts, as the examination of the effects in practice of what Foucault discovered through discourse analysis cannot be done with the same tools.
Psychogeography will not be my sole field method as it based on
dérive that means drifting around. That would involve letting my body
be affected by any force in the environment of study, not making any deliberate choices in order to find the forces in the environment that form our experiences37
. This would neither be desirable as I follow other people in order to find out what forms their experiences. Nevertheless, it would be an interesting field method for another study of a laboratory since the laboratory is a place of discipline, an outsider would probably soon find himself confined to a stairway and corridors, metaphorically, the ethnographer turned into an experimental rat. The solution is to go-along with the scientist who is the key to the laboratory and furthermore, without the practitioner no practices are to be seen.
Go-along
When actually following the experimenter around the laboratory and other settings in his everyday scientific life I use the Go-along as a field method. The Go-along has been developed for the ethnographical urban study and is a crossing of interview and participant observation. There are many similarities between the psycho-geographical and the go-along, especially the shared emphasis on the physical environment’s relationship to the mental. It is easy
34 Foucault.
Vansinnets historia under den klassiska epoken.
35 Foucault.
The Order of Things.
36 Foucault.
Vansinnets historia under den klassiska epoken.
37
to see this in Foucault as well; spatiality and institutionalized practices are central to Foucault’s analysis of power in Surveillance and Punish38
and The Birth of the Clinic 39
. Walking through the laboratory, observing, asking questions and socializing, this is neither an interview situation, nor observation; instead it is a go-along. According to Kusenbach, the go-along overcomes the ambiguity when choosing generally from the two methods in ethnography – interview or observation. In the interview situation the object of inquiry is detached from the everyday context, socially and spatially. The context and practices that produces meaning are absent. The material obtained will be limited to the questions the ethnographer raises and to what the object recalls and retells. The other option, observation, will produce less empirical material to work with since not much is said in the laboratory; lengthy periods of silence characterize the material obtained in the digital sound recorder. Laboratory shoptalk is incoherent and the work is hard to follow for an outsider in the laboratory, either the outsider gets in the way or gets lost. Performing the go-along, the ethnographic observer follows the object in the daily scientific life, in this case in the laboratory and its surroundings, taking notes, photos, asking question and trying to blend into the surroundings. In this way it become possible to “unveil the complex layering and filtering of perception: they can help ethnographers reconstruct how personal sets of relevancies guide their informants’ experiences of the social and physical environment in everyday life.”40
Kusenbach stresses the importance of spatiality of everyday life to understand engagement,
“go-alongs offer insights into the texture of spatial practices by revealing the subjects’ various degrees and types of engagement in and with the environment”. And connects spatiality to the social as
the go-along “illuminate the social architecture of natural settings such as neighborhoods. They make visible the complex web of connections between people, that is, their various relationships, groupings and hierarchies; and they reveal how informants situate themselves in the local social landscape”41. It is necessary to go
from observations in the local social landscape and see how these places of practices are connected to the global scientific community
38
Foucault. Övervakning och straff.
39 Foucault.
The Birth of the Clinic.
40 Kusenbach.
Street phenomenology: The go-along as ethnographic research tool.
41 Kusenbach.
Street phenomenology: The go-along as ethnographic research tool.
as science per definition seems to be universal in a unproblematic way for the practitioners of science.
Aesthetics, ontology and epistemology
In the line of argument in this thesis, the three concepts and philosophical spheres; aesthetics, epistemology and ontology, are necessary to understand the introduced scientific gaze. The methodology described above is my hunter’s trap, my experimental setup42
, eclectically designed to momentarily trap the flickering gaze that makes it possible for the scientist to see and say. The go-along and psycho-geographical mapping will show how judgments, statements, scientific diagrams, graphs, images and practices associated with it constitute a visual culture (aesthetics) of bio-science, and this can be construed to find a cosmology of bio-science (ontology) and conceptions of what science is (epistemology) as knowledge depends on what is thought to “really exists”.
Foucault uses a Nietzschean perspective on knowledge and power; that the will to knowledge is a will to power. But he rephrases it and says that there is a pleasure in using one’s power to gain knowledge and, the other way around, when gaining knowledge of someone or something one gain power. The essential here is that there is a pleasure to exercise the power necessary for observing, monitoring, supervising, spying, watching and seeing when this is done in order to gain knowledge. There is a pleasure to see and gain knowledge. In the cases of bioscience there is a pleasure to gaze through the ocular of the microscope and gain knowledge of the specimen on the stage of the microscope. This is knowledge of life. Though, it is not life in the political meaning life has to Foucault, which he connects to power to form Bio-politics or Bio-power.43
Instead, it is knowledge of life dissected and divided by many scientific disciplines; genetics, chemistry, physics, molecular
42
Michel de Certeau points out the nature of experiments and pins down the problem with methodology when working in the no-mansland between practice and theory “An individual science can avoid this direct confrontation. It grants itself a priori the conditions that allow it to encounter things only in its own limited field where it can “verbalize” them. It lies in wait for them in the gridwork of models and hypotheses where it can “make them talk”, and this interrogatory apparatus, like a hunter´s trap, transform their wordlesssilence into “answers”, and hence into language: this is called
experimentation.” Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. P. 61.
43
biology, microbiology, ecology and math to form the biosciences. Knowledge is the “truth of the order of the world” and the “the order of the world” is cosmology.
“The residency of the truth in the dark centre of things is linked, paradoxically, to this sovereign power of the empirical gaze that turns their darkness into light. All light has passed over the thin flame of the eye, which now flickers around solid objects and, in so doing, establishes their place and form”.44
We must ask, when scientists have seen the truth of the world how do they know that it is the truth they have seen? Do peer, textbooks or articles confirm it? How can new knowledge and new images become a part of the structure for perception that allows the scientist to see the world in a scientific way? Because somehow these illustrations will become part of the discourse formation that shapes the cosmology of other bio-scientists.
But “the gaze will be fulfilled in its own truth and will have access to the truth of things if it rests on them in silence, if everything keeps around what it sees. The clinical (or empirical) gaze has the paradoxical ability to hear a language as soon as it perceives a spectacle”45
. For science to be productive as a social apparatus, or dispositif, it must stay invisible and silent for the affiliates of the apparatus; its success is proportional to its ability to make it invisible and silent. Only the objects of study will be visible and speak the truth of the world, but the apparatus that make them visible is invisible46.
The drive for using the scientific gaze is the pleasure to see the truth of the order of the world. Seeing the truth of the world produce pleasure and this forms a communis sensis47
among the members
44 Foucault.
The Birth of the Clinic. In Introduction xv.
45
Foucault. The Birth of the Clinic. P. 132
46
Foucault. Viljan att veta. P. 98
47 "..we must take
sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared [by all
of us], i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought, of everyone else's way of presenting [something], in order
as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general... Now
we do this as follows: we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and [thus] put
ourselves in the position of everyone else..." (Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar) (http://www.sensus-communis.com/) (31st of
January 2008)
of the discourse, a shared sensitivity of what beauty is. Science is the aesthetics of the mind (Gaston Bachelard) and this is expressed in a visual culture of science.
Problematizing theory and method
When I introduce a gaze that connects aesthetics to ontology, it is not the gaze of a unified subject that I am describing, it is rather modalities of seeing produced by the scientific apparatus. There is an important difference here as the gaze of an unified subject implies that there is an essence of the gaze that could be unveiled, when instead it is only modalities of seeing produced by the apparatus. Jonathan Crary describes this as the differences between the Foucaldian and the Debordian way of perceiving visuality in modernity; Guy Debord sought to unveil visuality as the “spectacle” used by capitalism to dupe the masses. For Foucault, this was an all too simplistic way to perceive how power is exercised in an effective way. Rather, power should be analysed as an economic and not as if there is a conspiratory power behind visuality, everything is there to bee seen and power is exercised by producing visuality, not hiding it. In Surveillance and Punish, power is inscribed in the
architecture of the prison, the school and the hospital, there is no single possessor of power for Foucault, only relations where power is exercised48
.
The important difference here is the power with a possessor and power as an economic. This difference could be used to explain the
failure of my first attempt to do a psycho-geographical mapping with one of the professors in the Department of Zoology. This illustrates the Foucauldian struggle of power in our relation, a struggle between a student and a professor.
48
Figure 5 shows the first psycho-geographical map; the instructions was “Visualize the hypothesis: “Fish X exposed to toxin Y in water will show increased growth in weight and length compared to control”. How would you describe this for a research colleague on this piece of paper? Formulas, arrows, flow charts, schematic pictures, text, numbers, artworks or additional image material from other sources, everything is allowed within this 200x200mm. Use many papers if necessary.”
I instructed the professor to “visualize the hypothesis” and I expected to receive a drawing that I have seen so many times when scientists, as I would describe it, visualizes their hypotheses. Instead I received a classical Popperian falsification scheme belonging to the discipline that I represent when I do fieldwork. However, this must only be regarded as a temporary failure for my method; an effect of the power relations established when I do fieldwork. To avoid being reduced to only a biologist, the professor shoved that also he knows philosophy. My method evolved during the entire fieldwork, I return to this in the last chapter.
Whether the professor produced this scheme to show his philosophical skills or to make resistance does not matter, either way he did it out of pleasure. It is either the pleasure that comes from escaping power when it is used to observe, monitor, supervise, spy, watch or see in order to gain knowledge, as I tried to do. Or, it is the pleasure that comes from using ones knowledge of others as
he made use of what he knew of my background or what he knows of philosophy.49
My presence and my questions are as much the only solution as an obstacle for the fieldwork. I can only agree with the observations made by Latour concerning the presence of the fieldworker in the l a b o r a t o r y , “an observer who declares himself to be an ‘anthropologist of science‘ must be a source of particular consternation.”50
And I note, as a biologist, which used to be my disciplinary belonging, I had full access to the practices and discourse of biology, as they were my own, but I had no distance. As an ethnographic fieldworker I am pushed away from biology, thereby gaining some distance, but at the same time being expelled from the intra-disciplinary discourse.
The feminist saving clause
When writing of scientists, observers and practitioners in general I have chosen to denote them with masculine pronoun, I do not claim that the choice is arbitrary but I choose to ignore the gender implication of this choice for the time being.
49
Foucault. Viljan att veta. P. 87.
50
Latour also notes that the outsider/student who is “working towards final admission into the scientific profession (…) is easily accommodated (…) however for outsiders who are completely ignorant of science and do not aspire to join the ranks of professional scientists the situation is rather different (…) outsiders have simply no business probing the activities of
Chapter Two: The Zoologist
The montage of images and text reflect two different go-along series, they follow two different experiments employed to answer the same scientific question; the question of early evolution of vertebrates. How shark, eelpout, lake sturgeon and lamprey are related, as they all are belonging to a critical group of early vertebrates where the genealogy is indecisive. In practice, two different experimental techniques were used in these two experiments, SEM – Scanning Electron Microscopy and TEM – Transmission Electron Microscopy. In the first experiment the researcher looked at the specimen as if they were a landscape that we fly over. The second experiment is the slicing of a body in sections to study tissues. Both these two ways of looking at a specimen are dependent on knowledge of zoology51
and practical skills of how to handle the electron microscopes and preparation of specimen.
One aspect that caught my interest from the start of this fieldwork was the fact that the researcher is working with genetics and comparative zoology. The first, a symbol for modern biology and the latter, the discipline that inaugurated the modern episteme of biology, according to Foucault who claims that the modern episteme in this knowledge realm was made possible by the birth of comparative zoology. “One day, towards the end of the eighteenth century, Cuvier was to topple the glass jars of the Museum, smash them open and dissect all the form of animal visibility that the Classical age had preserve in them”52
, this iconoclastic gesture illustrates the move from one episteme to the other for Foucault, from Natural history to Biology. The laboratory work performed by this researcher traverse this modern episteme. It is up to this go-along to study if this causes tension in his work or if Foucault’s hypothesis of episteme is applicable at all in practice. Even if the practices he performs belong to the same episteme, the viscosity of history, as Foucault
51
The discussion in the 60s on how observations are theory-laden is
illustrated by this go-along. Kuhn claimed in The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions that theory precedes both experimental design and observation.
52Foucault uses Cuvier as symbol for the epistemic rupture that separates
natural history and biology and also the invention of life (p.138). Life did not exist (p.160) before the major functions of the animal organism (respiration, locomotion, digestion, and circulation) (p.264) became the foundation for the knowledge of diversity in animal. Linnaeus was the symbol for natural history where knowledge of diversity was made intelligible by outer characteristics systematically staged in the herbarium. Michel
Foucault, The Order of Things.
puts it, might make it hard for older practices and theories to work alongside with contemporary practices and theories53, if we still live
in the modern episteme at all. This chapter will foremost describe how knowledge is produced in the dark room where the microscope is placed, what it is that happens when “placing a specimen on the instrument’s stage and closing one eye to peer through the viewfinder (…) the microscopic specimen is apparently stripped of its corporeality, its function, and its history even as it serves as a final proof”54. It is this relationship that is interesting, how the
microscopist relates to the objects placed on the stage of the microscope and how knowledge is produced in this situation. Note that the experimenter seldom closes one eye to peer through the viewfinder today; instead a digital photomicrograph is displayed on a screen where it can be rotated, twisted, zoomed, played with, shared and transformed in a number of ways.
The map
I will focus on the time spent in the microscopy room. In here the researcher I am following used the image below as a psycho-geographic map for the first experiment; it was printed on paper and he made notes on it in order to avoid getting lost in the detailed topography of the fish eye on the screen. Nothing else was drawn. But I will also archeologically follow the screen image backwards to show the necessary preconditions for its existence.
Figure 6 This is the SEM image of a fisheye that was used a psycho-geographical map. By courtesy of Department of Zoology, University of Lund
53 Michel Foucault,
The Order of Things.
54
