Asdal's Incremental Latour Enhancement

Not to beat a dead horse, but I was surprised by what I heard in class as something of an out of hand dismissal of Kristin Asdal's claim on the grounds that it fails to offer anything truly contrary or "new" to Latour's black box. While I appreciate that networky strategies are all about a constant process of (re)evaluation, this type of knee-jerk condescension fails to differ from “old-world” science in any significant way. Rather would I expect students of Latour to appreciate any additional contributions on both their own merits as well as anything they may have to offer, including nuance. I certainly would not expect such a crass assumption that she was simply stirring up trouble by eschewing Latour while simultaneously trumpeting his concepts as her own. Maybe college students might think they could get away with that, but what professional journal would fail to see through such a self-serving strategy? We have seen political wrangling as a very real aspect of “mobilizing the world,” but I thought a major point of this exercise in Science Philosophy was to apprehend the potential value of any relevant contributions to upstream OR downstream process; put another way, have we not been prepared be more suspicious of apparent black boxes in favor of a more fluid concept of nature-states? Is a claim's relative weight merely proportional to its effectiveness as a counter-argument?

For all the hairsplitting about her terminology (which no doubt is pointless to debate without her own elucidation here or elsewhere), I particularly valued Asdal's contribution even if for no other reason than that it served to clarify by paraphrasal the essential core of Latour's black box. I would even be surprised to find that Latour was not himself influenced by her other primarily quoted source, Michel Foucault, particularly as she points out, relative to actor-network theory, that Foucault regards human practices within the context of relations (125). Relations are in fact at the heart of her argument, especially with “the ways in which enactments of nature and the enactments of economy go together” and how “Nature is grasped as a relational effect of its relations to economy, or rather accounting and economies, in the plural” (124).

Moreover she opines, “What we tend to call politics very often turns out to be another science, and by studying politics and administration empirically, we can explore natural science in its co-production, its relation, to ‘the economy’” (125). I believe this alone helps to push Latour's argument further downstream by democratizing what it means to be “a science” within the process of advancing webworky claims. It is perhaps important to note here that she does not fetter herself much with the concept of claims. Aspects of Nature are simply quantifiable in response to conflicting natures (or story lines) and Nature-wholes are the paradigms resulting from negotiations between equally viable disciplines. She is more concerned with negotiated outcomes of institutional consciousness derived from the same source data yet motivated by differing principles balanced against each other.

Perhaps Asdal fails to adequately differentiate herself when she claims to “turn the philosophical argument of Latour on its head...by treating...the emergence of this new Nature-whole...empirically and historically” (124), but this is only the preparatory half of her approach. Latour does indeed take Nature as his starting point in his piece on Circulating References, signifying its “out-there-ness,” while she prefers to view Nature as “the outcome — a consequence of a series of practices and transformations.” She admits to drawing upon Latour and even fails to note Latour's likely agreement with “social theories on the politics of nature [which contend that] 'nature' can only be grasped indirectly through the intermediaries of science” (attributed to U. Beck, Risk-society: Towards a New Modernity, 1992).

Rather she is concerned with “demonstrat[ing] the rich confusion in the making of a specific version of out-there-ness...which, literally, may be said to have been the result of this endeavour” (124). Where Asdal succeeds is her cogent delineation of how “objects of nature could potentially grow in size and significance, to the extent that they could touch upon and interfere with the factory” (125), due to its emmissions of flourine killing local farmers' animals. “What was at stake was not an external ‘nature’, a nature ‘out-there’, but rather two forms of economic life, two ways of living, in confrontation with each other.” It is in this way, she suggests, that the “politics of nature emerged in relation to industry and the factory.” Similarly, “ecology played an important role in enacting a specific whole, in relation, competition and confrontation, with another abstract space, namely the economy” (126) as the critical load map was squared off against cost-effectiveness.

Initial Thoughts on Circulating References

By contrasting the field and hotel restaurant settings, LaTour illustrates the difference between fieldwork and laboritory experimentation while hinting at their profound interconnectedness: in the field, scientists appear to confront Nature directly, without (at first) clear points of reference, while in the "lab" they have the luxury of reliance upon several black-box precedents of various disciplines like "trigonometry, cartography and geography" to locate the boundaries of their specific area of study (both a physical locale and a contained arena for exploration of evidence to support abstracted claims). Both settings are indispensable towards providing coherent connections between active Nature and scientific investigation, as the "lab" contains the black-boxes that aid in definition and settling of study parameters, while points of reference in the field of experienced Nature serve to provide the organizing framework or syntax by which observations will be articulated for interpretation within the context of reasonable claims. Reference points at all levels are necessary for ensuring certainty of containment, rather empirical "controls," as well as credible assurance of context.

He also uses the setting of the hotel restaurant as both a metaphoric and concret example of a field from the point of view of its owner by demonstrating the practice of mapping this terrain by discreetly identifying each table with its own referential number marking (or inscription), not unlike the tags tacked onto the nearby forest trees, in order to fascillitate reliable and consistent navigation within its boundaries of operation. Both of these fields further serve as meeting places for individuals with differing professional agendas, languages, and educational backgrounds, yet these are staging grounds for successful deployment of resources as well as accomplishment of individual tasks through faithful coordination and thoughtful communication.

Moreover, LaTour begins to draw our attention to the parallel, symbolic gesture of finger-pointing, in both theaters of activity, as perhaps the essential genesis of discourse through indication of this or that point of interest of which locale is more than geographic, but also intrinsically referential. The importance of LaTour's inquiry is to examine not only at what it is exactly that a scientist believes s/he is pointing but rather how these points of reference intersect and react with applied ontologies to stimulate dialogs between inscribed data, perceived observations, black-boxes, and claims which are literally and figuratively "brought to the table" of field expeditions.

Will LaTour go so far as to draw deeper parallels between field work and laboratory experiment beyond universality of reliance upon inscriptions, or will he portray these unique science activities as fundamentally differential? In lieu of multiply applicable black-boxes, field-work must certainly rely upon some pre-defined regularity of dispersion of points of reference, as surveys of every kind must be protected from latent bias that could insidiously distort data array inscriptions. Will black-boxes then be considered points of reference (even as they are in the lab) upon which decisions about such data collection must be derived?

Debut Hurray

Checked Banweb tonight and discovered an open seat to register for.
Should have course texts in my possession by tomorrow, er, today
in my following class, Hist. of Modern Science w/ Richard Beyler.