De Abaete

[editar] Established Sentiments, Alternative Agendas and Politics of Concretisation

Casper Bruun Jensen

(Submitted to Configurations)

In this paper I am interested in discussing some of the political or practical efficacies, which constructivist science and technology studies (STS) is imagined or intended to have. I refer to the ways in which authors make arguments and claims about such efficacies as politics of concretisation; concretisation of why, how, and in which circumstances it actually matters to be a constructivist. As social science and humanities research is increasingly called upon to legitimate its usefulness and relevance in broader societal terms, for instance under the banner of mode 2 knowledge production (Nowotny 2001), this discussion, similarly, appears increasingly important. Clearly it matters which argumentative resources STS, cultural studies and cultural anthropology have access to and draw upon when defining their disciplines and their relationships to other social and political arenas.

The problem field for the argument here presented can be delineated by juxtaposing two constructivist arguments made by literary theorist and intellectual historian Barbara Herrnstein Smith, on the one hand, and philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers on the other. The first is from Smith’s article “Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology” (Smith 2002). In this piece, Smith survey a number of putatively radical contemporary arguments on the current academic scene, and suggests that

We can derive some sense of the way intellectual life is experienced in an era from the recurrence of certain metaphors to describe its conduct – for example, the frequency with which, in our own time, intellectual projects and achievements are described in terms of navigational finesse: the charting of passages between extremes, the steering of middle courses, the avoidance of the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis (Smith 2002: 187)

As Smith shows the capacity for moderation is often praised by commentators precisely because of its “extremity avoidance”. But she is far from convinced by the strategy. For as she argues, such “navigational feats risk becoming not so much a steering-between as a steering-in-two-directions-at-the-same-time” (187); it is such self-induced ambiguity with regards to where one is steering that she terms “cutting-edge equivocation”, and she defines her stance as a defence of extremity:

Conversely, what gives many of the “extreme” proposals their conceptual power is, among other things, precisely their extremity – that is, the unhedged explicitness of their questioning or rejection of various traditional ideas, and the consistency of the alternative ideas they develop. Contrary to what the term extreme may suggest, these intellectual virtues are the product not of uncontrolled excess or exhibitionist derring-do but, rather, of an effort at clear and precise formulation and a rigorous working-through of theoretical and practical implications – at least where such characteristics are in fact displayed. The intellectual virtues of some challenges to orthodoxy, “extreme” or otherwise, may, of course, be quite meager (Smith 2002: 191-2).

The problem Isabelle Stengers defines for herself in The Invention of Modern Science is quite different. Yet, she is also concerned with defining the parameters within which constructivist analysis can fruitfully operate. In this connection she retrieves what she calls the “Leibnizian constraint”, “according to which philosophy should not have as its ideal the ‘reversal of established sentiments’”. (Stengers 2000: 15). As Stengers remarks: “few philosophical statements have been as badly viewed as this one” (15). Gilles Deleuze, for instance, characterised it as Leibniz’ “shameful declaration”. But yet, she continues, “it is easy to ‘speak the truth’ against established sentiments, and then to be proud of the effects of hatred, ressentiment, and panicked rigidity one has aroused as so many proofs that one has ‘reached the beast’ – even at the price of persecution, since the martyr and the truth are good bedfellows” (15). How to read these two formulations together? Perhaps, they could be easily taken to suggest opposite strategies for dealing with issues in science and technology; where Smith would represent the raving iconoclast, Stengers would be the figure of moderation.(1) Yet this interpretation would be incorrect, for no one is less (traditionally) critical than Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and few contemporary intellectuals are, in certain respects, quite as radical as Isabelle Stengers. At the end of this paper, I return to explore the topos opened up by their diverging arguments, with respect to the theoretical, practical, and therefore political and normative capacities it may engender.

The topic is important because social science and humanities research is increasingly publicly discussed in terms of the usefulness and value they are seen as capable of providing, while the terms of evaluation are rarely opened up for scrutiny and remain narrowly defined. Such definitional work has consequences on many levels; from the individual researcher struggling to do research on a “useless” topic to the relative apportioning of funds among disciplines and institutions and the infrastructure of education more generally. The concretisation of disciplinary capacities are obviously not controlled solely from within.Nevertheless, arguments generated from within fields such as STS, cultural studies or social anthropology about the kinds of goods they are capable of providing take part in shaping public and political understandings of what ought to be expected from such fields. Among other ways, this is done through rhetorical constructions of these fields, which show the importance of specific kinds of research and their potential societal contributions, and thereby link it up with other fields and interests in various ways.(2)

Below I exemplify some of these ways in which this happens and some of its consequences in recent “normative” STS, exemplified by the work of Marc Berg. Berg is a social theorist who has been a pioneer in making sophisticated analyses of complex sociotechnical arrangements involving IT in health care (for example Berg and Timmermans 2000). I choose his work as an entry point for discussing politics of concretisation precisely because he has increasingly urged that his studies are of special normative and practical merit.

I use the term politics of concretisation to characterise the relations a text (or other pronouncement) tries to establish between itself, its intellectual environment, and its (hoped-for) readers. I am particularly interested in capturing the rhetorical tendencies exhibited as one pronounces on the strengths of one’s research, and emphasises the goods that it provides. Often this is done in explicit or implicit juxtaposition with other studies, which are presented as failing to meet a set of specified values and which one, concurrently, can claim to supersede. Politics of concretisation thus involves at least two aspects. First, they illuminate how an author works to control the relation between his text and its reader by providing guidelines for how it should be read. And second they show how an author attempts to demonstrate some form of superiority or other through his capacity to deliver according to these guidelines in a better manner than comparable texts.

Politics of concretisation are manifested in very variable ways, but in my estimation they take two main forms in connection with present constructivist and cultural studies in science and technology. Both of these lean on a sense of the merit of being “normative”. The first of these forms is most readily available from scholars of overt political orientation, and it has been used to argue that while such ‘approaches’ as post-structuralism, post-humanism, or constructivism have perhaps provided some insights, their value is nevertheless limited because they fail to engage critically with the powers that be. This is the well-known charge of “complicity”. The second orientation is often found in the work from researchers located in practical or “applied” environs, such as policy institutions or management departments. Here, too, it is repeatedly argued that such studies fail to properly cash out their value; but in this version of normative argumentation this is because they are viewed as insufficiently capable of providing practical guidelines for how to improve some set of affairs, such as, in Marc Berg’s case, the use of IT in health care. To remedy these variably conceived deficiencies such arguments regularly claim to go “beyond” the above-mentioned designations, or more specifically, in the case of STS, beyond the work of Bruno Latour, actor-network theory, and so forth (e.g. Berg 1996, Monteiro and Hanseth 1995).

The remainder of the text has the following steps. First, I identify two sorts of normativity in constructivist STS, which, as a shorthand, I refer to as “political” and “practical”. I exemplify a version of the former in the work of Donna Haraway, and discuss its principled refusal to be too quickly or literally practical. Marc Berg, however, has argued that it is urgently important to make STS practically useful. In section five I analyse some of the rhetorical complications arising from his attempt to convey the benefits of a sociotechnical approach to an audience of medical informaticians.

There is increasing constructivist agreement that research should not be perceived as representing other fields through a “god’s eye perspective”, but should be seen rather as located “next to” them. This is entailed in the mode 2 argumentation, according to which knowledge exists on a transdisciplinary playing field, inhabited by multiple perspectives and kinds of expertise.

However, in section six I argue that this does not entail that STS research has a specific obligation to become prescriptive. On the contrary, the emerging agreement that intellectual labour is not radically detached from other sorts of work makes it increasingly important for such endeavours to maintain a non-prescriptive breathing space (Strathern 2004). In this argument, the value of constructivist STS-studies can be located, to a large measure, in its singular stance of symmetry, which in its basic form states that: “explanations of true and false beliefs should refer to the same kinds of causes” (Bloor, 1976). In its extended form, proposed by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour it suggests that analysts should remain agnostic not only with respect to the truth and falseness of claims, but should also abstain from starting analyses with pre-conceptions of what constituted society or nature. Rather, one should follow actors, whoever they might be, and watch them form surprising socio-technical assemblages. This principle of generalized symmetry points towards the exploration of practical ontologies, in which stable networks are the emergent result of the interactions between actors, both humans and others (Jensen 2004). Each case will call for a new explanation, which can only be made by following in detail such interactions (Latour 1988). Far from sidestepping or evading normative issues, such attentiveness to specificity arguably allows such studies to offer effective suggestions for how to redefine what counts as political, practical, and relevant.

In section seven, I follow Haraway, Smith and Stengers in arguing that while constructivism makes an especially prescriptive and normative stance impossible to uphold, it points in the direction of an attentive and humorous approach to knowledge claims and political aspirations both in our own fields and others. Such a humorous disposition, I suggest, is conducive to engaging actively and relevantly with issues of societal importance.

2. Normative Questions in STS

One can observe a heightening interest, both in STS and neighbouring fields such as cultural studies and social anthropology, as to the question of how to be practical in doing intellectual work. It is itself remarkable and worth inquiry that this question is increasingly raised in such terms, since they rely on a number of distinctions between, for example, mind and body, the ideal and the material, and so forth, which have been extensively problematised from within these fields. Various explanations for the (recovered) felt need to connect what is viewed as the abstract labour of thought with the concrete work of some real life practice or other; that is, to “produce” something practical, could undoubtedly be constructed, and would certainly be relevant.(3) But rather than looking for causes, I want emphasise a symptom, which can be described by inverting one of Isabelle Stengers formulations.

Stengers has suggested that “nothing is easier for a modern person than to be tolerant”, a formulation I discuss in detail in section seven. First, however, I will entertain the idea that a corollary to this suggestion is that few things seem more important to a number of politically motivated intellectuals, than to remedy this perceived deficiency by becoming (again, perhaps, or for the first time) duly normative.

Normativity takes multiple shapes, but I want to here mention two broad kinds, which may in practice overlap. The first can be referred to as political or critical, as it is regularly inspired by left-wing thought in general, and Marxism in particular, and is embraced by self-described radical scholars (e.g. Cohen 1999, Kirby 1989). The second could be called practical or instrumental, and is associated with the question of how to accomplish some tasks or other better, or more efficiently, according to some agenda; bureaucratic, corporate, or emancipating (e.g., Berg 2004, Ciborra 2000).

In a discussion piece considering the work of Bruno Latour, Marc Berg has posed a number of questions, which can be taken as introductory for a discussion of normativity in and of constructivist science and technology studies. Berg frames Latour as a residual modernist, because “although Latour would be the last to deny that every representation is also an intervention, his work does breathe the ghost of that denial” (Berg 1996: 256). He suggests, referencing Donna Haraway, that “the inseparable connection between depiction and intervention should be embraced rather than fled from” (256) and urges Latour “to spell out the political implications of his owncreations” (256). How, wonders Berg, “can theories like these be put to work? And anticipating a topic that will be taken up later, he asks, “In the case of (information) technologies for work practices, for example, is there any way in which such insights can be drawn upon to design better technologies, for example, or to implement them more successfully?” (256).

In the argument Berg refers to a version of normativity formulated, as he sees it, in Donna Haraway’s work on cyborg feminism, and he wants to bring her political sensitivity to bear on themes relating to technology use in health care. Specifically, he wants to associate her question of the normative with his interest in making better IT systems and ensuring better implementation procedures. Thus Haraway’s political ideas are transported and translated into a realm of practical application, which, as I will indicate in the next section, is somewhat foreign to her own project. This is not problematic as such – people borrow concepts and ideas from each other all the time, and bring them to bear on new settings – but it opens the question of whether Berg can sensibly use Haraway in his argument against Latour’s putative residual modernism. This use is troublesome because Haraway’s own formulations far from offering practical suggestions for their application explicitly argue against such use.

3. Normativity as Determined Ambivalence

Genealogy aims to unfix the terms of the contemporary political situation, and it does so from a particular normative set of investments; but it doesn’t tell us what is to be done, or even what is to be valued. It does not replace the truths and convictions it renders historically contingent and discursively containing; rather, it questions whether truths and convictions make up the right ethos for critical political consciousness. Should these challenges constitute a source of political anxiety for left intellectuals? I think otherwise (Brown 2001: 120)

To illustrate some of these differences, I start by discussing a few aspects of Haraway’s “Mice into Wormholes: A Comment on the Nature of No Nature”, a well-known article which introduces the OncoMouse™, a rodent that has by now become famous in cultural studies and STS-circles (Haraway 1998: 209-45).(4)

While this text points continually to political issues it does so in a determinedly ambivalent manner, which alternates between rather simple principled stances towards certain issues and the subsequent complication of those same issues. This can be exemplified in connection with the discussion of the famous OncoMouse™, which qua patented animal Haraway in stated principle opposes, but in textual actuality only sort of opposes.

Thus, on the one hand the ethical stance is clear as daylight: "I oppose patenting of animals, human genes, and much genetic material” (218). Yet this message co-exists with a pragmatic sensibility, as when is pointed out that: “Whether or not I agree to her existence and use, s/he suffers, physically, repeatedly, and profoundly, that I and my sisters may live.” (224). Clear-cut stances are out of the question, then, for both mice and women suffer, the former sacrificed to save the latter. In evaluating the tension between these ethical and pragmatic issues, Haraway considers the fact that mice have “rodent feelings” and “mousy cognition”:

I do not think that fact makes using the mice as research organisms morally impossible, but I believe we must take responsibility for using living being in these ways and not talk, write, and act as if OncoMouse™, or other kinds of laboratory animals were simply test systems, tools, means to brainier mammals’ ends, and commodities (225-6)

The array of statements of increasing complexity here delineated certainly elicits the political interests and investments of the author. Haraway is decidedly unworried about offering “normative” statements regarding the state of affairs she discusses. However, her clear or simple political propositions never stand alone; either they run in parallel with a set of qualifications, or they remain in an oblique relationship with other textual elements. The result is that her stance towards practical, pragmatic, or, indeed, practice-guiding issues remain thoroughly obscure. Read in the hope of finding such ammunition, one comes away disappointed: Haraway seems to both oppose the OncoMouse™ and not necessarily oppose it; to agree that it is morally reprehensible to experiment with these mice, while simultaneously recognising that since it is done anyway, with (some) benefits for (some) women, then we should take responsibility for them. How should we act, practically, in this complex situation? At the end of the essay, we do not know. Lest it be misunderstood, the purpose of drawing attention to this tension is not to criticise Haraway for not being normative enough after all. It is rather to point to her quite different conception of what normativity entails: the definition of new and relevant political issues that readers will be “forced, kicking and screaming to notice” (Haraway 1991: 199). In her work the facilitation of such noticing is the normative point because: “The power to define what is technical and what is political is at the heart of technoscience” (1997: 231).

Haraway wants at all cost to avoid the fallacy of misplaced concretism, as can be witnessed not least in her highly metaphorical and convoluted writing style. But the point is also made explicit, when she describes Modest Witness as: “In its most basic sense, … my exercise regime and self-help manual for how not to be literal-minded” (Haraway 1997: 15). This characterisation poses a challenge to those who would like to adopt it as a model for practical normativity, because it emphasises that intellectual work, no matter how substantive and elegant does not, and cannot, translate directly or easily into this kind of efficacy.

4. Concretising the Normative: From “Political” to “Practical”

In his critique of Bruno Latour’s “lingering modernism”, Marc Berg has taken on himself the task of rendering constructivist STS-insights relevant in the setting of Dutch health care. Specifically he wants to participate in improving its information infrastructure, while also theorising the possibility of this efficacy.

As will be recalled he argued that the “inseparable connection between depiction and intervention should be embraced rather than fled from”. But what he has committed to doing is, in some sense, considerably more difficult to accomplish than Haraway’s task. As we saw she viewed her job as one of opening up avenues of investigation, while also indicating the political issues she believes these would need to take into account. Berg’s task, however, is the much more literal minded one of using STS theory to make better IT systems and ensure better implementation processes.

A manner of questioning this idea exists within the actor-network theoretical vocabulary, as it suggests that the attempt to apply anything to anything else will always result in an unforeseen outcome. It is implied in the alternative designation of actor-network theory as the sociology of translation. This suggests that, even if Latour’s analyses are applied with the purpose of securing specific organizational effects, the outcome of this attempt is nevertheless bound to offer surprises since the intervention itself transforms the organizational playing field (e.g. Berg 1996). While these surprises may be pleasant or unpleasant they occur inevitably; Latour has called their effect the “slight surprise of action” (Latour 1999). However, knowing that one is not fully in control need not, of course, detain one from setting to work. In the following I survey some of the interventions recently described by Marc Berg in light of his argument that STS both can and should be more prescriptive and interventionist than is presently the case.

5. Practical Heterogeneity and Abstract Practicality

I take my examples from the article “Implementing Information Systems in Health Care Organizations: Myths and Challenges”, directed at the medical informatics community through its publication in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.(5) The paper has two aims. Given that the implementation of patient care information systems seems to be always a daunting task, it wants to first discuss three myths, which regularly continue to guide and “hamper implementation processes” (abstract) and, second, to explore the alternative guidelines for such processes, which could come out of a “sociotechnical approach” (144).

Before the explosion of myths and subsequent re-building of the landscape of medical informatics can take place, Berg formulates two caveats, both concerning the measure of “success” in relation to implementation. This is important because, in a nominalist gesture, “[the] final decision is about the attachment of the label “success” or “failure” (or anything in-between) to a particular situation” (144). So “success” is not a simple thing, but is rather multi-dimensional: it can have to do with

effectiveness, efficiency, organizational attitudes and commitment, worker satisfaction, patient satisfaction – and not all parties in and outside of the implementing organization may agree about which dimension should be the most relevant (145)

This point is typical STS-fare in its stressing of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of actors, aims and measures, but it is mixed up with the admission that

It is of course also possible to be less relativistic, and to set a success measure outside of an organization’s own deliberations…Only in this way, after all, can one compare different implementation processes (144)

The claim exemplifies a willingness to let go of the STS insight in order to secure a soothing rhetorical effect on behalf of the more rationalist inclined practitioners of medical informatics. It enables readers to re-assure themselves that that, after all, is what they are interested in accomplishing, and that their particular endeavours are therefore not included in the otherwise argued for relativistic field.

Berg is put in a difficult situation by this assurance, for in his second caveat he asks, “how successful are success factors?” (146). While on the one hand he wants to argue “not so important after all”, he has already opened the possibility that this answer can co-exist with “quite important” or, indeed, “crucial for some purposes”. Berg becomes progressively entangled in the ramifications of this initial admission, as he introduces his main argument against the three prevalent myths, identified in relation with implementation and evaluation processes. For what he has termed myths are precisely the tacit assumptions that practitioners of medical informatics rely on in their work to develop, implement and assess new health care technologies. Thus he suggests that:

This is not to say that we cannot outline certain insights that seem to be a sine qua non to the realization of successful systems, however, defined. Indeed, in the following paragraph some of these insights will be discussed in the form of prevalent ‘myths’ that stand in the way of fruitful implementation (146)

Berg’s myths are in fact the everyday assumptions of his medical informatics readers and the elucidation of this point is the main contribution of the article: it is what opens up for an alternative formulation of the challenges of medical informatics. In the sentence just cited, which immediately precedes the statement of this demythologising aim, however, these myths are rendered equal to “certain insights that seem to be a sine qua non to the realisation of successful systems”.

Are they then valuable insights or myths or, indeed, ‘myths’ – where the inverted commas work to guard against the dangerous idea that he really think the mythical assumptions of medical informaticians are, well, mythical? Again, are the insights really discussed in the form of myths, or are they clarified in contradistinction to prevalent myths? In other words, are the myths really insights, or is the insight, rather, that the ‘myths’ are really myths?

From the point of view of constructivist STS, there is of course no doubt that the latter is the case. The equivocation arises because the argument has been arranged in such a way that the stated goal is to replace one set of assumptions with an alternative set whose advantages can be argued from such a point of view, while the implications of these assumptions are elided in order to not offend the sensitivities of the relevant set of readers. The article nevertheless continues to elaborate the myths; that “PCIS implementation is the technical realisation of a planned system in an organization”, that “you can leave IS implementation to the IT department” and that “IS implementation can be planned including the required organizational redesign”, in a manner, which leaves no doubt as to Berg’s convictions concerning their myth-ness.

I turn now to the “Conclusion: The Challenge”. It can be first noted, as indicated in the headline, that the normative implications are spelled out here not as a set of practical recommendations, but rather in terms of a future common challenge. The challenge is to recognise implementation and development projects as mutually transforming all participants in the process, and to see them as a “balancing act between setting goals and targets for the implementations”, while “stimulating the mutual learning processes that will inevitably transform these goals and targets” (154).

Berg’s conclusions as regards these challenges are in significant accord with arguments I shall develop in the remainder of the text, notably in the suggestion that “accepting, and even drawing upon, th[e] inevitable uncertainty might be the hardest lesson to learn” (154), and he goes so far as to suggest that “searching for critical success or failure factors reinstalls exactly the urge for control that we should abandon, or at least mitigate, in order for the full potential of IS synergy to emerge” (154-55).

But they are not manifestly more normative or practical than those of other STS researchers (e.g. Fujimura 1991, Star and Ruhleder 1996, Suchman, 1993). Yet, the effort to concretise them as if they were, have given Berg significant rhetorical leverage both inside and outside STS. Inside STS, it has enabled critiques of Latour and others (Berg 1998) for failing to be duly normative and practical. Outside STS it has enabled the formulation of arguments, which would not fare well inside, for example that one can be simultaneously relativist and realist about success measures, and that the realization of this double vision enables wholly new sociotechnical possibilities for Dutch health care.

Berg’s strategy has had tremendous effect. Indeed, he has become increasingly influential among health informaticians, managers and policy-makers while winning the Robert Merton Professional Book Award from the American Sociological Association for The Gold Standard: The Challenge of Evidence-Based Medicine and Standardization in Health Care, co-written with Stefan Timmermans, which up-scaled the attack on “non-normative” sociology.

In tandem with this knowledge translation, however, it has become progressively more difficult to see relations between his practical achievements and STS insights. By 2005, Berg has become fully enmeshed in the re-organization of Dutch health care, including work such as developing standardized care paths and performance indicators (Berg et al 2004), is harder and harder to distinguish from health care consultancy. He has drawn extensively on the repertoires of normativity, usefulness and practicality and STS knowledge has certainly been translated in this process. As we shall see below he has also argued that this direction ought to be taken as a model for otherwise irrelevant social research. The question to be engaged is whether this is a promising way of concretising the capacities of STS.

6. Prescriptive and Participatory Problems

While statement limits meaning and makes it sterile, allusiveness keeps the word open as to its deployment and makes it poignant with meaning (Jullien 2000: 354)

It is worth noting that the idea of better theory enabling better practice is not a particularly new one, nor, necessarily a particularly liberating one, nor necessarily, for that matter, a particularly sophisticated one. Indeed history can provide many examples of benevolent scholars aiming to improve society in multiple ways and with quite variable results (e.g. Gould 1996). I propose that while arguments and articulations in constructivist and cultural studies in science and technology can and should take many different forms, they should not rely on a claim to especial prescriptive value.'(6)

In the conclusion to their award-winning book The Gold Standard, Stefan Timmermans and Marc Berg argue strongly for a positive engagement with what they call the Quality Improvement movement in health care. They suggest that: “entering into debate with the subjects of this study, so to speak, is what is now most relevant” (215). Sociology, they claim, is rendered helpless and “deadly stale” by its repetitive critiques of rationalisation, McDonaldization, and so forth: “Failing to redraw our own politics of standardization would not only render us blind to all the transformations that are occurring in front of us. It would also render us powerless in its further development” (216).

It is definitely true that one cannot work in constructivist STS with an old-fashioned conceptual separation between theory and practice. Timmermans and Berg interpret this predicament as implying that a theory would in some sense be legitimated by its practical efficiency. However, both engagement and practicality can mean many things. Wendy Brown, following Foucault, suggests distinguishing between studying for or in terms of a contemporary situation (Brown 2001: 42-3). The difference indicates whether

intellectual life will be submitted to existing political discourses and the formulation of immediate political needs those discourses articulate, or will be allowed the air of independence that it must have in order to be of value as intellectual work for political life (43)

Her formulation connects with the view here embraced. This view emphasises that theory is always a form of practice, always a form of intervention and, therefore, always political. Since this is always the case one needs to do nothing special to be normative in doing research. Of course, this does not specify how practical, political, or any other consequences of research will play out. This can surely happen in multiple ways, in relation to which one is not totally helpless but of which one is certainly also not in full control. It suggests, however, that an issue, which is perhaps as pressing as learning how to engage with practices on their own terms, is to retain breathing space for “non-practical” inquiry, by “sever[ing] critique from prescription” (Brown 2001: 118).(7) Contrary to what is implied by Timmermans and Berg’s characterization of much social research as “deadly stale” this is not an argument for a return to a dark and solitary ivory tower; neither does it signal a withdrawal from participation in a vibrant field. As Brown points out

to argue for a separation between intellectual and political life is not to detach the two. The point instead is to cultivate among political intellectuals an appreciation of the productive, even agonistic, interlocution made possible between intellectual life and political life when they maintain a dynamic distance and tension. By itself a political act at a time when universities are increasingly underwritten by “interested” corporate, private, and state funds, such cultivation is also quite possibly a route to freeing political life from its current moralizing despair and intellectual life from its grip of bad conscience (43-4)

One can, of course, attempt to spell out the specific political implications of one’s intellectual work as seen by oneself, but this is always a volatile gesture, as this interpretation is necessarily put into the hands of later users. As we know, these users have a tendency to confound expectations, and turn putatively radical ideas to conservative ends, or make creative use of a dangerous legacy (as in Haraway’s cyborg figure).

I would suggest, in addition, that the claim to be able to deliver especially useful guidelines, while it can manifestly be used to significant rhetorical effect, carries a significant risk of back-firing in the long run.'(8) For insofar as the rather grand promises fail to materialise, as they may well do, this is likely to be seen by those who believed in these promises as demonstrating that STS or ANT are incapable of improving health care in much the same way as other management methods (business process re-engineering, new public management, total quality management) have been incapable of doing so. This would furthermore be a realistic evaluation, according to this analysis, but that is because these studies have a different task than delivering those goods.

If one takes seriously these propositions it becomes an unviable strategy for constructivist STS to claim special capacity guiding other practices and offer implications through knowledge translation. Furthermore, in my estimation, the withholding of implications may well be more conducive to the experimental processes of mutual learning and transformation that Berg recommends than offering “position taking, policy formulation, or blueprints for action” (Brown 2001: 43). As in François Jullien’s description the ambivalence and non-explicitness regarding consequences may “keep the word open as to its deployment and make it poignant with meaning” and might thereby better facilitate a creative process of transformation. To repeat, the point is obviously not that one should way away from practice (as if one could). It is rather that STS attentiveness to the contingencies and transformations of practice could lead to a rather different stance with respect to one’s capacity to solve problems, not less interested or engaged, but perhaps with a more well-developed and humorous sense of its own capacities and limitations. I develop this theme in the final section.

7. Thinking In Front Of…and Learning to Laugh

As Deleuze said, to think (or create) is to think “in front of” or “for” analphabets or dying rats or alcoholics. This does not mean addressing them, or helping them, or sharing hope or faith with them, but, rather, not insulting them with our power to justify everything. Thinking with them “in front of” us means thinking with the feeling and constraint that we are not free to speak in their name or even side with them (Stengers 2002: 238)

In the introductory section I referred to a theoretical preference for “extremity” and against “equivocation” advocated by Barbara Herrnstein Smith. How does this relate to Isabelle Stengers rather differently sounding Leibnizian recommendation that one should not overturn established sentiments? It will be necessary to first of all prevent “the alternative” and “the established” from being turned into steel-cased oppositions and rather use the formulations to explore possible openings and productive contrasts.

Some of these become more visible if we follow the “intellectual vectors” of these scholars. Barbara Herrnstein Smith comes with a special interest in the potentialities, in many different fields, of constructivist thought. Her worry, as displayed in “Cutting-Edge Equivocation” and elsewhere is that the important differences and most crucial consequences established by these new styles of thought are flattened in the name of old conceptual or political categories.

Stengers, on the other hand, comes with an interest in thinking about the possible development of an “ecology of practices”, which would not be homogenised by power, which she identifies with the figures of the Politician, the Policeman, the Scientist, and the Critic. This is the connection in which she argues that: “nothing is easier for a modern person than to be tolerant”. She identifies the ease of tolerance with freedom of a particular kind, as instantiated in the figures listed above; it is the freedom brought about by a power by means of position, which ensures that one does not have to engage with other practices on their premises. In this way a generalised state of easy tolerance articulates a negative phenomenon. It indicates that too many practices manage too well to ignore and stay indifferent to each other, each filling out its own limited niche in a fragmented ecology.

Tolerance quickly turns antagonistic when differences become serious enough to threaten key understandings of the involved parties. As an example consider how arguments relying on notions of “genetic determinism” would be evaluated in a scientific ecology where molecular biology was not virtually guaranteed to be taken more seriously than arguments from STS, or how visions of health care improvement might develop if queer studies had a status similar to engineering.

Encounters whose results are not pre-determined by position may force practices and actors to re-consider who they are, what they are doing, and what their relationships are to other parts of the ecology. Easy tolerance is thus a symptom of stasis and fragmentation, whereas encounters entailing genuine risk, while “intolerable” may therefore enable the construction of creative links between practices.

In Stengers’ ideal, practices would not exist in separated alcoves, but would be in significant exchange with each other. The shared trait of the types identified above is their inability or unwillingness to participate in such exchange. Because these figures are capable only of tolerating other practices, they cannot respect them as partners or foes in engagements involving transformation. All this suggests that tolerance partakes in a logic of power:

power, when it grows a capital letter, transforms the rhizome into a tree: each branch is “explained” by its relation to another branch, one closer to the trunk, and indeed to the roots, that is, to the site – occupied by a “logic” if not by actors – from which all the rest can be denounced as puppets, acted on beyond their intentions and plans (Stengers 2000: 124)

The organization of the sciences into a hierarchy according to the depth of their explanatory power (typically with physics on the summit and the humanities in the basement) has been under heavy fire, not least from Bruno Latour, who has likened epistemology to a “professional hazard…much like a bad back” (Latour 1996). Stengers points out, however, that “it is difficult to put…the ‘error of the epistemologists’, rather than power, in the role of the thing responsible for everything that does not go well” (124). “Error”, she continues, “does not have to be denounced any more than power. It explains nothing, except insofar as it is a product of the network, characteristic of the style of the network that belongs to our epoch, and of the political problem it poses” (124).

This formulation indicates a different point of entry to an analysis of the politics of concretisation and it points to the fruitfulness of locating an investigation into the recurrent felt need to be political or practical on the level of causes – asking “what kind of networks make these interests and strategies understandable?” – rather than symptoms – asking, as I have done, “how does this manifest itself textually and argumentatively, and with what consequences?”

One might, then, agree with Stengers, that denouncing “epistemological errors”, or conceptual problems more broadly, explains nothing, and also that such explanation would have to take into account the broader intellectual, disciplinary, and institutional dynamics, which have researchers located in widely diverging intellectual milieus with equally varying requirements and exigencies. Undeniably one’s various audiences have a more or less direct influence on the way one’s own discourse is shaped, since it is shaped in the attempt to be understood, responded to, and acted upon by those audiences.

However, the fact that a symptomatic reading of politics of concretisations explains nothing, does not indicate that it is without function. When Barbara Herrnstein Smith spends her energy pinpointing what Stengers might view as “errors of epistemologists”, it is just because these positions are “intolerable” to her as a participant intellectual who is in various ways affected by such claims. Nor are her alternative descriptions of multiple phenomena separated from an understanding of the structures which compulsively re-generate “epistemologists’ errors”, for they are also attempts at making those networks and their activities intelligible in different terms (see Smith 1988, 1997). Nevertheless the tension emphasised by Stengers raises the interesting question of how one can remain a radical and unrepentant constructivist without merely alienating “established sentiments”.

The topos defined by these agendas can be opened up by Stengers’ specification that

the problem designated by the Leibnizian constraint ties together truth and becoming, and assigns to the statement of what one believes to be true the responsibility not to hinder becoming: not to collide with established sentiments, so as to try to open them to what their established identity led them to refuse, combat, misunderstand (Stengers 2000: 15)

The “responsibility not to hinder becoming” has a high degree of openness and intellectual versatility as a pre-requisite, because nurturing such transformational processes require a capacity for engaging divergent discourses and practices, with respect but therefore neither with tolerance nor with submissiveness. In specific the responsibility involves letting go of what Deleuze called “the indignity of speaking for others” (Deleuze 2004: 208) with its attendant modern tendency to “justify everything”. This, I think, is what it means to think “in front of” other actors, situations, and practices. Stengers explicates one of its entailments:

We must be clear that this does not mean we will reach a world where everyone will be beautiful and kind. I hope to make myself hated, but I would like to try to not be hated those whom I have no desire to offend – that is, all those who submit to the mobilizing power of words that recruit them into antagonistic camps, without for all that having an active stake in the maintenance of this antagonism (Stengers 2000: 17)

Hatred, of course, is an unusual word to evaluate positively in a philosophical discourse. Consider, in contrast Donna Haraway’s methodical dictum to “critically analyze, or “deconstruct” only that which I love and only that in which I am deeply implicated (Haraway 1997: 151). Who then is the critical scholar? Is it Stengers, who urges us to stop trying to overturn established sentiments, while condemning tolerance and encouraging a form of hatred, or is it Haraway who approvingly cites Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, to the extent that “we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism”, while vowing to deconstruct only that which she loves? As is the case with many other terms, neither hatred nor love goes through the intellectual machinery of these scholars, without emerging in new constellations.

The “rhizome” surreptitiously connecting the superficial opposition is humour. Stengers notes that to “relearn to laugh is never insignificant” (2000: 17), for “the laughter of someone who has to be impressed always complicates the life of power” (17-18). Her laughter is neither critical nor ironical, but humorous in its aim to “comprehend and appreciate without waiting for salvation”, and its capacity to “refuse without letting itself terrorize” (18). In a similar gesture Haraway writes: “I laugh, therefore I am…implicated. I laugh, therefore I am…responsible and accountable” (Haraway 1997: 182). Laughter, here, does not mean imply lack of seriousness. Rather it implies continued attentiveness to the complexity and contingency of practice, and therefore to both the possibilities and risks involved in interaction and intervention.

Rather than attempting to be normative or useful as those terms are traditionally conceived, researchers, which have learned to laugh, might think in terms of careful experimentation with practices both inside and outside the university. In this sense, adoption of a “humorous” stance could enable our disciplines to stay relevant by formulating ongoing challenges – conceptually, politically and practically – to established sentiments, rather than willingly letting their agendas translate us in the name of an unquestioned usefulness.

Posing such challenges may well be relevant not only to intellectual communities, but also to all the organizations, institutions and disciplines that tend to “suffer from an advanced case of hardening of the categories” (9), for example in health care systems envisioning smooth technical or scientific solutions to a multitude of social, cultural, organizational and political problems. Without being able to promise solutions, since we are not expecting salvation, this would already seem quite an accomplishment.

Acknowledgment: A version of this paper was presented at the STS seminar in the History of Consciousness Programme, University of Santa Cruz, California, May 2005. I would like to thank the participants for their suggestions.

Notes

1. For some her figure seems distinctly too moderate, not to say conservative. Braidotti refers to Stengers regressive “post-poststructuralism” (1994: 23), while Nina Lykke (1996: 21-22) likens her position to that of a modern Auguste Comte!

2. Themes such as usefulness, intervention and knowledge translation have been the focus of attention in a number of recent workshops and conferences in STS and social anthropology, including “Does STS Mean Business” organized by Steve Woolgar and the Säid Business School at University of Oxford in 2004 and 2005, “Description and Creativity: Approaches to Collaboration and Value from Anthropology, Art, Science and Technology,” at King’s College, Cambridge, July 2005, and “Practices of Assessment and Intervention in Action-Oriented STS-studies,” in Amsterdam, April 2005.

3. As I note in part six, Isabelle Stengers in fact encourages such an analysis.

4. An expanded version was printed in Modest Witness…(Haraway 1997: 49-119).

5. The chapter was re-printed in a volume on Health Information Management written by Marc Berg with colleagues and Ph.D. students, which introduces the reader to challenges and lessons learned about how to manage information in health care (Berg 2004).

6. Some of the forms they might take are discussed in more detail in Jensen (2004).

7.In Brown’s formulation: “We do no favor, I think, to politics or intellectual life by eliminating a productive tension – the way in which politics and theory effectively interrupt each other – in order to consolidate certain political claims as the premise of a program of intellectual inquiry. Indeed, we usurp the increasingly scarce space allocated today to thinking” (Brown 2001: 41).

8. The analysis of strategic essentialism in Smith (1997) has inspired these considerations.

9. From Watson-Verran (1994), cited in Haraway (1997: 131).

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