Reconstructing the Past, Constructing the Present: Can Science Studies and the History of Science Live Happily Ever After?

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Reconstructing the past, Constructing the Present: Can Science Studies and the History of Science Live Happily Ever after? Author(s): Sheila Jasanoff Source: Social Studies of Science, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Aug., 2000), pp. 621-631 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/285783 Accessed: 26-02-2016 19:31 UTC

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COMMENT

ABSTRACT Historical and contemporary social studies of science and technology have developed an asymmetrical relationship in recent years. While historical research has been regarded as crucial to the project of contemporary theorizing, science studies is still regarded by many as incompatible with history of science's mission of faithfully reconstructing the past. This Comment suggests that the two fields can usefully collaborate in the task of democratizing science and technology. They have in common an interest in making science and technology more transparent, resurrecting vanished actors and voices, representing the hybrid networks of science and society and, not least, educating students about the societal dimensions of science and technology.

Keywords constructivism, denmocratization of science, panopticon, science and society, transparency

[Editor's note: This is the slightly adapted text of Sheila Jasanoff's contribution to a Plenary Session entitled '75 Years of HSS: Perspectives from SHOT, PSA, SSSS, & BSHS', at the HSS Meeting in Pittsburgh, PA, on 4 November 1999. We have preserved its original title and style of presentation.]

Reconstructing the Past, Constructing the Present: Can Science Studies and the History of Science Live Happily Ever After? Sheila Jasanoff

It is a great pleasure and honour to address this distinguished audience at the semisesquicentennial celebration of the History of Science Society (HSS). The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) seems a mere stripling by comparison with this venerable organization: we have two years still to run until our Society's 25th anniversary. Speaking of behalf of 4S, as its President, I congratulate HSS on the many and varied contributions that you have made in your 75 years to a deeply humanistic appreciation of science and technology. We have admired your example and tried to follow your lead in fostering and providing a forum for scholarly excellence.

Social Studies of Science 30/4(August 2000) 621-31 ?DSSS and SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi) [0306-3 127(200008)30:4;621-63 1;01 6754]

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At this very special moment, however, I would like to invite historians of science to join with 4S in considering a more ambitious course for our common future. Science and Technology Studies (S&TS), the field that 4S stands for, has reached a point at which we can begin to engage (some would say reengage) with the History of Science as a mature intellectual partner. I would like to share some thoughts with you this evening about ways in which our two Societies and the enterprises they represent might work together to enhance the public awareness of science and technology in the next 25 years. What kind of future might we imagine for a unified field of science and technology studies - understood as encompassing both historical and contemporary methods of inquiry - when HSS celebrates its centennial and 4S its half-century? As I thought about the relationship between 'science studies' (I use this shorthand for S&TS) and the history of science in preparation for this meeting, I was struck by a kind of asymmetry, or at least an imbalance, in our perceptions of each other. 4S has recognized from its very foundation that history of science has to be part and parcel of any meaningful attempt to study science and technology as human, social institutions. Accordingly, we have not only welcomed historians to our meetings but have showered on them most of the prizes and honours at our Society's disposal. For example, since 4S created its first book prize in 1994 (named after the pioneering sociologist of biology, Ludwik Fleck), all six recipients have been people who had spent at least a part of their scholarly lives as historians of science; you would recognize them all as significant con- tributors to the territory surveyed by HSS. Similarly, the list of people whose lifetime achievement 4S has honoured with its John Desmond Bernal Prize also includes a goodly number of scholars who, if asked, would unhesitatingly locate their intellectual oeuvres within the history of science. On the HSS side, the attitude toward 4S's intellectual programme bespeaks, in my view, considerably greater wariness. I recall, for instance, that it was impossible to find a well-known historian of science to write a review chapter on the historical dimensions of S&TS when my colleagues and I were compiling the Handbook of Science and TechnologyStudies [Jasanoff et al., 1995] in the early 1990s. The volume, as a result, incor- porates perspectives from just about every field or discipline that has spoken powerfully about the place of science and technology in human lives: sociology, anthropology, philosophy, political science, rhetoric, women's studies, to name a few. Only history is strangely absent. A similar jitteriness about being caught out in risque company marks the hiring practices of our major history of science departments. You will sooner see a historian of science keeping company with colleagues in a sociology or an anthropology department than the reverse; and the politics of science seems not even to make it into history of science's field of vision. A historian colleague given to pithy statements puts it this way: 'Historians like to get prizes from 4S, but they don't want to go there'.

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What are the reasons for this somewhat one-sided love affair, and is there anything we can do to strengthen the correspondence between our fields - to build, as it were, a mutual admiration society out of the ranks of HSS and 4S? I think so, but to get there we will have to go beyond the conventional terms in which we describe our work as scholars. We will have to discard the presupposition that the past and the present are ineluctably divided by some fiat of time and memory, or even by the entrenched practices of scholarship. We will have to invent a discourse with which it becomes possible not only to demonstrate history's essential r6le in inter- preting the contemporary scene, but also to show how contemporary science studies may help to enrich and deepen the project of the history of science. Reconstruction, and its messy relations with construction (or, more accurately, constructivism):here, perhaps, is the best place to begin our exploration. For to quite a number of historians of science, the con- structivist strain that threads through so much contemporary work in S&TS seems to be a source of puzzlement and profound disquietude. Historians of science often seem to share with scientists the suspicion that the firm ground of reality will dissolve into the quagmire of make-believe if social constructivists are allowed to have their way with science and technology. If every fact became merely a claim - contending for turf with countless competing claims - where would this leave the historian of science, whose authority lies in giving a truthful voice to the vanished facts of the past? Few, I dare say, would wish to labour long hours and days in the archives for the dubious pleasure of constructing a historical claim. There is, too, the perennial worry for historians that hob-nobbing too closely with investigators of the present will inevitably lead to whig history. Instead of recovering the past in all its complexity, its situatedness, its messy specificities, the too analytically-minded historian might conjure up instead an imagined past, tricked out in rhetorical finery and theoretical ambition to serve or justify the demands of the present. This would not be the path of history as truth but of history as politics. But is a stronger partnership between history of science and science studies bound to be so doomed? I was wondering about this recently when reading a collection of essays called Thinkingwith History, by Carl Schorske (1998), better known to many of you as the author of Fin-de-SiecleVienna [Schorske, 1961], that inimitable portrait of a city seeking to define its civic identity through the extraordinary historicity of its major public buildings. I was drawn to Schorske's essays because here was a historian reflecting on history as a cultural practice, just as many in science studies relect on science and technology as culture practices. I was also attracted in part because Vienna in 2000 - a troubled and troubling city at another fin de si&cle- was to be the site of the joint meeting of 4S and EASST (the European Association for Studies of Science and Technology). But Think- ing with History turned out to resonate in unexpected ways with some other things that were on my mind. A short digression through what I found there will help me return with tighter focus to my main theme for this

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 26 Feb 2016 19:31:33 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 624 Social Studies of Science 3014 evening: the relationship between the reconstruction of the past and the construction of the present in science and technology studies. Schorske's essays explore two broad tendencies in using, as he says, 'the materials of the past ... to orient ourselves in the living present' [Schorske, 1998: 3]. We can think with history by using the images of the past as locators by means of which we situate our present condition. Alternatively, we can think with history by inserting ourselves into the dynamic flow of time, by self-reflectively contemplating our position as situated in, and born from, the traceries of past events. To illustrate these tendencies, Schorske offers a fascinating series of mini-portraits of artists and intellectuals who 'thought with history' in either of his two senses. One of his protagonists is Augustus Welby Pugin, the influential architect and converted Roman Catholic who, in the mid-19th century, attempted to lead the English back to medievalism as a vanished source of harmony between faith and beauty, religion and politics. Pugin, it appears, shared with Michel Foucault and many other thinkers of our own cultural moment an abhorrence of the Benthamite panopticon and its ideology of centralized, rational control. In a pair of pictures from his polemical work Contrasts:or, A Parallel betweenthe Noble Edificesof the MiddleAges and the CorrespondingBuildings of the PresentDay; Showing the PresentDecay of Taste,Pugin opposed the grim symmetries of a panoptical 'modern' poorhouse with the more humane and naturalistic contours of its medieval equivalent, the almshouse (see Figure 1). As Schorske [1998: 76] elaborates, The medievalphysical facility is to strikeus by its openness in form and its closeness to nature. Its component elements are irregularin size and variedin design, yet freelyarticulated into a harmoniouswhole.

Underlying Pugin's polemic (1969 reprint) is a tension which, I sub- mit, is central to much of the work in our own field, regardless of where we are situated in precise disciplinary terms. Grappling with the implications of science and technology for life at the turn of the 20th century, in particular, one has to take on board the constant opposition between the thirst for order, prediction and control - what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1991) has called the 'gardening instinct' that underpinned the Nazi holocaust - and the yearning for individual subjectivity, local self-rule and the intimate comforts of Gemeinschaft.Pugin, for example, already wrestling with the dehumanizing impulses of urbanization, deplored the fact that 'the differentiated life-affirmation of holistic Christian culture [had] been broken into separate modern institutions to impose on man the instrumental grids of specialized, rational repression' [Schorske, 1998: 78]. Interestingly, almost a century and a half later, we find James C. Scott masterfully exploring the same tension in his important book, Seeing Like a State (1998). Where Pugin saw in the rectilinear form of the panopticon an ultimate betrayal of beauty, engendered by the loss of faith, Scott sees in the gridlike outlines of the modern megalopolis (his illustration of the downtown map of Chicago in 1893 is instructive: see Figure 2) the con-

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cretization of political power, bent on imposing order irrespective of individual human aspirations and presences. Ironically, Scott, too, turns to

FIGURE1 Pugin's 'Contrasted Residences for the Poor'

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Source: Carl Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorationsin the Passage to Modernism, 77. Copyright C 1998 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

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FIGURE2 Map of Downtown Chicago, circa 1893

Source: Anon, 'Bird's-eye View of the Business District of Chicago', circa 1893 (Chicago, IL: Chicago Historical Society collection). Reproduced by permission of the Chicago Historical Society. medievalism for his contrasts, presenting next to Chicago a map of the old city of Bruges (Figure 3). In a post-Foucauldian world, science and technology have become allied with the practices of statecraft to render obsolete the medieval city's organic and holistic order - an order that Scott argues could only be understood from within, from the standpoint of those whose daily practices of coming and going gave the city its physical plan and cultural substance. There are two lessons that we can take away from juxtaposing Schorske and Scott, Pugin and Foucault in this way. First, work such as theirs underscores a point that we in science studies have always known: that judicious uses of the past can help illuminate - indeed, make indelible - the arguments that we wish to make about the present. Who can have read Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1979) without having the stench of the regicide's burnt flesh and his piteous cries forever colonizing their imaginations - delineating through a contrast no less scorching than Pugin's what we have lost and gained in the turn away from public torture to our own more subtle forms of coercion and control? Second, juxtapositions such as these prompt us to question the idea that there are, or should be, fundamental incompatibilities between the aims of science and technology studies and those of history of science. To begin with, science studies seems curiously not to have suffered from the ahistoricitythat Schorske in his essays attributes to intellectual life in the modern period. Even a random sample of the canon of science studies

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FIGURE3 Bruges circa 1500

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Source: Anonyme Bruges Master, 'Fragment of the plan of Bruges' (circa 1500). Reproduced by permission of the Directie van de Stedelijke Musea, Stad Brugge. produces many examples of historically grounded, yet critical and theoretic- ally sophisticated, explorations of science's meanings in society. We have only to think of Evelyn Fox Keller's (1985) classic reflections on gender and science, Steven Shapin's (1994) exploration of truth and credibility in early modern England, and Ian Hacking's (1995) provocative reconstruction of the roots of multiple personality disorder in the United States. These works, as any science studies scholar would acknowledge, effectively cross the boundary between past and present, narrative and theory. So, the resistances to a collaborative project, if indeed there are any, would seem to flow mostly from the other direction: when historians of science are asked to recognize and take on board the kinds of insights offered by their colleagues in the broad church of contemporary science studies. It is as if then, mysteriously, the 30 years that methodologically separate history from contemporaneity reconstitute themselves as an unbridgeable gulf across which inquiring minds can no longer meet. To imagine how it might be otherwise, let me take Schorske again as a point of departure. For him, the right relation between history and the more analytical and theoretical social sciences is one of complementarity. History, he says, is (and even should be) atheoreticalin itself - single- mindedly committed to representing time and change, the two phenomena that give the field its abiding identity. To be sure, history may choose now and then to dance with partners who offer formal analytic tools for

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 26 Feb 2016 19:31:33 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 628 Social Studies of Science 30/4 examining events, be they from philosophy, rhetoric or political science. But it is not history's function, Schorske suggests, to invent analytic categories for itself. History merely records; let other fields, more committed to explanation, create the concepts that structure the narratives of history. This vision, I think, consigns history to an unnecessarily passive role in the dance of understanding and reflection. Where Schorske is content with complementarity, I am more inclined to advocate co-production. The objective in science studies should not be to strive for some unstable modus vivendi between fundamentally divergent modes of thought: the historiciz- ing and the analytic. Rather, it should be to recognize that those of us who have embraced science and technology as the objects of our concern already have a common project in hand that transcends disciplinary particularities. That project is to enrich, with all the means at our com- mand, the reflective resources with which we and our fellow citizens can, at this transitional moment, better comprehend two of the most powerful forces that are shaping our destinies. In studying science and technology from the outside in, we have embarked on a path that sociologists like to call 'studying up'. The cognitive and social authority of the sciences is greater by far than that of the scholars, historians or social scientists, who choose to study these institutions closely. But through our inquiries, we have gained privileged access to centres of power that remain remote to most of our academic colleagues, let alone to the majority of our fellows in wider society. With studying up, then, comes an obligation to bring back our hard-won knowledge to others who may derive substantial benefit from it. Our field has invaluable insights to contribute to the public understanding of science and technology. The metaphor of 'studying up', moreover, should not distract us from recognizing that the object is not merely to construct a one-way mirror, making scientific knowledge more transparent to society. When it comes to appraising how their work is infused with social elements, and how it influences and connects to other structures in society, scientists have no monopoly on understanding. Perhaps the most important intellectual benefit that social studies of science can confer on society is to make scientific and technical communities more reflexively aware of the ways in which their belief systems are conditioned by the environments in which they practise. Both science studies and the history of science can be seen, in these respects, as avenues for opening up the black boxes of science and technology. Can we not meaningfully extend each other's capabilities in the task of democratization? Once we focus on the project of enhancing society's reflective resources with respect to science and technology, it becomes easier to identify possible areas of convergence between science studies and the history of science. I would like briefly to sketch four points at which it seems that our fields are already reaching out toward common goals:

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First, both historical and contemporary studies have done much in recent years to bring greater transparency to the inner workings of science and technology. Making the process of science more accessible by illuminating the normally invisible backstages of laboratories and other scientific spaces - this is the impulse underlying work as discrep- ant in style and method as Bruno Latour's (1988) study of pasteuriza- tion in France and Daniel Kevles' (1998) painstaking account of David Baltimore's confrontation with the political might of the US Congress. As these examples suggest, present-day historians of science share with their colleagues in science studies a conviction that much wisdom can be gained from looking at science and technology as social institutions, in which people collaborate and compete, struggle for credibility, seek to make livings, and yearn for success or glory, just as in other walks of life. Science's specialness, as much of our work makes plain, derives from the objects of its quest, not from the strategies by which scientists try to achieve it. * Second, regardless of whether their concern is with the past or the present, students of science and technology today are deeply engaged in resurrecting the voices and perspectives of actors whose contributions to the enterprises of discovery and innovation may have been heedlessly neglected, even erased from the official records of science. Just as Michel Foucault's investigations of legality mark an important break with formal legal studies, so the injection of gender [Rossiter, 1982, 1995], culture [Haraway, 1989], race [Stocking, 1968; Stepan, 1982], and ethics [Shapin, 1994] into stories about science and medicine has added new depth to flat, triumphalist accounts of scientific progress. Research in this vein has reminded us of the inescapable connections between truth and power, and taught us to appreciate science's allegedly value-free status, indeed its very claim to objectivity, as historically and culturally situated achievements. * Third, both science studies and the history of science have become aware that there is more to science at the turn of the 20th century than scientific revolutions, evolutionary theory or quantum uncertainty. Historians have begun to ask whether their methods might not help to shed light on more recent events, inventing terms like 'contemporary history' to show that the present is not strictly off limits to students of the past. Meanwhile, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and legal scholars have discovered that an appreciation of history can help them make more sense of current developments in science and technology. The emergence of hybrid sociotechnical fields, from risk assessment to climate science, begs investigators from our communities to find new ways of talking about science and technology in relation to economics, culture, society, and the state. Faced with the challenge of explicating new scientific and technological formations to diverse audiences, the past-present dichotomy necessarily recedes in significance as an organizer of scholarship. We search instead for ways

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of characterizing forms of life that seamlessly connect the material, the social, and the idealistic. Fourth, in creating a meaningful public discourse around science and technology, our fields are also engaged in shared tasks of conceptual clarification, theory building, and public education. Sometimes, the collaboration has been explicit, as when investigators from the history and sociology of technology and the sociology of scientific knowledge collaborated to form a new research programme on the 'social construction of technological systems' [Bijker et al., 1987]. At other times, it has been carried out behind institutional screens, as in the case that I know best, the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, where historians and specialists in science studies worked together to define a curriculum that wove together strands from history, philosophy, sociology and politics. These are good begin- nings, but there is still some distance to go if our work is to have the kind of impact it should have on the social relations of science and technology. To create a fully elaborated, compelling picture of the ways in which natural and social orders sustain each other is not a task for either science studies or the history of science to undertake alone; it requires wholehearted commitment from each. The past is not merely prologue, any more than the present is merely epilogue. Historians or social analysts of science and technology, we are all engaged in a continuous project of sense-making; our shared enterprise is to create pockets of sanity, reason and understanding in a bewilderingly complex world. We should be grateful for the organizing power of chronol- ogy in these difficult interpretive endeavours. But to allow the mere passage of time to set up false dichotomies between historical and contemporary studies of science and technology - to let time play a divisive role in our attempts to grasp the interplay of knowing and making and meaning - that would be a genuine tragedy.

References Bauman (1991) Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY; Cornell University Press). Bijker et al. (1987) Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes and Trevor Pinch (eds), The Social Constructionof TechnologicalSystems: New Directionsin the Sociology and History of Technology(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Foucault (1979) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York:Vintage Books). Hacking (1995) Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalityand the Sciencesof Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Haraway (1989) Donna Haraway, PrimateVisions: Gender,Race, and Nature in the Worldof Modern Science (NewYork: Routledge). Jasanoff et al. (1995) Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen and Trevor Pinch (eds), Handbook of Science and TechnologyStudies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications). Keller (1985) Evelyn F. Keller, Reflectionson Genderand Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Kevles (1998) Daniel J. Kevles, The BaltimoreCase: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character(New York:WW. Norton).

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Latour (1988) Bruno Latour, The Pasteurizationof France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Pugin (1969) Augustus Welby Pugin, Contrasts(NewYork: Humanities Press, reprint). Rossiter (1982) Margaret W. Rossiter, WomenScientists in America: Strugglesand Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press). Rossiter (1995) Margaret W. Rossiter, WomenScientists in America: BeforeAffirmative Action, 1940-1972 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press). Schorske (1961) Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siele Vienna: Politics and Culture (NewYork: Random House). Schorske (1998) Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Scott (1998) James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Shapin (1994) Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth:Civility and Science in Seventeenth- Century England (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press). Stepan (1982) Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books). Stocking (1968) George A. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution:Essays in the History of Anthropology(NewYork: Free Press).

Sheila Jasanoff is Professor of Science and Public Policyat Harvard University'sJohn F. Kennedy School of Government and former head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University,where she collaborated with colleagues in history of science and technology to build an integrated curriculumin science and technology studies. Her research centres on the relationship between science and law in contemporary democratic societies. Address: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, HarvardUniversity, 79 John F.Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA;fax: +1 617 495 8963; email: [email protected]

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