Elusive Memories of Technoscience

Barry Barnes University of Exeter

“Technoscience” is now most commonly used in academic work to refer to sets of activities wherein science and technology have become inextricably intermingled, or else have hybridized in some sense. What, though, do we understand by “science” and by “technology”? The use of these terms has varied greatly, but their current use presumes a society with extensive institutional and occupational differentiation. Only in that kind of context may science and technology be treated as “other” in relation to “the rest” of the social order; whether as differentiated sets of practices or as specialized institutional forms. References to “technoscience” may then be taken to imply a reversal of earlier processes of cultural and institutional differentiation and/or a recom- bination of separate bodies of practice and skill. Either way a move back to a less differentiated state is implied, which makes it surprising that we appear to have very few memories of technoscience in periods less culturally and insti- tutionally differentiated than our own and a lower level of technical and intellectual division of labor. However, the elusiveness of our memories of technoscience may be signiªcant mainly for what it suggests about our ways of conceptualizing the past, rather than for any insight it offers into that past “itself.” We tend to identify practices and networks of practices in terms of functions. And it may be because, at different times, different functions have been selected as constitutive of practices, that “technoscience” has come to be regarded as something especially characteristic of the present.

The comments and criticisms of the members of the workshops in Berlin where this paper was originally presented were invaluable in developing the ªnal version: particular ac- knowledgements are offered for the detailed feedback from Wolfgang Lefèvre and John Pickstone. Colleagues at Exeter also offered valuable comments on an earlier draft, and I need to make special mention of Jane Calvert, whose empirical research is cited later.

142

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 143

This paper is at once a reºection on the notion of technoscience and an at- tempt to engage with a fundamental problem that in different guises has long interested sociologists of science. A nice illustration of this problem can be found in Charles Fisher’s study of the “death” of Invariant Theory (1966, 1967), one of the earliest recognized contributions to the sociology of mathematical knowledge. Fisher described how many of the practices of Invariant Theory continued in use long after its supposed “death,” although they were then no longer described as applications of, or contributions to, Invariant Theory “itself.” The practices were subsumed under other descriptions, and those enacting them were said to be doing different things. Thus, the relationship between practices and descriptions of those practices was rendered problematic by Fisher’s work, and the question was raised of how far accounts of what we do relate to intrinsic features of the doing, and how far to context and to the goals and functions of the doing. Eventually, I shall ask this question of “technoscientiªc” practices, but ªrst of all it is necessary to prepare the ground.

1. Diverse uses of the terms “science” and “technology” Since “technoscience” is supposedly science and technology intermingled, or else hybridized, it makes sense to begin the discussion by asking what the terms “science” and “technology” might themselves refer to. In truth, the use of these terms has varied so much from time to time, and from one context to another, that an entire monograph could only scratch the sur- face of what has been involved. And even that would ignore the cognates and afªnes of the terms in other languages, sustained by other cultures no less important than those of the English-speaking world. Fortunately, however, a very simple account will sufªce for present purposes. I shall highlight just three important variations in the modes of use of these terms, which index corresponding variations both in how knowledge and skill are institutionalized and how they are understood. “Science” and “technology”, I shall suggest, may be used in ways that mark a cultural differentiation of specialized forms of knowledge and skill, in ways that ac- knowledge our alienation from these specialized forms, and in ways that involve their reiªcation. I shall also make mention of the efforts to oppose tendencies to reify that are to be found in the current discourse of sociology and STS. A considerable number of English words are obvious derivatives of four key ancestors: “ars”, “scientia”, “techne”, and “episteme”. It is hard to make ªrm distinctions between the meanings of these four kinds of word. A craft trade, for example, could long be legitimately referred to as a science, and it was common at one time to speak of the science of hunting, or even the science of pugilism. Conversely, the term “technical” long meant,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 144 Elusive Memories of Technoscience

and still can mean, “pertaining to a speciªc art or science.” Even so, for as long as these terms have been in use they have also been employed to mark a distinction between knowledge in the sense of our cognizance of things, or our systematic classiªcations and theoretical accounts of things (scientia, episteme), and knowledge in the sense of skill and trained com- petence (ars, techne). And this distinction seems to have gained in importance, so that by the nineteenth century it had become routine to speak of science (knowledge) as opposed to art (skill), and something of that contrast is still evoked today when science and technology are spoken of as distinct and separate entities. Over time, we have come routinely to speak of “science and technology” and to regard them, however inconsistently, both as a mysterious composite essence and as two distinct entities with different characteristics, but even as this was happening another important development of usage was under way. The terms were more and more being used to refer only to specialized varieties of knowledge and skill, preserved and de- ployed by trained practitioners in the context of speciªc sub-cultures. This shift was the correlate of an extensive cultural and institutional differentiation, and a corresponding change in the nature and extent of the division of labor in the relevant societies. The semantic shift here is commemorated in standard dictionary deªnitions of “science” and “technology” and a sense of what was involved is readily derived from them. Thus, both the O.E.D. and the “Chambers” I like to use offer initial deªnitions wherein the science and technology of a society consist in its knowledge, and its repertoire of technical skills, re- spectively. Note what this implies about the science (knowledge) and the technology of a simple undifferentiated society. Both will be embedded in the common culture and inseparable from it. Were an anthropologist to give an account of the shared culture of the society, she would at the same time give an account of its science and technology. All this changes, however, with differentiation and division of labor. As these proceed, much in the way of knowledge, and of technical skill, is alienated from ordinary life, and comes to reside in specialized sub-cultures, wherein expert practitioners sustain them and employ them on our behalf. The dictionary com- memorates the change with a second set of deªnitions, wherein science is the knowledge (and/or the trusted methods of extending knowledge) of a speciªc ªeld of learning, and technology is the practice (or the study of the practice) of the various applied sciences or mechanical arts.1 Crucially, sci-

1. The bracketed deªnitions here are interesting in that they evoke a theme that appears later, that of the historical tendency for arts and techniques to be ranked of less worth than theories and modes of cognition. Thus, “technology” was not merely characterized as the “study” of technical practices and procedures, but sometimes as their “scientiªc study”,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 145

ence and technology may be confronted as if externalities. Now it may be meaningful, even if still formally incorrect, to speak of the effects of “science and technology” upon the culture or society of which in truth they still remain a part. And indeed we have long been inclined to refer to science and technology in precisely this way. There is, however, a third semantic shift, besides those involving differentiation and alienation, which must be taken into account if we are to gain a tolerable understanding of our current usage. I can convey what it involves by citing a third deªnition of technology, although it is one that does not ªgure prominently in dictionaries. When I ask people what technology is, almost invariably they identify it, not as skills or skilled practices but as tools, machinery and gadgetry. It is arguable that this third shift, unlike the two that preceded it, represents a loss to our understanding. It is true that skilled technical activity has always involved tools and artefacts, and that accounts of technology have always been expected to do justice to their role. And it is true that there has long been a tendency, even amongst professional historians of technology, to emphasize that role above all else: outstanding studies of the evolution of tools and machines, those by George Basalla (1988) and Edward Constant (1980) for example, merely follow precedent when they describe themselves as histories of technology. Even so, it might be thought impoverishing that technology is now close to being perceived as nothing but artefacts, and that everyday awareness of the importance of the associated specialized technical skills is apparently far less than it once was. What I want to say here is that technology, the skills and practices of a culture or a sub-culture, has taken on an unduly reiªed form in the context of everyday understanding, wherein it is rendered as no more than the tools and artefacts employed in those practices.2 It is not merely that it is seen as alien and other by a speciªc set of people; it is that it is seen as independent of human beings and their actions altogether. And if this is the case with technology, so is it also with science, which having been alienated to specialists is now all too often seen not merely as separate from the everyday life of human beings but as distinct and separate from humanity altogether, a set of concepts and classiªcations, or of theories and laws, in-

whether in a “college of technology” or elsewhere. But “technology”, unlike “art” did at least retain its strong association with the mechanical and industrial “arts”. 2. Thus, whilst I do not criticize semantic changes elicited by process of differentiation and division of labor engendering specialized forms of technical culture, I do criticize, not reiªcation per se, but a form of reiªed understanding that numbs our sensitivity to the role of technical skills and practices. Another view, which Wolfgang Lefevre has suggested, is that a reiªed view of technology as tools and artefacts usefully sensitizes us to the role of dead labor in production processes.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 146 Elusive Memories of Technoscience

habiting a Platonic realm of its own, God only knows where. Of course, it is not only in everyday understanding that one encounters these unfortu- nate forms of reiªcation. Academics are inveterate separators and reiªers, and the virtuosity shown by some philosophers in carrying out these tasks is particularly remarkable. Their insistence upon rendering scientiªc knowledge formally, as hypostatized concepts and statements, heedless of the carriers of the putative knowledge and the actual use made of it in their practice, certainly merits indictment here. But sociologists and historians of science have been at fault as well, especially in their treatment of technology. Practically all advocates of technological determinism have contributed to the reiªcation of technology, as have those who have spoken of the relationship of technology and society, and even those who have claimed to discern a social shaping of technology.3 Whatever their past failings, however, it is sociologists and historians who we now have to thank for seeking to correct this unduly reiªed vision of science and technology. Indeed, the entire project of STS may be understood as substantially this project, and its hard-won success is of profound importance for just this reason. That success could perhaps have been achieved at less cost. Simply by looking back to what science and technology were taken to be before reiªcation and hypostatization ran rampant, a great deal of reinvention and rediscovery might have been avoided. But recent historical and sociological work has not merely reversed the tendency to reiªcation and taken us back to where we were. It has offered distinctive positive contributions of its own. Current accounts of the sciences as forms of skilled practice, for example, have few really close historical precedents, and their documentation of how those practices are based upon, and their development shaped by, a shared material culture, including a distinctive instrumentation, amounts to an impressive new vision of scientiªc change. And work in the history and sociology of technology is no less distinctive. Thus, when Thomas Hughes (1983) characterized the large technological systems he studied as socio-technical systems, he was not simply reminding those few of us who might have forgotten that skills, and the practices wherein skills are exer- cised, are intrinsic to technology, and that these skills are carried and con-

3. This last is indeed a strange notion: even if technology is reckoned to be no more than artefacts, what are artefacts but materials shaped to suit a social use? Even so, the literature on “social shaping” is impressive (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999). And “social shaping” may usefully be read as the shaping of an artefact to perform functions other than that primary one that deªnes the relevant artefact as technology. To read the material in this way also creates an interesting link with the basic argument about practices and functions made later in this paper.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 147

stituted by organized sub-sets of the members of the relevant societies. Hughes’ work pointed toward a conception of technology as a collectively constituted and socially organized body of skills, and thereby marked the beginnings of a break with the individualistic modes of thought previously dominant in this context. His insight here is yet more vividly exempliªed in Diane Vaughan’s rightly celebrated sociological analysis of the Challenger launch decision (1996). Vaughan showed in detail that in order to understand how the relevant technological system operated it was necessary to refer both to the technical skills and competences incarnate in it and to the knowledge and skill required to coordinate them. The specialized knowledge and skill of bureaucrats and administrators were relevant here of course, but so also, as Vaughan clearly shows, were the everyday interactive skills of the parties involved. They too have to be counted as a part of the system; for how it functions as a system is unintelligible without reference to them.

2. Science and technology as work There is currently an intense concern with science and technology as practice and process. Reiªed notions—of science as concepts and theories in- habiting a Platonic realm, of technology as machines and artifacts—have given way to understandings of these things as sets of socially organized and embedded practices. But if science and technology are indeed differentiated clusters of practices, the questions remain of what the practices are, how they differ, and how they affect each other as well as the much larger body of practices that constitute the rest of society. There are many ways of approaching these questions. One is to treat them as problems for institutional history. Science and technology may be identiªed as whatever practices are ongoing in routinely recognized “scientiªc” or “technological” institutional locations. And accounts of their relationship, including accounts of how they intermingle or combine to constitute technoscience, may refer to the nature and extent of the interactions between practitioners trained in these different locations, between “scientists” and “technologists” and/or “engineers” working together in teams perhaps, on joint projects. Note that, on this way of looking at things, technoscience has to be a recent phenomenon, with a history of no more than a century and a half; for only over this limited period have the differentiated institutional settings existed from which science and technology may be brought forth and combined. There is a lot to be said for an institutional approach to “the science- technology relationship,” but it is out of tune with current thinking, and somewhat neglected in consequence. It identiªes practices as parts of sci-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 148 Elusive Memories of Technoscience

ence or of technology simply according to where they are found, regardless of the kinds of practices they are, whereas the dominant concern at the moment is to characterize science and technology speciªcally in terms of the kinds of practices they are. An ambitious and impressive example of work of this kind is John Pickstone’s recent account of the history of science, technology and medicine, Ways of Knowing (Pickstone 2000). This is a history ordered neither by chronology as is usual, nor by a division into disciplines, nor even by science, technology and medicine each being sepa- rately considered. Instead, Pickstone treats science, technology and medicine as one thing, STM, the history of which is the intertwined histories of different kinds of work – of different ways of knowing, and different ways of doing, as he puts it. Among the major ways of knowing are classifying and describing, analyzing, and experimenting. And among the major ways of doing are making and producing, tending and mending, and de- stroying. Here, he suggests, are “timeless” ways of categorizing activities, and by writing their histories, and the history of how they have been related to each other in different places and different times, a vision of STM as a contextually variable and internally complex constellation of practices and activities can be produced, that transcends the idealizations and problematic demarcations of earlier accounts.4 What is offered here is a radical reconceptualization of STM, as rendered in traditional histories of “science”, “technology” and “medicine”. But it may be that I have made it slightly more radical than in truth it is, for it retains many of the features of traditional histories. Always and everywhere in STM, Pickstone says, different ways of knowing, and of making, may be found, so that the history of STM may always be presented as the history of the different activities that constitute these “ways.” But at any given time, one of these ways may be the most important, even though all the others continue to be present. Thus, in the seven- teenth and eighteenth century classiªcation was the most prominent way of knowing; indeed this was an “age of classiªcation,” a period dominated by natural history. Subsequently, analysis, and then experimentation, came to the fore in STM. And, today, we live in an age dominated by yet another way of knowing, technoscience, wherein the “ways of making knowledge... are also ways of making commodities” (p. 13) and our projects involve an interweaving of science and technology. Evidently, Pickstone is content to retain “ages” and “periods” from the discursive frame of tradi-

4. John Pickstone notes that my brief account above may mislead by omitting his discussion of craft, rationalization and invention as clusters of technological work practices, but I do not think that this oversimpliªcation adversely affects my basic argument.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 149

tional history, as well as its intuitive sense of the distinction between science and technology, the very kind of distinction that becomes redundant if STM is understood as a whole, as various kinds of practices intertwined together.5 But if this is a lapse, it is a fortunate one in the present context; for it engenders an account of science and technology as distinguishable forms of practice, and of technoscience, the focus of this essay, as yet another form of practice involving the intertwining of the other two forms. There are a number of accounts of technoscience in the literature, and the term is used in several different, albeit related, ways, which I shall dis- cuss later. But Pickstone’s account is of immediate interest because it characterizes technoscience as a form of work, and hence as practice. According to Pickstone, technoscience involves an interweaving of the ways of knowing associated with science and the ways of making and producing associated with technology. It is the prominent form of STM in the modern world, within the medical-industrial complex as well as the military- industrial complex, as Pickstone nicely puts it. But the practices that constitute ways of knowing and ways of making exist in all cultures, at all times, in all contexts, and “technoscience” is accordingly a “timeless” concept, whose referents may be encountered anywhere in any period. Pickstone not only cites instances of technoscience existing on a signi- ªcant scale in the nineteenth century, in the form of the dyestuffs and the pharmaceutical industries and the associated research and development facilities. He looks back still further, to the great specimen-gathering ex- peditions and explorations of the expanding European powers, as major manifestations of natural history technoscience. And these examples do indeed meet Pickstone’s deªnition just as satisfactorily as, for example, present day genomics or information technology, even though, unlike these current projects, they were not, and in the last case at least still are not, generally identiªed as technoscience. Both as an instance of the current trend to treat science and technology

5. Pickstone often treats both the boundaries between science, technology and medicine and those around STM as a whole as if they are known already, independently of the practices and activities that they supposedly consist in. This would not matter if the independent considerations that did identify the bounds of STM and of its three components were made explicit. But Pickstone does not make it clear how he is identifying STM, and serious problems emerge as a result. Should we, for example, regard the one time predominance of “natural history” in STM as a genuinely interesting historical observation, or should we dismiss it as no more than an artefact of historians’ selectivity in deciding what to count as STM in the ªrst place? Of course, some historians, extremely sensitive to this kind of problem, meticulously desist from deciding what is to count as STM, and leave it to historical agents themselves to categorize their own actions and practices, even at the “cost” of writing history of science without any mention of science.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 150 Elusive Memories of Technoscience

(once more) as culture, practice and skill, and as the source of a particularly interesting account of technoscience, Pickstone’s book is of great relevance here. But it is not just its many insights that are important. It pro- vides a backdrop against which I can advance some critical reservations about the move to practice and process, at least as it is currently rational- ized. Pickstone’s book impressively develops the view that the history of STM is best written as histories of describing, analyzing, experimenting, and perhaps one or two other things. This makes it an exemplary history of practices, one that seeks to convey a sense of what practitioners have actually been doing. But it needs to be asked how far histories of STM can hope to convey what its practitioners have actually done, and even whether, in the last analysis, this is what they ought to seek to do. Let us look to some examples drawn from Pickstone to initiate reºection on this point. Suppose our interest is in eighteenth-century “natural history”—in the work of geology for example. What was the work like? No doubt it would have involved a considerable amount of walking, some digging, scraping and cleaning, chipping and hammering, the careful scrutiny and drawing of whole landscapes, and of small pieces of rock, possibly also a more elaborate treatment of the rocks, involving a magnifying glass perhaps, or the dripping of acid upon them, although no great detail on this sort of thing is provided even in the more recent practice-oriented studies. Work in one of the great nineteenth-century chemistry laboratories, had that been our concern, would probably have been just as diverse, although that of any given individual therein would perhaps have been less so, being narrowed by a more advanced division of labor. But there is no way in which work practices in the ªrst case could be said to have been simply those of describing and in the second case those of analyzing. And still more important, it is far from clear that accounts of it as describing and/or analyzing enrich our understanding of the actual work practices involved—of what was actually being done, as it were. Now of course Pickstone does not advocate the exhaustive description of the work of STM even as an ideal; he merely wants to make STM visible as work that contributes to one or more “ways of knowing.” But what is it about the work done in a given context, or a given practice within it, that makes it such a contribution—part of a project of describing, for example, or analyzing? I want to propose that it is not the actual characteristics of the work or the practice at all, not anything about “what is actually being done,” but is entirely a matter of the signiªcance accorded to what is being done. Indeed, it is one of the main purposes of this paper to offer this hypothesis, to argue its merits in the present context, and to point to some of its implications.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 151

At one point in his book (p. 43), Pickstone asks us to imagine an early twentieth-century chemistry laboratory, and the rows and rows of bottled chemicals therein. As he rightly points out, in themselves these could easily be exhibits in a museum of natural history, substances ordered, sorted, and classiªed in an aesthetically pleasing way. Yet they are not, since for participants in the laboratory culture they have epistemic signiªcance primarily as tools for the practice of chemical analysis (as reagents, solvents, and so forth). These “chemicals” are identiªed and categorized in terms of their mode of use, that is, according to their functions in the overall practice of the laboratory. But this insight into the categorization of laboratory “chemicals” needs to be extended. The very practices that constitute the work of the laboratory will also be categorized according to their functions. Just as there is nothing inherent in a “chemical” that makes it a laboratory solvent or a reagent, so there is nothing inherent in what a person does—in the practice, or activity, or work, or whatever—that makes it a contribution to a natural history, or an analysis, or an experiment. It is whether we count it as the one and/or the other, and use it as such, that matters: the role that we give it in our entire system of practices makes intelligible the way in which we categorize it.

3. Practices and their functions Most of our practices are the practices they are designated as being by virtue of the functions we have them perform and the uses we put them to, and this is speciªcally the case with the various practices Pickstone identiªes as making up the work of STM. As far as the nature of practices themselves is concerned, no more is conveyed by designating them as parts of a descriptive, or an analytic, project than it is by designating them as parts of a “scientiªc” or “technological” one. Indeed it is quite extraor- dinarily difªcult to write history that communicates a grasp of the nature of practices themselves; even the everyday discourse that accompanies practices tends to mention them in functional more than descriptive terms and relies on their nature and characteristics being grasped by other means. But what is the importance of this here? The best route to an answer is via examples. Let us cast our minds back about a century to the work of a great German organic chemistry laboratory of the kind men- tioned by Pickstone. And let us consider what contemporary descriptions were in routine use for the practices and activities involved. We know that many everyday practices in that kind of context were described, just as familiar “chemicals” were, in terms of the immediate goals they served and the functions they performed. Just as “chemicals” were categorized as, for example, solvents that dissolved, oxidizing agents

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 152 Elusive Memories of Technoscience

that oxidized, or catalysts that catalyzed, so practices were described as, for example, ªltrations or titrations or fractionations or extractions. Whole clusters of such practices, coherently ordered, were identiªed in terms of more general functions, as analysis for example, or puriªcation, or synthesis. And this last is particularly interesting, since synthesis, arguably as important as analysis in the practice of classical organic chemistry, was explicitly a way of making, and the ªrst stage of ways of producing, ways constituted by large systems of practices many of which were located way beyond the university laboratory, in facilities ªnanced by industrial chemical companies. And of course, having been reminded of this connection, we are bound to note other crucial practices of the university laboratory the function of which depended on a systematic connection with these “external” locations: training, for example (often indistinguishable, qua practice, from researching), and testing (often indistinguishable from analyzing). Many of the speciªc practices of our chemistry laboratory, perhaps most, would have been categorized in functional terms by reference to the immediate routine goals of the agents employing them. Clusters of these practices would also have been categorized functionally, in relation both to immediate goals and those intelligible only in terms of outputs to settings beyond the laboratory itself. But there would also have been functional categorizations used to refer to the entire constellation of practices of the laboratory culture, practices that, as we have just seen, were actually functional in a number of different ways. Which of these different functions were the bases of these general categorizations? The answer is clear as a matter of history: by virtue of their location, all these practices were classiªed by contemporaries as a part of chemistry, and were together referred to in a way that ªxed upon their function in advancing the knowledge of the scientiªc discipline of chemistry as their crucial function. That these same practices also constituted training and testing, making and producing, and much else besides, was passed over at this level, which is not to say that it went unnoticed by the practitioners involved. Compare this example with how a much more recent set of practices is categorized, those that constitute the human genome project. Again, there are speciªc functional categorizations of practices: mixing and separating, heating and cooling, and so forth. Again, entire sets of practices, at various levels, are also categorized by function: as sequencing perhaps, or decod- ing, or recombining. Again, outputs into other settings may affect descriptions of what work on the project is doing, so that given that part of its output is familiar via the internet, or the purchase of a CD-ROM, it may be understood as an information processing project, something easily

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 153

rendered in Pickstone’s terms as describing or analyzing. Notice, however, that it is actually quite difªcult at present to ªnd signiªcant examples of these practices functioning in making or producing. The relevance of this, of course, is that the genome project is now a paradigm case of technoscience, whereas the great organic chemistry laboratories of the past that did function in making and producing, both internally and within an extended division of labor, were not characterized in this way at the time; and the contemporary identifying descriptions of their practices gave little hint that these laboratories were anything more than settings for science and scientiªc ways of knowing. Although in one sense it has always been apparent that what went on in these laboratories was techne as much as episteme, stories that make this explicit have only been constructed by historians quite recently. I have now described, I hope uncontroversially, how many of the practices that make up two different bodies of work within STM have been identiªed in terms of their functions. And I have noted as well how the two clusters of practices have themselves each been identiªed as wholes in terms of their functions, how these identiªcations have been selective in recognizing some functions and not others, and how the recognized functions have not necessarily been those to which the relevant sets of practices have been most strongly oriented in actuality. I can now reºect on the signiªcance of the tendency to identify practices in terms of functions against the background of these examples. The ªrst thing to say here is that I make no criticism of this tendency per se. The identiªcation of practice by function is ubiquitous, and arguably essential. Indeed, it is good that we do it, as we all do. In the context of a form of life, practices and actions have to be made intelligible in terms of their roles in that form of life. There is of course a yet stronger argument that can be made here: a practice, it can be claimed, just is something that we do identiªed in terms of its function; if we did not identify and orient to what was done in terms of function then we would not be treating it as a practice at all; practices are functional by deªnition as it were.6 But whilst acknowledging the plausibility of this line of argument, I am myself suspicious of it, and do not wish to use it. It may sometimes be useful and legitimate, or so I believe, to speak of “practices themselves” staying the same even as descriptions of them change, or of “the same practices” being identiªed and oriented to differently by the members of different sub-cultures. Indeed, in the second kind of case—and there are

6. This kind of argument is more familiar in relation to “intention”, but I think its pros and cons are the same whether it is “intention” or “function” that is at issue.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 154 Elusive Memories of Technoscience

surely innumerable examples, in our context and elsewhere, of practices falling under different descriptions in the accounts of different audiences— it is difªcult to know how else to proceed if not by dissociating practices and descriptions of practices. Practices, I should like to say, may be amenable to different identifying descriptions in the context of our communi- cative interaction, much as material objects are so amenable in the context of scientiªc research. Practices should not be deªned by function (or intention), or so I believe, but there is nothing to be said against identifying them by function in speciªc contexts, and much to be said on behalf of that. Nor is there anything to be said against identifying a practice by just one of its many functions. How would we live otherwise? We cannot evoke the complete role of a practice within a form of life in each and every individual utter- ance. What would merit criticism, however, would be for those of us who study practices to proceed without proper awareness of what is involved here. Criticism would be merited, for example, if we failed to keep in mind that descriptions are always and invariably incomplete, that the words we put to practices, like those we put to material objects, are selected from a larger set of (valid) alternatives, and, speciªcally, that the current identifying function of a practice is unlikely to be its only function. In a nutshell, then, I have called attention to how we identify practices not so much to criticize as to warn. And the warning concerns not the con- nections we make but those we do not. My paper is about the dangers of forgetfulness. Thus, in identifying John Pickstone’s history of STM as a history of work practices identiªed by function, no criticism whatsoever is implied. On the contrary, the approach represents a signiªcant advance on much traditional history in this context. Pickstone uses “timeless” categories to describe STM, “timeless” in that the functions whereby they are identiªed may plausibly be assumed to be timeless: describing, analyzing, making, producing are close to being universal functions of work as it exists in any culture. At the same time, he characterizes technoscience as a constellation of practices that function both as ways of knowing and ways of making, and thereby deªnes it in terms of its orientation to these universal functions. Given this, it is easy to see why he is able to remember, as most traditional historians have not, so many examples of the importance of technoscience in long past periods and settings. And indeed there will be many more such memories encroaching into historical studies as the concern with STM as work and practice intensiªes (see Harwood, Klein, and Pickering, this special issue). These very memories, however, ought to make us question the assumption that today we are truly living in an “age

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 155

of technoscience.” Where is the warrant for this claim, when it is now a simple matter to identify signiªcant examples of technoscience through- out the history of STM as conventionally deªned, and even before?7 By addressing it as work and practice, John Pickstone’s book sensitizes us to how profoundly STM, and in particular those parts of it conventionally identiªed as “science”, have been oriented to the functions of making and producing. The result is an historical vision that is fundamentally ir- reconcilable with standard accounts of the recent rise of technoscience, accounts of how specialists from different kinds of disciplinary location, chemistry and engineering for example, are now increasingly cooperating by bringing together the “science” and “technology” necessary for a given project. If ways of knowing and making are already intertwined in the original disciplinary contexts, if they may be sites of technoscience already as it were, then talk of “science” and “technology” being brought together here will merely obscure what is going on. Nonetheless a near consensus on the predominance of technoscience as something characteristic particularly of recent times does actually exist, and extends well beyond the specialized discourse of history of science. How is this to be accounted for? Neither directly nor indirectly is it likely to be a result of a detailed awareness of how the many and various practices of STM are, and were, intertwined together. Nor, is the general pat- tern of conviction here primarily the consequence of visibly changing rela- tionships between differently trained, or differently labeled, or even differently competent expert professionals, even though this or that particular account of technoscience as a currently dominant set of practices might conceivably be understood in these terms. A more plausible hypothesis is simply that those favored functions with which we choose explicitly to associate the practices of STM have changed. As we have noted, when we identify an entire cluster of practices by “its function,” we always select that explicitly acknowledged function from a larger set of actual functions. Given this, we ought to ask whether our current “age of technoscience” is not better regarded as an age of talk of technoscience, which talk predominantly reºects our inclination to associate the practices of STM with a different selection of functions and roles from that previ-

7. It is very difªcult to do what Pickstone seeks to do here—to reconcile a history employing ‘timeless’ categories with traditional histories that employ concepts applicable only in speciªc periods, ages or epochs. Notice that if ‘technoscience’ is regarded as a time- lessly applicable notion, then the culture of any simple undifferentiated society is a technoscientiªc one. The Stone Age then stands as an “age of technoscience” and the history of subsequent social differentiation and division of labor must presumably involve a move away from it.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 156 Elusive Memories of Technoscience

ously favored. And if we judge that this is the case, then it is interesting also to ask why it is the case.

4. “Technoscience”: an essentially uncontested concept So far it has been expedient to conªne the discussion to just one account of technoscience, one selected for its emphasis on how it is constituted of practices. But of course there are many such accounts, and several ways of deªning the notion of “technoscience,” and whilst they are obviously related to each other they nonetheless reveal a remarkable degree of diversity. A very brief reminder of some of this diversity will now be useful.8 I noted earlier that “technoscience” is most commonly employed to refer to some hybrid or combination of science and technology, but strictly speaking this is not the case. The term is now very widely employed to speak of a general characteristic of our culture as a whole. It is said that we live in a “technoscientiªc culture”, or a culture wherein that speciªc cultural style, or form, or dimension, is hegemonic. Indeed a vast amount of effort is being expended on describing our culture in this way, in the main by cultural anthropologists, and feminists, and different humanist intel- lectuals intent upon critique, but also, to a lesser degree, by enthusiasts celebrating the virtues and the beneªts of the same phenomena. Work of this kind, however, must necessarily draw upon the more specialized literature for its initial understanding of what technoscience con- sists in. And indeed it cites that literature extensively, and especially the work of Bruno Latour (1987), wherein the term “technoscience” appears to have ªrst been used. The crucial feature of Latour’s initial discussion was that it treated science and technology as just one interconnected system: his approach was relentlessly monistic, here as elsewhere. But formally speaking, his account identiªed technoscience as science, science that is heavily dependent on instrumentation and hence on technology. Science was taken to be a known entity that was observably changing its characteristics as time passed and the technical, instrumental resources available to it became more and more potent. Thus, Latour was the ªrst of a number of writers who have conceptualized technoscience as a form of science, one profoundly dependent upon the technology incarnate in it. Later work in

8. Strictly speaking I should be reviewing the use of “technoscience” and other related concepts deriving in one way or another from “techne”. It is their increased popularity that is material to my argument. It is worth noting that the speciªc term “technoscience” appears not to have wide currency among its practitioners, even though they currently favor a variety of terms linking “techne” and “scientia” as descriptions of what they do. “Technoscience” tends to be favored by external commentators and critics rather more than practitioners and apologists.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 157

the same vein has sought to be more speciªc about how the nature of research is affected by the infusion of technology. Ursula Klein, for example, (this volume) speaks of technosciences as sciences which themselves produce the objects that it is their task to investigate: here technology facili- tates production processes essential to, indeed partly constitutive of, the practice of research itself. Clearly, views of this kind, wherein technoscience refers to transforma- tions in the practice of scientiªc research, need to be distinguished from those that identify technoscience as something that emerges at the inter- section of science and technology, conceived of as persisting, distinguishable clusters of practices, or kinds of practices. On the ªrst view, science could conceivably be entirely transformed into technoscience, and indeed the import of Latour’s own discussion is that to all intents and purposes it already has been. On the second, “technoscience” is a meaningful term only in so far as science and technology themselves remain in existence, whether as distinct forms of practice that may be combined or intertwined, or as distinct institutional loci that may interact, via the mobility of personnel or otherwise. (Again following Ursula Klein in this volume, it is possible to imagine the necessary interaction consisting in the transfer of material objects between settings.) Neither of the conceptions of “technoscience” so far discussed requires any radical reconceptualization of “science itself”. One of them permits technoscience to be identiªed as an externality to the core practice of scientiªc research. The other points to the incorporation of technological skills and artefacts into that core practice, but allows them to be deªned as resources in the service of science. There is, however, a third possibility, wherein “technoscience” denotes something other than science as tradi- tionally understood, and its use is intended speciªcally to challenge that understanding. The challenge may be conveyed by the assertion that all science is really technoscience. Or it may be said that in current conditions science is technoscience, that it is now so much subsumed into and dominated by technology that if science is to be spoken of at all it can only be as something inherently technological. What precisely is meant, though, when putatively scientiªc practices are redescribed as technoscientiªc in this sense? What is implied by the suggestion that science is dominated by technology? As usual, different accounts of this sort may imply very different things. Science may be redescribed as technoscience simply to stress how what scientists do is necessarily constrained by the (technological) skills and artefacts that are available to them: a picture of science as applied technology may be presented, in contrast to traditional pictures that render technology as ap-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 158 Elusive Memories of Technoscience

plied science and are insufªciently appreciative of the independent potency of the former. But many accounts are more ambitious than this, and subsume science into technoscience as a crucial exempliªcation of the way that thought must inevitably be dominated by practice in the context of any form of culture or way of life. Such accounts are often strongly prag- matist in their epistemological ºavor. Knowledge is held to arise not from contemplation but only from acting on things, and exploring what can be done with and to them. Indeed, it may be that this kind of approach is being pressed just a little too strongly in current history and sociology of science, where it seems to be encouraging the conviction that science may successfully be pursued in laboratories, but not in observatories. More generally, there are several different accounts of what it means for (scientiªc) thought to be dominated by (technological) practice, and only an extended review such as cannot be given here, and embracing in particular the Marxist tradition in philosophy and the social sciences and the various accounts of science and technology it has produced, would begin to do justice to them. One intriguing account that is worth brief mention, however, is that of Thorstein Veblen (1908). Veblen makes a strong distinction between thought (theory) and life (practice), and between prag- matically oriented thought and thought moved by “idle curiosity.” And whilst he is deeply appreciative of the value and potency of modern scientiªc thought, he unambiguously identiªes it as of the latter sort: as well as reasoned lines of conduct, conduct moved by idle curiosity and “irrelevant attention” must be acknowledged as an inalienable element of scientiªc research, an activity which always retains something of the qual- ity of play. This does not mean, however, that scientiªc thought ºoats free of life and lived experience. Science orders the facts of experience in terms of a “scheme of habitual interpretation” shaped by the “habits of thought” of the wider culture, which habits are shaped and conditioned in turn by the “habits of life” therein. But in the industrializing societies within which modern science has developed “the technological range of habitua- tion progressively counts for more in the cultural complex.” And hence, in the modern world, and in the context of science especially, “men have learned to think in the terms in which the technological processes act.” In this sense we may say, or Veblen might have said had he possessed the notion, modern science is technoscience, even though it is a form of enquiry divorced from expediency and characteristically motivated by a disinter- ested idle curiosity. It is interesting that Veblen’s account of the conditioning of scientiªc thought by technology aroused little interest at the time of its ªrst publi- cation, whilst far more radical accounts of that connection have aroused much greater interest in recent decades. In these accounts no reference is

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 159

made to idle curiosity and there is no hint that playfulness and unpredict- ability may inhere in scientiªc research: science is technoscience in that it is both moved and structured by pragmatic expediency—very much the opposite of Veblen’s view. Thus, today we take seriously the claim that, whether considered as thought or as practice, science is instrumentally oriented: prestructured by a knowledge-constituting interest in prediction and control as Habermas has put it; oriented to the domination and control both of nature and of human beings as Marcuse and others have claimed; partaking of a peculiar violence and destructiveness which according to Heidegger is characteristic of technology in its more recent manifestations. If a view of this kind is correct, then the validity of scientiªc knowledge is judged in terms of its instrumental success and technical efªcacy, and techne prevails over episteme not just empirically but epistemically as well, strange as that may seem. Needless to say, those who are ready to speak of ours as an age of technoscience in the profound sense implied by this last account acquiesce in a deeply pessimistic vision of our present condition. But of course there need be no correlation between what the term “technoscience” is taken to mean and how the world is taken to be, even though terms of this sort are frequently fashioned in order to gain purchase on how the world is or what it is rapidly becoming.9 Thus, Rheinberger (1997, p. 31) takes references to technoscience to assert the identity of science and technology, rather than their interaction or combination in given settings, but immediately goes on to question the utility of the concept if it is deªned in this way. He rejects the identity it presumes and the impoverished conception of scientiªc research he takes it to imply, and he laments its use as an instance of the “virulent” tendency to lump together that which should be understood in its interaction. And more generally, for any given conception of technoscience, once agreed, further discussion is invariably needed concerning how much or little of it actually exists, or else, in some few cases, concerning whether any of it could possibly exist. I have now described three ways in which “technoscience” may be conceptualized, and indicated how different understandings of the term ex- press different understandings of the relationship between science and

9. The point may also be illustrated by citing the reºections of scientists themselves. Whether or not they are familiar with the notion of technoscience, Sulston and Ferry (2002, p. 265) note that science and technology are now very often identiªed as one thing, and that their own ªeld of genomics is currently funded as if its sole purpose were technological development. But they speak of these things as encroaching dangers to be avoided, in a world where knowledge can still be evaluated independently of its application by those who choose to do so, and not as given features of their social and cultural environment.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 160 Elusive Memories of Technoscience

technology. But there are, at the same time, many different accounts of how science and technology should themselves be conceptualized. So by combining the latter with the former an elaborate taxonomy of conceptions of technoscience could be produced, and a review of the many different ways of using these various conceptions to describe actual states of af- fairs. But this is not my purpose here. My immediate aim is simply to convey some idea of the sheer number of references to technoscience that have recently found their way into the literature, and of the great variety of meanings currently associated with the term. Indeed, the diversity of meanings is such that some stand in ºat contradiction to others, not that this serves to daunt or discourage those who use the term in these conºicting ways. Everyone seems happy to share the notion, or at least the token, with everyone else. In brief, there is currently a great and widespread inclination to use the term “technoscience” to describe practices and activities that might at other times have been described very differently. And it will be clear that this change has not been inspired by the aim of establishing a shared and precise label for a newly emerging phenomenon. What has inspired the change cannot be inferred from the above discussion, but my conjecture is that it forms as part of a very general secular tendency to render in terms of “techne” and its derivatives much that might previously have been rendered in terms of “episteme”. Indeed, I would also see the move from talk of theory to talk of practice, a move of great import in recent STS and history and sociology of science and one that has obviously inºuenced the construction of this paper, as a part of that same general tendency. But if this is indeed the case, why has such a secular change occurred? A plausible answer is not hard to produce if it is acknowledged that a practice is commonly identiªed and described in terms of its function, that this function is invariably selected from a larger set of actual functions, and, further, that in making the selection the need to justify and legitimate practices may be a major consideration.

5. Practices and apologetics At least since the work of Edgar Zilsel, we have been thoroughly familiar with the thought that different kinds of practices in STM may be assigned very different degrees of worth and standing. Zilsel’s famous thesis linked the rise of science to the changed relationship between scholars and crafts- men in early modern Europe. “Mathematical practitioners, superior arti- sans, engineers, surgeons on the one hand, and scholarly trained members of various traditional disciplines on the other” were able to interact together for the ªrst time (Raven et al. 2000, p. iv). The gap between practi-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 161

tioners of the “liberal” and the “mechanical arts”, hitherto reinforced by their disparate institutional locations and by a contempt for manual labor on the part of social elites, was eroded (Shapin 1981). And this permitted the essential combination of craft skill and causal/empirical thought styles with trained formal reasoning. I mention Zilsel’s fascinating thesis here solely in order to raise the issue of the status and worth of different forms of practice. Whatever actually occurred in sixteenth century Europe the prejudice against manual labor and the disdain of technique and technical skill, then engrained in the status order and the occupational structure, far from being overcome with the rise of science, have continued to ªnd expression within it and within STM generally. At different times they have been responsible for those who lacked independent means also being deprived of full and equal standing with other practitioners in their ªelds, for technicians and engineers suffering a chronic lack of status or status security, for the curious exclusion of the occupation of medical practitioner from the status of work involving the hands, and for a systematic tendency, in the identiªcation of work and work practice by function, to speak of “medical science” and “engineering science”. And of course the hostility directed at the thesis itself scarcely half a century ago is testimony to the enduring nature of these prejudices, which were bound to be excited by work that explicitly re- jected “purely intellectual” accounts of the rise of science and apparently advocated a causal externalism instead. Probably the most obvious and important example of the precedence of “head” over “hand” in rankings of the practices and activities of STM was the hierarchical conception of the relationship of “basic science”, “applied science”, and “technology”. Although just what these terms were supposed to mean was intensely disputed over a long period, this did not dis- turb the consensus view that advances in basic science were what initiated change and innovation in the other two areas, and thereby operated as the prime movers of change in the economy. And this hierarchical vision, wherein every technological development was putatively inspired by some preceding advance in basic science, was generally interpreted in institutional terms, as implying, for example, that academic science laboratories were the well-springs of the innovations produced by industrial scientists and engineers. This particular interpretation of the hierarchical vision long provided a rationale for “the social license of basic science” (Layton 1977, p. 206), but its speciªc importance here is that it was wholly incorrect empirically, yet very widely credited, both by practitioners and out- siders. For decades, this myth profoundly conditioned and ordered how political and economic institutions oriented themselves to “science and

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 162 Elusive Memories of Technoscience

technology”, and how the relationship between the two was perceived. That a completely erroneous conception of the nature and organization of these vast arrays of practices readily secured a widespread and enduring credibility is testimony to what is possible when such arrays are identiªed and perceived in terms of selective references to their functions. Lately, however, we have seen a profound shift in the way that the functions and practices of STM are evaluated. Secular social changes have re- sulted in a general decline in the standing of all forms of expertise, and in an inversion of the relative standings of “techne” and “episteme”. “Useful” practices now have greater value than describing, analyzing and experimenting as ways of knowing “for its own sake”; or at least they do for out- siders if not always for practitioners themselves.10 Thus, whilst in the past there was a clear incentive to make out any body of practices within STM as science, to identify its function as the production of systematic knowledge and nothing more, and to pass over whatever other functions it might be performing; now the emphasis is very much the other way. Pro- liferating ªelds in universities and elsewhere are now identifying themselves to outside audiences not in terms of what knowledge they are gener- ating but in terms of what they are making, or making it possible to make. Academic laboratories are no longer playing down their links with industry and government: indeed, whether they involve ªnancial support, or technical cooperation, or exchange of personnel, the tendency is to pro- claim them. Even projects almost exclusively concerned with the acquisi- tion and classiªcation of information are now making themselves visible in terms of their “technology”, that is in terms of an instrument or instru- ments, the Hubble telescope, for example, or the tactfully renamed MRI scanner. And commentaries and theoretical reºections are continually ad- justing to this process of relabeling, so that even radical critics of science now direct their barbs more at techne than at scientia, and disdain the knowledge it engenders not as irrelevant and lacking applicability, but for the opposite reasons. So advanced have these changes now become, and so important in structuring discourse and perception, that what might be happening by way of change to the nature and organization of “practice itself” is extremely hard to identify independently of them, even for specialists in the

10. An empirical study by Calvert (2001) nicely documents how practitioners make artful use of concepts of “basic” and “applied” research, expediently varying the meanings of the terms with context as they address different external audiences, including grant giv- ing agencies. A further ªnding of the study, however, was an apparent continuing respect for, and desire to be involved in, research that seeks “knowledge for its own sake” amongst these same practitioners.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 163

history and historical sociology of science. Those of us active in these ªelds need to recognize the difªculty that this represents. A shift of emphasis at the level of discourse, not a shift into error but from one legitimate mode of description to another, may nevertheless encourage error unless we take account of it, and exercise the caution its existence demands of us. Because of the shift we stand in danger, if not of misrepresenting technoscience as wholly of recent provenance, then at least of exaggerating the extent to which its importance has increased in the context of STM since the middle of the nineteenth century. And even before that time, if we are inclined to speak of science and technology as it then existed, the possibility of misdiagnosing the functions of the relevant practices because of the selective attributes of the contemporary discourse is still present. There is, of course, substantial compensation for the need to cope with these difªculties in the shape of the heightened awareness of and proper respect for techne now manifest, at long last, in both everyday and specialized forms of discourse. Few of us will wish to lament the current inclination to treat “life” as prior to “consciousness” in this context; and even fewer, I suspect, will regret the passing of the perversions and injustices alluded to by Zilsel—and by both Freudenthal and Lefevre in this volume. But even if these developments are greeted with unequivocal pleasure, it needs to be borne in mind that fortunate outcomes may sometimes be the products of problematic causes. The discursive shift I have just attempted to describe is surely a part of a much larger transformation, representing the long-delayed triumph of a utilitarianism that political and economic changes had made all but inevitable. But the dangers associated with the complete triumph of that perspective are notorious. If we are indeed reaching the long-heralded point when the only value we can claim for things is their extrinsic value, then a heightened respect for “techne” is a predictable consequence, but, so too, is an indiscriminate disdain for episteme. Of course, it is not the triumph of utilitarianism per se that is relevant here, but its triumph in a speciªc form. The mere doctrine would permit us to ask about the productivity of a social system that incorpo- rated “basic science” within an extensive division of technical and intellectual labor, and would even permit the answer that nothing inherently more productive than a highly differentiated system of this kind is to be looked for. But there is a utilitarianism that is offended by even the ap- pearance of uselessness, and claims to judge not just the social whole, but also each and every supposedly separate part thereof, in terms of its supposed utility. And it may be the move to an individualistic utilitarianism of this sort that is shifting the way in which we identify and describe the practices of STM. It could well be this, more than any change in the in-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 164 Elusive Memories of Technoscience

trinsic characteristics of practice itself, that is propelling us, or rather our imaginations, into a new “age of technoscience”, and heightening our concern with “technoscientiªc productivity”.

References Calvert, Jane. 2001. “Goodbye Blue Skies? The Concept of Basic Research and Its Role in a Changing Funding Environment.” D.Phil. Thesis, Brighton: Sussex University. Constant, Edward. 1980. The Origins of the Turbo-Jet Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fisher, Charles S. 1966. “The Death of a Mathematical Theory.” Archive of the History of the Exact Sciences , 3:137–59. –––. 1967. “The Last Invariant Theorists.” European Journal of Sociology , 8:216–44. Haraway, Donna J. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. London: Routledge. Hughes, Thomas P. 1983. Networks of Power: Electriªcation in Western Soci- ety, 1880–1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Klein, Ursula. 2005. “Technoscience avant la lettre.” Perspectives on Science, 13(2). Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Layton, E. 1977. “Conditions of Technological Development.” In Science, Technology and Society. Edited by I. Spiegel-Rösing and D. Price. Beverly Hills: Sage. MacKenzie, Donald, and Judy Wacjman, eds. 1999. The Social Shaping of Technology. Buckingham: Open University Press. Pickstone, John W. 2000. Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Tech- nology and Medicine. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pickstone , John V. 2005 “On knowing, acting, and the location of technoscience: a response to the paper by Barry Barnes, Berlin, July 2003.” Perspectives on Science, 13(3). Raven, Diederick, and Wolfgang Krohn. 2000. “Edgar Zilsel: His life and work.” in Zilsel: The Social Origins of Modern Science. Boston: Kluwer. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthe- sizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford: Standford University Press. Shapin, Steven. 1981. “The Zilsel Thesis.” in Dictionary of the History of Science. Edited by Bynum et al. London: MacMillan. Spiegel-Rösing, I., and D. Price, eds. 1977. Science, Technology and Society. Beverly Hills: Sage. Sulston, J., and G. Ferry. 2002. The Common Thread. London: Bantam Press.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 165

Vaughan, Diane. 1996. The Challenger Launch Decision. Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press. Veblen, Thorstein. (1908) 1990. “The Place of Science in Modern Civili- zation.” Reprinted in T. Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civiliza- tion and Other Essays. London: Transaction Publishers. Zilsel, Edgar. 2000. The Social Origins of Modern Science. Edited by Diederick Raven, Wolfgang Krohn, and Robert S. Cohen. Boston: Kluwer.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361405774270520 by guest on 30 September 2021