The pleasures of reading

Why do the books fall into two heaps, the novels on the one hand, and the academic volumes on the other? Why do the novels get themselves read at the weekends, or on holidays, or in the ten minutes before falling asleep at night? Why do the work-books get read in the day, at prime times?

Then again, another kind of question. How do these different kinds of books get read? Why is it that reading a novel brings pleasure not only for its plot and its characterisation, but also for its use of words? If we reflect on the sheer pleasure of reading a well-crafted novel, one in which the words are carefully chosen, put together just right, then we may ask the question: what is the pleasure in reading an academic book? And how many academic books are really well written at the word-level? At the level of crafting?

How these two kinds of books get read is often, perhaps mostly, very different. If we read novels we read them, often, as an act in itself, for the pleasure of the read, the ‘good read’ of the airport novel, or the crafted text of a Barbara Kingsolver or a Penelope Lively or a J.M. Coetzee. They are pleasures in themselves, intrinsic. Whereas I guess we do not often read an academic book for the pleasure of the read itself, the pleasure, so to speak, of the journey. Rather we read it for the destination, where it will take us, where we will be delivered. We take pleasure, to be sure, in a well-crafted academic book – the ones that come to mind for me are, perhaps, mostly by historians. But the interest is different.

Perhaps, then, the distinction is between means and ends. Novels are ends in themselves, worth reading in their own right. Academic writings are means to other ends. The textures along the way, the actual writing, these are subordinate to those ends. It may be more agreeable to travel first class than third, but in the end we all arrive at the same destination. What difference would it make if we were instead to apply the criteria that we usually apply to novels (or even more to poetry) to academic writing? Wouldn’t the library shelves empty as the ranks of books disqualified themselves? What would we be left with? And, more

importantly, if we had to write our academic pieces as if they were poems, as if every word counted, how would we write differently? How much would we write at all?

Of course we would need to imagine representation in a different way. Poetry and novels wrestle with the materials of language to make things, things that are said to be imaginary. It is the making, the process or the effect of making, that is important. The textures along the way cannot be dissociated from whatever is being made, word by word, whereas academic volumes hasten to describe, to refer to, a reality that lies outside them. They are referential, ostensive. They tell us how it is out there.

How, then, might we imagine an academic way of writing that concerns itself with the quality of its own writing? With the creativity of writing? What would this do to the referent, the out-thereness?

STS

Arguments from the discipline of STS (science, technology and society) will play an important part in the argument of this book. Thus, though I weave together a number of sources, the shifting ground on which I stand comes first and foremost from STS. A few words, then, on STS, and its role in the argument.

STS is the study of science and technology in a social context. The basic intuition is simple: it is that scientific knowledge and technologies do not evolve in a vacuum. Rather they participate in the social world, being shaped by it, and simultaneously shaping it. Some of the implications of this intuition are uncontentious. Who is going to deny the social significance of genomics or informatics, or try to argue that these are not shaped by social and economic concerns? Other implications are less obvious and much more controversial. Is the structure of current scientific reasoning patriarchal? Is the content of scientific knowledge at the same time essentially social? Does scientific theory and practice necessarily carry and enact social and political agendas? Is the distinction between scientific inquiry and knowledge on the one hand, and other forms of inquiry or experience on the other, a social contingency? Is the knowledge produced by scientists more or less contexted and local rather than possibly universal? Does scientific practice help to produce the objects that it describes and explains? Many STS scholars would answer ‘yes’ to each of these questions. But as is obvious, all, in greater or lesser degree, run counter both to common-sense and to many versions of the received philosophical wisdom.

So as I deploy the STS arguments (together with related positions developed in such disciplines as anthropology, sociology and cultural studies) these are going to take us to some more or less unfamiliar and sometimes anxiety- provoking territory. But this is precisely my object. STS work over a period of

thirty years has made a series of strong and counter-intuitive claims about the character of science. These have profound potential implications for the conduct of natural science. But if they have implications for natural science, then so, too, they are potentially important for social science. So it is a source of some frustration that those arguments – and their implications – have not been more important in social science and its thinking about method and methodology. And such, to be sure, is the object of this book. I work through some of the STS findings in the context of social science, and in doing so attempt to destabilise some standard versions of social science wisdom. All this means that my argument moves between natural and social science. There are certainly important distinctions between the two, but here, for the most part, I trade upon their commonalities. These, I take it, are instructive and important. And this is where I start.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14