Covering up the traces

But then there is the great question: why doesn’t it look that way? Why is it not obvious that inscription devices produce not only the statements about reality but also the realities themselves? How come people don’t see that ‘phenomena are thoroughly constituted by the material setting of the laboratory’ (1986, 64)? Why is it that reality is taken to be independent, anterior, definite and singular? How come scientists are said to ‘discover’ a reality that is anterior, definite, and all the rest?

Latour and Woolgar have given us the elements that we need to answer these questions. Thus we have seen that the object of scientific practice is to make unqualified statements about reality. All the qualifying modalities need to be deleted. We have also seen that it is important to routinise statements by turning them into taken-for-granted assumptions, instruments, or skills. The more the hinterland is standardised and (at least in certain respects) the more it is concealed, the better.

But this means that as the modalities disappear, so too do almost all of the processes in which statements and realities are produced. The largest part of the work that has gone into their production is deleted. In the end, the inscription devices themselves disappear, though those that are most novel are likely to retain a foothold in the ‘methods section’ of scientific papers. But it is the ‘subjective’ and the ‘personal’ that disappears first. The traces and the statements in the laboratory are used ‘in such a way that all the statements were seen to relate to something outside of, or beyond, the reader’s or author’s subjectivity’ (1986, 84).

This deletion of subjectivity is crucial. In natural and social science research statements about objects in the world are supposed to issue from the world itself, examined in the proper way by means of proper methods, and not from the person who happens to be conducting the experiment. If this is not achieved, then independence and anteriority are not achieved either. If the scientist appears in her text, if she appears as a person, then this undermines any statement about reality.

So what is the consequence of this process of deletion? Latour and Woolgar suggest that scientific statements should be seen as ‘split entities’:

On the one hand, it is a set of words which represents a statement about an object. On the other hand, it corresponds to an object in itself which takes on a life of its own. It is as if the original statement had projected a virtual image of itself which exists outside the statement.

(1986, 176)

So there is deleting and splitting. But then something else happens to complete the effect: there is a causal reversal or inversion. It is no longer the case that the manipulation of inscriptions is seen to produce particular realities. Instead it is the realities that come first:

Before long, more and more reality is attributed to the object and less and less to the statement about the object. Consequently an inversion takes place: the object becomes the reason why the statement was made in the first place.

(1986, 177)

This is the way in which reality becomes the determining factor. It is no longer the processes of comparing, contrasting, and weighing up inscriptions that produce reality. It is no longer the long sequence of actions, events and nego- tiations in which appropriate inscription devices are brought together and arrayed. Least of all is it the uses made of the special skills of particular technicians or programmers. It is not arguments, debates, discussions or controversies that produce reality. It is not the work that lies behind those debates and discussions. Rather it is reality that settles any disagreements. It is reality that produces statements.

The thing and the statement correspond for the simple reason that they come from the same source. Their separation is only the final stage in the process of their construction.

(1986, 183)

The result is a sense of a world that is out-there in far more than the primi- tive or originary sense. It is an out-thereness that is also assumed to be independent of and prior, anterior, to our scientific attempts to know it. It is assumed to be definite – even if we do not yet know that definite form because we have not acquired the methods we need to know it. And it is assumed to be singular.

Latour and Woolgar’s proposal, then, is that this bundle of out-therenesses can be understood as an accomplishment rather than something that defines and sets limits to the ways in which we can properly know the world. Indeed, it is that out-thereness is better understood as an accomplishment rather than something given in the order of things. In short it is that the embedded hinterland of scientific method, the practices that it carries, work to produce a reality that is independent, anterior, definite and singular.

This is the bottom line of their ethnography of science. The hinterland of methods enacts realities. And (one can turn this round) those realities then enact the conditions of possibility of further research. They do not do so wantonly. They do not do so randomly. This is not a matter of the will, of lust, of desire, or of political visions. Nothing can be made real without the ramifications of an appropriate hinterland. But none the less, realities are enacted. If this is difficult then this is because it questions the self-evidence of Euro-American metaphysics; because it undermines the necessity of the methods that we happen to have available to us; because it presents us with possibilities (a reality enacted?) that are dangerous and potentially destabilising at least in principle not only to the metaphysics in which our methods are embedded, but also to the particular realities which they produce.

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