Notes on purity and hybridity

The first version of modern science grew up in the 1660s and 1670s in Restoration London. Historians Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, looking at the rise of the Royal Society and Robert Boyle’s experimental work at this period, note that Boyle was faced with a problem: how to ensure that his experiments were ‘witnessed’ in a way that could carry conviction with other natural philosophers when those philosophers were unable to travel to London to witness the experiments for themselves.109

This was an epistemological problem: how to produce statements about the world that would carry conviction. But it was simultaneously a social problem: how to persuade other natural philosophers that Boyle, or Boyle’s experiments, or Boyle’s reports of those experiments, were appropriately authoritative. How to convince sceptics that Boyle was, indeed, an authority, an author. In response to this double epistemological/social problem, Shapin and Schaffer argue that Boyle devised three interrelated and mutually embedded ‘technologies’.

• The first was material and took the form of an elaborate air-pump in an equally elaborate laboratory. The air-pump, they say, in an analysis that is closely related to that proposed by Latour and Woolgar and the other sociologists of science discussed above, produced phenomena that were otherwise unavailable, and might be interpreted (for instance) as demon- strating the elasticity and the pressure of air. As with most of the experimental arrangements we have considered, Boyle’s air-pump was unreliable and temperamental. Finding the right patterns was difficult. But the air-pump and the laboratory were not simply technical arrangements. They also helped to create a social space. Thus the laboratory became a public location in which appropriate people might ‘witness’ the facts about air as revealed by the working of the pump. Appropriate people? Yes, indeed, for it turns out – I’ll return to this in a moment – that most kinds of people were not appropriate and could not be counted as proper scientific witnesses.

• The second technology was literary. In practice very few people could make the journey to London to see the air-pump in action, and witness it for themselves in person. Some kind of indirect witnessing was therefore necessary if the experimental claims emanating from Boyle’s laboratory were to achieve anything other than local currency. If what Shapin calls ‘virtual witnessing’ was to be achieved:

The technology of virtual witnessing involves the production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either its direct witness or its replication.

(Shapin 1984, 491)

This, he adds, is also a technology of trust. So how was it done? The quick

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answer is that Boyle created a particular kind of text that included: an image of the pump (a ‘representation of reality’); a verbose though modest style (to increase verisimilitude); and discussion of those experiments which failed.

• Each of these, however, also implied and helped to carry through a social technology – that is, the creation of a set of conventions for recognising and responding both to other natural philosophers and to claims about the behaviour of air. First, then, on social philosophers. These were to be modest people. If they reported experiments they were to do so in a matter-of-fact way. Whether in person or in their texts, they spoke confidently of matters of fact – matters that they had witnessed – whilst avoiding generalisations. Metaphysical speculation was out. Facts might be witnessed, but other kinds of realities were inappropriate. But, and second, they also needed to show that they were not constrained or dependent on others in any way. That they were free agents unbeholden to anyone. But what did this mean in Restoration England? The answer was very specific: only ‘gentlemen’ could fulfil this social requirement. Only gentlemen were not beholden to anyone else. Women, even upper-class women, were likely to be dependent on men – fathers, husbands, brothers. Their testimony was accordingly unreliable. And certainly anyone who needed to work for a living – including, not least, the technicians who built the apparatus and were physically responsible for the conduct of the experiments – was automatically rendered ineligible as a witness: in the Restoration imagination such persons were self-evidently open to being suborned.

Shapin and Schaffer talk about the way that each of these ‘technologies’ is embedded in and helps to carry the others.

Historically this moment in the Royal Society of London when these technologies were given shape is incredibly important because it establishes the general shape of scientific experiment, scientific witnessing, and scientific authorship with which we are still wrestling at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Leaving aside the way in which gendering and class agendas get built into the basis of scientific practice and proof right at the beginning of natural science,110it also establishes a very specific version of proper authorship – and a relation between authorship, authority, and accounts of reality. The scientific author is the one who witnesses, but modestly. He is the one who helps in the witnessing process by letting the facts speak for themselves.

But we have been there before – for this, more than three hundred years later, is what Latour and Woolgar are describing in the Salk Laboratory. Crucial to the creation of reliable statements about reality is the Othering of the personal and the subjective. If the author appears at all, it is simply as a neutral medium that passes on statements that have been produced by nature via an appropriate set of inscription devices. Nature has a specific reality. Nature speaks. The person speaks for nature, and then modestly disappears. This, as Alpers and Haraway note, is the creation of a view from nowhere.111 And it is, perhaps

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historically, the first time there is the creation of a secular and naturalistic view from nowhere.

Clearly this enacts an heroic series of disentanglements, deletions and Otherings. If it is to witness reliably, then the scientific assemblage needs to detach itself from the personal and, more generally, from social interests and social context. It needs to detach itself from geographical location (scientific truths, nature as revealed, will subsequently become universal). It also needs to detach itself from specific material forms (the air-pump, properly assembled, makes possible a witness which, however, may be replicated in other forms elsewhere). All of these need to be Othered if a representational as opposed to an allegorical version of depiction is to succeed. There is, as we can still see 350 years on, nothing more damaging to a statement about reality than to say that it has been made by a specific person with specific social interests in a specific geographical location using some idiosyncratic material arrangement that cannot be reproduced elsewhere. Such a provenance is not acceptable.

So in this enactment of knowing most of the social, the geographical and the technical are rendered invisible. But this is only achieved because of a hidden set of carefully organised relations with the social, the geographical and the technical. These are the ‘technologies’ described by Shapin and Schaffer briefly outlined above. The method assemblage bundled together by and through Boyle – a method assemblage that is so successful – works by distinguishing between a public discursive reality and a private heterogeneity which together, and separated, secure the appearance of purity. Indeed, as we have seen, in other language this is also an argument made by philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour (1993). Modernity, he claims, is precisely characterised by its insistence on purity – and also by its practical heterogeneity. The scientists at the Salk Institute pretend to talk – and indeed imagine that they are talking – about nature when they write their papers. But, as we have seen, in practice they are more or less precariously bundling together a heterogeneous hinterland of subsequently deleted social, material and textual resources. Contra appearances, nature is always entangled with culture and society. To negotiate the structure of one is to negotiate the structure of the others.

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