Science in culture and politics

Science and technology account for many of the signature characteristics of contemporary societies; the uncertainty, unaccountability and speed that contribute, at the level of personal experience, to feelings of being perpetually of balance, the reduction of individuals to standard classifications that demarcate the normal form, the deviant and authorize varieties of social control, the scepticism, alienation and distrust that threaten the legitimacy of public action, and the oscillation between visions of doom and visions of progress that destabilize the future. Both doing and being, whether in the high citadels of modernity or its distant outposts, play out in territories shaped by scientific and technological invention. Our methods of understanding and manipulating the world curve back and reorder our collective experience along unforeseen pathways, like the seemingly domesticated chlorofluorocarbons released from spray cans and air conditioners that silently ate away the earth’s stratospheric ozone layer. Just as environmental scientists are hard put to find on earth an ecological system that has not been affected by human activity, so it is difficult for social scientist to locate forms of human organization or behaviour anywhere in the world whose structure and function have not been affected, to some extent, by science and technology.

Take culture, in particular, or more accurately cultures. Although science and technology are present everywhere, the rambunctious storyline of modernity refuses to conform to any singular narrative of enlightenment or progress. The familiar ingredients of modern life continually rearrange themselves in unpredicted patterns, creating rupture, violence and difference alongside the sense of increasing liberation, convergence and control. The terrorist attacks in 9/11 acted out in brutal reality and on global television screens many contradictions that were already seething below the surface. This was suicidal violence on a previously unimagined scale. Yet at the threshold of a new millennium, this violence only dramatized in horrific form much that was already known.

Industrial societies, despite their many commonalities, articulate their needs and desires in different voices. Despite the global homogeneity that they signal the din of multimodality rises rapidly as one leaves the havens of the industrial west. Politicians and citizens have met the challenges and dislocations of the present with disparate resources and divergent criteria of what makes life worth living. The world is not a single place, and even the west accommodates technological innovations such as genetically modified foods with divided expectations and multiple rationalities. Cultural specificity survives with astonishing reliance in the face of the levelling forces of modernity. Not only the sameness but also the diversity of contemporary cultures derive, it seems, from specific, contingent accommodations that societies make with their scientific and technological capabilities.

In terms of identities, whether human or non human, individual or collective, it is one of the most potent resources with which people restore sense out of disorder. When the world one knows is in disarray, redefining identities is a way of putting things back into familiar places. It is no surprise, then, that co-productionist writing in science and technology studies, concerned as it so often is with emergent and controversial phenomena, has consistently been absorbed with questions of identity. The formation and maintenance of identities plays an important role in several fields and writings. The identity of the expert, in particular, that quintessential bridging figure of modernity, makes a prominent appearance in several texts. But collective identities are also contested or under negotiation in the working out of scientific and technological orders. What does it mean to be European, African, intelligent or a member of a research community, learned profession or disease group? And what roles do knowledge and its production play in shaping and sustaining these social roles or in giving them power and meaning?

How do new socio-technical objects - such as climate change or endangered species, or Europe, Africa or democracy - swim into our ken, achieving cognitive as well as moral and political standing? How is knowledge taken up in societies, and how does it affect people’s collective and individual identities, permitting some to be experts, others to be research subjects, and still others to be resisters or revolutionaries? By making visible such questions, and proposing answers that were not previously on the table, co-productionist analysis performs a neglected critical function. More conventionally, though no less importantly, it enables normative analysis by following power into places where current social theory seldom thinks to look for it; for example, in genes, climate models, research methods, cross examinations, accounting systems or the composition and practices of expert bodies.

Prediction is the hardest case, and one may well wonder why in our surprise prone societies any social science ever purports to tell the future. But to the extent that co production makes apparent deep cultural regularities, to the extent that it explains the contingency or durability of particular socio technical formation, it also allows us to imagine the pathways by which change could conceivably occur. It illuminates, in this way, new possibilities for human development.

Perhaps the field of science and technology studies is insufficiently normative and has little to contribute to macro social analyses of culture and power. Or that they demonstrate that some of the most enduring topics in politics and government lend themselves well to elucidation in a co-productionist mode. Among these are the emergence of new authority structures and forms of governance, the selective durability and self replication of cultures, and the bases of expert conflict over knowledge in rational, democratic societies. A point has become also clear that historical and contemporary voices in the field have a lot more in common than has been permitted to surface across institutionalized disciplinary boundaries. Regardless of the observer’s standpoint in time, there is in these pieces a shared outlook on the nature of knowledge and its embeddeness in material and social forms.

Perhaps as important, in one after another of these findings, the distinction between micro and macro that has played so foundational a role in traditional social theory is shown to be, in significant part, an artifice of our own thought processes. The practical experience, the scales of analysis and action are frequently scrambled together. The national or global constitutional orders we recognize and live by are constantly remade in innumerable, localized engagements; without this perpetual reperformance they might as well cease to exist. Co production then allows the bringing together of insights from anthropology and history law and politics, cultural studies and social theory. it is an integrative as well as an interdisciplinary framework.

Science and technology as a field has been criticized, for making science too social to the point, some say, of representing science as no different from any other exercise in the accumulation of authority. It is indicated that this thin reading misrepresents the breadth and sophistication of the field’s engagement with the social worlds in which science and technology function today as indispensable players. The cultural uniqueness of science has been acknowledged, insisting only that their special ness arises from repeated, situated encounters between scientific, technical and other forms of life. Science and technology are infused by other ways of knowing, perceiving, and making accommodations with the world. Unlike laws of nature, the idiom of co-production does not seek to foreclose competing explanations by laying claim to one dominant and all powerful truth. It offers instead a new way of exploring the waters of human history, where politics, knowledge and invention are continually in flux.

Jasanoff, S., (2004) States of Knowledge, The co-production science and social order, Routledge publishing

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