The Romance of Reflexivity

Ever since Socrates turned the logical thumbscrews on his opponents and fancifully called it ‘dialogue’, the injunction ‘Know thyself’ has exercised an enduring moral fascination on generation after generation of thinkers. Educated in such Socratic dialogues (and by Delphic oracles), many have also come to savour the insight, famously argued but also involuntarily exemplified by Auguste Comte, that the science that comes closest to our own existential concerns is the most intricate and difficult of all. For Kant, who first championed the idea of reflexive philosophical judgment, the quest for self-knowledge was nevertheless equal to a descent into hell – an insight that found abundant corroboration in the heroic but also painful posturing of Nietzsche, who descended to psychological depths where no Kantian would ever dare enter. In Nietzsche's informed judgment, every great philosophy, including the Kantian system, was actually ‘a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir’ (1990 [1886]: 37). Perhaps it was for this reason that Foucault chose to resist this form of truthfulness: ‘Don't ask who I am’ (2002: 19).

As few others, Foucault remained wary of the many pitfalls and seductions that escort all calls for reflexive self-disclosure. Reflexivity often parades itself in a show of confessional virtues, such as the courage of ‘opening up’, the candour of ‘telling where you come from’, the correctness of ‘taking responsibility for your roots’, and the consistency of ‘not making an exception of yourself’. Reflexive sociology, whether in the autobiographical and personalistic style practised by Gouldner in the 1970s or in the more rigorously impersonal and objectifying version advocated by Bourdieu during the 1980s, typically flourishes such a rhetoric of moral rectitude and epistemological panache. Ethnomethodology has been censored for its ‘skew to the right’ in its failure to sustain a radical referential reflexivity (Pollner 1991). As the previous chapter has described, rival schools in the constructivist studies of science, each trying to be more self-consciously reflexive than the others, have routinely accused one another of committing the ‘self-excepting fallacy’ and of a ‘failure of nerve’ in facing the consequences of this radical methodical principle.

Self-Interested Science

Twenty-five years of irreverent thinking and thick empirical description have done much to dislodge the long-standing philosophical conviction that science has a special, singularly compelling, and context-spanning rationality that legitimately dominates and adjudicates ordinary, local forms of reasoning (what used to be called ‘common sense’). It is no longer seen as the supreme legislator of all human knowledge, setting standards of truth and logic that automatically bridge disparate social and historical experiences, and defining universal principles of right reasoning and rules of proper method that explain its unique capacity to produce a truthful picture of the world. Increasingly, also, ‘science’ in the singular has come to be seen as bad shorthand for a vast plurality of practices, which are fragmented across many disciplines, niches, paradigms, and approaches. More dramatically, science has come to be viewed as just one culture of rationality among others, ‘just another story’, one among a plurality of perspectives, information bases, and interpretive communities, none of which can lay claim to a totalizing, overarching, or foundational status. The shockwaves that were generated by Feyerabend's rhetorical question ‘What is so special about science?’ (1978: 73) have gradually subsided, because the efforts of an entire generation of sceptical students of scientific and technological success have meanwhile been invested in arguing the implied answer: ‘Nothing really’.

This new emphasis upon the ordinariness of a core element of intellectual culture is not an isolated phenomenon but partakes of broader cultural mutations and social realignments, which have tended to desacralize high culture and brought it closer to the world of everyday meaning. A tradition has been building up from Benjamin's (1973 [1939]) ground-breaking proposition that the cultural realm was shedding its ‘auratic’ character and could no longer be separated on principle from the broader social realm. Indeed, some twenty years before Feyerabend mooted his iconoclastic question, Raymond Williams had already established a firm baseline for British cultural studies by emphasizing that ‘culture is ordinary’. In Williams’ estimate, culture was not confined to the arts and high learning, to the dazzling peaks of discovery and creativity, but included the ‘most ordinary common meanings’ next to the ‘finest individual meanings’.

Feel the Force!

Philosophy and science, including social science, have always been strongly attracted to strength. Reason has always sought to be a force, denying its own politics of knowledge in order to become that much harder to beat. Epistemology has been a war machine, wielding logical proof and an all-purpose methodology as its main pieces of ordnance. The whole point of Truth is, of course, that it is compelling and compulsory, that you cannot escape from it, that it has an inherent tendency to spread, and that there is something seriously amiss with the unconvinced or recalcitrant (‘Surely you can't deny that …’). It is closely allied to the classical ambition to know the world in toto with total certainty. Nowadays, of course, we no longer want our truths to be absolute, immediate reflections of eternal Platonic Forms; we are prepared to let our doubts creep a little further than Descartes, who doubted only for a brief moment before fastening upon great and indubitable certainties. A small weakness crept in when Popper dared to replace the metaphor of the rockbottom of science with that of the ‘swamp’, but foundationalists and other truth-sayers have not been much impressed. Everybody who is anybody in epistemology still seems interested in pointing the gun at everyone else in order to forcibly extract agreement.

Classical Power Talk

Sociology has likewise been aggressively macho, loving itself for its methodological prowess, its legislative potency, and its governmental (or guerilla-fighter) power speech. It must now learn to be soft, weak and vulnerable, refusing to flex the muscle of a male-dominated epistemology. Let us look again at the record of the founding fathers. Marx's grand ambition was to trace iron laws of capitalist development, while Durkheim infamously defined social facts as things. In both cases, these objective laws and things were taken to exert constraint on individual behaviours; but they also conveniently constrained ‘common sense’ and all alternative interpretations of the social world. Weber spoke approvingly of the Greek invention of conceptual thought as wrenching opponents in a logical-argumentative vice. Weber fans would probably like to exonerate their favourite intellectual celebrity on the grounds that his view of disenchanted rationality removed at least the ‘value’ half of all that we can say about the world from scientific certification.

Mannheim versus Wittgenstein

The preceding chapter has cleared a path for a more detailed inventory of the resources for developing a more pragmatically levelled and ‘earthly’ perspective on scientific rationality and objectivity. This chapter will sketch a field map of recent positions and divisions in the sociology of knowledge and science that have been influential in establishing such a disenchanted view. The next chapter will then enter into a sociological depth analysis of the fact/value distinction, which, like similar dualisms such as truth/power or knowledge/interest, has often acted as an epistemological placeholder and enforcer of a more ordinary and relative distinction between unhastened and institutionally secluded practices (such as science) and more hurried and gregarious ones (such as politics). The primary task of the present chapter is then to address the paradoxical fact that, while they have set fire to a whole range of other dualisms and dichotomies, science and technology studies (STS) have remained stuck in a significant residue of the dualism between fact and value. In order to account for this remarkable exceptionalism, we need to address the foreshortening of historical vision, within both STS and mainstream sociological theory, which has prompted both traditions in some way to reinvent the wheel (and to repeat some of the foundational flaws) of earlier contributions to the sociology of knowledge.

A first survey of the discursive field highlights the existence of a schism and mutual indifference between two currents of theorizing and research which I shall dub the ‘Mannheimian’ and the ‘Wittgensteinian’ traditions. This appellation is in somewhat ambiguous homage to David Bloor, who, in one of the first statements in print of the Edinburgh Strong Programme, compared the two thinkers with regard to the strategic possibility of a sociological explanation of logic, mathematics and natural science (Bloor 1973). The Mannheimian programme for the sociology of knowledge was considered ‘weak’ precisely for its refusal to explain cultural and natural science symmetrically and hence to extend causal sociological analysis to the hard case of the natural sciences; and for its coincident failure to demand an equally radical symmetry between the sociological explanation of true and false beliefs, thus confining the sociology of knowledge to a mere ‘sociology of error’.

Symmetrical Delay

This chapter returns to a more in-depth investigation of some of the core methodological principles in the social studies of science and technology – a family of approaches that we have previously encountered as forming part of the Wittgensteinian impulse in the modern social theory of knowledge. As I have argued before, SSK and STS were drawn towards a form of value-free or ‘a-critical’ relativism that subdued the dilemma of reason vs. power but failed to rise conclusively above the residual dualism of facts and values. Their passion for detached ethnographic redescription and for ‘following the natives’ incurred a systematic normative deficit that diminished their critical flair, and undercut their capacity to tackle successfully the issue of the proximity or distance between observers and observed. It might then be interesting, at this point, to look more carefully into the various ways in which SSK and STS have sought to ‘translate’ the conventional demands of scientific detachment and neutrality in terms of their signature principle of symmetry.

In its initial incarnation in the Edinburgh Strong Programme, the principle of symmetry required social students of science to adopt an even-handed, agnostic approach to winners and losers in the scientific game, or to what scientists themselves generally considered as established truth and what they rejected as scientifically obsolete or erroneous. The sociology of knowledge should be ‘impartial with respect to truth and falsity, rationality and irrationality, success or failure’, which required it to be ‘symmetrical in its style of explanation. The same types of cause would explain, say, true and false beliefs’ (Bloor 1991 [1976]: 7; 1983: 2, 5; Barnes 1976; 1982: 4ff., 58–63). For Collins, these tenets defined the main thrust of the Strong Programme, focusing his own radical programme of empirical relativism in SSK (Collins 1981; 1983; 1991a). Others, such as Lynch and Roth, have likewise encircled symmetry and impartiality as constituting the methodological heart of radical science studies (Lynch 1992a; 1993: 75–77; Roth 1994). Operating in close alliance, they mesh into a type of ‘value-free relativism’ not too dissimilar from that of mainstream twentieth-century ethnography as it has evolved from Boas and Malinowski to Mead and Lévi-Strauss (Lemaire 1976; Stocking 1982 [1968]; Fabian 1983; Clifford 1988).

Philosophical Stammering and Monastic Silence

The first aim of this concluding chapter is to provide a broader historical background to the minimalist and pragmatic identification of science that I have attempted so far, in order to deepen the description/justification of its weak autonomy over against other professional pursuits in what I have called the ‘social triangle’. My narrative has repeatedly distinguished between the philosophical (dis)guises of traditional demarcative exercises and the more pragmatic operational conditions that determine the sources of variation and the dynamics of interaction between the professional roles of scientists and politicians. Rather than emphasizing the more conventional spatial dimension of autonomy, I have drawn attention to the peculiar timescape or ‘time flow’ of intellectual work as providing such a minimal touchstone of distinctiveness. In the following, I want to enrich this critical (because anti-essentialist) phenomenology of scientific work by tracing a few lines of genealogical descent of the notion of unhastening (and of the estrangement it both requires and produces), retracing the brittle knowledge-political compromises between the academy and ‘big’ politics that were instrumental in gradually institutionalizing a margin of intellectual autonomy. As an informal history of the temporality of doubt and distanciation, this narrative leads on to a summary of how the various more interesting epistemological principles that we have encountered in this book (such as anti-politics, symmetry, and reflexivity) can be more fruitfully translated as chronopolitical principles of deceleration. After having reclaimed the differential ‘time geography’ of the social triangle, I shall finally outline a new interpretation of academic freedom and of the ‘idea of the university’ that turns the ‘unhastening’ argument into an explicitly normative and political project.

Let me embark upon this episodic genealogy of the times and spaces (the silences and seclusions) of science by recapturing the canonical moment in Western thought that is represented by the Socratic dialogues, which are traditionally identified as the theatre of invention of the philosophical life and the contemplative ethos more generally. In its dialogical form, philosophy is initially invented as a distinctively ‘slow’ manner of speaking. At this historical turn, writing still appears effectively subordinate to both public speaking and private conversation…

The Fact/Value Split

Values, the cultural pessimist laments, are no longer what they used to be. The language and practice of contemporary morality, critics such as MacIntyre, Bloom, Scruton and Finkielkraut agree, suffers from a deplorable state of confusion: ethical judgments are permanently contested and seem no longer capable of being rationally justified. But Facts also, fellow pessimists hasten to add, are only a slim shadow of their former self. Ever since Popper exchanged the inductivist metaphor of the rock-bottom of knowledge for the critical rationalist one of the swamp, empirical science appears to have lost all solid footing, rendering Kant's first question ‘What can we know?’ just as precarious and unanswerable as his second: ‘What ought we to do?’ To compound this twin complaint, there is a third, which completes the doleful a capella. The venerable art of distinguishing judgments of value from judgments of fact, or of avoiding logical contaminations between them, appears similarly lost to the contemporary mind. Traditionally hailed as one of the foremost accomplishments of Western rational culture, the categorical separation between Sein and Sollen, already undermined by neo-Marxist politicization drives since the late 1960s, is today unceremoniously swept into the intellectual dustbin by an entire generation of pragmatist, constructivist, and postmodern thinkers. The principle of value-freedom is routinely debunked as an antiquarian dogma that nobody in his or her right philosophical mind would care to reanimate.

In this chapter, I undertake to replace this threefold pessimism with a threefold optimism. The failure of the classical Enlightenment project to secure a rational foundation for moral values and empirical explanations is not a twin intellectual distaster, but might be celebrated as a double awakening from an impossible and perilous dream. The ‘unfoundedness’ of both genres of judgment is not a double trap-door leading towards cognitive irregularity and moral licence, but a sign of epistemological and axiological modesty, signalling the absence of the symbolic violence that so naturally accompanies the (universal) temptation to universalize our set preferences and pet ideas. However, this chapter will not be focally concerned with such currently over-rehearsed critiques of foundationalism.

Autonomy and Duality

In this chapter, my aim is to engage more directly with Bourdieu's field theory of science and his notion of the intellectual ‘politics of reason’, which supply intriguing thought material for a further elaboration of a pragmatic, knowledgepolitical conception of intellectual autonomy. Similarly to Latour's theory of translation, Bourdieu's field theory relativizes the science/politics divide, but does not satisfactorily resolve the conundrum of fact and value. However, while Latour defends the view that the purpose and strength of scientific laboratories is precisely to erode the differences between science and society, Bourdieu continues to profess a principled loyalty to the idea of scientific and intellectual autonomy. Indeed, his approach positions the concept of autonomy so centrally that it virtually performs as a sociological deputy of more traditional criteria of truth and rationality: professionalism and autonomy go far towards defining the specificity of the intellectual and scientific fields in their most authentic state. In this respect, and in critical abnegation of the de-differentiation as proclaimed by radical constructivists and ‘nothing-specialists’, Bourdieu maintains a principled distinction between an ‘external reading’, which thematizes the incorporation of science in the wider social cosmos, and an ‘internal reading’, which is oriented towards the concatenation of knowledge and (symbolic) power inside the scientific microcosmos itself (e.g. 1990b: 298).

Before entering upon a discussion of Bourdieu's perspective, however, I first need to clarify my usage of the protean concept of ‘intellectual’ and its relation to adjacent concepts such as ‘professional’, ‘expert’, and ‘academic scientist’. First, it makes little sense to hope for objective definitions of any of these categories by means of enumerative or ‘finger-pointing’ exercises. All definitional portraits of intellectuals, professionals, experts, and scientists are simultaneously self-portraits, often attempts to delineate a cherished identity, and hence liable to entail claims that are essentially knowledge-political in nature. For Bourdieu, the very definition of intellectuals, scientists, and professionals is itself continually at risk and at stake in struggles within intellectual, professional, and scientific fields. Secondly, following the lead of Feyerabend, Foucault, and Bourdieu himself, I shall refrain from drawing any hard-and-fast demarcation lines between intellectuals and professionals or scientific experts.

Temporal Differences

This book offers a new account of what makes science special in the company of other human pursuits. It engages critically with a variety of current approaches, especially constructivist and relativist studies of science and technology, which tend to level science down to an ordinary enterprise that is just as idiosyncratic, localized, interest-ridden, and ‘political’ as other forms of social endeavour. This view is now widely shared by a large tribe of those whom I frivolously call the ‘nothing-specialists’. Taking up the challenge of their ‘knowledge-political’ demystification of science, I shall mount a defence of scientific autonomy, albeit in a reflexive and self-critical way, without reverting to traditional foundational principles such as transcendental truth, universalist method, disinterestedness, or value-neutrality. In this sense, this book reclaims the venerable pursuit of intellectual autonomy and academic freedom in a way that transcends conventional essentialist criteria of demarcation between science and society.

This specificity of science is primarily located in its studied ‘lack of haste’, its relative stress-freeness, or its socially sanctioned withdrawal from the swift pace of everyday life and alternative professional cultures. This ‘unhastened’ quality defines science's peculiar ‘delaying tactics’, which systematically slow down and objectify ordinary conversations and contests (e.g. by means of reading and writing technologies, publishing conventions, peer review procedures, flexible time economies), and which tend to attract ‘slow’ personalities who read more (books rather than reports or memos) and talk less (e.g. in board meetings, on mobile phones, in video conferences) than the ‘fast cats’ who are attracted to and recruited by more decisionist, stress-driven and hasty cultures. It is possible to articulate a detailed phenomenology of pragmatically rather than philosophically defined practices and work-styles (observation, fieldwork, experimentation, reading and writing, over against public speaking, participation in board and committee meetings, soundbiting and spinning in the media), which are intrinsically tied to differential workpaces (slow vs. fast), and differential workspaces (the glare of publicity vs. the stillness of private study).

Anthologies of alchemical treatises by divers hands were popular and influential in England and on the Continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and ranged in size from Lazarus Zetzner's voluminous Theatrum Chemicum, first published in Ursel in 1602 and frequently reissued in expanded editions, to the Collectanea Chymica, which the London printer William Cooper produced in 1684. It included ten essays by both long established alchemical authorities, Roger Bacon, George Ripley, and Bernard of Trevisan, author of this work, and more recent writers, such as John Baptist van Helmont and Francis Antonie, whose recipe for aurum potabile appears later in this collection. Bernard of Trevisan (the Earl of Trevisa in Italy, or Trevisanus) probably flourished during the last half of the fourteenth century, although he has also been placed in the fifteenth. An autobiographical passage in one of his works, De Chemico Miraculo, presents Trevisan as one whose life was passionately devoted to searching for the secret of transmutation – which proved unsuccessful until his final years. He is perhaps best known for his alchemical correspondence with Thomas of Bologna, father of the poet, Christine de Pisan (ca. 1363-ca. 1431). Trevisan's Treatise of the Philosopher's Stone presents an unusually clear and succinct summary of the process.

The following text is complete and taken from the Collectanea Chymica: A Collection of Ten Several Treatises in Chymistry (London: Printed for William Cooper, at the Pelican in Little Britain, 1684).

The Cleopatra of this early alchemical dialogue is not the famous Cleopatra VII (69-30 BC), last queen of the Ptolemy dynasty and lover of Mark Antony. Along with Mary Prophetess and Zosimos's Theosebia, this Cleopatra occupies a high place in alchemical lore as one of very few ancient female adepts who possessed the secret of the philosopher's stone. She thus became a revered authority widely cited in alchemical literature, and to her the invention of the alembic is sometimes attributed. The following Dialogue of Cleopatra is from the Book of Komarios (Komarios being the reputed teacher of Cleopatra), one of many surviving Greek alchemical manuscripts. The author of this Dialogue and others featuring Cleopatra probably lived in the first or second century AD and was perhaps part of the richly eclectic culture of Graeco-Roman Alexandria. He invests his work with elements from earlier Egyptian culture: for example, the legendary Ostanes, whom Pliny regards as the introducer of magic into Greece (Natural History 30:1), is presented as a participant in the dialogue. But pervasive allegory and symbolism are its most distinguishing features, lightly concealing the alchemical content beneath; as Ostanes says to Cleopatra, “In thee is concealed a strange and terrible mystery. Enlighten us, casting your light upon the elements.” Cleopatra's response figures forth several highly visual motifs that were to become alchemical commonplaces: the analogy between the plant kingdom and the distillation process, or that between human birth and the formation of the philosopher's stone, or the death-resurrection motif, as applied to materials within the alchemical vas.

The Islamic rise to political and military power beginning in the seventh century had important consequences for the study and practice of alchemy. With the conquest of Alexandria (642) and other centers of Greek learning, the Moslems came into possession of the bulk of Greek philosophy and science, including alchemy. Thus, the writings of the Greeks became the basis for Moslem advancements in the field, and Arabian scholars helped extend the knowledge of alchemy in the West through preserving, translating, and transmitting the Greek heritage.

Khalid (Khalid ibn Yazid) of Damascus was among the first of the Moslem scholars to take a serious interest in alchemy. Under his direction, Arabian translations of Greek and Coptic treatises were completed. He is also said to have personally studied alchemy under the tutelage of the Christian scholar Morienus – himself a pupil of Stephanos of Alexandria – and to have written alchemical poems (Holmyard 64). The Secreta Alchymiœ is a reasonably clear and comprehensive summary of topics and themes that were to become central in alchemical writing in the West, including certain of its primary processes, relations between the body and soul of metals, degrees of fire, laboratory equipment, and the preparation of both the white and the red stones.

The following selections from the Secreta Alchymiœ are taken from Kalidis Persici, Secreta Alchymiœ. Written Originally in Hebrew, and Translated thence into Arabick, and out of Arabick into Latin: Now faithfully rendred into English, By William Salmon, printed in Salmon's Medicina Practica (1692).

Flamel's most recent editor, Laurinda Dixon, notes that the Exposition of the Hieroglyphical Figures (first French edition, 1612) “was destined to inspire debate and conjecture not only in its own century, but for three hundred years thereafter” (Introduction, Nicolas Flamel: His Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures (1624), xiii). The controversy centers primarily on questions about Flamel's identity as alchemist and author: was he – along with his beloved wife and alchemical partner, Perrenelle – a real, fabulously successful medieval adept whose transmutations resulted in many charitable acts in Paris and Boulogne (as reported in the Introduction to the Exposition, precisely dated 1413), or was the “Flamel legend” a fiction created by the work's first publisher, P. Arnauld de la Chevalerie, in the early seventeenth century? Current scholarly opinion favors the latter view, while admitting the existence of a wealthy medieval Parisian named Nicolas Flamel, a scrivener by trade, whose tombstone is still to be seen along a stairway in Paris's Musée de Cluny. Indeed, no manuscript or printed text of the Exposition that dates from before the seventeenth century has been discovered.

Flamel's Exposition is an excellent example of the combining of visual and verbal mediums so characteristic of alchemical discourse before and after the invention of printing. Most of the work is, in fact, given over to explication of the painted figures that he commissioned for an arch in the churchyard of the Innocents in Paris (see Figure 14); these were no ordinary representations but imitations of the allegorical illustrations from the famous book of Abraham the Jew, that had served as Flamel's alchemical inspiration.