Organized by Karen Knorr-Cetina, now a senior researcher in science
studies, the panel included Stephen Shapin and commentary by Donna Haraway.
Shapin led off by questioning whether _anything_ is really 'global', from
scientific protocols and procedures to the values of physical constants or
measuring techniques. He emphasized the empirical fact there there is quite
a bit of variation between one lab or nation and another. In some ways he
was following Latour's suggestion in _We Have Never Been Modern_ that
science, far from being universal in its truths, has merely figured out how
to extend its specialized and everywhere-local networks thinly around the
world. As Shapin noted, very few of the world's people actually participate
in the knowledge or belief systems of science, so they are certainly not
global in that sense either. His most dramatic point, and one I generally
agree with, was that the universalism of science's truth claims are a sort
of neo-Christian theology, born of its competition with those other
universalist claims.
Unfortunately, unlike Latour, Shapin seemed to rather overstate the case.
Sciences and technologies are certainly not universal in any meaningful
sense, but they are in many ways trans-national, and that is what 'global'
means in current usage. The networks may be thinly spread, but they do
extend around the globe (e.g. the internet's hardware infrastructure
consists today largely of undersea and overland cables that do extend a
single technoscientific vision to a global scale). Yes, there may be minor
local variations in procedures and accepted numerical values (often a
residue of nationalism), but the values differ only in the fifth and sixth
decimal places. All over the globe a small number of scientists and
standardizers trade signals with sattelites to synchronize their clocks.
Astronomy is pretty thinly spread, but also pretty effectively global. And
so are the international associations and the somewhat shared culture of
international science and even of international technical standards and
engineering practices. Moreoever, Shapin ought to know that similarity is
not the basis of membership in a culture or community; that basis is
articulated difference: there are differences between different subgroups
and individuals in communities, but the differences are systematically
related to one another because of interaction. Interaction, not shared
beliefs and values, grounds cultures and communities. By this criterion
there are certainly global cultures and communities of technoscience.
Shapin made some good points and primed the audience to be critical of the
claims to be advanced by the other presenters.
Rudolf Stichweh, a colleague of Knorr-Cetina's from Bielefeld, presented
some statistical and historical evidence for the rise of globalization in
the sciences. His basic point was that institutionally science remains
mostly a nationalist endeavor, but that multinational collaborations are
growing rapidly. One force behind the globalization in this sense is that
each research institute or university wants one specialist in each area,
and if these specialists want to collaborate, they have to seek out
colleagues elsewhere. Personally, I think this pattern is what will
ultimately doom the university as an institutional form, probably in the
century ahead of us. Research partnerships, consortia, and communities will
have to institutionalize themselves outside the framework of universities,
and the internet will make this very easy to do. (At the same time,
teaching will also increasingly be carried out on-line, with students
accumulating credits from different universities, even those in different
nations.)
Ted Porter was the winner of this year's prize for best book, dealing with
globalization in economics and mathematics. He seemed to more closely
follow Latour in seeing that numbers have their validity only within
networks of activity that assign meaning and social function to the
numbers, and that these networks, while still thinly spread, are
increasingly global ones.
Karen Knorr offered an extensive account of a particular global activity
network: currency trading. She began with a rather ethnomethodological
micro-analysis, and was trying to show how micro-interaction methodology
could be extended to analyze even global networks. Together with the
preceeding papers, this raised for me quite seriously the issues of scale
and units of analysis that have been a regular theme on xmca lately and
also in my own work. Knorr's notion of 'global microstructures' (globally
replicated and interlinked microstructures or genres of activity) seemed to
me to be struggling to extend an interactionist paradigm to the level of
emergent social structures at higher space-time scales ... and not quite
succeeding. It is certainly interesting and valuable to see how
interactionist notions need to be revised in the context of
non-face-to-face communication, and she offered some interesting insights
on this, but it was still not clear how a lot of people doing the same
thing in different places around the world adds up to the global social
institution of currency trading. While there was recognition of the
increasing spatial scale of the networks connecting local activities, there
was no corresponding attention to the larger _time_ scales. We heard only
briefly about 'illegitimate' message traffic that established personal
bonds between traders -- and contributed to the formation of a community
over longer time periods. We heard nothing about the history and
development of the banking institutions, currency trading practices, etc.
that would help us see what was evolving as the institutional contextual
framework for knitting together the microsocial practices Knorr focussed on.
Donna Haraway's commentary ripped open various small but strategic gaps in
the assumptions of various presenters' papers. For me her two most telling
points were that (1) because the networks studied are thin, we tend to
neglect what is going on in their large interstices, and (2) that a more
basic critique of the universalist and idealist claims of mathematics is
needed. She noted that even Shapin's anti-theological assumptions are quite
local to the very think networks he participates in, and that there are
large domains of 'terra incognita' left blank on the map of global
technoscience: most human beings in most places are engaged in practices
that have no standing in these studies because they do not participate in
the same rarified networks as the researchers' culture. Globalization
cannot simply be about how eurocultural, patriarchal, upper-middle class
networks of practices get stretched trans-nationally around the globe; it
must also be about all the other kinds of practices that are going on among
Others Elsewhere. As to the critique of mathematics, certainly Valerie
Walkerdine, among others, has given us some directions to pursue, and I
have recently found an excellent critique of the philosophical idealism
still dominant in Mathematics in the work of Brian Rotman at LSU.
... the next installment of my report will discuss the Saturday symposium.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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