Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India

5. Three Cultures of MRI: Local Practices and Global Designs

5 Three Cultures of MRI: Local Practices and Global Designs The positivist foundations of modern Western civilization were inherently divided against themselves but externally united against the non-elite, i.e., against common people and against the non-Western world. —J. P. S. Uberoi, Science and Culture, 1978 High energy physicists construct their world and represent it to themselves [as] a culture of no culture, which longs passionately for a world without loose ends, without temperament, gender, nationalism, or other sources of disorder—for a world outside human space and time. —Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes, 1988 Despite fears to the contrary, “scientific culture” remains among the most pervasive and influential cultures in the world.1 As a universal culture of exalted values, it also continues to present “a map for the rearrangement” of other cultures.2 Nevertheless, sociological investigators have found the cultures of technoscience to be both elusive and difficult to define. The problem, in the first instance, is that scientific culture has been, and continues to be, defined through idealized epistemological values.3 Consequently, “modern science” has become, to use Sharon Traweek’s phrase, “a culture of no culture.”4 That is to say, the social entanglements of science have been either erased or written off as exemplifications of lag or lack. The difficulty of defining the cultures of technoscience is compounded, however, when we shift our gaze to the transnational geography of technoscience . Here, on the one hand, modern science is projected as a culture of no culture while, on the other, it is held to be Western/European.5 An important implication of such discursive framing is that the cultures of technoscience in different parts of the world become entrapped within Eurocentric historicism, and the non-West is relegated to the “waiting room of history.”6 100 Chapter 5 We cannot wish away Euro/West-centrism, which, however invisible it may sometimes seem, continues to inflect technocultural imaginaries in the West and the non-West alike.7 Moreover, absent a deconstruction of Eurocentrism, analysis of the local cultures of technoscience can easily become folded within the Euro/West-centric discourse. Thus we must keep in mind from the outset that the cultures of MRI research in the United States, Britain, and India cannot be framed as reflections of the West versus non-West divide, even though this “imaginary” continues to impact technocultural practices to the present day. This chapter analyzes these three local cultures of technoscience as entanglements of technoscientific practices, technocultural imaginaries, and national and transnational networks of power and administration. I hold, with Donna Haraway, that “technoscience traffics . . . in the passages that link stories, desires, reasons, and material worlds.”8 In the case of MRI, such engagements in “materialized reconfigurations” were inextricably intertwined with the technocultural shift to big science that resulted in the United States becoming the center of MRI research and development (see chapters 2 and 3).9 More broadly, the cultures of MRI research were entangled with the histories of the three nations, even while they remained imbricated within transnational flows of technologies, knowledges, discourses, and peoples.10 The chapter focuses on a technocultural dominant in each of these nations to show how each technoscientific culture was constituted “in the passages that link stories, desires, reasons, and material worlds.” Culture of MRI Research in the United States: Big Is Beautiful It is no accident that the existence of Big Science was first discerned in the United States, where growth is a way of life and bigger is often viewed as better. —James Capshew and Karen Rader, “Big Science: Price to Present,” 1992 In the second half of the 1980s, just a few years after the first MRI machines received FDA approval, the iconic status of MRI in the American technocultural imaginary was starkly evident.11 MRI was not to remain an ordinary cultural icon, however. It soon became yet another expression of the “American technological sublime.”12 Media reports vied with one another to articulate its sublime aura, calling it a “modern miracle” and often comparing the technical virtuosity of MRI to “Star Wars” and “Star Trek.”13 As part of a constellation of big science/big technologies enhancing the prowess of both nation and citizens, MRI was an exemplification of American exceptionalism. Thus the Saturday Evening Post enthused: Three Cultures of MRI 101 The magician’s act of sawing a person in half is, of course, only...