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SESSION II. After Dualism
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49 S E S S I O N I I After Dualism Andrew Pickering I’m honored by the invitation to write a paper for discussion at this conference. I don’t present a measured review of the literature on dualism and challenges to dualism; what follows are basically my own thoughts from my own field, science and technology studies (STS).1 Though they originate in a specific field, I think they have wider relevance, across the disciplines and beyond. I have not aimed at a linear exposition; what follows is a series of chunks which interconnect. The important thing, I suppose, is to set up some topics for discussion. • Modernity has been characterized in terms of its operation of all sorts of dualisms , so to begin we need to think about just which dualism is being challenged. The classic modern dualism is the Cartesian split between mind (soul) and body, but this is not the one that is directly challenged in STS (though it could be). Instead, STS focuses, as I will today, on a related dualism of people and things, of the human and the nonhuman. The basic idea is that not only do we (moderns) distinguish between people and things, but that we further seek to understand them separately as two realms different in kind. The natural sciences take as their referent a world of things from which people are notably absent. Physics and chemistry would be paradigmatic examples of this, and not much more needs to be said about them. The social sciences and humanities take as their object a world of people in which things are marginalized, to say the least. I think here 50 of Durkheim’s construction of sociology as a discipline, though much the same could be said of a much wider range of approaches.2 Durkheim defined the proper object of sociology as “the social,” understood as irreducible to the proper objects of any other discipline (psychology, economics, and physics, for example), and he also insisted that like causes like: in this case, that social effects have social causes. Here we have a prescription for talking only about people and never about things. Of course, apparently nonsocial things are not as elegantly avoidable in the social sciences as social ones are in the natural sciences, but they are easily defanged by an insistence that we have no access to things in themselves but only to their meanings for us, and which are themselves securely within the realm of the social. Hence, a classical sociology of the supernatural (religion), of the natural (science), and of knowledge in general. This duality of people and things is manifest in disciplinary and departmental identities across the university and goes deeply into modern common sense. In STS it was manifest in the early sociology of science developed by Robert Merton et al, which focused on the social norms of scientific conduct rather than, say, the substance of scientific knowledge and practice. A similar disciplinary allegiance was evident in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) as it developed in the 1970’s.3 While dismissing the Mertonian approach as a “sociology of scientists” that failed to address the substance of science, still SSK offered a distinctly dualist account centered on the social causes of scientific beliefs. Nevertheless, this bifurcation between people and things was the key dualism to be challenged in STS from the mid-1980’s onward. More on this below, but I can say now that the challenge centers on the interface between these putatively different realms—a zone whose existence is implicitly denied by the modern disciplines. It began with a focus on practice, the place where the human and nonhuman engage one another on a more or less symmetric footing (Pickering 1992, 1995a). • Bruno Latour (1993) offers an unusual insight into modernity, which connects it directly to the history of science and technology. He associates modernity with [3.135.202.224] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 09:56 GMT) 51 precisely the dualism of people and things, and asserts almost paradoxically that “we have never been modern.” I want to explore this idea, which I think is important. What does it mean? Latour’s own exegesis is, I would say, ontological.4 His idea is that the building blocks of the world are themselves nondualist hybrids of the human and the nonhuman—global warming, say, grasped not as an unequivocal fact about the world, but as an assemblage of human and social concerns...