Notes
FOREWORD 1. Bjelic; picks up one of Garfinkel’s characteristic expressions—“demonic contingencies ”—and plays on the word “demon-stration” to signal the way unanticipated, often rather wild and disconcerting, circumstances haunt the effort to reproduce the law. 2. The demonstration was described in unpublished drafts of a manuscript that Garfinkel circulated in 1988 and 1989 (Garfinkel et al. 1989). 3. Eric Livingston (1995) also used Galileo’s pendulum demonstration in an ethnomethodological respecification of physical experimentation. Livingston’s treatment was developed independently of Bjelic;’s, and provides an interesting companion piece with a somewhat different lesson. 4. The “problem of replication” (Collins 1985) is well known in science studies circles. Not only does it apply to contemporaries who attempt to replicate the experiments of colleagues and rivals in their specialized fields, it applies with extra force to efforts to replicate experiments across centuries of history. The problem of replication is both a practical and rhetorical one. Practically, it can be difficult to reproduce exactly the materials and practices of scientists who are long dead. Theories and observation languages are likely to have changed, and the original equipment may be difficult and expensive to find or rebuild. 5. This point about the unusually “robust” character of Galileo’s demonstration was made by Bruno Latour, in a personal communication during a seminar at the Centre for the Sociology of innovation, at l'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris, May 1998. A group of faculty and students at the seminar collaborated in an effort to perform the inclined plane demonstration as described by Galileo and Bjelic;. 6. Garfinkel (2002) uses the inclined plane demonstration to demonstrate the possibility of “losing the phenomenon”—a practical possibility that he claims is essential to the natural, but not the social, sciences. Less no robust; and more technically exacting and historically questionable, demonstrations tend to make a different possibility perspicuous. We might call the latter “not getting to first base.” Far from losing the phenomenon, one is left in doubt as to whether it is possible to “get” it in the first place. I gained insight about the difficulties associated with getting the phenomenon by participating in an International Workshop on Replications of Historical Experi161 N o t e s ments in Physics, Their Function in History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science and in Science Teaching, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany (24–28 August 1992). INTRODUCTION 1. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 165. 2. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 2. 3. Peter Singer, review of Dearest Pet: On Bestiality by Midas Dekkers. http://www.nerve.com/opinions/singer/heavypetting/main.asp. 4. Ibid. 5. For more on interspecies sexuality see Piers Beirne, “Towards a Concept of Interspecies Sexual Assault,” Theoretical Criminology 1, no. 3 (August 1997): 318. 6. Haraway, Primate Visions, 2. 7. The learned volumes, written and read; the consultations and examinations ; the anguish of answering questions and the delights of having one’s words interpreted; all the stories told to oneself and to others, so much curiosity, so many confidences offered in the face of scandal, sustained—but not without trembling a little—by the obligation of truth; the profusion of secret fantasies and the dearly paid right to whisper them to whoever is able to hear them; in short, the formidable “pleasure of analysis” (in the widest sense of the latter term) which the West has cleverly been fostering for several centuries: all this constitutes something like the errant fragments of an erotic art that is secretly transmitted by confession and the science of sex. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 71. 8. Judith Butler explains the Nietzschean notion of creative value: “Value emerges as the ‘show’ of strength or superior force and also comes to conceal the force relations that constitute it; hence, value is constituted through the success of strategy and domination; it is also that which tends to conceal the genesis of its constitution.” Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 181. 9. Butler, Subjects, 229. 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York.: Penguin Books, 1978), 115. 11. Butler, Subjects, 231. As...
OR
Buy This Book in Print