Was the Last Turn The Right Turn? The Semiotic Turn and A. J. Greimas

Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, willless, painless, timeless knowing subject” [which] demand[s] that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking. . . . There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be. ¹

Nietzsche’s passage highlights several themes central to recent work in science studies. First, it rejects a single, all-empowering gaze, a nonperspectival seeing, in favor of radical, critically positioned seeing—the theme of situated knowledges. Second, the passage enjoins us not to abandon vision and objectivity, but to reclaim embodied vision, perspectival seeing, even technologically mediated vision as a route to the construction of located, and therefore responsible, knowledges.

This, it seems to me, is roughly where the field is headed, or at least ought to head; in what follows I survey and assess some of the latest efforts to conceptualize science studies as cultural studies. Within this general movement I will limit my concern to the interesting, provocative, and sometimes mystifying “semiotic turn” in some of the most recent science studies. Specifically, I have in mind the papers of Bruno Latour and Madaleine Akrich presenting what they call a “semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies”; ² Donna Haraway’s papers on what she calls “material-semiotic actors,” notably her “Promises of Monsters,” “Situated Knowledges,” and “Cyborg Manifesto”; ³ and N. Katherine Hayles’s proposal for enrolling these hybrids in a semiotically inspired program of “constrained constructivism.” ⁴ By tracing the versions of semiotics presented in these papers to their source, I seek an answer to this question: was that last turn the right turn?

Considerations about language, whether Kuhn-inspired interest in quantitative linkages between scientific publications or concerns about Wittgensteinian language games and forms of life, have always been part of science studies in one form or another. These are not the sources of the recent semiotic turn, but they point us in the right direction. To repeat a familiar story: the point was to move away from theory-dominated accounts of knowledge production in science to an account sensitive to actual scientific practice in which theory was simply one of the many important games in town—experimenters and crafters of instruments and techniques being crucial but silenced laborers in the production of knowledge. The rehabilitation of skill and craft knowledge (even in the domain of theory, mathematical and computational practice), concerns about tacit knowledge and unarticulable skill, experimenter’s regress, interpretive flexibility, and negotiated closure of debate all contributed to newer accounts of science as a disunified, heterogeneous congeries of activities. ⁵ The emphasis on practice and on the local context of investigation initiated by the first generation of laboratory studies prompted a new wave of inquiries into the ways in which these different domains of practice mesh with one another locally and how they translate globally to other sites. Joan Fujimura’s exploration of what she has called “articulation work” in linking up different social worlds examines how networks of heterogeneous actors, practices, and different social worlds, including industry and markets, are knit together in usable, effective packages; she provides one salient example of the way in which studies of practice have expanded into studies of context and linkages between contexts. ⁶

Other lines of work have led directly from considerations of science as practice to the view of science as culture studies. Some of these studies have verged into the semiotic turn that interests me. Jim Griesemer’s and Leigh Star’s work on boundary objects is a case in point, where they show that objects like museum dioramas mediate multiple domains of interest and programs of meaning-making. ⁷ Another...