Scrips and ScribblesAuthor(s): Hans-Jörg RheinbergerSource: MLN, Vol. 118, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 2003), pp. 622-636Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3251938Accessed: 23/02/2009 17:45

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Scrips and Scribbles'

Hans-Jorg Rheinberger

1. Introduction

Over the past thirty years, scientific writing and publishing has received substantial coverage from the history of science and related

literary studies. A great deal of attention has thereby been devoted to

literary technologies, especially the different forms and tools of rhetorical enhancement, persuasion, and dissimulation.2 This paper addresses another aspect of scientific writing. It is concerned with the

scrips and scribbles of the laboratory, that research place where scientific knowledge is made to emerge and can be grasped in its

emergence. An increasing amount of literature in the history of science, especially from historians of science and technology con- cerned with micro-historical reconstructions, has been devoted to

laboratory notebooks and other forms of laboratory and research

inscription.3 With few exceptions, however, the epistemic function of such notes in the overall order of knowledge production has been

I thank Colin Milburn for editing this text and improving its readability. 2 See, for example, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump:

Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985); Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge. The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1988); Greg Myers, Writing Biology. Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press 1990); Timothy Lenoir (ed.), Inscribing Science. Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998).

3From a science study perspective, see Karin Knorr Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge. An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (Oxford: Pergamon Press 1981); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life. The Construc- tion of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1986); for an overview from

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widely neglected.4 In what follows, I cannot claim to compensate for this neglect, but I would like at least to highlight some facets of the

productive function of particular forms of laboratory writing in the

process of knowledge acquisition. In other words, I would like to consider laboratory writing in its epistemic positivity.

2. Laboratory Writing

Elsewhere I have given a detailed description of experimental systems as the material arrangements within which I see the game of modern scientific knowledge production taking place.5 The following brief rehearsal shall serve as a starting point from which to develop the argument of this paper. I have characterized experimental systems as the smallest working units of science in the making, as systems of

epistemic manipulation designed to give yet unknown answers to

questions which themselves are not yet clear. As such, and as the French molecular biologist Francois Jacob once marvelously put it, they are systems "for concocting expectation," or "machines for

making the future."6 Experimental systems inextricably co-generate phenomena and the corresponding concepts that these phenomena come to embody in the process of their techno-epistemic constitu- tion. I have addressed these noumenal-phenomenal entities, manipu- lated within experimental systems, as epistemic things. Epistemic things thus are shaped in and occupy an opaque intermediary space: they lie, so to speak, at the interface between the material and the

conceptual side of science. To stress this hybridity, I have therefore also characterized them as graphematic entities.7 That means they are

scripturally configured in the broad sense that Jacques Derrida has

conveyed to this notion and to which I will come back at the very end of this paper. In the realm of graphematicity, the objects of research

the perspective of history of science, see Frederic L. Holmes, Jiirgen Renn, and Hans- J6rg Rheinberger (eds.), Reworking the Bench. Research Notebooks in the History of Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer, in press).

4 An exception is Christoph Hoffmann and Peter Berz (eds.), Uber Schall. Ernst Machs und Peter Salchers Geschoflfotografien (Gottingen: Wallstein 2001).

5 Hans-J6rg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things. Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997).

6 Francois Jacob, La statue intrieure (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob 1987), 13. 7 Hans-J6rg Rheinberger, "Experimental Systems-Graphematic Spaces" in: Timo-

thy Lenoir and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (eds.), Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998), 285-303.

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HANS-JORG RHEINBERGER

have not yet definitely become paper, and the paper-the scrip, the scribble-is still part and parcel of a materially mediated experimen- tal engagement. It still belongs fully to the knowledge regime of the

laboratory. A closer look into these spaces reveals an immense variety of

primary written research traces and marks ready for historical analy- sis. These traces reach from excerpts of research papers to notes of

fragmentary ideas or preliminary conjectures, from sketches of

experimental setups to records and arrangements of data deriving from these experiments, from tentative interpretations of experimen- tal results to calculations, from the calibration of existing instrumen- tation to the design of new apparatus. All these and many more

comparable activities circumscribe a space, and at the same time are inscribed into a space that lies between the materialities of the

experimental systems and the spirituality of the final written commu- nications that are eventually, at a later date, released to the scientific

community. The primary forms of 'write-ups' in the laboratory have long been

regarded as simple records of data. These data in turn have been seen as ideally resulting from some 'pencil of nature' and thus transparent with respect to the matter whose contours they were taken to render

intelligible. Forms of tracing such as the 'method of curves' in nineteenth century physiology or microphotography in bacteriology at the end of the nineteenth century have been praised as instances of such transparent renderings. But being the result of data collection- which usually itself already derives from a sophisticated experimental constellation-is only one part of these graphic assessments: they are

always already part of a broader laboratory discursivity.8 They are not the inert and extrinsic starting point for a genuinely 'intellectual'

process of subsequent knowledge generation, for they are themselves an integral part of this process, deriving from and connecting the

process to its epistemic objects. The epistemically productive function of these tracts, tracks, and traces of an experimental system is that

they always already display and exhibit a tentative texturalization that can be addressed as an intrinsic aspect of any epistemic thing.

8 Soraya de Chadarevian, "Graphical Method and Discipline: Self-Recording Instru-

ments in Nineteenth-Century Physiology" in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 24 (1993), 267-291. Peter Geimer (ed.), Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit. Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2001).

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One of the eminent functions of the tracing and writing process at the laboratory bench is what I would like to call the 'redimension- alization' of the experimental arrangement. In the most trivial sense, this means that the temporal and spatial arrangement of the experi- ment with its corresponding data scattered in four dimensions is

essentially plated and pasted onto a two-dimensional surface. Sur- faces force and enable one to explore new options of ordering and

arrangement. Sequential events can be displayed in simultaneity, temporal relations rendered as spatial relations. In a more sophisti- cated sense, however, a laboratory protocol produces what I would like to call effects of condensation. Such condensation can extend over several stages of reduction, where at each stage, new patterns may become perceivable according to the order and the amount of data compression. It is essential for a well-conducted laboratory protocol that such reduction processes be kept reversible. Their

epistemic productivity lies exactly in the possibility to walk transversally along the chain of transformations in both ways, to travel back and

eventually turn the compression in another direction.9 In a sense, therefore, laboratory protocols represent the integrated

memory of whole series of experiments, a memory that makes the retrieval of data easier and possible at any time. Reducing the size of the memory and transforming it from a chronology into a flexible

patchwork of signs-icons, symbols, indices-have more than a

quantitative function. The ensuing redimensionalization brings the

laboratory, so to speak, into a manageable and transportable form, thereby creating novel forms of dislocation and disposition.10 In

doing so, laboratory protocols transform sources and sediments into resources and materials that can be played with and from which new

questions may spring. Driven by the forces of compression, they set free the inadvertent powers of synopsis inherent in their patch condition.

In what we might call the space of primary scientific writing, the

idiosyncrasies of the scientist can develop and play out their potentials. It is here that the individual style of scientific novelty production is exerted and exercised. On this level, we gain a thoroughly different

9 For a nice example of such reversibility, see Bruno Latour, "Le pedofil de Boa Vista" in La clef de Berlin (Paris: La Decouverte 1993), 171-225.

10 Christoph Hoffmann and Peter Berz, "Machs Notizbuch" in Uber Schall, 91-141.

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idea of science in the making than on the level of texts and the

possibilities of analysis they suggest. Here we find ourselves largely in the space of the pre-normative, where the opportunistic character of

knowledge acquisition shows itself unhindered, in the space of the

'assay' in the deeper sense of this notion, a sense that is constitutive for the making of science. An assay is not a trial. It is an exploratory leap whose tentativity is not yet bound to scrutiny. Thus, the explor- atory potential of experimental systems is carried over into the

exploratory space of notetaking with its enhanced freedom of combi- nation, unrestricted by narrow compatibility considerations.

As Francois Jacob has recently remarked, scientists, when going public, "describe their own activity as a well-ordered series of ideas and experiments linked in strict logical sequence. In scientific articles, reason proceeds along a high road that leads from darkness to light with not the slightest error, not a hint of a bad decision, no confusion, nothing but perfect reasoning. Flawless.""1 Research notes, on the other hand, are the documentary residues, the products of

whatJacob, in contrast to the well-ordered "day science," has charac- terized as the agitations of a "night science." "By contrast, night science wanders blind. It hesitates, stumbles, recoils, sweats, wakes with a start. Doubting everything, it is forever trying to find itself, question itself, pull itself back together. Night science is a sort of

workshop of the possible where what will become the building material of science is worked out. Where hypotheses remain in the form of vague presentiments and woolly impressions. Where phe- nomena are still no more than solitary events with no link between them. Where the design of experiments has barely taken shape. Where thought makes its way along meandering paths and twisting lanes, most often leading nowhere."'2 In this contact zone halfway between experiment and paper, where the shuffling and reshuffling of research notes is executed, the individual artistic potential of the research scientist finds its primary playground.

II FrancoisJacob, OfFlies, Mice, & Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1998), 125.

12 Ibid, 126.

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3. The Research Notes of Carl Correns

Let me illustrate these considerations with an example taken from the early history of genetics. In the spring of 1896, the German botanist Carl Correns started a series of crossing experiments with

pea varieties in the small botanical garden of the University of

Tuibingen. Since 1894, he had been searching for a solution to the xenia question: Can pollen of a different variety have a direct influence on the characteristics of the fruit and seed of the mother

plant? Correns had been screening the literature for reports of plants on which to demonstrate the phenomenon that had already puzzled Darwin. Zea mays and Pisum sativum were among the plants reported to show xenia. Correns hoped to be able, first, to produce a clear-cut and indisputable example of the phenomenon by experiment. Sec- ond, he wanted to solve the riddle by a physiological-histological examination of the fructification process.

The protocols of Correns' experiments with Pisum and with corn have been preserved.'3 They allow us to retrace the gradual process by which the original research question was substituted by the observa- tion and explanation of regularities in the character distribution of the hybrid progeny, which had already been described by Gregor Mendel in a paper published in the Verhandlungen des Naturforschenden Vereins in Briinn in 1866.14 This paper had scarcely been noticed by the

contemporaries of Mendel and in fact did not gain a wider recogni- tion until around 1900, the year marked in the annals of the history of genetics for the 'rediscovery' of Mendel's laws. The publication of Correns' results in the spring of 1900 was precipitated by a paper by Hugo de Vries from Amsterdam reporting on the same phenomenon.15

In the years between 1894 and 1899, Correns had accumulated a

growing repository of observations that concentrated on the charac- teristics of the hybrid seeds of his two experimental plants and their varieties. Elsewhere I have followed Correns' experimental pathway

13 Archive for the History of the Max-Planck-Society, Berlin, III. Abt., Rep. 17. 14 Gregor Mendel, "Versuche fiber Pflanzen-Hybriden" in Verhandlungen des Natur-

forschenden Vereins in Brunn 4 (1866), 3-47. 15 Hugo de Vries, "Sur la loi de disjonction des hybrides" in Comptes rendus de

lAcademie des Sciences de Paris 130 (1900), 845-847; Carl Correns, "G. Mendel's Regel fiber das Verhalten der Nachkommenschaft der Rassenbastarde" in Berichte derDeutschen Botanischen Gesellschaft 18 (1900), 158-168.

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in detail and from year to year.16 Here I would like to focus in

particular on some characteristics of his way of notetaking. It is obvious that at the beginning, Correns' attention was fully devoted to the xenia question. He experimented with a considerable number of maize and pea varieties that he had selected according to the characters of their fruits. His aim was obviously to produce a broad spectrum of hybrid fruits through which to observe and study potential xenia. From the reciprocal crosses of these varieties he raised, in each case, a very limited number of hybrid plants which he then carried on into the second and third generation, accompanied by a corresponding number of control plants and backcrosses where necessary. Accordingly, he drew up protocols that contained detailed

descriptions for each cross of the color and structure of the seeds as well as the embryos within them. Since he pursued these experiments over a period of six years, the accumulated details are immense. The historian looking at these details tends to become lost. But from this

immensity, an impression of the experimenter's involvement with the minutiae of his work emerges, and it becomes clear that these notes

kept the arrangement of the experimental garden and the fruits of the experimenter's labor present from year to year in an almost one- to-one manner, albeit ready and arranged for condensation, as will become clear from what follows.

It is worth mentioning that Correns drafted his protocols in such a

way that he later was able at any time to trace back each individual seed and the plants raised from it to the respective plants and the seeds of the preceding generation. He thus kept a virtually complete record of individual seed lineages on paper that he could follow forward and backward. These paper tracks were complemented by the seeds themselves, stored in boxes and on shelves: a corresponding material repository. This observation is very much in line with the

assumption that Correns by no means designed the starting point of his Pisum experiments to corroborate a statistical regularity-as we

might expect if he had derived such an idea from his first docu- mented reading of Mendel's paper in 189617-but rather, he was

looking for surprising seed characteristics that he expected to emerge within this broadly conceived set of crossings.

6 Hans-J6rg Rheinberger, "Carl Correns' Experimente mit Pisum, 1896-1899" in

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 22 (2000), 187-218. 17

Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, "When did Carl Correns read Gregor Mendel's paper? A research note" in Isis 86 (1995), 612-616.

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Despite their appearance as a faithful duplication of the order of the garden and its products on paper, the protocols were thus not mere inert records of data. Their very design and structure related to and also translated the original object of investigation. In addition, the design of the protocols focused attention on certain aspects of the

object. On the other hand, the notes were drafted in such a way that

enough redundancy and excess of possible information existed in both retrospective and prospective directions so as to allow for reorientation of the experimenter's gaze at a later stage. Consider the

following example.

Fig. 1. "Hybrid gr + p $ Al (yellow)." Archive for the History of the Max Planck Society, Berlin, III. Abt., Rep. 17, Folder "Pisum Results 1897." Reprinted with permission of the Archive for the History of the Max Planck Society, Berlin.

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HANS-JORG RHEINBERGER

On this protocol sheet of 1897, we clearly see the individualizing notation that reaches from the numbering of the plants to the

numbering of the pods to the numbering and detailed description of the peas contained in them. We also see that the very outline of the

page leaves a blank space to the left, a space that eventually came to be filled with a peculiar form of additional remarks at a later stage. From all the indications that can be gathered from the written record and which cannot be displayed here in detail, the overwriting of the

primary protocol must have taken place over the course of the year 1899. The first of these remarks reads: "E was 22 and is 22. From these seeds therefore none has been sowed. 18 with yellow germ, 77,8%, 4 with green [germ] 22,2%."

From the right to the left of this protocol, we can follow the switch from the descriptive and individualizing xenia-regime to the numeri- cal and statistical Mendel-regime. This difference could not be more drastic. At some point in the course of his experiments, in all

probability while contemplating the results of some odd corn crosses of the fall of 1897 which proved to be inadvertent backcrosses with

unrecognized hybrids, Correns must have come to suspect that

something else was going on in his experiments, something to which he had so far not paid attention. It is also reasonable to assume that, at this point in the course of his experiments, his earlier reading of Mendel's paper took on a new meaning for him. When he had read the paper for the first time in the spring of 1896, he had only looked at it with the prospect of obtaining possible clues to the xenia

question. Now his reading amalgamated with the results of his

experiments that surreptitiously had come to fill the pages of his notebooks and the boxes of his experimental barn without explicit recognition. Only now did he realize that, whereas his peas persis- tently refused to exhibit any obvious xenia, the proliferating hybrids of Pisum and, in a less clear-cut manner, also those of his corn breeds, showed clear segregation with respect to the seed characters on which he had focused his attention. One character appeared to be domi- nant over its complement in that it swept throughout the first generation of hybrids. However, in the second generation, the dominant character appeared to rule in only about three quarters of the offspring, while in the remaining quarter, as we have seen in the above quotation, the suppressed character reappeared unaltered.

Correns could now browse through the whole record of his

protocols under a completely different perspective without having to start experimentation all over again. He could concentrate on just

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one character pair, namely the color of the germ (cotyledons), and

neglect the form of the seed as well as the color of the seed coat to which he had paid considerable attention in his earlier descriptions. He could retrace which seeds he had used to raise the successive generations of hybrid plants, and add them to the remaining ones to

yield a virtually complete record. In so doing, and in summing over all the individual plants and their yield of seeds, he could arrive at substantial numbers that allowed him, in contrast to what he had set out to do at the beginning, to perform a thorough statistical evaluation of his numbers. The "experiment" in his publication of 1900, which in fact is a composite of all the crosses he had been doing with these two pea varieties between 1896 and 1899, now added up to several hundreds of peas in each of the successive generations for the

particular character pair under review. The research notes assumed the positive function of a repository and of a tool to reorient the

experimental gaze in a direction that had been unthinkable for Correns at the beginning of the experiments.

It can be seen as a fortunate byproduct of the starting point of the

experiments that Correns concentrated on characters that he ex-

pected to become visible on the seeds. Paradoxically speaking, we could say that the xenia both prevented him from an early recognition of the transmission ratios observed later and enabled him to do just that after all. For in addition to the protocols-that is, the paper record-the seeds themselves acted in his system as a kind of

naturally digitalized material protocol of green cotyledons and yellow cotyledons. This repository existed because Correns had to collect and keep the seeds for sowing the next generation in the following years. Correns could also come back to this material protocol- namely, his boxes filled with peas-at any time, even after a year or two, and he could use them additionally as a check for his notes. Not until Correns had worked himself deeply into the breeding system of Zea mays and Pisum for about four years did this character of the

system become relevant for him, at a time when he realized that his results were heading in a different direction. It appears to me that this is a particular juncture of an experimental paper trail with the material characteristics of an experimental system, creating the

possibility of recurrent moves of interpretation, which possibly repre- sent a generalizable feature of experimental exploration. In any case, it is a good example of the epistemic and potentially knowledge- producing function of scientific notetaking.

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4. Collective Forms of Laboratory Writing18

Let me now go one step further and ask whether there are 'collective'

equivalents to the individual, more or less 'private' forms of scientific

notetaking, such as we have encountered in the case of Correns. The

question amounts to an exploration of a kind of graphism that can no longer be seen as a simple protocol, but which is not yet a definite form of argument. There are intermediate forms of representation in science located in the space between the laboratory bench and the

organized public discourse of the scientific community. With Michel Foucault, we could talk about an exploration of the "discourse-

objects" of a laboratory archaeology.19 We could talk about the

laboratory itself in its scriptural organization. In this intermediate realm we find different categories of writing, of preserving traces and marks worth being explored in their general characteristics for their own sake.

One of these categories comprises lists, tables, and other forms of what could be called scientific bookkeeping. We could call them

technologies of numeracy.20 In the research process, they serve as

registers from which to retrieve the bits of information, data, or

figures that are necessary for assembling an experimental setup, or that have to be chosen in a particular experimental situation. In this function, they are systems of retrieval, an archive that is integrated into the laboratory itself. In addition, they serve as the databases into which research results can be entered and thus made available for the collective work of a particular laboratory, or even a network of

collaborating laboratories. They serve as media and mediators for the

exchange of primary data. Today, these technologies of numeracy have largely taken on electronic forms of data storage, retrieval, display, and communication. Prominent examples are the DNA

sequence databases on which molecular geneticists and gene tech-

nologists rely in constructing their probes and comparing their results, and into which they in turn feed their sequencing products.

18 This part of the paper is based on a section of Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, "Discourses of Circumstance. A Note on the Author in Science" in Peter Galison and Mario Biagioli (eds.), Scientific Authorship (London: Routledge 2003), 309-323.

19 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books 1972), 140.

20 Special kinds of such technologies are to be found in different scientific disci- plines. For chemistry, see Ursula Klein, "Paper Tools in Experimental Cultures" in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32A (2001), 265-302.

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The items that compose these pools of information constitute a first form of the collectivization of the research process. As such they represent a new source from which new questions can spring, resulting from comparison and synopsis.

Another category in this realm comprises semi-standardized proto- cols and laboratory manuals. They could be addressed as technolo-

gies of literacy in a very specific sense. This category consists of written

procedures that have proven robust and reliable enough to be

applied, at least by those initiated, in a more or less routine form. These protocols have left the realm of an individual researcher's

idiosyncrasy, but they usually remain marked by the collective idiosyn- crasy of a local laboratory community. They preserve in an incremen- tal manner, sometimes even over generations of experimenters, those elements of laboratory practice that have proven to be successful.

They are also-and this is not the least of their function-the

scriptural forms of laboratory life into which newcomers are social- ized. As such, they constitute a particular laboratory identity.

It is very tempting to perceive the 'laboratory' itself emerging as a scientific writing collective in these conserved, written, mimeographed, and chronically overwritten forms and formats. The writing collective

preserves a particular laboratory tradition, an identifiable way and

style of doing experiments that is reiterated precisely because of these

protocol-related reifications. It displays the laboratory function as a collective author representing more than the mere fact that a group of people have collaborated in order to arrive at a particular result. It is rather the choreography needed to arrive at results, the collective form of an epistemic subject, the way in which 'personality' and 'style' in science begin to take on the form of interpersonal work, in the

competitive as well as the collaborative mode. Such a laboratory- function is at the base of what has been discussed for a long time

already in science studies and the history of science as research traditions or research schools.2 Instead of concentrating on the

sociological features of these schools or traditions, such as the strong leader, the special opportunities of a local institution, or the disciplin- ary junctures in a particular laboratory, I would like to claim that it will be worth investigating in more detail the material circumstances

21 For a comprehensive overview, see Gerald L. Geison and Frederic L. Holmes (eds.), Research Schools: Historical Reappraisals (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1993, Osiris 8).

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and the embodied gestural repertoire of the epistemic foundation of these phenomena. My guess is that particular technologies of numeracy and literacy such as those mentioned play a major role in shaping these traditions. Research traditions emerge from a process of material reproduction, in which the scripturally reified idiosyncrasies of the laboratory, such as recipes, procedural advices, log sheets, standardized experimental designs, and adapted software, are irre-

placeable bits and pieces of a local research culture. Within this medial realm between semi-matter and semi-print,

forms of scientific numeracy and literacy exist that, though they are not yet of the order of texts released into the public, also no longer pertain to the private diary of the individual researcher. They take their shape from a sort of collectively accumulating memory and communalized experience, and in turn shape this memory and

experience, from one laboratory generation to the next. The ques- tion is what precisely these forms can tell us about that strange but

epistemically crucial form of half-authorized subjectivity and half-

private objectivity, something that is different from 'signature' writ-

ing. What does it take epistemically to make a researcher part of a

knowledge-gaining collective? As what kind of figure and in precisely what kind of function does the researcher act at the bench? Who

speaks to whom and especially through which kind of written media in the process of research? How can we characterize that space and time where epistemic things are no longer private dreams but not yet sanctioned facts, that semi-public realm where capillary communion overrides official communication? The mechanisms of reinforcement that hold a knowledge-producing community such as a laboratory together, in both the synchronic and the diachronic axis, are materi- alized in a special kind of laboratory discourse with its unique laboratory scripts somewhere between the dense and impenetrable experimental arrangement on the one hand and the articulated

concept on the other, between the scientist at the bench and the scientist as the author of a scientific paper. Just as languages of art, in their capacity as systems of symbols, oscillate between density and articulation, between picture and text,22 this laboratory relation can assume all kinds of hybrid forms, mixtures, and blends between the seamless plenitude of an acting subject and the punctuated detach- ment of a signature, between the jargon of a recipe with its

22 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1968).

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performative, almost private language and object-signs barely intelli-

gible for the non-initiated on the one hand, and the codified and

punctuated argumentation of a research paper on the other. In this short essay, my concern has been with forms of data

collection and writing as they occur in the laboratory. I have tried to

convey a sense of the fact that the process of graphematic tracing and the forms in which it takes place at the work bench are not in themselves passive data recording procedures. On the contrary, the

primary traces, prints, and indices of the experimental setup make

part of a textured entanglement which scientists address and experi- ence through their efforts of 'making sense of data. It is on this plane that the process of knowledge generation takes form. It is the

privileged plane of epistemic tinkering. It is the plane where scientific

representations take shape. Tinkering here is meant in exactly the same way as it is defined by Claude Levi-Strauss: namely, that "the

signifies change themselves into signifiants, and inversely."23 Speaking with Levi-Strauss, in tinkering, the traces have still the opacity of signs, they have not yet assumed the transparency of concepts.

As shown in the example of Correns, the microhistorical gaze through the magnifying glasses of research notes can reveal the kinds of delays that appear to be constitutive for empirically-driven thinking in general, the sorts of "slownesses and troubles that appear, in the

very act of knowing, intimately, in a kind of functional necessity," of which Gaston Bachelard has spoken in his psychoanalysis of the scientific spirit.24 The research notes of Correns help not only to make this point in a particularly clear manner, but they also display some of the intricacies and peculiarities characterizing the process of

note-taking in the positivity of its recursive potentials. They practically show what iterativity means for the generation of knowledge. In his

Margins ofPhilosophy, Jacques Derrida has proposed a generalized view of writing as the exemplar of a process of "iteration."25 According to Derrida, writing is characterized by the structural possibility of

becoming weaned either from its putative originary referent, from that to which the writing refers and is derived from, or from its

putative origin, from the one who writes. The first possibility has been

23 Claude Levi-Strauss, La pensee sauvage (Paris: Plon 1962), 31. 24 Gaston Bachelard, La formation de l'esprit scientifique (6th ed. Paris: Vrin 1969), 13. 25Jacques Derrida, "Signature evenement contexte" in Marges de la philosophie (Paris:

Editions de Minuit 1972), 365-393.

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636 HANS-JORG RHEINBERGER

exposed in the section on laboratory writing and explored through an example in the section on Correns. The second has been the

subject of the last section on generalized forms of laboratory writing. The historical productivity of scrips and scribbles, of inscription and

transcription, resides exactly in the possible incidence of such a double loss in the process of gaining knowledge.

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin