Ivan Tchalakov Dep. of Applied and Institutional Sociology,

University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria PAST Center – Tomsk State University, Russia

The Amateur’s Action: On the Limits of Actor-Network Account about resistance and

endurance in scientific research

EASST Conference, Torun, 17-19.09.2014

Contents

• Endurance in science - evidences from research

• ANT account of endurance – the notion of heterogeneous micro-

community

• The ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘other’ science (Pasteur v/s McClintock)

• The limits of traditional notion of action

• The endurance and forgotten amateur roots of modern science

• Discussion

ANT notion of heterogeneous associations

• In 1990s and even till now it is a common claim that stability and

solidity of as-sociations is largely due to the nonhuman/hybrid actors

in it

• I remember when observing holographic lab in Sofia in early 1990s

one scientist said: ‘We are working with JENA lasers. The company

stop producing them and not supply spare parts anymore, while we

had no money to by new ones. When the lasers cease to work, this

will be the end of our research.”

Yet they managed to keep the lasers working ten years more until

eventually bought new lasers…

Endurance in science - evidences from research

• 1993 survey on science brain-drain in Bulgaria

Under what circumstances could you stop doing science

• 2011 Job Announcement: Rojen National Astronomical

Observatory (NAO) is seeking to employ a young researchers.

The successful candidates should:

• possess university degree in physics or other natural sciences;

• possess computer skills, incl. Windows and Unix operational

systems; programming in C/C++, Java, PHP, Perl, etc.;

• be able to analyze visual data using IRAF, MIDAS, and IDL

software,as well as IDL astro-libraries

• to have experience in web-page

creation and maintenance

• write and communicate in at least

two foreign languages, incl. English

• - to possess driving license.

Endurance in science - evidences from research

2011 Job Announcement at Rojen NAO (continued). The

successful candidates are expected

• to live at NAO at 1750 meters above the seat and 10

kilometers from the closest village

• to learn to operate NAO telescopes and related equipment

• to participate in daily maintenance of the equipment and

research infrastructure

• to help NAO engineers in maintaining and improving the

telescopes and other equipment

• to participate in planned night observations of astronomical

bodies and events

• to communicate in Bulgarian and English with media and the

public day and night (to meet visitors, to give them short

lectures on NAO facilities and research activities)

Endurance in science - evidences from research

2011 Job Announcement at Rojen NAO (continued).

• The above activities comprise 50% of the work load. The

remaining 50% should be devoted to researcher’s own

scientific activity on specific topic and publishing the

results of it (at least 1 paper per year at international

astronomical journals).The working time is flexible since

NAO is operating round the clock 7 days at week.

• The month salary - 364 BGN or 186 €.

• Application deadline – October 10, 20111.

• Please send a CV, motivational letter and address of

two people able to provide references at

office @ astro.bas.bg. More information at tel. (+359 2) 9741910

Endurance in science - evidences from research

The ‘moral equivalence’ principles

“… A passion for knowledge, idle curiosity, altruistic concern with the benefit to humanity, and a host of other special motives have been attributed to the scientists. The quest for distinctive motives appears to have been misdirected… [There is] no satisfactory evidence that scientists are recruited from the ranks of those who exhibit an unusual degree of moral integrity… The objectivity of scientific knowledge [does not] proceeds from the personal qualities of scientists.”(The Sociology of Science”, 1973, pp.267-278)

=> Nothing special with the scientists – what matter is not personal motives, but institutional setting, norms in science

The ‘moral equivalence’ principles in the cultural context

of mid-XXth century

“The ‘moral equivalence’ of scientists is now a commonplace, but it was

NOT a commonplace at the time Merton begin to voice it. It was a claim

against the background of widespread sentiment to the contrary (moral

integrity, ‘priests of truth’, ‘another way to serve God’, calling, personal

devotion)

… This was, among other things, a tactics in building an academic

discipline – justifying its procedures and bounding it from other disciplines

(psychology) and from what was taken as the matter-of-fact individualism

of the common culture… In doing so Merton became precursor of

Foucault’s celebrated identification of the typical post-WW II figure of the

“specific intellectual”… but whose role was now defined by providing

particular expert services to power.” (Steven Shapin 2008, p.22)

Moral equivalence principle outcome

• NSF: “There are not many working scientist left who exert much spiritual power over their disciplines. However personally and professionally ethical prominent latter-day scientists may be, they have lost the halo of incorruptibility and unimpeachable integrity that many of their predecessors once projected.

In fact, it seems pretentious nowadays for senior scientist to act as the exemplar of an admirable person worth emulating, when the role of arbiter of integrity and good manners in scientific conduct has been taken over by impersonal organs such as the U.S. Public Health Service’s Office of Research Integrity”.

=> 50 years after Merton: instead of presumption of morality in science – apparatus of institutional surveillance!

=> “The residual sentiments about the special motivational constitution of the modern scientist or about the personal moral basis of the scientist’s cultural authority were one of the major obstacles to a properly sociological story about modernity…

The ‘moral equivalence’ thesis could be considered as site there some of the tensions of tectonic cultural change became visible.” (S. Shapin, p.23)

But it wasn’t always like that…

"The early modern scientist was, almost without exception, not a professional but an amateur. He was understood to do it not because it was a job… but because, in some irreducible sense, he wanted to do it, or even because he was called to do it...

The integration of science into structure of power and profit was never more than partial in the XIX century. The figure of the man of science as an amateur, conducting inquiry without expectation of remunerated career did not disappear. The most famous scientist of the century was a gentleman-amateur: Charles Darwin was never employed to produce scientific knowledge... In Britain alone, the list of amateur-scientists in the late eighteen and nineteen century included some of the most influential figures in all the sciences". (Shapin 2008:35)

Let us keep for a while this link…

The price paid by Mertonian sociology

Sociology has deserted from studying the content of scientific work, the process of acquiring new knowledge: “we shall NOT deal with the substantive findings of sciences (hypotheses, uniformities, laws)...”

“In choosing this paradigm, sociology had proposed a division of labour with other disciplines – such as history, linguistics, ethnography, or philosophy. The cognitive content, discourse, cosmology and ontology of modern institutions were left to these fields.” (Karin Knorr 1991)

Sociology of scientific practice

• The notion of ‘laboratory’ signifies a form of life in which the scientific objects are not simply ‘technically created’ but are also symbolically and politically constructed. (Knorr 1994)

• The lab is a place of local reconfiguration of the experience, where new embodied skills, artifacts and codified texts come into being (Callon 1996).

© I. Tchalakov, Aleksanteri Institute, April 15, 2010

Observational critique of STS notion of ‘laboratory’

• Early in my field work I was surprised that almost every

researcher had a nickname that inevitably contained as an

essential element the name of the object he was studying: o Margarita with photorefractive crystals;

o Clement with rainbow holograms;

o Methodius and Rositza with in-phase lenses

• The same was found during our student research practices at

National Astronomical Observatory “Rojen’ in 2012 and 2014:

o Grigor with twin stars

o Nikola and Peter ‘the Slunchars’ (Sunny boys)

o Sevinch with quasars, etc.

• =>‘Laboratory’ signify rather big organizational entity. To set it up, prior to that micro-communities between humans and nonhumans must be established!

I called it ‘coupling’.

The heterogeneous micro-communities (definition)

• Elementary forms of reconfiguration of the [social] order. It is the place where new configurations and mediators first will be produced.

The scientist - a spokesperson for the nonhuman he or she has coupled with, its messenger in the "large society."

• Constitutive elements of the laboratory. The largest group of this kind has consisted of two or three researchers with (sometimes) a Ph.D. student and a [few] laboratory assistants.

=> However, this definition describes coupling from the outside - it leaves untouched he problem of what cements concomitance in the couple, what supports it, and what stabilizes it. (Tchalakov 2004)

How is heterogeneous microcomunity constituted? (continued)

“… a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated’, moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans… The body is thus not a provisional residence of something superior – an immortal soul, the universal or thought – but what leaves a dynamic trajectory by which we learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is made of

… there is no sense in defining the body directly, but only in rendering the body sensitive to what these other elements are.” (Latour 2004: 2006)

=> Yet he too miss the problem of what sustain the concomitance in the process of being affected, recognizing passion as insufficient condition

Negative definition of ‘heterogeneous micro-community”

• The concept of heterogeneous couple has meaning

only if it indicates a new type of relations, a new

layer in the interaction between humans and

nonhumans, which oversteps the activist ontology.

Knorr is talking about „unity“ and „sharing“ as well

as about the „disappearance of self-consciousness“

and about „subjective fusion“ of the researcher with

his "knowledge objects", about turning the object into

a subject… (Knorr, 1996, p. 16)

The potential of notion ‘heterogeneous micro-community”

• What cements concomitance in the couple, what supports and stabilizes it?

How is the elementary heterogeneous relationship between a human and a nonhuman constituted when for most fellow humans the nonhuman partner in the relationship simply does not exist?

• Barbara McClintock story Fox Keller, E. - A Feeling for The Organism. The Life and Work of Barbara

McClintock, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1983

• Methodius story Tchalakov, I. (2004) The Object and the Other in Holographic Research. Approaching Passivity and Responsibility of Human Actors, in: Science, Technology & Human Values, vol.29 No.1

ANT (and STS in general): a cultural framing of ‘entrepreneurial’ science; a strange link to Merton’s moral equivalent principle…

Key feature of modern science – the emancipation and the increase of the proper role of methods and techniques of study in the process of research. The ”strong link” is not between researchers and nonhuman agents immediately, but between researchers and ‘hybrids’, i.e. the technical artifacts, equipment and procedures they are using in this process.

=> The mastering of specific method (tool) and its transfer into new area of research gives the newcomer competitive advantage to the indigenes of the field (such as farmers and veterinarians Pasteur has found in his study of anthrax). (Tchalakov & Kapriev 2005)

ANT (and STS in general): a cultural framing of ‘entrepreneurial’ science; a strange link to Merton’s moral equivalent principle…

“…knowing about Nature was no longer lime knowing divinely written book, but like knowing how car engine worked. The automobile mechanic – like natural scientists –can be regarded as an expert, even a highly valued, powerful, and well-remunerated expert, but nothing uplifting.” (Shapin 2008: 25)

ANT (and STS in general) as cultural framing of ‘entrepreneurial’

science; a strange link to Merton’s moral equivalent principle (continued)

‘Entrepreneurial’ science and the way the problems are formulated:

Scientists came to fields where the research problems were already articulated, the debates were going on, and the interested parties outlined. Coming with their methods, the scientists in fact transform (or translate) the old problems - “translation” always presupposes a text (or story) that is already available, an existing configuration of actors and interests.

The ‘Other’ type of science

• Science, guided by patient, laborious, and uncertain efforts for acquaintance of a new agent or unknown features of an existing agent and where the methods of study are secondary. This is a science, where you continue probing into your study when the colleagues you are working with are leaving in despair, or switch to other problems, or some of them even manage to prove that the elusive entities you are studying are nonexistent.

This is a science too, maybe not as successful as the ‘entrepreneurial’ one, but indispensable for the development of knowledge and for the evolution of human ways of engaging with the world. This is the science of Pasteur’s colleagues from the crystallographic lab that have remained there searching the problems interesting for their tiny community only. (Tchalakov & Kapriev 2005)

The amateur link to ‘Other’ type of science

• Shapin stresses the close link between vocation (calling) and

amateurism in the development of modern science, but

science amateurs are not just an early modern phenomenon:

• - low-cost sandbox holography in 1970s (S. Johnston 2007)

• - Mars Society at its Desert Research Station in Utah, USA. The

amateurs producing research results interests to NASA

• - ‘fruitful exchanges between professional astronomers and

amateurs” (Callon, Lascoumes et Barthe 2009, ch.1) or astronmer-amateur at NAO Rojen, integrated in research;

• - science amateurs at Luxembourg Museum of Natural History,

studied by s Morgan Meyer (Meyer 2008 2010)

• - amateur science movement “do-it-yourself biology” (DYTbio)

in USA and other developed countries (Meyer 2012).

the persistence of these relationships, which somehow

preserved and transfer over the centuries the initial sense of

doing science as ‘calling’ and deep personal involvement

To restore the asymmetry between human an non-human actors, if on a different, non-Cartesian ground

Possible strategies:

Non-orthodox phenomenology:

o Bodily interactions with closer material environment - ‘wild layer of intercorporality’ (Merleau-Ponty)

o ‘passivity’ and ‘responsibility’ of the human actor (E. Levinas – “responsibility to other (non) human”)

Pragmatic theory of “regimes of engagement” (L. Thévenot)

Sociology of amateurs (sociology of attachment) - A. Henion

Reconsidering the sociological notion of ‘action’ - the Aristotle’s

notion of ένέργεια (energy) with its Byzantine interpretation

Thank you for your attention!