By Jason Curtis Droboth
March 30, 2020
A short weekly response for COMS 613: Communication Theory
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s groundbreaking 1979 book Laboratory Life: The (Social) Construction of Scientific Facts advanced the view that the scientific method, the holy grail of science itself, is a social process by which scientific facts are constructed, not discovered. But a process can only produce results when the relevant actors are made to act in relation to one another. In the case of science, the actors - scientists, lab technicians, secretaries, test tubes, microscopes, fluorescent lights, and more - scientific facts are produced (Latour, 1979).
Since scientific facts fulfill a superior epistemological role in modern society, the laboratory works to produce an ontological precedence and thereby structure society and formulate the individual - or subject - in uncontested ways (Latour, 1979). The implications for this are vast and profound, for if the laboratory does indeed perform this role, we might see it as the new papacy. Man’s sole channel to the divine. This sort of centralized access to “truth” might make one uncomfortable since, in the Foucaultian sense, knowledge is power; the power to shape society and form the individual in ways that serve the dominant hierarchy and inform the ontological framework that holds it together. Today we ask (or at least try to ask) for transparency and accountability of the Vatican, that their duty should be to liberate the people not enslave them. So, should we not then ask the same of the new Vatican, the laboratory? Feminism, it seems, might be best poised to lead this endeavor.
The laboratory can be seen through the eyes of Actor-Network Theory as a network composed of the heterogeneous actors mentioned above along with countless others. If we were to attempt to demand transparency and accountability from the laboratory, one likely place to start is with the leading human actors, the scientists. For Latour and Woolgar’s famous two-year study in the 1970s, they decided to focus on a biomedical laboratory at the Salk Institute in California run by Nobel Price-winner Roger Guillemin (Latour, 1979). While I’m unsure exactly who was in his lab at the time, it’s probably a safe bet to assume that - given the high male demographic representation in science in the 1970s - that the lab was male-dominated. While the existence and focus of the laboratory network was influenced by multiple human actors outside of the lab - such as the average tax-payer through virtue of their tax funding of the lab - their involvement is so far removed from the discursive fact-forming process so central within the lab, that their interests are unlikely to be represented at all. Yet, once these scientific facts are formed, they can be translated in almost untraceable ways that alter and constitute a new reality outside of the lab.
Gender and sex often play a central role in the biological laboratory, not just in the demographic representation of the actors such as the scientists and study participants, but in the very assumption that sex or gender are relevant variables in understanding biological phenomena. Further still, the assumption that biologic sex dichotomy even exists outside of cultural context. Actors in a biological laboratory are likely to perceive gender as socially constructed and, depending on the study, may try to ignore such a variable since it has no place in studies of natural phenomena. However, they’re more likely to incorporate sex as a variable since this is often seen as a biological reality independent of cultural context. To Judith Butler, this is a common, though mistaken view.
“gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which "sexed nature" or "a natural sex" is produced and established as "prediscursive," prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts” (Butler, 1999).
According to Butler, sex is not prediscursive. When the scientists speak of sex as if it were a biological reality, they’re actually discursively producing as a result of the very “apparatus of gender” (Butler, 1999). Even if the scientists do not find an appreciable difference between results associated with the 2 sexes they enlist, the papers which they produce summarizing the findings are likely to state so. They are unlikely to state that since there were no noticeable differences, then the 2 sexes are not a biological reality.
Another problem with this new papacy, the laboratory, is the centralization of power within a hierarchy and thus the necessary and oppressive exclusion of the masses and the elevation of the status of the few. Given that science in the 1970s (and to some extent today) was dominated by demographically by men, the dominant hierarchical structure likely served and was served by the dominant male interest. In this regard, the work of Roger Guillemin, a man, and his laboratory, mostly men, worked within and for the maintenance of a patriarchal structure. The power of science, given its special status as a fact-producer, to reproduce patriarchal structures within society cannot be understated. The most common method employed at the moment to right this wrong is simply to alter the demographic distribution of the actors involved in the discursive process. Essentially, it is thought, science will increasingly represent the interests of women if there are more women scientists. This endeavor has resulted in incredible shifts within science and as a result, society at large that are far too vast to discuss here. But as more women enter careers in science, major concerns still remain and continue to emerge. Specifically, the question of proportional representation.
If proportional representation within science is the goal, there are a few challenging questions that must be addressed. First, who should be represented and how do we define the who? Second, how to represent them and by who? Third, is it even possible or desirable to achieve proportional representation? None of these questions are specific to science but universal to any sort of specialization, division of labor, or democratic process.
Butler again, asks questions about the term “women/woman”. If the desire is proportional representation of women in any field, how do we first define “women”? What unites them? Is it only their shared experience of oppression? If this is so, then is each individual’s experience of oppression of similar enough nature so as to create a coherent group? Further still, is defining one as a “woman” and thus forming the subject, is it doing her any favors? “If one "is" a woman, that is surely not all one is” (Butler, 1999). Surely the heterogeneity of “women” is not best served by the imposition of homogeneity.
Next, we find problems in democratically selecting people to represent the underrepresented in consensual ways. Even within academic feminism, we see that proportional representation is challenging in that the most privileged women - mostly American middle-class white women - though still marginalized, are often slow or incapable of representing the most underrepresented and marginalized voices - poor southern black women like bell hooks (Hooks, 1984).
“Privileged feminists have largely been unable to speak to, with, and for diverse groups of women because they either do not understand fully the inter-relatedness of sex, race, and class oppression or refuse to take this inter-relatedness serious” (Hooks, 1984).
To bell hooks, being a woman is indeed no universal unifying identity. There are a large variety of influential factors in determining a woman’s experience that fly in the face of “the dominant tendency in Western patriarchal minds to mystify woman's reality by insisting that gender is the sole determinant of woman's fate” (Hooks, 1984).
Finally, proportional representation might indeed be an impossible task. For even within academic feminism and feminist theory, we see the continual rise of “stars”, people motivated by the fame and attention they receive as they “produce” ideas, theories, ontologies, and ethics to merely be “consumed” by the public (Stanley & Wise, 2000). Impossible or not, it’s a necessary pursuit that the institutional knowledge producers and the thus the reality-shapers, must attempt. However, to some feminist scholars and activists, “this debate should come ‘from below’, [and] not be confined to ‘the theorists’” (Stanley & Wise, 2000). The discussions must also engage a multiplicity of voices, yes they “need to be carried out by many people, in different parts of the world” (Stanley & Wise, 2000). As much as the laboratory effects and influences whole the network of society, society might be able to affect the knowledge production of science. But only if a vast multiplicity of actors across all of society, representing not just “women” but women from all lifeforms engage and enact influence upon the laboratory.
Habermas, Jürgen. (1964). Social Structures of the Public Sphere. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 26–56.
Habermas, Jurgen, Lennox, S., & Lennox, F. (1974). The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964). New German Critique, 3(3), 49. https://doi.org/10.2307/487737
Simis, M. J., Madden, H., Cacciatore, M. A., & Yeo, S. K. (2016). The lure of rationality: Why does the deficit model persist in science communication? Public Understanding of Science, 25(4), 400–414. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662516629749
Thomassen, L. (2010). Habermas : A Guide for the Perplexed. In Habermas : A Guide for the Perplexed (1st ed.). Continuum. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472546616