Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines 9781503616059

Citation preview

INSTITUTING SCIENCE

WRITING

EDITORS

SCIENCE

Timothy Lenoir and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

INSTITUTING SCIENCE The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines Timothy Lenoir

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1997 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data are at the end of the book

Acknowledgments

The cover art done by Bruce Jenson for Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash depicts the novel's central character, Hiro Protagonist. standing at the Babylonian Gate looking toward a futuristic city hovering above a large computer circuit board. Hiro's views about discipline not only parallel my own, but his journey is also emblematic of the trail of discipline formation I follow in this book. Although I do not begin at the Babylonian Gate, I start literally across the street from its present home in Berlin's Pergamon Museum at another site, the Gustav-Magnus-Haus, the original home of the "organic physics" ofr847, the Berlin Physical Society, and the disciplinary developments in physiology and clinical medicine I explore in several chapters. Parallel to Hiro's virtual journey, mine ends in Silicon Valley, the home of the microprocessor, where I explore the dynamics of industry-university relationships in the formation of contemporary disciplinary economies. My travels from Berlin to Stanford in search of discipline have been assisted by numerous institutions, colleagues, and friends to whom I want to express my appreciation and thanks. I gratefully acknowledge research support by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Stanford Humanities Center. In addition to financial support the Wissenschaftskolleg and Stanford Humanities Center have provided me with stimulating colleagues, wonderful working facilities, and more lunch than a once youthful body can sustain. William Coleman, Joseph Ben-David, and Thomas Parke Hughes provided enormous intellectual support for the enterprise I have undertaken here. I spent many valuable hours discussing the themes and sources

vm

Acknowledgments

of my work with Bill Coleman, who was embarked on similar research before his tragic early death. Josi Ben-David was similarly helpful in guiding a younger colleague. At the beginning of my project he offered a seminar on the sociology of knowledge, intended as a forum for discussing our different perspectives on the subject. The seminar was just one of many supportive gestures he made for which I am grateful. Through his pathbreaking works on science, technology, and art as seamless webs sustaining cultural systems, Tom Hughes has provided both model and inspiration for my enterprise. He has also been a careful reader and respondent to my work, for which I am deeply grateful. Norton Wise has been a constant sounding board for my work. He has read, critiqued, and suggested improvements on so many aspects of this book that I feel he is its virtual coauthor. The same could be said of Peter Galison, Simon Schaffer, Mario Biagioli, and Lorraine Daston, each of whom has been a source of numerous fruitful suggestions. Much of what I have written is in dialogue with their work. I thank Brian Rotman, Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, and Nicolas Rasmussen for helpful reading and valuable suggestions on different parts of this book. I owe special thanks to Yehuda Elkana for inspiring and supporting my work in so many ways over the years, and to Joachim Nettelbeck and Ulrich and Helga Raulfffor assisting me in forming this project. Finally, words alone cannot express my gratitude to Cheri Ross for taking time away from her own writing projects to accompany me into the arcaneries of "Himholtz" studies. In this strange world policed by Enforcers and MetaCops, Cheri's humor plus generous editing of some amazingly tortured texts helped the deliverator stay on time. Credits Portions of this book have appeared in earlier form and are reprinted here by permission of the publishers: Chapter 2 appeared as "Practice, Reason, Context: The Dialogue Between Theory and Experiment," in Practice, Context, and the Dialogue Between Theory and Experiment, ed. Tim Lenoir and Yehuda Elkana, special issue of Science in Context 2 {1988): 3-22. Chapter 3, "The Discipline of Nature and the Nature of Disciplines;' appeared in Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity, ed. Ellen Messer-Davidow, David Sylvan, and David Shumway (Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia, 1993), pp. 70-102. Chapter 4, "Social Interests and the Organic Physics of I 84 7," appeared in Science in Riiflec-

Acknowledgments

IX

tion, ed. Edna Ullmann-Margalit, Israel Colloquium: Studies in History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science. vol. 3 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1988), pp. 169-81. Chapter 5, "Science for the Clinic: Science Policy and the Formation of Carl Ludwig's Institute in Leipzig," appeared in The Investigative Enterprise: Experimental Physiology in Nineteenth-Century Medicine, ed. William Coleman and Frederic L. Holmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 139-78. Chapter 7, "A Magic Bullet: Research for Profit and the Growth ofKnowledge in Germany Around 1900," appeared in Minerva 26 (1988): 66-88. Chapter 8, "Practical Reason and the Construction of Knowledge: The Lifeworld of HaberBasch," appeared in The Social Dimensions of Science, ed. Ernan McMullin (South Bend, Ind.: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1992), pp. 158-97. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to use this material here.

Contents

I.

Introduction

2.

Practice, Reason, Context: The Dialogue Between Theory and Experiment

22

3· The Discipline of Nature and the Nature ofDisciplines

45

4· Social Interests and the Organic Physics of I 84 7

75

5· Science for the Clinic: Science Policy and the Formation

of Carl Ludwig's Institute in Leipzig

96

6. The Politics ofVision: Optics, Painting, and Ideology in Germany, I845-95

IJ I

7· A Magic Bullet: Research for Profit and the Growth of Knowledge in Germany Around 1900

179

8. Practical Reason and the Construction ofKnowledge:

The Lifeworld of Haber-Bosch

203

9· Instrument Makers and Discipline Builders: The Case of

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (In collaboration with Christophe Ucuyer)

239

Notes

295

Index

345

Tables and Illustrations

TABLES I.

Varian-sponsored research

264

2. Introduction dates ofVarian NMR spectrometers to 1965

270

J. Sales ofVarian analytical instruments

281

FIGURES I.

Schematic of Haber model for ammonia synthesis

224

2. The BASF ammonia plant at Ludwigshafen

236

J. Budget memo for research sponsored by Varian, I 964

265

4· Varian projections of company-sponsored versus contractsponsored research

266

5· Varian NMR spectrometer frequencies

27I

6. The A-6o NMR spectrometer introduced by Varian in 1961

280

7· Numbers of articles on NMR, PMR, EPR, and ESR in five major chemistry journals

284

8. Cumulative view of the use ofNMR in five major chemistry journals, r 9 5 I -67

286

9· The use-rate in chemical research in the United States for seven new types of instrumentation

289

Plates follow page 150.

INSTITUTING SCIENCE

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash, freelance hacker Hiro Protagonist leads a double life delivering pizza in postmodern Los Angeles and honing his ninja warrior skills in the Metaverse, a virtual reality world he jacks into from .his personal computer. Stephenson's imaginings of the dimensions of the Metaverse and its physical properties are fascinating. The main geographical feature of the Metaverse is the Street, more garish than Las Vegas, where the buildings-constrained by neither physics nor finance but only the technical abilities of the hackers who write the codes that define and produce them-seem a mile high. One hundred and twenty million PC users can travel the Street at any one time; many of them simply ride the monorail, a free piece of public utility software, up and down looking at the sights. Others, like Hiro, design motorcycle

software, racing into "the black desert of the electronic night." Stephenson describes the rules of travel in the Metaverse: On the Street, you can pass through other people's avatars. But you can't pass through walls. You can't enter private property. And you can't pass through other vehicles, or through permanent Street fixtures such as the Ports and the stanchions that support the monorail line. If you try to collide with any of these things, you don't die or get kicked out of the Metaverse; you just come to a complete stop, like a cartoon character running spang into a concrete wall. 1

The Metaverse can serve as a metaphor for instituting science. Institutions guide, enable, and constrain nearly every aspect of our lives. Within scientific fields, professional life takes place entirely within a context of nested, overlapping, interacting, sometimes conflicting institutions. Like the experienced hacker Hiro, perfectly at home in the Metaverse he

2

Introduction

helped to create, persons who embody the required skills-the cultureof an institution move through it unconstrained: Once the Metaverse began to fill up with obstacles that you could run into, the job of traveling across it at high speed suddenly became more interesting. Maneuverability became an issue. Size became an issue. . . . A Metaverse vehicle can be as fast and nimble as a quark. There's no physics to worry about, no constraints on acceleration, no air resistance. Tires never squeal and brakes never lock up. The one thing that can't be helped is the reaction time of the user. So when they were racing their latest motorcycle software, holding wild rallies through Downtown at Mach 1, they didn't worry about engine capacity. They worried about the user interface, the controls that enabled the rider to transfer his reactions quickly into the machine, to steer, accelerate, or brake as quickly as he could think. 2 The key to success in Metaverse motocross is, surprisingly, embodied skill: even though the place exists only in virtual reality, Stephenson presents it not as an abstraction but as a fully imagined, physicalized location governed by rules and guided by practice. The same goes for scientific institutions: far from characterizing them by theoretical, disembodied abstraction, I view them as sites for the coordination and embodiment of skill. Persons deficient in the requisite culture, lacking both explicit and tacit knowledge of how the institution works, run spang into concrete walls: they experience the institution as a disciplining force, either oppressing them (in the case of those upon whom discipline is practiced in a negative way or who are systematically excluded from entry) or generating and organizing competence (for those hoping to become initiates in the institution). In time, those who are disciplined in this second way may become, like Hiro the ninja hacker, adepts within the institution, able to avoid its constraints, to innovate within its parameters, to locate and exploit loopholes. Hiro discovers such a loophole while writing sword-fighting software: His blade doesn't have the power to cut a hole in the wall-this would mean permanently changing the shape of someone else's building-but it does have the power to penetrate things. Avatars do not have that power. That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse; it is a structure that does not allow avatars to penetrate it. But like anything else in the Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a convention that different computers agree to follow. In theory, it cannot be ignored. But in practice, it depends upon the ability of different computers to swap information very precisely, at high speed, and at just the right

Introduction

3

times. And when you are connected to the system over a satellite uplink ... there is a delay as the signals bounce up to the satellite and back down. That delay can be taken advantage of, if you move quickly and don't look back. 3 Within an institutional context, it is when one attempts to try something new, to occupy a new position in the field of struggle for honor, prestige, or resources authorized by the "rules of the game," to act outside the repertoire of moves allowed by the institution, that one tests one's level of institutional acculturation. One may slip successfully inside a minute but enabling gap, or one may find that invisible walls suddenly become palpable constraints to action. The chapters in this volume draw upon historical materials from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explore the dynamic processes through which the institutions that constitute and support science are formed, maintained, and rendered "invisible" for those with the requisite culture. By focusing on instituting science, I propose to revisit a topic that was mainstream for students of the sociology of science constructed in the American functionalist tradition exemplified in the writings ofRobert K. Merton and Joseph Ben-David, but has disappeared from the recent science studies literature. Having rejected the view of science, the scientific establishment, and the growth of scientific knowledge at the core of the Mertonian framework, the early practitioners of the social studies of science turned· their attention away from questions of institutionalization, which had tended to emphasize macrolevel structural explanations, and attended instead to micro studies of laboratory practice. My approach in this book is sympathetic with these recent directions in science studiesand as the microstudies offered here attest, I am indeed highly indebted to them-but I am interested in resurrecting certain aspects of the investigation of institution formation, particularly the formation of scientific, medical, and engineering disciplines. My approach, however, departs from Merton's and Ben-David's emphasis on contractual relations between science and society that enable the autonomy of science. Instead, I emphasize the manner in which science as cultural practice is imbricated in a seamless web with other forms of social, political, even aesthetic practices, and I treat the formation of discipline and scientific institutions as sites for constructing and sustaining forms of social and cultural identity situated in relation to these other cultural frames. My strategy for elaborating this framework is to offer case studies that reexamine certain crucial junctures in Joseph Ben-David's historical picture of the evolution

4

Introduction

of the role of the scientist in modern Western society; I focus especially on the establishment of new disciplines within the context of the German research universities in the nineteenth century, the problematic relationship that emerged between science, industry, and the state at the turn of the twentieth century, and finally the situation of post-World War II science and technology, which threatens, in Ben-David's view, to undermine the autonomy of scientific institutions with attendant compromise in the quality of scientific knowledge. It might be useful, before turning to my proposal to treat institutionalization within a framework of cultural production, to review aspects of the work ofRobert Merton and Joseph Ben-David that serve as counterpoint to my argument. At the center of this sociology of science was an essentialist and presentist definition of science. Science-by which these sociologists understand the natural sciences, and physics primarily-is defined as rational inquiry into nature in terms oflogical inference aimed at finding universal laws, preferably written in the language of mathematics, and the prediction of new empirical facts deducible from theory confirmed by observation and experiment. The goal of the historical sociology of science is to identify the social, political, and cultural conditions under which the pursuit of science thus conceived comes to be a value in its own right, capable of sustaining the cumulative growth of knowledge independently of its connection to other institutions such as religion, philosophy, or even technology. Along with these intellectual characteristics, the pursuit of science demands a particular cultural ethos and normative structure internalized by the scientist and binding his "scientific conscience." 4 Merton identifies four norms crucial to the functioning of science as a social institution: communalism, disinterestedness, universalism, and organized skepticism. In addition to the internal culture of science, an appropriate external supporting environment is required. Emphasizing the interdependence of socially patterned interests, motivations, and behavior in one institutional sphere (such as economics or religion) and behavior in another sphere (such as science), Merton argues that substantial and persistent growth of science occurs only in societies of a certain kind. 5 In a similar vein, Ben-David stresses the importance of particular organizational frameworks for the pursuit of science, such as the unification of teaching and research in nineteenth-century German universities, and the importance of a decentralized, competitive market for scientific talent as an incentive to innovation in contrast to societies, such as absolutist and

Introduction

5

Napoleonic France, organized in a centralized bureaucratic form. Like Merton, Ben-David believes that the ethos of science thrives in a liberal, democratic political environment that guarantees the autonomy of science.6 For both Ben-David and Merton, science as an autonomous institutionally sanctioned activity embodying the norms constitutive of the "scientific ethos" first emerged in the Royal Society of London in the seventeenth century and achieved its most perfect historical realization in the organization of science in post-World War II American science. This admittedly truncated description of the views developed by the practitioners of the sociology of science is intended not to critique the discipline per se, but rather to highlight the features that form a grid for my own deliberations. 7 I found several of Merton's and Ben-David's assumptions difficult to accept. In their conception, the edifice of science rests on the cornerstones of realism, objectivity, disinterestedness, and autonomy, each of which is problematic from my perspective, which takes the institutional setting of scientific work as a vantage point from which to produce a contextualized, historically sensitive account of the production of scientific knowledge. Crucial assumptions for the models developed by Merton and Ben-David are realism (the notion that we are inhabitants of a "real world" of objects and processes bearing properties, with the correlated notion that the truth of scientific theories consists of a correspondence to this world) and objectivity (the notion that there are "objective facts" about the world that do not depend on the interpretation, or even the presence, of any person). In terms of these assumptions science can be characterized as cumulative and progressing toward truth. At the same time, the content of science can be regarded as independent of the context of its production or the conditions of its reproduction and distribution. Social, ideological, or economic context plays a role only when denying support or interfering with the operations of the norms of science diverts science from its goal of producing truth. From the historical perspective I prefer to adopt, however, knowledge is always situated, local, and partial. The object ofknowledge and the interpreter do not exist independently of one another; knowledge is a form of interpretation, involving temporal, bodily engagement with the world rather than the detached, disembodied, contemplative stance favored by the sociology of science. The privileging of scientific theory is another key feature of the sociological tradition. Along with the central notion that science is the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, Ben-David and Merton insist on distinguishing between pure and applied science, concern with application

6

Introduction

diverting and corrupting the disinterested pursuit ofknowledge. Furthermore, they assert, the best way to further the growth of knowledge is to preserve the institutional autonomy of science. As the institutionalized form of organized skepticism, science, in its goal of achieving objective knowledge, is the antithesis of ideology and interest, whether social, political, or economic. A related set of propositions deriving from this privileging of scientific theory are notions about the relationship between theory and experiment, on the one hand, and between science and technology, on the other. In the sociology ofBen-David and Merton, efforts to confirm theory drive experiment. Similarly, technology is conceived as applied science, with technological innovation emerging from a linear development of theory through application and refinement. The notion that technological innovation might drive the ostensibly leading edge of theory, or that the construction and refinement of scientific instrumentation might inform theory, is not part of this perspective. The position I articulate in this book, however, drops distinctions between pure and applied as meaningless. Instead I regard the internal history of science, the part normally treated as the "content of science," as a crucial element in a seamless web involving interested action that is simultaneously social, political, economic, and technical. Viewing the internal history of science this way involves a shift in focus from the history of theory to the history of practice and culture. My dissatisfaction with Merton's and Ben-David's models extends beyond disagreement with their characterization of science to the appropriateness of their norms of science, particularly disinterestedness and autonomy. From my own commitment to the notion that knowledge is engagement with the world in an interpretive relation, it follows that, for me, knowledge is necessarily interested. But Ben-David lays great emphasis on the pursuit of knowledge about the natural world for its own sake, unmotivated by utilitarian economic or class interest. For BenDavid, "an economic investigation of the subject would be about as useful as an attempt at the economic analysis of private prayer or neighborhood gossip." 8 Ben-David describes the pursuit of science from the nineteenth century to World War I as a "calling." Discovery was regarded as the inspired work of charismatic genius rather than the disciplined outcome of method, instrumentation, and technique. As the pursuit of knowledge became itself a value, the pursuit of scientific research became accepted as one of the most respected and important ways to pursue truth claims. Thus, although scientists necessarily sought material resources to pursue

Introduction

7

their research, they were motivated by a disinterested pursuit of truth. But in these terms it becomes odd to describe science as disinterested activity. In the end Ben-David is forced to admit that this position leads to a paradoxical situation. He observes that throughout the nineteenth century science increasingly became a paid occupation: first university professors taught the natural sciences, and then, with the bacteriological revolution and the application of chemistry to the needs of industry, scientific research became a paid occupation outside the academy as welP When he examines the post-World War II era, however, Ben-David sees in these developments a threat to science. It is necessary, he notes, "to take into account the fact that science itself has become an important economic enterprise. Scientists today are an interest group that competes for resources with other interested groups and thus may be involved in class conflict. These new involvements of science with central government, military, and some industrial interests on the one hand, and the involvement of scientists in conflicts of class interests on the other, threaten the faith in science." 10 Ben-David attributes these problems to the success of efforts to professionalize science, which resulted in its establishment as an autonomous and self-regulating institution with power over the distribution of funds through the modern peer-review system. 11 Paradoxically, in the period of the greatest growth of science and its establishment as an autonomous institution, its continuation as an institution best suited to produce certified knowledge valued by society for its own sake threatens to dissolve amidst the struggle of economic and class interest. Problems with the realist-objectivist conception of science at the core

of the sociology ofscience and apparent contradictions in the implications of the norms of disinterest and autonomy guiding its functional organization and development led me to rethink the institutionalization of science from a different starting point. In particular, it seemed crucial to drop the notions of disinterest and autonomy altogether. Given that matters of distinction, prestige, recognition, and struggle over economic and technical resources have become inseparable from the production of scientific knowledge since at least the turn of the twentieth century, why bother to keep these matters distinct in the first place? From this point of view, disinterest and autonomy are idealizations artificially imposed on the practice of persons engaged in the construction of scientific knowledge. To accommodate the notion of knowledge as interested in the twofold sense, encompassing active interpretive engagement with the world as well as the social and economic interests of the actors involved in the

8

Introduction

construction ofknowledge, it seemed best to pursue a mode of investigation that treats the cognitive and social as mutually implicated in one another. Such an approach situates science as a form of cultural practice. Thus, as Chapter 4, "Social Interests and the Organic Physics of I 84 7," and Chapter 6, "The Politics of Vision," argue, the founder generation of "science" as an independent, institutionally supported career in Germany is best understood not as pursuing the goal of institutionalizing (and especially not professionalizing) science, but rather as actively remaking their own culture as part of a broader reshaping of German Bildungsburger (educated middle class) culture to include the values of scientific materialism and technological progress. The account of science and its institutions I wish to offer is better situated within other traditions of sociology, cultural history, and philosophical reflections on the foundations of knowledge. The work of the American Pragmatists C. S. Peirce and William james offers the notion of truth as historically situated, which, combined with their advocacy of pragmatic realism, provides a solution to the impasse I have sketched in the preceding paragraphs concerning realism and objectivism. I explore this pragmatic turn in a number of places in this volume, but it is the central concern of Chapter 2, "Practice, Reason, Context." In thinking about science and technology as cultural production, the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl, particularly his concept of the lifeworld as the precondition for objective science, is a valuable additional resource for thinking about linking pragmatism with my concerns about instrumentation, skill, practice, and the material embodiment of dispositions, taste, and other cultural forms that do crucial mediating work between disparate domains of experience. I focus on these subjects in Chapter 6, "The Politics ofVision," Chapter 8, "Practical Reason and the Construction of .Knowledge;' and elsewhere. The tradition of sociology most relevant to my purposes derives from Pierre Bourdieu's work on practice. Bourdieu's concepts of the habitus, cultural capital, and the dynamics of the field frame several chapters in this volume. I want to devote a portion of this Introduction to examining the relevance of this work to the task of instituting science. Bourdieu's approach supports my attempt to treat the construction of natural knowledge as simultaneously an attempt to define society and to legitimate one's own version of social reality or that of the group to which one belongs. 12 Moreover, while acknowledging rational calculation as crucial, Bourdieu distinguishes between the logic and rationality of the-

Introduction

9

ory and the logic of practice and strategic action. A move of this sort provides a useful starting point for the endeavor I want to pursueformulating an alternative to theory-dominated history of science-by forcing us to consider the historically situated, time-dependent character of plans and actions. The focus on practice shifts our gaze to the mundane: to the construction of instruments, the manipulation of experimental apparatus in the time and space of the laboratory, and the relationship of these practical activities both to the "object" and to its theoretical representation. This activity differs profoundly from the rationalist notion that experiments and instruments are simply the mechanical implementation of previously laid theoretical plans. Practice, for Bourdieu, has a life of its own: "Practice has a logic which is not that oflogic" -that is, the logic of abstract, theoretical representation. 13 Among the crucial differences between the domain of embodied, material practice and that of theoretical representation is a difference in the role of temporality: "The shift from the practical to the theoretical schema, constructed after the event, from practical sense to the theoretical model, which can be read either as a project, plan or method, or as a mechanical programme, a mysterious ordering mysteriously reconstructed by the analyst, lets slip everything that makes the temporal reality ofpractice in process:' 14 Whereas the logic of theoretical representation treats relationships synoptically, in a detemporalized manner, practice unfolds in time; its temporal structure and its directionality constitute its meaning. An account of science from the perspective of practice is thus necessarily historical. The focus on practice expands the horizon of inquiry into the production of scientific knowledge. Instrumentation, experiment, and practical interpretive labor are shown simultaneously to participate in an economy of social, political, and cultural interests, thus dissolving the distinction between "internal" and "external" in traditional history and sociology of science. These scientific practices are part of what Bourdieu calls "symbolic capital" and "fields of cultural production." Bourdieu defines symbolic capital as education, gift-giving, aesthetic or cultural interest, competence, honor or respectability-in short, anything that can be characterized as opposed to and therefore autonomous from strictly material, economic interest. 15 He explicitly rejects the idea that pursuit of cultural or symbolic goods is disinterested and fundamentally not an economic transaction. On the contrary, Bourdieu argues for a general economy of practices according to which economic interest in the narrow sense of material profit is simply one form of capital along with symbolic,

ro

Introduction

cultural, and political capital. Crucial to Bourdieu's perspective is that all forms of "capital" are interconvertible, all conforming fundamentally to the logic of interested calculation in the narrow sense: Thus the theory of strictly economic practice is simply a particular case of a general theory of the economics of practice. The only way to escape from the ethnocentric naiveties of economism, without falling into exaltation of the generous naivety of earlier forms of society, is to carry out in full what economism does only partially, and to extend economic calculations to all the goods, material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation-which may be "fair words" or smiles, handshakes or shrugs, compliments or attention, challenges or insults, honor or honors, powers or pleasures, gossip or scientific information, distinction or distinctions, etc. . . . The only way in which such accountancy can apprehend the undifferentiatedness of economic and symbolic capital is in the form of their perfect interconvertibility. 16 Thus, in Distinction, Bourdieu treats economic and symbolic capital as symmetrical and opposite, but interconvertibleY He assumes that each individual has a certain "volume" of capital, composed of certain material economic resources and a quantity of cultural capital, which is determined, for instance, by education and life trajectory. The volume and relative distribution of the different kinds of capital, the "asset structure," are the basis for groupings within classes (Bourdieu calls them "class fractions") as well as for distinctions among classes, among larger segments of society, and, most important for my purposes, even among fields of cultural production, such as art, literature, medicine, or mathematics. Each class is characterized by a "dominant" and a "dominated" pole, and in every class a struggle for domination goes on between persons possessing economic capital and those whose position, power, and status depend primarily on cultural capital. For example, some members of a group-a class fraction-such as small businessmen among the middle class, have more economic capital; others within that same class, such as secondaryschool teachers, have assets consisting primarily of cultural capital. Similarly, certain groups of professionals such as academics, artists, or writers are members of the dominant class, having high degrees of both economic and cultural capital. But, in Bourdieu's terms, they occupy the "dominated" pole ofth~t class: they possess a dominated form of power in the sphere of power_l8 Whether possession of a predominance of material and economic assets provides the key to power within a given class or whether power is

Introduction

I I

to be located in a predominance of symbolic capital is always a contingent matter determined by the field itself. In the economic fields of business and industry, for instance, possession of economic clout is obviously the principle of domination. What distinguishes the fields of cultural production from the economic fields is that the logic of domination is reversed. In these social worlds the law of success is defined not in financial or economic terms but rather in terms of the creation of value-the generation of belief in the value of art or science for its own sake and the recognition of the legitimacy of the artist, writer, or scientist as a creator of valued objects. As Bourdieu notes, "the literary field is the economic world reversed; that is, the fundamental law of this specific universe, that of disinterestedness, which establishes a negative correlation between temporal (notably financial) success and properly artistic value, is the inverse of the law of economic exchange." 19 The same genetic structuring principle operates within the university field, generating a space of differences between positions and the dispositions of those holding them. Some fields within academe are closer to the economic pole, have deeper ties to industry, government, or the military, their personnel recruited largely or almost exclusively from class sectors with specific asset structures of economic and cultural capital, whereas fields in the arts and humanities and some fields in the social sciences are relatively autonomous in asserting principles of legitimation independent of and even opposed to political or economic interest or relevance. 20 But even within a "pure" theoretical or autonomous field, such as literature, a transformed form of the opposition between the two com-

peting principles oflegitimation can be seen: on the one hand, a dependence on the principles operative in the field of power; on the other, an insistence on the autonomy of the intellectual order. Thus, production in the literary field can be oriented toward literary criticism or journalism, Broadway theater or television, symbolist poetry or the pulp novel-in other words, forms that are culturally dominant and symbolically "pure" though economically dominated versus those that are commercially oriented to "the market." Similarly, philosophy can be oriented via subfields, such as philosophy of mind, to areas of psychology or, more recently, toward cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence; within these domains, it can participate in the production of educational software for commercial markets, or, via its connection to linguistics, in the translation of natural languages, or, through work on pattern recognition, in the decryption of code for military research.

12

Introduction

At any given moment, some fields are more autonomous than others, however. For instance, sociology is, in Bourdieu's view, less autonomous than biomedical fields, and the latter less autonomous than physics. 21 But these designations of autonomy are always relative. Thus, in the late 1990s physicists working in the large government laboratories founded during the Cold War are in the process of making a "new contract with society," forging new research alliances with industry that are redefining basic science in a manner unthinkable two decades ago. In the older functionalist sociology, behavior aimed at the discovery of new scientific facts was regulated by the norms of science. These were static idealizations arrived at by privileging the standards of judgment in certain fields, such as physics, and imposing the criteria of those fields on others. Moreover, the distinction between pure and applied was taken to be relatively obvious and the positive valuation of the "pure" fields empowered the argument for autonomy. From the practice perspective, each of these categories is the contingent outcome of the dynamics of the field organized around the struggle for domination. Crucial in this scheme are the conditions regulating the conversions among different forms of economic, social, and cultural capital. These are the stakes of the field, which, in contrast to the illusive "norms of science," are constantly up for grabs. According to Bourdieu, the exchange rate among forms of capital is always at stake in the contest within the dominant class to determine which of the forms of capital should supply the dominant principle. 22 Restructuring and controlling the exchange of the different types of capital is one of the fundamental stakes in the competition between class fractions whose power and privileges are linked to one or the other of these types of capital. As I argue in Chapter 3, "The Discipline of Nature and the Nature ofDisciplines," one of the objectives of disciplinary struggles is to rechart the boundaries of the field, to legitimate and consecrate new combinations of assets with cultural prestige and authority, to revalue a form of capital previously considered "impure," and to secure that valuation through an institutionalized structure. The struggle to grant Ph.D.'s to engineers graduated from German technische Hochschulen (technical universities) in the late nineteenth century and, in our own day, efforts to legitimate computational mathematics as a field of mathematics on a par with traditional mathematical disciplines, and the consecration of science fiction as a literary genre admissible within academic departments of literature may all be considered cases in point. Similarly, in Chapter 9, "Instrument Makers and Discipline Builders," Christophe Lecuyer and I

Introduction

r3

argue that transforming the practices of organic chemists by introducing expensive new nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) instrumentation and the new body of interpretive skills required to use it was a disciplinebuilding strategy deployed by a group of nuclear and microwave physicists who sought to build a new hybrid research culture that would bridge the gap between the university and industry. The notion of an economy of practices is central to several of the chapters in this volume. In Chapter 4, "Social Interests and the Organic Physics of I 84 7," and Chapter 6, "The Politics ofVision," I argue that in a society in which cultural authority was held by practitioners of the "pure disciplines" such as philosophy, philology, art, literature, and increasingly history, young Bildungsburger (members of the educated classes) of the generation of Hermann Helmholtz, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Werner Siemens, and Carl Ludwig tried to redefine the cultural field to include the natural sciences as "pure" scientific pursuits on a par with philosophy. Indeed, they sought to move these disciplines away from the theoretical wing of applied and pragmatically oriented disciplines such as medicine and technology and to relocate them within the philosophical faculty. They tried simultaneously to expand the occupations yielding high cultural status to include the natural sciences and, in Siemens's case, sciencebased industry. Much of their work was founded on the most advanced technologies of the industrial age, particularly the telegraph, and their concern with exact method and measurement in science potentially marked them, in the context oflate I 84os Germany, as practical men, able to advance the material interests of the Burger (middle) classes-but not as

bearers of culture. Their efforts to counteract these conditions by redefining the cultural field can be seen, I argue, in their extraordinary interest in matters of sensory physiology and issues relating to mind-body problems in philosophy, in their effort to bring mathematical and experimental methods to bear on matters of art and artistic practice in areas such as theories of color and pigment, and in their interest in the physical and physiological principles of acoustics. Moreover, their concern to present themselves as men of high culture-Du Bois-Reymond's much praised ability to recite the entire first book of Goethe's Faust, Helmholtz's deep appreciation of art and music, and Ernst Briicke's membership on the board of directors of the Vienna Academy of Art, together with his production of a volume on color theory for artists-testify to their pursuit of a politics of the cultural field. In Bourdieu's terms, specifically at stake was a struggle over the principle of domination and the conversion of

14

Introduction

certain forms of cultural capital into powerful positions in the political and economic orders. Also at stake in this struggle was another issue crucial to Bourdieu's model: the construction of the perception that these were pure activities, which amounts to the misrecognition of an economic transaction as disinterested. The approach taken here is not a rewriting of"externalist" history; I am not examining how external political, demographic, or economic forces shaped the institutions and contents of scientific practice. I do not treat the intellectual positions adopted by the individuals in these studies as "reflections" of their class, nor do I treat their stated intellectual interests and scientific work as disguised forms of their social interests. Science is not politics pursued by other means. Instead, I advocate a careful look at the conditions of the production of the scientific work in question and the social relations that support it. Although internalist history may focus on the intellectual product as the sole object of investigation and the prime historical mover, scientific work itself, even in the most "disinterested" fields of inquiry such as abstract fields of mathematics, is unthinkable without the objective conditions giving rise to and supporting it. 23 This truism deserves more attention. Contextualist history takes as its object not just scientific theory or published products (scientific texts), but also scientific work, examining the objective conditions that enter into the creation, circulation, and reproduction of the products of any given field. Within this perspective the author of a scientific text or theory is only the most visible node of a whole network of social relations, including authors of other scientific texts with whom he or she argues or from whom he or she draws support, publishers, instrument makers, lab assistants, university and state administrators, possibly even commercial suppliers of equipment and expertise. "In short, it is a question of understanding works of art [or science] as a manifestation of the field as a whole, in which all the powers of the field, and all the determinisms inherent in its structure and functioning, are concentrated." 24 Contextualist history views the formation of scientific institutions within a twofold set of relationships. As the chapters in this volume on Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Carl Ludwig, Hermann Helmholtz and Ernst Briicke, Paul Ehrlich and Farbwerke Hochst, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, and James Shoolery, Martin Packard, and Varian Associates demonstrate, the dynamics of the scientific field are organized by individual actors or groups staking out positions with respect to other positions in the field. The character of those

Introduction

r5

positions, however, is conditioned by local factors of varying sorts, the market for the specific pursuit, and the social and material support for it. The scientific field is a field of positions occupied by agents with differential stances toward one another. Each field, whether politics, economics, art, literature, or science, has its own logic. To play for stakes in the scientific field requires a specific form of capital, such as educational experience and appropriate material resources. The field is not just a domain of differentially constructed intellectual positions; it also includes instruments of circulation, such as journals or publishing houses, which choose to publish articles and books in accordance with certain criteria and with specific audiences in mind. Each field also has institutions concerned with consecrating good work through, for instance, bestowing prizes and membership in academies. In addition, each field has institutions responsible for the circulation and reproduction of other entrants in the field, namely educational institutions, prescribed courses of study, and beyond this even public institutions, such as museums, which disseminate the views of dominant fractions in the field more widely to other groups. In the case of fields in the natural sciences, an additional means of circulation is the production of scientific instruments, including their standardization and marketing to other scientific practitioners. An account of the formation of institutions through the dynamic interaction of interested groups of actors must come to grips with the problem of the relation of knowledge to power-power considered both within and among the disciplines no less than the relation of knowledge to power in the broader senses of economic and political power. These issues are dismissed as irrelevant by the Mertonian sociological tradition with its notion of a contract between science and society safeguarding the boundaries that establish the autonomy of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. In treating the relation of knowledge and power, I view each disciplinary field of scientific and technological work as having its own structure of power and as itself situated within the more general fields of economic and political power. All fields are relatively autonomous with respect to one another in that each has its own beliefs, specific logic, rules of the game, and stakes. Each field has its own specific forms of economic and cultural capital.2 5 People are obviously members of other social units, such as families, schools, and churches, before and even while they are trained professionals. But whatever attributes a person might bring from his or her class background, upbringing, and education, the set of disposi-

r6

Introduction

tions internalized as what Bourdieu calls the habitus, and whatever the objective cultural and economic goods attached to a person, the logic of the disciplinary field determines which attributes are valid in its own market. This means that the positions occupied by individuals in a specific disciplinary field-be it within art, literature, or organic chemistrydepend upon the specific capital they can mobilize within the field, regardless of other forms of wealth or cultural capital at their command. No field is completely autonomous, however. The point is crucial, for it alerts us to a supplemental source of the dynamics within and among fields. In a certain sense, each field is a transformed version of the others, because each is organized by the same dynamic relationships between economic and cultural capital. Though coded in different forms and obeying their own specific logic, the struggles surrounding the production of specific types of scientific knowledge and their status among the disciplines are homologous with the dominant relations of economic, social, and political power generally in society. This point is crucial to understanding how the practice-centered approach I am advocating avoids the problems of internal-external dichotomies and treats the pursuit of knowledge by its own immanent criteria as an interested form of social action. For instance, in the Cold War era the relations of economic and political power energized by the military-industrial complex were refracted into relations of relative power among academic fields. Thus, in the wake of the Manhattan Project in the 1950s and 196os, physicists enjoyed enormous prestige in the United States. Among academicians, few were closer to seats of economic and political power than physicists; physicists were important intellectual leaders even outside their own disciplines as well as advisors to government. Physics departments and those closely allied to them received the largest budgets; and proximity to physics was a crucial social resource for other fields such as biology in borrowing physics-like agendas, language, and attitudes, which reframed the character and goals of biological disciplines, empowering fields such as molecular biology and evolutionary biology. 26 Even distant domains seemingly driven by other independent concerns, such as medicine, were equally sites refracting the dominant power relations of the Cold War into their own economies of practice. Thus the introduction of physics-based instrumentation, radionuclides, scanners, tomographs, computers, magnetic resonance imaging, and other physics-based instrumentation transformed the American medical landscape, spawning entirely new medical specialties, while leaders of major medical schools, such as Stafford L.

Introduction

r7

Warren of the UCLA Medical School, consciously viewed the large multidisciplinary style of organization in the Manhattan Project as a model to emulate in biomedicineY A theme repeated throughout the historical episodes I examine in this volume is the observation that declarations in the realm of theory, method, technique, or even style are, in addition to being matters of substantive content, also always social strategies in which powers are affirmed or claimed. 28 In order to see how these power relations resonate in homologous fashion throughout the system, it is crucial to realize that academic fields are loci of struggles to determine the conditions and criteria oflegitimate membership and legitimate hierarchy. 29 In any scientific field the primary stake is the struggle over the principle of domination and with it the very definition of the field itself: its objectives, its methods of legitimate inquiry, its procedures for resolving disputes, and finally its allocation of financial resources. But absolutely crucial to understanding the dynamics of discipline formation and institution building is realizing that no field, no matter how autonomous it appears, is completely closed to external factors. Indeed, "external" factors provide crucial leverage points in the dynamics of the field. Changes external to the operation of a specific field, such as shifts in funding, political developments, or expansion of student clientele, are refracted by the logic of the field. Indeed, the degree of autonomy of the field is a function of its ability to refract external demands into its own logic. 3°From this perspective, then, scientific and engineering disciplines embed within them the structure of the general power relations in society, while each disciplinary field's own activity of selection and indoctrination contributes to sustaining that structure. Each disciplinary field has its own logic, specific forms of capital, and stakes, but each discipline is homologous to the grid of general power relations. No field is entirely free of relationships to external economic, political, or cultural resources. Indeed, as I argue in Chapter 3, "The Discipline ofNature and the Nature of Disciplines," and illustrate in several of the case studies in this volume, the state of external political struggles or economic developments combines with historically contingent openings to "external" resources to provide the main points ofleverage for struggles within a scientific field. In each of the struggles over discipline and institution building treated in this volume, a common strategy employed by defenders of orthodoxy as well as by heretical innovators is the attempted construction of a strategic, timely fit between the internal constitution of the field and an exter-

I

8

Introduction

nal power perceived as (or hoped soon to become) dominant. The actors in the various studies in this volume are always weighing the advantage to their own projects of invoking powers external to the value structure and acknowledged rules of the game internal to their own discipline in order to create points of leverage for their programs. Early in their careers, Helmholtz, Du Bois-Reymond, and Bri.icke actively linked support of their scientific work to the politics of building modernized industrial nations, whereas in later life they sought to defend their scientific edifice by participating in the cultural politics of a renewed German Idealism. Varian scientists and managers actively courted Sputnik-generated policies for the funding of science to generate markets for their NMR instruments, their tools for transforming the disciplines of analytical and organic chemistry. A related cluster of issues that an interpretation of science as a form of cultural production must address is the construction of meaning, the naturalization of representations, and the linkage between different domains in an economy of practices. These were not problems for traditional sociologies of science based on realist epistemologies and theorydominated accounts. The truth of theories was a function of their fit with an independent world of objective facts. Appeals to laws of nature and the assumption that rationally constructed representations mirror the structure of the world guaranteed the universality of scientific claims. In this traditional account, if one wanted to introduce social, political, or economic interests-always conceived as distortions-into the picture, one did so under the rubric of discussions of ideology, in which ideology was always conceived as a rationalization of a veiled oppressive interest. By contrast, the approach to science as the construction and practice of a certain form of culture highlights the radically historical, contingent, and local character of knowledge production. One of the central implications of this work is that universality must be constructed. An account must be given of how meanings locally produced are multiplied in other sites and how representations circulate and acquire global legitimacy. A further implication of this approach is that science is disunified. Analogous to the manner in which I consider different fields to have relative autonomy with respect to one another, I regard the work of theorizing as driven by different interests, guided by varied sensibilities organized through different schemas of perception, and conducted independently of work in fields of experimentation or instrumentation. Recent work in historical and social studies of science demonstrates that these skills are concentrated

Introduction

19

in distinct communities. 31 How links between these different communities and between different domains of action are fashioned in order to generate a meaningful form oflife is an object of investigation for cultural studies of science. Ideology has a crucial role to play in this process. Ideology is not negatively valued in my account. Rather, I look to ideology's role in generating and sustaining links between disparate domains of belief and practice and between the different communities in which they are located. Forging links and coordinating exchange between these different domains is a problem in the organization of skill and management of work. Several chapters in this volume pursue the centrality of the organization and management of skill to instituting science. Chapter 5, on Carl Ludwig, depicts the formation of an innovative research program and its establishment as a model for institutionalizing science-based medicine. Rather than treating Ludwig's institute as the logical outcome of efforts to secure funds for an expanding research effort, the chapter demonstrates that the direction of Ludwig's research was both shaped and enhanced by the confluence of interests of state ministers, local institutional agendas, and strategies for defending scientific claims. The implication that organizational setting is crucial for establishing links between different domains of practice is explored further in Chapter 7, on Paul Ehrlich's magic bullet, an effort to develop a program of drug research and chemotherapy in a joint state- and industry-supported extrauniversity research institute that served as a model for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. Like Chapter 5, this chapter emphasizes the role of entrepreneurial state ministers as well

as local institution builders in discipline formation. This chapter also illustrates the crucial role of the market economy in bringing about configurations of practice. The theme of configurations of practice within an economy of practice is the central focus of Chapter 8, on the HaberBasch synthesis of ammonia. Like the chapters on Ludwig and Ehrlich, this study emphasizes the difficulties in fashioning a fit between quantitative theory and practice: how engagement with measurement, agreement about standards, and problems of scaling up from bench-top model to industrial production simultaneously articulate and refine theory (in this case, of thermodynamics and of catalytic reactions). Central to the depiction of how mathematical tools and theory are linked with practical experience of materials and technology is what I term the lifeworld of Haber-Bosch. Discussions of the formation of scientific disciplines invariably focus

20

Introduction

on academic institutions, on the organization and dissemination of technical training within those institutions, on professional societies, and on the organization of scientific communication. The standard, virtually unquestioned assumption in disciplinary studies is that academics create disciplines. Parallel to the assumption in older studies of technology transfer and innovation of a linear flow of innovation from academic research settings to industry, older studies of discipline assumed a flow of disciplinary knowledge and technical practice from the university to industry in which industry practitioners are the consumers of scientific discipline. The focus on practice suggests a broader spectrum of sites for discipline formation. Given the importance of discipline-specific instruments and training in their use and interpretation, we might do well to consider the role of the industrial partner, particularly the manufacturer of instruments, in the process of discipline formation. In the final chapter of this volume, "Instrument Makers and Discipline Builders," Christophe Lecuyer and I analyze the role of university-industry relationships and extended networks of exchange of skills and tacit knowledge in the generation of a new technology, nuclear magnetic resonance scanners, and the active role of the industrial partner in the creation of new regimes of practice at the core of a young scientific discipline. We argue that NMR, as a discipline of technology, science, and knowledge production, was invented in large part by scientists at Varian Associates in Palo Alto, California. At stake here was not just the challenge of constructing a machine; more important, industry scientists and engineers intent upon having their work valued and adopted by others produced the interpretive techniques and practices that made the NMR scanner an instrument. Equally crucial, Varian scientists, through their educational and promotional activities, helped transform the discipline of chemistry in the university. Rather than treating universities and industry as bounded, sharply delimited organizations, this chapter as well as the one on Haber and Bosch depict universities as participants in a situated knowledge community and in effect treat the disciplinary structure of the university as part of a regional knowledge economy. I began this Introduction by discussing the constraints experienced by participants in disciplined institutional formations. In the story ofVarian Associates, what also become clear are the ways that such constraints can prompt creative response, and the opportunities available to those who know how to negotiate disciplinary boundaries. Varian, the start-up company founded alongside-not within-Stanford University's walls,

Introduction

2I

which offered an alternative and self-consciously designed campuslike work site and work style to physicists and engineers raised professionally within the university culture, provides an apt image for the conceptions of discipline and institution I am advocating here: the effort to construct disciplines is simultaneously an effort to inscribe supportive structures that sustain a culture.

CHAPTER l

Practice, Reason, Context: The Dialogue Between Theory and Experiment

Experiment, instrumentation, and procedures of measurement, the body of practices and technologies forming the technical culture of science, have received at most a cameo appearance in most histories, for the history of science is almost always written as the history of theory. The interpretation of science as dominated by theory was the main pillar of the critique, launched by Kuhn, Quine, Hanson, Feyerabend, and others, of the positivist and logical empiricist traditions in the philosophy of science. Against Carnap, Hempel, Nagel, and Popper, who accorded observation reports an independent status either as a source of inductive support or as a basis for the falsification of scientific theories, Hanson and Kuhn emphasized the theory-ladenness of observation. They made this central pointthat all observation is shaped by reference to theory-the cornerstone of a full-blown philosophy of science by buttressing it with two additional lines of argument: First, theories are always underdetermined by the data, several theories being compatible with the same set of data. Hence, choice between theories is never a matter of empirical support, but always turns on conceptual issues. Second, statements derived from theory never confront nature alone; they are always clothed in a web of interrelated beliefs. Thus, theories, their associated observation languages, and the entire technical culture they support must be accepted or rejected as wholes. In place of the view of science as an eminently timeless, objective, and rational pursuit, we have inherited from Kuhn and others the interpreta-

Practice, Reason, Context

23

tion of science as a historically rooted, socially and culturally contingent enterprise. But this interpretive framework has been unfriendly to the contributions of technical and social practice to the production ofknowledge. Once observation and practice were acknowledged as theorydependent and once experiment had been stripped of any crucial role in theory choice, these subjects did not seem to offer any intrinsic interest as positive factors in the growth of knowledge. But ours is, perhaps, becoming a more pragmatic age. Based on the premise that the history of science should not be written simply as the history of theory, a recent movement to reevaluate the relationship between theory and all levels of practice has been gathering momentum. An important contribution to these efforts has been a reexamination of the fundamental propositions outlined above-upon which the theory-dominated historiography and philosophy of science of the last generation have depended-that all observation is theory-laden, and that experiment is simply theory conducted by other means. The most penetrating discussion of these issues is provided by Ian Hacking in Representing and Intervening. 1 Experiment, Hacking argues, has a life of its own. He disputes the claim that deliberate experimentation is dominated by theory. Hacking's experimenter is no "mere empiric" in the Baconian sense of a "tinkerer" with nature; the experimenter must formulate an investigative goal. But that goal need not be directed at testing or comparing theories. Rather the investigative goal can be more modestly formulated as pursuing one's curiosity about a surprising phenomenon with the available techniques and instruments, and on occasion even stretching those technical means to the limit or inventing new ones in order to investigate the behavior of some phenomenon. Much of this kind of work precedes relevant theory. For example, Einstein's photon theory was preceded by Becquerel's exploration of the voltage change produced by illuminating one of the plates in an electrovoltaic cell, the reduction of resistance of selenium by illuminating it, and the exploration of other isolated phenomena. Similarly, the phenomenological laws of solid-state physics were known before any theory existed to coordinate them. Hacking does not claim that theory emerges out of the data generated by experiment, or that all theory must be preceded by experiment. There are many relationships between theory and experiment, but observation and experiment can have long lives of their own without necessarily being connected to theory. Hacking also attacks the claim that all observation is theory-laden.

24

Practice, Reason, Context

Agreeing with Dudley Shapere, he holds that whether or not something is an observable entity depends upon the state of our knowledge and, therefore, upon our theories about the world. But, Hacking argues, that is far from asserting that all observation is theory-laden. William Herschel's observations concerning radiant heat illustrate Hacking's claim. Herschel's theory of light was Newtonian, but this contributed little to his actual research, which was initiated by the observation, made in the course of searching for appropriate filters for looking at the sun through a telescope, that filters of different colors transmit different amounts of heat. Herschel probed this phenomenon in some 200 experiments noteworthy for the lack of theory guiding them. Herschel pursued the nebulous idea that sunlight consists of both visible and invisible rays. Because they were reproducible, Herschel's observations concerning radiant heat remained intact long after the Newtonian theory oflight rays and particles within which Herschel attempted to place his observations had departed the scene. Similarly, our present theory about the positron, for example, could change, leaving intact the present class of observation sentences represented by "that is a positron." These and similar examples illustrate the point that statements about observation need not be inferences from theory. For Hacking (and Shapere) the notion of theory-laden observation has been cast too broadly. Observing certainly depends upon theories of the world, investigative ideas, and the like, but whenever the bundle of theories upon which observation relies are not intertwined with the facts about the subject matter under investigation, observation is not theory-laden. 2 Hacking and others have provided arguments for granting relative autonomy to both theoretical and experimental practice. But the central issue in the formulation of an account that attributes a constitutive role to practice in theory development remains to explain how theoretical, experimental, and technical practices mesh. Just as we want to avoid treating theories as totally divorced from a variety of levels of experience and practice, we also want to avoid discussing experiments as if they were constructed without presuppositions. Peter Galison has observed that an appropriate analysis of the context of dialogue between theory and experiment will attempt to formulate levels of theory as interwoven with levels of experimental practice. 3 Without adopting a Leibnizian, preestablished harmony, we want to explain how abstract theoretical structures can be made to fit the domains accessible to our means of technical control.

Practice, Reason, Context

25

Several historians and philosophers of science have suggested model building as one locus for the dialogue between theory and practice. 4 Most theoretical speculations do not initially mesh with nature, because it is not possible to derive testable statements directly from theory. But deficiencies in the means for articulating theory may not be the only problem. Experimental ideas and technology may also be insufficient for testing theory. The link between these two domains is provided by models. Model building facilitates the dialogue between theory and experiment in two ways: models are at once models of phenomena and models of theory. The activity of model building selects from the phenomena under investigation those aspects capable ofbeing connected to theory by simplifying structures. Models are approximate representations of the phenomena and at the same time articulations of theories by means of currently available representational techniques. These may include mathematical structures, computational techniques, and a variety of types of analogy capable of linking up with contemporary technical and experimental practices. One of the most important consequences of the recent neopragmatist critique of theory-dominated science is the implication that the successful linkage of theory and experiment is conditioned by the ways in which both are embedded in current technical and social practice. There are good reasons, internal to the critique, for believing that several dimensions of context are essential to the production of knowledge. Consider, for example, the critical notion of a "phenomenon." Hacking proposes that "phenomenon" not be taken in the sense of a fleeting sense-datum, but rather as "a noteworthy, publicly discernible, event or process that

occurs regularly under definite circumstances." 5 Phenomena in this sense are not "discovered." They are created. The object of experimentation is to create pure isolated phenomena in a reliable and repeatable manner using the apparatus and techniques made available by our current technical culture. Phenomena like the Hall effect, the Josephson effect, the Faraday effect, and even lasers and masers, Hacking argues, do not exist outside the apparatus and arrangements of the laboratory. What exists in nature is complexity. We analyze this complexity by manufacturing pure, isolated phenomena in the laboratory. The practical context of the laboratory and the culture oflaboratory life is, therefore, essential to the production ofknowledge. Nancy Cartwright has argued that the models physicists use as formal representations are not all deducible from the theory itself. In fact, it is not unusual, she argues, to find several mutually inconsistent models within

26

Practice, Reason, Context

the same theory. No matter, says Cartwright, for these are merely convenient representational tools used for articulating some local aspect of theory by adapting it to phenomena and to our experimental technology. Furthermore, Cartwright observes that models are robust under theory change, that is, the overarching theory may be replaced but the models retained. There may be more truth in the models, she notes, than in the theory. 6 To the historian and sociologist seeking to develop a contextualist approach to the construction of knowledge, Cartwright's approach is extremely suggestive. Because the assembly of models into convincing arguments is not prescribed by theory, a potentially crucial role of context is suggested in the selection, adaptation, and interlinkage of the resources for articulating theory. Pursuing the role of context, we may inquire whether the effectiveness of the models Cartwright describes may notreside in the social and technical practices within which they are embedded. The pragmatist strain implicit in the critique of theory-dominated science by philosophers such as Hacking and Cartwright argues for the fruitfulness of exploring the relationship between the development of abstract concepts and models for interpreting nature on the one hand, and the technical and experimental means for intervening in natural processes on the other. More to the point here, however, is the possibility oflinking this suggestion to another pragmatist notion deriving ultimately from Peirce, that what is real and true involves the idea of a community. 7 We should examine not only the role of technical practices but also the role of wider social practices in providing a context for shaping the dialogue between theory and experiment. In terms of such a suggestion, physicists, for example, do not appear as a homogeneous group with a unified culture, but as subcommunities with different knowledge-constitutive interests and experimental traditions, organized socially for access to different resources, and oriented around different repertoires of techniques and apparatus. In this light, the plurality of models Cartwright describes may reflect the cognitive and technical practices of different communities, and the mutual inconsistency of models she describes may reflect the plurality of the communities and their pursuit of different interests. A broad spectrum of positions is represented in the recent literature on the different types of context that play a role in establishing the dialogue between theoretical and experimental practices. While each approach emphasizes context as a constitutive factor in the production of knowledge, opinions vary on just how narrowly or how broadly to construe the relevant contexts. The chapters in the present volume argue for a broad

Practice, Reason, Context

27

notion of context. To introduce this approach I will discuss some of the main strategies currently being pursued in contextualist accounts of experimental science.

Between the Laboratory and the Study: Microcontextualist Approaches Microstudies in which context is limited to the culture of the laboratory offer one end of the spectrum of contextualist approaches to knowledge. Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life provides a useful point of departure for the position I want to defend by setting forth a strong program of extreme social constructivism against which other, more moderate-and arguably more adequate-accounts can be forged. The central claim of studies such as Latour and Woolgar's is that scientific facts are not discovered, they are socially constructed. While this claim has certain similarities to the view considered above that the object of experiment is to create phenomena, they are not fully compatible, for the account of fact construction in Laboratory Life is theory-dominated. In effect Latour and Woolgar have made a translation into sociological terms of the theorydominated approach that many of the newer accounts of scientific development are seeking to modify. This aspect of Latour and Woolgar's approach is most clearly visible in what they consider the object oflaboratory work, to produce statements accorded a high value among other statements in the scientific literature, a process they term "literary inscription." Latour and Woolgar see laboratories as places for transforming statement types from speculative claims to noncontroversial statements of fact appearing in textbooks. The process of transforming statement types involves a variety of different social microprocesses of persuasion, but the general movement is a rather straightforward path from speculative theoretical claim to construction of fact. The process is complete when a statement has been reified in a technical process, packaged in an instrument, or produced as, for example, a white powder used by other groups of researchers. This treatment of fact construction emphasizes the social negotiations in persuading others to accept a claim as noncontroversial to the exclusion of the problems of getting an experiment to work or the difficulties of getting an instrument to produce reliable data. Hence, no dialogue with experiment is at issue here. In the world of the Maxwellian demon Latour and Woolgar describe, all things are equally possible. "It is crucial to our argument," they

28

Practice, Reason, Context

write, "that anything can be reified, no matter how mythical, absurd, whimsical, or logical it might seem either before or after the event. CalIon, for example, has shown how technical apparatus can incorporate the outcome of totally absurd conclusions. Once reified, however, these decisions take the role of premise in subsequent logical arguments. In more philosophical terms, one cannot understand science by accepting the Hegelian argument that 'real is rational.' " 8 It is useful to consider Frederic L. Holmes's study, LAvoisier and the Chemistry of Life in juxtaposition with LAboratory Life. 9 While Holmes's work deemphasizes the social elements crucial to Latour and Woolgar's study, there are nonetheless important parallels between their accounts of the construction of knowledge in the laboratory. Three aspects of Holmes's study can be usefully contrasted with Latour and Woolgar's: (I) the role of chance in the assemblage of arguments; (2) the packaging of concepts and practices; and (3) the role of analogy. In contrast to the relatively straightforward production-line reification of theoretical statements into facts described by Latour and Woolgar, Holmes emphasizes a more complex interactionist perspective, with numerous feedback loops linking theory and practice in terms of what he calls "bounded investigative units." 10 In a vein somewhat similar to Latour and Woolgar's, Holmes argues that the objective of a laboratory investigation is completed with the creation of a scientific paper that knits together into a coherent logical whole the various parts of an investigative path. But the scientific paper is not the transcription of a previously planned investigation designed to test a theory set out in advance. Lavoisier, for example, did not have a theory of respiration that initiated his experimental work and provided its logical grid throughout. His many experiments extending over several years were not the execution of preplanned steps in a theoretical argument. Many of the experiments that Lavoisier presented in published papers as parts of a continuous experimental demonstration of his theory of respiration were actually performed at widely separate times, were never pieces of a single experimental narrative in the laboratory, and were in fact parts of different, sometimes conflicting investigations. They were only assembled into a coherent whole supporting a particular theory when Lavoisier began to set his ideas to paper. Only in the course of writing drafts of a paper did the theoretical idea itself come into sharp focus. Holmes's study depicts theories as historical entities consisting of numerous component conceptual elements assembled over time in jigsaw-puzzle fashion rather than as the elaboration of a single

Practice, Reason, Context

29

concept. Even this metaphor is not exact, for the edges of the pieces of the theoretical puzzle are not sharply defined, nor is their logical interconnection given. It must be constructed. Holmes is careful to distinguish the process he has depicted from the familiar disjunction between the "context of discovery" and the "context of justification." Before he developed the theoretical concepts that enabled him to select among his investigations, to cast and shape them into an orderly and coherent form, Lavoisier was not proceeding blindly. He did not yet have a theory, but he did have certain investigative goals. Moreover, in pursuing these investigative goals, Lavoisier was a practical reasoner. Practical reason is guided by regulative principles rather than deductive logic. Three strategies served as Lavoisier's regulative principles: (r) he embedded his investigations in a network of interrelated investigative streams that served to illuminate one another; (2) his exploration within an investigation aimed at suggesting alternatives and eliminating them, rather than single-mindedly pursuing a well-formed theory (which only emerged toward the end of an investigative stream); and (3) he sought to expand and refine the existing body of techniques to be able to produce direct experimental demonstrations of the entities central to his developing theories. I will illustrate the role of these three principles in what follows. 11 Consider first the problem of order. While supporters of Latour and Woolgar's approach can find much common ground for agreement in Holmes's account of Lavoisier, the two approaches are fundamentally opposed on the sources oflogical consistency emerging from the assembly of experiments into arguments. For Latour and Woolgar, this is a completely contingent affair defined by processes of social negotiation within locally idiosyncratic circumstances. The process of transforming statement types is always a matter of persuasion within the agonistic field. Just as in any field of political contention, success in the agonistic field of science consists in "the political qualities necessary both to make a point and to out-maneuver a competitor." 12 Not only the solidity of the argument in terms of recognized empirical support, but the personality and institutional affiliation of the author(s), the academic rank of the person(s) asserting the claim, the style of the paper, the nature of the problem attacked and the methods used, the implied stakes offuture investment in equipment, skills, and other capital should the argument be accepted, the unexpectedness of the point, and even the number of people in the field, can all influence the likelihood that a given argument will have an effect. 13

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Latour and Woolgar emphasize the important point that nature, conceived as an independent external reality, is not what determines the order of scientific reality. Order and the necessity perceived in the connections of arguments and facts emerges from a dialectically contingent situation of setding controversies over positions in the field, just as on a batdefield or in a game of Go. Contingency and circumstance also play a crucial role in Holmes's analysis of Lavoisier's career, but the rational coherence of scientific argument arises in Holmes's analysis in a different fashion. Central to Holmes's account is the notion-derived from Howard Gruber's studies of scientific creativity-that creative scientists maintain a network of investigative enterprises. Holmes shows, for instance, that by 1773 Lavoisier had performed several initial experiments on the combustion of phosphorus and sulfur that confirmed his suspicion that something in the air combines with these substances, increasing their weight. Lavoisier embarked upon an expansive research program of studying the processes by which air can be absorbed or fixed. In addition to combustion, Lavoisier included other chemical processes in his program to investigate the fixation and release of airs. Among these were fermentation, vegetation, respiration, and the composition of bodies formed by plants and animals. Each item on this agenda opened up large vistas of research, containing many independent investigative paths, each potentially taking on lives of their own. The construction of concepts and their coherent assembly into theories emerges from a process of bootstrapping from interactions among different streams of experiment in the network of investigative enterprises. The mutual interplay between these different enterprises is facilitated by the fact that experiments take time, allowing the investigator to explore a problem under investigation from many angles. Hence, experiments can and frequendy do serve many purposes simultaneously within the web of ongoing investigations. Due to this multipurposive character of experiment, ends and means are not necessarily fixed by a strict logic of hypotheses and given in pursuit of a fixed goal. Ends and means can be reversed in the experimental context, potentially providing an open window from one investigative stream onto another. Rather than deliberately orchestrated batde-plan assaults on problems, Holmes sees experimental investigations as open-ended explorations of alternatives. In the course of investigations some possibilities are eliminated. Others are clarified and deepened within the web of investigations. In midstream, therefore, while the scientist is struggling to construct the concepts that will consolidate

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the investigations into coherent logical wholes, these two elements of strategy-the pursuit of networks of investigations that interactively illuminate one another and the drive to construct and eliminate alternatives-are the scientist's guiding light in the new domain. In drafting a scientific paper, the investigator temporarily seals off a portion of the continuous web of investigations and brings aspects of the investigations to a focus under the guidance of an analogy. It is in this process that concepts are constructed. Component conceptual elements of theories are not simply waiting to be discovered in the investigations. They do not leap out of the investigative stream unassisted, but are constructed in piecemeal increments through the use of analogies grounded in experimental practice. In his early efforts to construct a theory, for example, Lavoisier limited his focus to aspects of the absorption of respirable air from common air, which seemed directly analogous to the process of calcination. While he later abandoned this analogy because it forced him to suppress certain notable differences between the airs produced by calcination and respiration-namely the formation of "fixed air" -it did nevertheless give him control over one area of the puzzle he was attempting to assemble. The network of investigations served as a resource for modifYing the analogy and extending the domain of phenomena under his control. Thus, advances made in understanding the process of transforming "dephlogisticated air" to "fixed air," within a completely independent stream of investigation, suggested a new analogy between combustion and respiration. The new analogy enabled him to reinsert the phenomena he had previously neglected because they did not

mesh with the analogy he was pursuing at the time. But the new analogy was itself a creative resource for further expanding the domain of phenomena incorporated into the account. Thus the analogy to combustion opened up the entirely new investigative path of calorimeter studies with Laplace on the sources of animal heat. Accumulation of phenomena is not the goal, of course. The goal is to achieve confidence in the explanatory capabilities of a body of concepts and their continued usefulness in generating models for future explorations. Following Nancy Cartwright, we can say that the experimenter gains such confidence when his or her central model is capable ofbeing refined to parse in more detail the causal connections between the phenomena in different investigative streams. 14 Peter Galison calls this the stabilization of the phenomenal domain (discussed below). The power of the combustion model exemplifies this process in Lavoisier's network of

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investigations. In a line of investigation totally independent of his studies on respiration and on the combustion of charcoal, the discovery of the composition of water led Lavoisier to reconsider his experiments in both of those areas. Of essential importance to this reconsideration was not just the result but, more important, the refmed techniques for controlling and analyzing the inputs and products of a combustion analysis. These new techniques enabled Lavoisier to move a phenomenon previously considered to be part of the uncontrollable background of his experiments sharply into foreground relief as part of his causal story. Whereas he had previously treated the formation of water in respiration and in the combustion of charcoal as resulting from experimental errors and imperfections in his apparatus, and hence had neglected mention of it in the formal presentation of his results, the discovery that water is a composite substance and the understanding of the process in which it is formed enabled him to give a more direct and detailed analysis of an expanded body of component substances in both types of"combustion." This in turn served to deepen the commitment to combustion as a model for understanding respiration. Although networks of investigation are relatively open-ended resources, it is important to note the constraints on the formation of new concepts and the limits on theory construction inherent in the investigative network itself. The concepts at the core of a program of investigative research are not invented in a vacuum and then attached to empirical practices; rather, they come packaged with the practices themselves. The construction of the concepts is intertwined with the practices that operationalize them, give them empirical reference, and make them function as tools for the production ofknowledge. To develop new conceptual structures, it is necessary to expand, alter, and reshape the body of empirical practices. Holmes shows, for example, that although Lavoisier was convinced that the phlogiston theory was inadequate, some of the most fundamental problems he encountered in constructing a new conceptual framework derived from the fact that the various experimental procedures he used in the early phase of his work as well as the language he used to formulate his ideas were fashioned by Priestley. His dependence on procedures such as Priestley's nitrous air test for the "goodness of air;' and on Priestley's terms such as "dephlogisticated air" made it extremely difficult for Lavoisier-even as he was trying to break out of Priestley's way of conceiving the formation of airs-to consistently formulate the concept that the different types of airs produced by the various experi-

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mental operations on common air separated out component parts of a heterogeneous mixture of different airs rather than modifying a single air. 15 Moreover, the limitations Lavoisier found in his first theory of respiration, based on the analogy to the calcination of mercury, derived from the fact that the techniques available to him for analyzing airs did not permit him to argue directly that a portion of the air had been removed in respiration. He could only argue that the residue was unfit for respiration. Directness in the demonstration of a particular effect or reaction was, therefore, a crucial supplement to the elimination of alternatives and the stabilization resulting from the agreement among his interlocking streams of investigation. The new techniques developed in pursuit of experimental directness enabled Lavoisier to solidify his new concepts by grounding them in practice. Until he had expanded the body of techniques to acquire operational control over the separation of different airs and the ability to restore them in a heterogeneous mixture of common air, and until he had developed new language independent of the phlogiston theory, Lavoisier's conceptual framework was in an incoherent state of flux.

The Disciplinary Community as Context For Holmes, the appropriate context for examining the dialogue between theory and experiment is the investigative unit, a historical entity that includes the evolving body of experimental practices and techniques and the process of drafting scientific papers. Holmes's investigative scientist is not an isolated individual; Lavoisier profited from collaboration with other scientists, and his intellectual dialogue with contemporaries such as Priestley was essential in stamping the character of his science. But in Holmes's account, broader contextual factors are not in any interesting way essential to the production of knowledge. For the active experimental scientist, Holmes writes, "social context is peripheral unless it becomes an impediment to his ongoing work." 16 Several recent treatments of experiment from a social constructivist perspective have attributed a more positive constitutive role to broader contextual factors, spanning several dimensions from the local context to the political economy. Andrew Pickering's work provides a useful entry to these strategies because, in spite of the professed difference in their outlooks, many of the analytical constructs appearing in Holmes's work also play a role for Pickering. He gives them, however, a different twist. Like Holmes, Pickering emphasizes the symbiosis of practices and

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concepts. "The idea," Pickering writes, "that natural phenomena come packaged with experimental techniques and competence is an idea that needs to be repeated again and again." 17 Elevated to the level of social interaction rather than individual performance, the symbiosis of practices accomplishes some of the same functions as Holmes's network of investigative enterprises. Most important, it is the source of order. As opposed to the wild contingency of Latour and Woolgar's account, Pickering · develops the notion of "opportunism in context," an account of the dynamics of practice that replaces the random drift model of Latour and Woolgar with a structured model based on local contingency. Pickering dismisses the naive realist view that nature-the reality of quarks, for example-determines historical processes. Experiments by themselves are not closed systems, and as such can never simply determine the rejection or acceptance of a theoretical claim. He points to the fragile and open character of experiment, to the fact that the validity of experimenters' reports, the reliability of the instruments to produce phenomena that are not artifactual, are all dependent upon judgments reached through negotiation. Such judgments can never be infallible, for they are always capable of being called into question. Hence, the reality of phenomena produced by experiment is always threatened with dissolution. Clearly, Pickering occupies some of the same ground as Woolgar, Latour, and other defenders of the strong program of social constructivism. So, if nature is not the guide and arbiter of historical process, what is? In answer to this question, Pickering considers the dynamics of practice. Experimental traditions and theoretical traditions mutually support one another through a historical process with affinities to ecological adaptation. According to Pickering-whose position is not shared by all social constructivists due to its tendency to reinsert the primacy of theory-each generation of theorizing serves to mark out fresh problem areas to be investigated by the next generation of experiment. 18 The practices of theoretical physicists provide a reinforcing context for the practices of experimentalists, and vice versa. The practices of each group constitute both justification and subject for those of the other. The mutual support these different traditions lend one another creates a symbiosis. Experimentalists with access to the resources for producing the phenomena (scaling, for example, or neutral currents) of interest to the appropriate community of theorists (gauge theorists, for instance) concentrate on refining and adjusting those phenomena of interest to the primary consumers of their work. For their part, the theorists contribute to the sym-

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biosis of traditions by refining and adapting their theoretical practices to fit the phenomena produced by the experimentalists. The result of this fine-tuning of concepts, practices, and even hardware of both communities is the emergence of a culturally specific form of life, a congenial world with a self-contained, self-referential package of theoretical and experimental practices. 19 The emergence of coherent sets ofjudgments and the construction of facts at the basis of an experimental form of life is a socially contingent process. But it is a highly structured contingency. In contrast to the model developed by Latour and Woolgar, not everything goes for Pickering. Moreover, like Holmes, Pickering thinks that nature is not completely malleable or capable ofbeing fashioned according to the whims of groups of scientists. The emphasis on practice and on the dialogue involving technical apparatus, experimental manipulation, and the formation of concepts assures that the production ofknowledge is not purely random. In Pickering's account the dynamics of practice are structured by the distribution of and access to material and conceptual resources within local contexts. This differential availability of resources within a field of differently positioned, interested actors drives the symbiosis of research traditions. Scientific actors evaluate innovations in theoretical or technical practice for the opportunities they offer for furthering the scientists' own theoretical or experimental interests. Crucial to such decisions are the resources available within the local context. The perception by workers in one context of opportunities to constructively exploit the products offered by workers in other contexts drives the mutual effort to fine-tune the conceptual and material resources of these contexts and to render them compatible. Thus, the adaptation ofdifferent contexts is constrained by a host of factors, including material, theoretical and technical expertise, financial resources, and not least of all social factors relating to career strategies-in short, the entire structure of interests depicted by Latour and Woolgar as the agonistic field. The communities able to take opportunistic advantage of the situation in the field at any time are constrained by the profiles of the various local contexts and by the dynamics of practice within them. Out of such adaptive behavior subcultures of selfcontained scientific practice-research traditions-emerge, within which natural phenomena, the facts of nature, confer legitimacy on a conceptual order and the social and technical practices within which it is embedded. Peter Galison is critical of several aspects of the interest model used by Pickering. "Experimentation," writes Galison, "should not be parodied as

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if it were no more grounded in reason than negotiations over the price of a streetfair antique." 20 The interest model, according to Galison, produces a closed and self-referential system, which treats nature as though it can be molded to suit the presuppositions of the dominant theorists. Galison also wants to avoid treating the relationship of theory to experiment in terms of a web descending from high theory to experimental practice. Nor does he find much clarity in talk of a "symbiosis" of theoretical and experimental practices as a means for describing the dialogue between theory and experiment. Instead, Galison's own approach aims at constructing a finely grained analytical structure that distinguishes between different levels of theory as well as different levels of theoretical commitment as the backdrop to experiment. Each level is partially autonomous but is articulated with the other levels in different ways. Each level is structured by different sets of presuppositions and operates in terms of different constraints. Moreover, the time scales of change can be significantly different from level to level, so that a break in a theoretical tradition need not entail an interruption in the commitments and practices in the other levels. Included in this archaeology of experimental culture are richly diverse strata, analogous to cultural historian Fernand Brandel's distinction of long-, middle-, and short-range constraints. At the level of long-term constraints are instrumental practices conveyed by apprenticeship. Within this level, three sorts of "substrata" can be distinguished: traditions of instrumental development, pedagogical traditions, and traditions of style of argument. Other types of long-term constraints are of a theoretical sort: what Gerald Holton has described as great "themata," such as continuity versus discontinuity or the drive for a unification of natural forces. Of less enduring character are middle-range constraints on theory and experiment. Here Galison has programmatic goals in mind. Middlerange programmatic goals may be shaped by theoretical beliefs, such as the belief in the electron as a material corpuscle. But middle-range constraints can also include experimental programmatic goals, such as Millikan's experimental goal oflinking the production of gamma rays to the formation of organized matter. Again this layer of middle-range experimental constraints can be articulated into several "sublayers." One of these is programmatic laboratory practices, such as the commitment to microscopes, telescopes, spark chambers, or gyroscopes. Another level consists in technological presuppositions. But here, as elsewhere, theoretical programmatic commitments and experimental practices can be difficult to separate. Theoretical presuppositions frequently become "hardwired"

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into the architecture of specific pieces of experimental apparatus. Lest we assume, however, that there are rigid hierarchical relationships between theory, experiment, and apparatus, Galison reminds us-for example, in his treatment of the relationships between Einstein's work on the gyrocompass in the Bern patent office and the experiments he later conducted with de Haas aimed at measuring the ratio of angular momentum to magnetic moment as an accurate means for determining elm-that available technology and instrument types function both as resource and as constraint upon the types of theoretical models that get constructed. That is, instrumental assumptions sometimes get "hardwired" into theoretical models. As instruments change, so too will the dynamics of theoretical and experimental argumentation. 21 Finally, Galison distinguishes shortterm theoretical and experimental constraints. Here he has in mind the procedures used to establish confidence in a specific instrument or a particular run of experimental data. At the theoretical level, short-term constraints are given by the choice to develop specific models or to use specific phenomenological laws for purposes of calculation. Galison uses this archaeology of experimental practice to replace Reichenbach-styled theory-dominated approaches to experiment, in which decisions are treated as if they could be reduced to a protocol of hypothesis and deduction, with a focus on dissecting the structure of judgments made by experimentalists. Galison's annaliste descriptive scheme enables him to avoid talking about the social construction of facts and focus instead on the establishment of belief. The thrust is in the direction of a reasonable account of the production of knowledge aimed at unraveling the processes by which arguments are assembled and the ways in which groups of scientists gain confidence in them. The crucial point here is an epistemological stance. Like both the philosopher-critics of theory-dominated history and philosophy of science and the social constructivists, Galison insists upon the inadequacy of any account of science that treats the relation of theory to experiment as a matter of closed deductive logical implication. Like Pickering, Harry Collins, and others, Galison argues that the process of interpreting data and arriving at a meaningful experimental result is not a rule-governed activity. But he parts company with social constructivists in his insisting that the recognition of this point should not be interpreted as opening the floodgate to relativism. The choice of when to end an experiment is not guided by arbitrary nonrational conventions or by opportunistic interests in accumulating symbolic capital. Somewhere between the extremes of a logic

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of justification and the psychology of discovery lies the field of practical judgment. That judgment, trust in an experimental procedure, confidence in a piece of apparatus, or commitment to a strategy for modeling cannot be formalized or cast into the scheme of a rigid deductive system does not detract from their importance in ending experiments and producing knowledge. Arriving at a judgment is a collective process of consensus for action, but it is not thereby reduced to opportunistic bartering. Galison writes: Textbooks do not tell you that groups of physicists gather around the table at CERN stamping OUT and IN on event candidates. This may be due to the persistent myth that, at least at the level of datataking, no human intention ought to occur in an experiment, or if it does occur, that any selection criteria should conform to rules fully specified in advance. But here, as everywhere in the scientific process, procedures are neither rule-governed nor arbitrary. This false dichotomy between rigidity and anarchy is as inapplicable to the sorting of data as it is to every other problem-solving activity. Is it so surprising that data-taking requires as much judgment as the correct application of laws or the design of apparatus? ... The lesson to be drawn is not that experiments are merely capricious or that experimenters are "biased." Rather, we must come to see laboratory judgment as a subtle but essential part of the experimental process from beginning to end. 22 The attempt to oudine a new critique of practical judgment is the basis for Galison's approach to the problem of assembling arguments. As we have seen, for Latour and Woolgar arguments are assembled by a stochastic process, not without "feedback" from the larger agonistic field outside the laboratory, to be sure, but dependent upon chance all the same. Pickering treats the assembly of arguments as due less to random drift and selection processes within the agonistic field than to strategies for the optimization of opportunities with respect to external resource bases. Galison sees the assembly of arguments as arising out of the pragmatic rationality at the heart of the experimental form oflife. It is based on the rational adaptation of ends and means oriented by the operational pragmatic imperative to eliminate backgrounds. Galison introduces a metaphor to describe the goals of experimentalists. They are like the relationship of Michelangelo's David to the block of marble from which it was hewn: the statue is in the stone, but the background has to be carved away in order to see it. 23 Experimentalists aim at enhancing phenomena by increasing the ratio of signal to noise. To arrive at consensus on the existence of a new particle in high-energy physics is to arrive at agreement

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that there are no further backgrounds to be eliminated. Experiments end when the community involved agrees that the effect will not go away and the alternative sources for its explanation have been eliminated. There is a parallel between Galison's approach and Hacking's philosophy of experiment. Both Hacking and Galison emphasize the role of the familiarity an experimenter has with his or her instruments. This understanding of the instrument and the exploration of the limits of its functional capabilities is crucial to the goal of eliminating backgrounds. When an experimenter suspects he or she has detected a new phenomenon, the experimenter's immediate strategy is to vary the experimental setup in an attempt to eliminate the effect. The experimenter is at the same time attempting to "debug" the instrument. If the effect persists, the experimenter's confidence increases that it is not just an artifact of the apparatus. The process is twofold, according to Galison: varying the experiment in order to produce the same phenomenon under different circumstances leads to stabilization of the phenomenon. At the same time, efforts to improve the apparatus in order to bring the phenomenon directly into focus-to increase the strength of the signal-lead to directness in the demonstration of the effect. These two practical activities add solidity to the phenomenon by making it difficult to postulate an alternative causal account for its production. Galison sees this same strategic pattern of practical reasoning institutionalized in the community structure of science. Local variation in resources, the investment in different instrumental traditions and in different theoretical and interpretive skills, multiplies at the communal level

the effect of the imperative to eliminate backgrounds at the local level. At the community level, the discipline of physics, for example, can be conceived as a plurality of subcultures. Although different, these subcultures are not self-contained lifeworlds. The archaeology of experimental culture described above implies that there will be numerous links between these various subcultures, but they will not be Leibnizian monads reflecting an imaginary holistic culture. Galison sees great virtue in the absence of redundancy in these local subcultures, for it transfers up the organizational scale the combination of variability and constraints crucial to the production of knowledge at the local level of practice. Just as individual groups of experimenters vary their investigations in order to eliminate backgrounds or enhance signals, competition between different groups with different combinations of equipment and skills serves to increase this variability. The existence of an effect or entity gains in plausibility

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as groups of experimenters, each attempting to define different backgrounds against which to demonstrate that a proclaimed effect is artifactual, gradually come to agree that no alternative is consistent with the results they are obtaining. In this way stabilization occurs at the community level. It is important to note, however, that just as the processes of stabilization and directness, which build confidence in an experiment at the local level, are far removed from a model ofhypothesis and deduction, so too the establishment of consensus at the community level is a process analogous to the establishment of persuasive arguments in a court oflaw or in politics. Galison argues that the establishment ofbeliefin science has always been a social process, but the social character of the assembly of persuasive arguments has become even more visible in the huge experiments of the late twentieth century, in which the division of labor required to deal with high-energy, short-lived processes and the enormous expense of the equipment has led to highly fragmented and specialized work. No single mind examines all the data and marshals all the component arguments. Teams of structural engineers, electrical engineers, computer simulation experts, data analysts, and phenomenologists, together with teams of experimentalists and theorists, now all collaborate on a single large-scale experiment. Each of the subgroups brings the special salience of its own "subculture" to bear on the experiment-the kinds of backgrounds with which they are concerned and the types of evidence they find convincing. The decision to end such an experiment and the aggregation, refinement, criticism, and synthesis of arguments now takes place in internal conferences of the large research group. Galison sees an analogy here to the biogenetic law, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny": in the history of modern experimentation, the individual experiment recapitulates on a smaller scale the dynamics of the experimental community as it has evolved over some three hundred years. 24 Life Forms and the Political Economy ofPractices Although they disagree fundamentally over the processes driving the dynamics of practice, both Galison and Pickering agree that it is clearly social in character. For Pickering, as we have seen, the symbiosis of practices is driven by interests structured in terms of a context of perceived opportunities. For Galison, by contrast, the dynamics of experimental practice are driven by a collective pragmatic rationality drawing upon an elaborate historically conditioned architecture of constraints in arriving at

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judgments. On any survey comparing the relative role of context in the dialogue of experiment and theory, both accounts have to be evaluated as extremely broad in the role they attribute to context in the dynamics of practice. But even though broadly interpreted, in both accounts the dynamics of practices are circumscribed within the domain of particle physics. For the sorts of problems Pickering and Galison treat, it is arguably not essential to explain further how the practices of theoretical or experimental physicists are embedded within wider bodies of social and political practice. If one inquires concerning the conditions central to sustaining experiment as a form of life within the political economy of practices in the first place, however, things look rather different. Consider, for example, the role of facts typically given in scientists' accounts of scientific development. According to the scientists' account, nature compels the choice of theory and determines the outcome of scientific debate. Nature, the body of scientific facts, stands as an objective, independent reality that legitimates particular accounts. Mary Douglas and Pierre Bourdieu argue that the effectiveness of a system of practices to force compliance-the practice of gift giving, for instance, or the powers reified in a classification system-depends upon repressing the actual mechanisms of the practice itself and reifying them as independent objects. 25 Ethnographers of scientific practice have similarly argued that it is essential to the scientific enterprise that all traces of the social processes oflaboratory life that go into the construction of facts be removed at the end of the investigation. Latour and Woolgar call this process, which is the final stage in fact production, the process of splitting and inversion. State-

ments come to be separated from the process of their production and treated as if they mirrored some external reality. Furthermore, that external reality is now treated as the cause of the statement rather than the social processes of negotiation within the agonistic field. The laboratory disappears from the account, the social processes within its walls become "blackboxed" in instruments. Theory-dominated philosophers of science contribute the final stage in the act of "collusion." They legitimate this meconnaissance through failing to attend to the context of practices within which facts are constructed by drawing a distinction between the context of discovery and the context ofjustification. If we accept this as an approximate description of what transpires in the production ofknowledge in our culture, then we might inquire about the sort of interests that would motivate a society to organize its institutions for producing certified knowledge in terms of a form of life that

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aims at the production of facts through experiment. In addition we may inquire about the interests in sustaining the meconnaissance of the production of knowledge through the erection of boundaries between science and the polity. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer address this issue in Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Their work establishes the connection we seek between the dynamics of scientific practices and the broader context of social practices. Shapin and Schaffer argue that politics is not something that happens solely outside of science and presses in upon it as an impediment. The problem of generating and protecting knowledge, they argue, is a political problem. Moreover, they contend, solutions to the problem of knowledge are also always solutions to the problem of social order. 26 The framework of relations between our knowledge and our polity was laid down some three centuries ago with the construction of the "experimental form of life." The experimental form of life emerged in seventeenthcentury England as part of the settlement and protection of social order achieved at the Restoration. In a society torn by sectarian strife and profound disagreement over the sources of authority, the experimental form of life constructed by Boyle and the early members of the Royal Society offered an ideal society in which dispute could occur safely and at the same time uniformity of belief could emerge through assent within an environment of limited toleration. 27 To churchmen who hoped for means of combating and controlling private belief but for whom the experiences of the revolution and the resistance to the Clarendon Code in the r66os cautioned against externally imposing an authoritarian and dogmatic discipline, the experimental form of life offered a model for getting at people's consciences. This was possible because in the form of life Boyle and the experimental philosophers proposed knowledge was produced through collective witnessing of experiences constructed in a disciplined fashion with the aid of appropriate instruments in a public space, the laboratory. In the disciplined space of the laboratory, competent and modest observers voluntarily agreed upon what was to count as knowledge. Knowledge produced according to the conventions of the experimental form oflife could be a source of social solidarity, for assent was not coerced. So long as one did not attempt, as Hobbes did in his attack on Boyle in the Dialogus physicus, to unmask the conventions-the social and literary technologies, as well as the labor-involved in the production of facts, nature could be taken as the source of assent. Shapin and Schaffer's work shows the historical conditions under

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which life forms connected with the production of knowledge and central to modern science emerged in symbiosis with other areas, particularly the domains of social and political practice. Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise have articulated a similarly broad conception of the production of knowledge, but in an extremely rich study of monumental proportion on William Thomson they have gone even further than Shapin and Schaffer in contextualizing the dialogue between theoretical and experimental practices. 28 Smith and Wise attempt to embed the production ofknowledge in an intricately woven localist tapestry, the threads of which not only include political and religious practices but, no less crucially, the material processes of production and the technology central to the political economy. It is this introduction of an economic element and the related idea of an economy of practices that I want to explore further here. In portraying Thomson's work in physics, Wise and Smith present us with a creative scientist for whom physical theory and experimental practice, the construction of scientific instruments and practical measuring devices to be employed in industry-in short, measurement and profitare so deeply intertwined in a fusion of knowledge and power that it is impossible to understand the meaning of the quantitative concepts Thomson developed without appreciating the relationship of measurement to industry in Victorian Glasgow. 29 The context of dialogue in this case is not simply window dressing for understanding the motivations that triggered a cascade of innovations, but rather it is constitutive of the meaning of those concepts and (analogous to Shapin and Schaffer's conception of the process of sustaining forms oflife), through the use of those concepts in constructing a world, is the source of their stabilization. But the steam engine was not only a source of work and value, it was also a source of new scientific concepts. For example, conceived as a total system, producing work, the steam engine served Thomson as a powerful metaphor, which he used to explore the overall conditions controlling electrostatic systems, a problem in which the analogy between heat and electricity was by no means obvious. Thomson's theoretical considerations were not disembodied concepts. He was little concerned initially, for instance, with the nature of electricity, but rather with its ability to produce work. Thomson's theorizing was constantly concerned with shaping concepts that led to practical calculations and measurements. Thus, conceptualizing electrostatic systems by analogy to the engineering concept of an engine permitted Thomson to develop an absolute measure for electrical intensity in rela-

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tionship to the mechanical effect it produced. In a similar vein, he pursued the translation of the steam engine into the construction of concepts for measuring the values of other physical agents, the notion of absolute temperature being only the most striking example. The steam engine did not remain at the level of a source of fruitful analogies and heuristics, however; the measurement concepts Thomson pursued were not only conceived in terms of engines but the instruments themselves were designed and operated as engines. The steam engine thus became embodied in the very scientific instrumentation that was laying the foundation for the second wave of industrialization. Wise and Smith also point out that Thomson's Glasgow laboratory embodied the concept of work central to British political economists. But it is the positive, constitutive role of the relationship between work and value in Victorian Britain that Wise and Smith especially stress. They conclude: More generally, we have called attention to the fact that measurements, the most objective and non-hypothetical facts in a scientist's arsenal, are about values. Measurements assign numerical 'values to quantities thought to be worth measuring, or to have value. To measure is therefore to make a judgment about what constitutes the value of the thing measured. From early in his career Thomson inclined to measure values in terms of the available work contained in a material system, its mechanical effect or mechanical-value. Quite unashamedly he identified such measurements with economic value. That association was an essential part of their meaning, and not merely of their motivation, for the relation of measurement to industry informed both the precision of the measurements and the design of the instruments constructed to make them. 30

C:HAPTER 3

The Discipline ofNature

and the Nature ofDisciplines

The disunity of science figures prominently in discussions emerging from studies oflocal scientific practice. Stimulated in large part by challenges to theory-dominated accounts of science, proposals of a heterogeneous and more fragmented picture in which experiment and traditions of instrumentation have lives of their own independent of the guiding hand of "high theory" have defined the research agenda of recent science studies. 1 In contrast to older theory-dominated approaches, in which models of scientific explanation for an already made science were debated, the newer studies have focused on the sites of knowledge production-the laboratory and the agonistic field of scientific controversy-and have em-

phasized the negotiated character of science in the making and the instrument- and practice-laden character of modern technoscience. 2 Whereas earlier work tended to de-emphasize the labor involved in creating instrumentation and in stabilizing and replicating experiment, more recent work has insisted that the objects of scientific investigation are constructed and stabilized through instruments, a process of disciplining nature. 3 Indeed, several studies have shown that the instruments designed to investigate a particular phenomenon are frequently an embodiment of the object under study itself, the experimental technology serving as a model for the natural phenomenon. A closely related genre of recent studies has emphasized understanding the evidentiary context, the socially negotiated conventions and criteria for coming to local agreement about the outcome of experiments, about the technical and performative conditions for replicating experiment, about what constitutes competent per-

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formance, and about the standards of trust and evaluation. 4 A major consequence of these lines of research has been to foreground the heterogeneity of science, the division oflabor, and the differential distribution and dispersion of skill essential to scientific work. Defenders of an enculturational model have stressed the economies of skill, attitudinal components, and values that must accompany the formal elements of mathematics, physical theory, and engineering principles in scientific work. 5 Theorists no less than experimenters are depicted as practical reasoners. Just as laboratory studies have documented the assembly of unarticulated, nonverbal skills, together with competence in manipulating both simple and complex instruments, and calculational skills necessary to lab work, so too recent studies have shown that a theorist's work depends crucially upon the development and maintenance of a battery of practiced, skilllike competencies in mathematics and more specific theoretical tools required to do theoretical work, and that these ensembles of skills can be quite local in their specificity. One of the consequences of these studies is that the smooth integration of the different aspects of science taken for granted in theorydominated accounts has itself become an object of investigation. Stress upon enculturation, the practice- and instrument-laden character of scientific work, and the heterogeneous, disunified structure of science, has left science studies searching for an account of the manner in which the work of theorists, experimenters, and technicians is locally coordinated. Galison's work on "trading zones," in which coordination of diverse communities of practitioners is analogized to the formation of pidgins and creoles among different language communities, is the leading example of contemporary efforts to attack this problem. 6 No less pressing is the need for an attack on the manner in which local contexts are multiplied in order to account for the striking capacity of science to capture supposed universal features of the world. 7 Within this complex of issues generated by the disunity of science, discipline emerges as a crucial site; for just as laboratories and sites of apprenticeship are essential for organizing and reinforcing the economies of skill necessary for conducting science locally, disciplines are the structures in which these skills are assembled, intertwined with other diverse elements, and reproduced as coherent ensembles suitable for the conduct of stable scientific practice more globally. Disciplines are the infrastructure of science embodied above all in university departments, professional societies, textbooks and lab manuals. As Charles Rosenberg has pointed out, disciplinary identity shapes a

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scholar's vocational identity, setting problems and defining tools for addressing them; in addition, discipline rewards intellectual achievement. 8 At the same time, the discipline helps to structure scientists' relationships to particular institutional and economic contexts. Disciplines are the institutional mechanisms for regulating the market relations between consumers and producers of knowledge. They are also instruments for distributing status; by grounding expertise and skill, discipline sets boundaries and demarcates hierarchies of experts and amateurs. Moreover, as both Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have urged, attention to discipline is not merely a concern about institutions and professionalization; it is, above all, concern about bodies-human bodies. Disciplines are institutionalized formations for organizing schemes of perception, appreciation, and action, and for inculcating them as tools of cognition and communication. 9 At the same time, as embodied practical operators, disciplines are political structures that mediate crucially between the political economy and the production of knowledge. Disciplines are dynamic structures for assembling, channeling, and replicating the social and technical practices essential to the functioning of the political economy and the system of power relations that actualize it. Such a definition is consistent with efforts to treat knowledge as a social construction while avoiding the radical relativism and antirealism that many find disturbing in some of the earlier work in social studies of science. While treating technoscience as socially constructed, I want to avoid the (to me nonsensical) claim that nature is simply an invented fabrication. A more pragtnatically oriented realism emerges from consid-

eration that the products of the sociotechnical systems we call "science" and "technology" work precisely because they are embedded in our practices and stabilized in our technologies for producing truth. Every society, according to Foucault, is based on a regime of truth. The relevance of Foucault's concept for the discussion of the truth content of disciplinary knowledge and the relation of disciplinary knowledge to the system of power relations lies in Foucault's insistence that power must be based on truth. Crucial to my social constructivist interpretation is Foucault's further insistence that truth should not be considered as an objective, socially independent reality. Foucault defines truth as "a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements." 10 By a "regime of truth," Foucault has in mind the body of practices and the types of discourse that a society accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to

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distinguish true and false statements and the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; and the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. 11 Central to this conception of the relation of power to knowledge is the notion that power is not a negative force that weighs on us, but a constructive source, which "traverses and produces things .... It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than a negative instance whose function is repression."12 Fields of discourse and the practices in which they are embedded are the medium through which relations of power are activated and exercised. Considered thus as a positive force of cohesion of the social body, power is the source of truth; alternatively, genuine power, which does not resort to repression, cannot exist without the production of truth. I quote from Foucault: In a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth. 13 In Foucault's view, the relations of power are at once coextensive with the conditions of social relations in general, and embedded in the rules for the production of truth and knowledge. Put another way, relations of power are embedded in (that is, are activated by and exercised through) the rules of discourse formation. In commenting on this aspect of Foucault's work, Colin Gordon writes, "The rules for the formation of discourses are linked to the operation of a particular kind of social power. Discourses not only exhibit immanent principles of regularity, they are also bound by regulations enforced through social practices of appropriation, control and policing. Discourse is a political commodity." 14 It is this aspect of control and policing, not in an external or repressive sense, but rather through the internalization of patterns of discourse, structures of knowledge, and modes of practice to which I want to relate the present discussion of discipline. If my interpretation is correct, disciplines are essential structures for systematizing, organizing, and embodying the so-

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cial and institutional practices upon which both coherent discourse and the legitimate exercise of power depend. The conception of discipline I want to develop is integral to Foucault's notion ofa discursive formation. The discursive formation captures the sense of heterogeneity I have emphasized above in describing science. The idea of clinical medicine as a discursive formation, for example, attempts to capture the connections that emerged in the nineteenth century among statements concerning pathological anatomy, comparative anatomy, tissues, lesions, autopsy, percussion, auscultation, case histories, the hospital, hygiene, statistical method, etc. The claim is not that statements of these types could not have been or were not uttered previously, but rather, that in this period they came to be configured together, while simultaneously other statements concerning, say, miasmas, humors, faculties, and the like, were excluded from the discourse of physicians. The discursive formation is, accordingly, a historically conditioned system of regularity for the coexistence of statements. Configuration, coexistence, and grouping of statements are crucial to the discursive formation. In Foucault's terms, it is not through reference to some object anterior to the discursive formation that statements acquire their meaning. Objects and concepts are co-produced in discourse. Foucault claims as his concern "to substitute for the enigmatic treasure of'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. . . . A task that consists of not-of no longer-treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak." 15 Moreover, the meanings of statements-and hence the objects made possible within the discursive formation-are not constructed in isolation from other statements. 16 Statements do not have meanings by reference to an anterior field of objects or through a relation to the subject; they require the positioning of adjacent fields for their meaning. Meaning is constituted within a complex space ofjuxtapositions, bordering domains, and associated fields, connected not by an immanent logic or progressive historical unfolding but genealogically, that is, by series of historical contingencies related by constancy of use. 17 Meaning for Foucault is a topological relation: Since this is not some additional relation that is superimposed on the others, one cannot say a sentence, one cannot transform it into a statement, unless a collateral space is brought into operation. A statement always has borders peopled by other

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statements. These borders are not what is usually meant by "context" -real or verbal-that is, all the situational or linguistic elements, taken together, that motivate a formulation and determine its meaning. 18 The dispersed, network-like character of discursive formations is responsible for the construction of sense and of objects through stabilization in a broader web of heterogeneous elements. Foucault notes that one of the crucial elements in stabilizing statements is what he calls concomitance, the configuring of statements from quite different domains to different types of discourse-such as discourses of medicine and political economy. Foucault notes the importance of these resources for analogical confirmation of a statement, the use of concepts in one domain as models in another: "Thus the field of concomitance of the Natural History of the period of Linnaeus and Buffon is defined by a number of relations with cosmology, the history of the earth, philosophy, theology, scripture and biblical exegesis, mathematics (in the very general form of a science of order); and all these relations distinguish it from both the discourse of the sixteenth-century naturalists and that of the nineteenth-century biologists."19 In a similar vein, I will argue in a later chapter that in German states during the r8sos and r86os, the discourse of physiological optics was stabilized by drawing upon techniques and practices of astronomy and by configuration with discourse in the fields of aesthetics and painting, and with political discussions on what was termed the "politics of material interest," a concern to transform political realities through construction of railroads, custom unions, and telegraphs, rather than through the demand for parliamentary constitutional reform. 20 The ideas of regime of truth and discursive formation provide useful resources for framing the analysis of the problem of disciplines. First they remind us to avoid treating the contents of knowledge independently from their institutionalized forms; moreover, they remind us that problems of knowledge production and the determination of content are already invested with political interest and social controF 1 Discipline is central to the micropolitics ofknowledge production. Furthermore, these notions support the picture of disunified science in which local patches of coherence must be laboriously produced-for example, through the formation of "trading zones" -while at the same time establishing the conditions for locally reinforcing, stabilizing, and reproducing that local coherence more widely by embedding it in a dispersed and heterogeneous network of constraints of juxtaposition, interaction, and coexistence of

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discursive practices. To put it another way: stabilization of numerous, diverse local practices occurs through their position in the broader context of an economy of practices. Discipline is crucial for organizing and stabilizing this heterogeneity. Silent but powerfully operating, discipline is what makes disunified science work.

Discipline and the Dynamics of the Scientific Field While Foucault's analysis of discursive formations provides the appropriate apparatus for conceptualizing disciplines, his "archaeological" approach does not illuminate the process of discipline formation. The consideration of disciplines as mediators for economies of practices suggests an alternative path; namely, the metaphor of the invisible hand of the market adjusting relations between producers and consumers of the tools of knowledge production, and the schemes of action, appreciation, and perception needed to adapt them to the political economy. The need for approaching the problem of discipline formation in terms of an economy of practice becomes apparent if one considers the most important implication of Foucault's insistence on the dispersed character of discursive formations: no one creates disciplines. Shaped by a theory-dominated view of science, earlier discussions of scientific disciplines have divided between internalist and externalist accounts. Internalist accounts have for the most part treated disciplines as the products of particularly important scientific theories, resulting from pursuit of a salient discovery, a research program, or the work of a research

school; for example, the Phage Group, Watson and Crick, and work on the double-helix model of DNA are candidate founders of molecular biology. In contrast to this approach are studies that treat disciplinary and institutional dynamics generally as political in character, dependent more on resource allocation than upon cognitive content. For such studies, discipline builders, entrepreneurs, and scientific gatekeepers are crucial to establishing disciplines; a case in point would be Warren Weaver's steadfast efforts to use Rockefeller Foundation money to support his dream of creating molecular biology. 22 Common to both approaches are founder myths, featuring either founder theories or founder persons (usually fathers). The contingency of the genealogical approach I have sketched above, however, together with the heterogeneity and dispersion of interlocking elements in discursive formations, implies that the teleological unfolding

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of a "core idea" or the persistent efforts of single researchers, indeed even single groups of researchers in the same field, are insufficient to "found" disciplines. The multidimensional linkages and exclusions of and between different discursive practices required for the creation of a discipline exceed the power of individuals to engineer and orchestrate. The difficulty with founder narratives then is not simply the complexity of the task of building disciplines; the problem is that disciplines do not have single originary sources, but are more appropriately grasped as interactive system effects. The idea of an economy best captures this sort of dynamic. Bourdieu's conception of the scientific field can help us examine dynamic relations in the formation of disciplines. Bourdieu treats the scientific field, a special case of the cultural field, as a "locus of competitive struggle, in which the specific issue at stake is the monopoly of scientific authority, defined inseparably as technical capacity and social power, or, to put it another way, the monopoly over scientific competence, in the sense of a particular agent's socially recognized capacity to speak and act legitimately (i.e., in an authorized and authoritative way) in scientific matters." 23 This definition eliminates the distinction between internal and external by treating scientists as struggling with one another for the distribution of credit, which they can only achieve by displaying competence in the production of scientific goods. Credit, in turn, is the basis for authority and the accumulation of cultural capital, itself reconvertible into command over resources for the production of more scientific goods. This definition emphasizes the negotiated character of the production of scientific objects, the sense that scientists, starting with a base of acquired competence and capital earned through previous struggles, define their objects in an "agoristic" -a term that captures the "economic" sense of negotiated exchange linking parts of the field better than the term "agonistic" usually employed-field of claim, counter-claim, and struggle with one another rather than through a relationship to a transcendental object or investigative goal defined anterior to discourse itself. The approach is furthermore useful in capturing the flavor of contemporary technoscience, which is simultaneously political and technical: the obvious fact that to pursue an investigative program requires the assembly of a variety of scientifically trained persons, techniques, instruments, and administrative staff-the heterogeneous engineering of a local microeconomy of practice-all proof of the competence of an organization to produce more scientific goods. The political struggle to dominate resources is inseparable from the cognitive enterprise of defining what con-

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stitutes legitimate, authorized science. In struggling to gain recognition for their products, scientists are engaged in legitimating their power to define domains of the scientific field in which they have interests. 24 One temptation is to treat disciplines as the accreted results of research activity, packed down and distilled into the teaching wing of science. This has the undesired consequence of conflating what goes on at the site of research with disciplinary activity, which, as examples to be discussed below show, are not identical. Scientists at the research front do not perceive their goal as expanding a discipline. Indeed, most novel research, particularly in contemporary science, is not confined within the scope of a single discipline, but draws upon work of several disciplines. If asked, most scientists would say they work on problems. Almost no one thinks of her- or himself as working on a discipline. Bruno Latour, on the other hand, cautions against drawing a distinction between research and disciplinary work of the sort I am proposing here. Latour has argued that in order to achieve the goal of forcing recognition of their product, scientists must ultimately engage in making the world outside the walls of the laboratory susceptible to the regime within the lab: Pasteur's vaccine trials came out victorious by transforming the farm into a field station. 25 Pasteur's efforts to discipline the world outside his lab were inseparable from his efforts to gain recognition of claims about microbes from other scientists. While in full agreement with the aim of not separating what goes on inside from what goes on outside the lab, I find it useful nonetheless to distinguish the labor and political struggles involved in research work

from the quite different politics and work of discipline building. Although Pasteur pursued both activities, we must also take into account that some scientists-Walter Fletcher, whose case will be discussed below, for instance-devoted their careers almost exclusively to discipline building. To accommodate both of these senses, I suggest that work on the research front and discipline formation be treated as interrelated, not as cause and effect but as mutual resource. Within the spectrum of self-proclaimed discipline builders, some use the organizational power of their own scientific work as an ideological resource for dominating the scientific field, a reductionist strategy of legitimation aimed at imposing a definition of science. Cases in point are the evolutionary synthesis, medical genetics, or (in the mid-nineteenth century) reductionist physiology. 26 Another sort of discipline builder, one that interests me most here, attempts to arrange elements of the scientific field as a means for defining society. Discipline

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builders like William Whewell in his concern with the organization of training in mathematics and physics, reflected in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, or Warren Weaver in his concern with putting biology on physical foundations, define their goals as meeting the needs of society through the appropriate organization and coordination of scientific work. Researchers like Pasteur sometimes find themselves forced to manage society through a concern with discipline to legitimate their science; discipline builders try to construct science to legitimate their view of society. Both sorts of activities-research and discipline building-can be accommodated to Bourdieu's notion of the scientific field oudined above through the observation that authority and credit are assigned by socially recognized competencies other than the technical competence associated with lab or theoretical work and publication. 27 The practiceand instrument-laden character and heterogeneity of technoscience, together with the modes of competition specific to the scientific field, make the combination of organizational skill and vision particularly central to the functioning of the scientific field. The scientific field is distinguished from other fields of cultural activity by the fact that one's competitors are also the primary consumers of one's product. In the scientific field, where recognition of "competence" and "authority" cannot be forced without the scrutiny of other competitor producers, credit comes from symbolically appropriating others' work, incorporating it into one's owil work, and going beyond it. 28 The dynamic of the field leads to a more complex, heterogeneous environment. The assembly of techniques, skills, instruments, models, theories, and their materialization in productive experimental systems becomes "blackboxed" and stabilized by incorporation through use by other researchers. 29 Laboratories and other institutional settings where such assemblies occur themselves become instruments for generating credit. Beyond the resource requirements for conducting science is the obvious point that since the beginning of its professionalization in the nineteenth century, as an institution situated in universities and state bureaucracies, science has not functioned without administrators. 30 The organizational and managerial skill necessary for assembling and maintaining such productive credit-generating instruments can itself become a resource for acquiring authority and staking out a position in the scientific field. While entry into a position of authority in the scientific field is dependent upon credit gained through successful struggles in producing technoscience, further credit can be acquired after entry-level

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achievement through other institution-oriented activities, such as administrative work or institution building, which are certainly dependent upon, but need not arise directly out of nor be forever connected with, ongoing research. Thus, I find it useful in discussing discipline formation to distinguish between research programs and disciplinary programs. While both operate in terms of the same dynamic of the scientific field, they are oriented differently with respect to objectives. Disciplinary programs are fundamentally institutional in orientation, are concerned more with establishing service roles, facilitating links to other disciplines, and enabling transmission of the techniques and conceptual tools of the scientific field to (potentially multiple) user groups from neighboring disciplines and to persons training for particular types of careers. Although no less political in character, research programs, for the purposes of this discussion, are characterized less by their concern with organizing society than by their problem-oriented focus, through their effort to dominate the cycles of credit and available resources for extending and legitimating products of their research. Discipline builders draw upon research programs as political resources for achieving certain institutional goals. Once this is understood, it becomes clear that disciplines are not necessarily the success stories of particularly powerful theories or research programs. The latter might well exist without ever being institutionalized as the basis of a discipline, and the conditions of success depend upon market conditions, which are not causally related to the intellectual vision or success of the research program. The utility of maintaining a distinction between the processes driving research fields and the formation of disciplines and their institutionalization can be illustrated from an excellent paper by R. Steven Turner on physiological optics in the nineteenth century. 31 Effective use of bibliometric techniques enabled Turner to show that following a period of controversy over "nativism versus empiricism" between Hermann Helmholtz and Ewald Hering (which Turner assigns to a preparadigm stage) a consensus on theoretical matters formed around the work of these two leaders in the field in the late 1 86os. The cognitive consensus served as the basis of an expanding research effort ultimately spanning 70 different areas by ~he end of the century, to which physicists, physiologists, psychologists, and ophthalmologists contributed. Although fragmented disciplinary affiliations affected neither the ability of researchers to contribute to the field nor the formation of cognitive consensus on key

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theoretical issues, the high level of cognitive integration was not sufficient for propelling the field of vision studies toward disciplinary status. Turner shows, for instance, that the attempt of Ewald Hering and others to use the Zcitschrift fur Psychologic und Physiologic dcr Sinncsorganc as a forum for mobilizing efforts to create disciplinary status for the entire field of sensory studies failed to result in the establishment of either institutes or chairs in the subject. In my terms, their disciplinary program failed. Nonetheless, aspects of work in vision research, particularly research on accommodation, the dioptrics of the eye, and eye movements, as well as measurement techniques and instrumentation developed by vision researchers, was assimilated by practitioners of the discipline of ophthalmology. Similarly, other aspects of vision studies were assimilated by the disciplines of physiology and psychology. Thus vision studies provided resources for several disciplines without itself being the research wing of any single discipline. There are three morals to be drawn from Turner's tale. First, the site of knowledge production need not be localized within a single discipline, and the boundaries of research fields need not follow the boundaries of disciplines. Second, while research fields form around cognitive issues, high cognitive content and consensus on main theoretical issues-even when it exists-are by no means sufficient conditions for creating a new discipline. Successful research programs do not translate into successful disciplinary programs; indeed, the conditions for success of a disciplinary program lie only partly in the resources of its research base. Third (a point that Turner does not consider in the paper), to serve as the intellectual rationale of a discipline, a disciplinary program must incorporate a sufficiently broad theoretical vision, methods, and where relevant an inventory of techniques and instruments capable of sustaining research on a wide front of problems. I will return to this point later, but let me note that even these intellectual requirements can be effective only when the program can be adapted to the requirements of the political economy.

The Formation ofDisciplinary Programs: Accumulation ofTechniques and Innovations These conclusions of Turner's study are amplified by Robert E. Kohler's work on the development of biochemistry. Paralleling Turner's findings for physiological optics, for example, Kohler shows that the group of researchers who cultivated "biochemistry" was composed of specialists in a variety of established fields. They were united by their shared cognitive

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interest in enzymes as key agents in life processes rather than by institutional or disciplinary affiliation. Early biochemists represented a diversity of disciplinary background. Franz Hofineister was from pharmacology; Frederick G. Hopkins, physiological and pathological chemistry; Eduard Buchner, organic chemistry; Jacques Loeb, experimental zoology; Emil Duclaux, bacteriology and immunology; Hans Buchner, immunology and hygiene. 32 Kohler's investigations of the local differences of evolving biochemical practice and the careers of individual biochemists undermine the legend that casts F. G. Hopkins as the Moses figure of the discipline. Rather than viewing the "general biological chemistry" emerging from work centered on the enzyme theory as the basis for the development of the discipline, an account that does not smooth over the local differences must recognize that "general biochemistry" was one, albeit significant, program among several. It became the dominant program of the discipline in the late I9JOS, but even then the discipline ofbiochemistry was a heterogeneous collection of programs adapted to diverse institutional niches rather than a homogeneous consensual community. The common core of the discipline was not a commitment to a particular theory oflife or a specific research agenda but rather a growing collection of techniques and problem solutions connected with, for instance, enzymology, immunochemistry, protein metabolism, diagnostic biochemistry, and endocrinology, which could be exploited in a variety of directions as strategies for building programs within different institutional contexts. 33 These techniques and associated instrumentalities were more stable than the different, and often conflicting, theories they supported. The picture of the discipline that emerges, therefore, is of several disciplinary programs adapted to a variety of institutional niches within the existing disciplinary context. Kohler's analysis of the institutionalization ofbiochemistry identifies three different strategies for constructing the discipline. One program was conceived as broadly biological, taking as its domain all forms of life: microbes, plants, invertebrates, and higher animals. It was concerned with chemical explanations for fundamental biological processes such as growth, development, energy transformation, and biochemical control. A second program was physiological and biophysical in orientation, concentrating on those aspects of chemical physiology limited to animal and human physiology, such as research on vitamins and nutrition, hormones, and intermediate metabolism. The third approach was oriented toward clinical medicine. None of these disciplinary programs suffered from lack of intellectual innovation, but the conditions for and limitations upon the

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growth of each depended upon three factors: a supportive institutional context, a dependable clientele, and a viable intellectual program. In the early decades of its development as a discipline, biochemistry flourished where intellectual priorities were congruent with institutional structures and goals. At the heart of the approach to discipline I am proposing is the claim that disciplines are political institutions that demarcate areas of academic territory, allocate privileges and responsibilities of expertise, and structure claims on resources. To expand upon Kohler's notion, disciplines are embedded in market relationships regulating the production and consumption of knowledge; they are creatures of history reflecting human habits and preferences rather than a fixed order of nature. 34 Furthermore, disciplines perform the essential function of systematizing and regulating the flow of social and technical practices at the heart of knowledge production central to the socioeconomic system and to the system of power relations. The crucial feature of this proposal is the embedding of disciplinary knowledge in practice; that is, we are enjoined to focus upon the practices, techniques, instrumentalities, work patterning, and organization, and the coherent assembly of these different features-their packaging-in local sites of knowledge production: laboratories, institutes, and departments. The generation and accumulation of innovative practices and their coherent assembly occurs in local research sites organized in the service of a specific research project or program. For local work to effect changes within the established disciplinary landscape resulting in the formation of new disciplines, institutional niches must be generated in which departures from the routine of normal disciplinary activity can be sustained long enough for a distinctive style of work to emerge. Discipline-building scientist-entrepreneurs and outside facilitators exploit these exceptional conditions within the institutional context as resources for organizing employment, establishing service roles, creating reward systems, and routinizing professional socialization. Frederick G. Hopkins's program of general biochemistry at Cambridge as described by Kohler provides an illustration ofhow political and institutional contexts facilitate the formation of disciplinary programs. 35 Hopkins was one of many biochemists who read the literature on intermediate metabolism and saw the potential for discipline building, yet he was the only one who formulated a systematic disciplinary program. Whereas British biochemists were typically located in physiology departments and worked on problems of chemical physiology and pathology,

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Hopkins, after many years of frustration, succeeded in establishing biochemistry as an independent department. His success was due in large measure to the support he received from a scientist-manager, Walter Fletcher, a former student colleague of Hopkins's in Michael Foster's institute for physiology at Cambridge who had pursued an administrative career as the secretary of the Medical Research Council. The MRC had been established after World War I in response to agitation by a lobby of scientists who exploited fears of German scientific and military power in order to press for increased government support for research in science and medicine. Fletcher believed that utilizing basic knowledge of chemistry and physiology would be the best means for creating a national system of biomedical sciences that would make basic knowledge available to clinical practice. In this context, Fletcher called upon Hopkins to organize nutritional research and to make recent advancements in biochemical knowledge about vitamins available to physicians. Fletcher was also concerned with the biochemistry of infectious diseases, and the experience of the war in the trenches had convinced him of the importance of increasing the numbers of biochemists as a basic requirement for the long-term needs of biomedical science. Inspired by these convictions, Fletcher was able to use his pivotal role as a mediator and coordinator of philanthropic and foundation funding, most notably from the Dunn bequest, in order to create a separate institute for biochemistry at Cambridge. Fletcher's aims were to organize the training of biochemists and to insure that they became leaven to the clinical sciences. In order to facilitate this end, Fletcher was instrumental in establishing a clinical research unit at London Hospital staffed by biochemists trained in Hopkins's Institute. By stimulating both the supply and demand for biochemists, Fletcher intended to generate a market for biochemists within clinical medicine. But Hopkins's own objectives were not confined to clinical medicine, and his own research and the research ofhis laboratory drifted away from problems of relevance to clinical medicine, such as nutrition research. Taking Michael Foster's laboratory as his model, Hopkins appropriated the chemical parts of physiology, pathology, and chemistry as his own preserve and encouraged research on the biological organization of chemical reactions in cells and tissues as a method for addressing the problems of form and function common to biology in general. Hopkins continued to enjoy the support of Fletcher and the MRC, but once his school became established, Hopkins no longer depended financially and

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politically upon service roles to medicine and physiology. Hopkins's own charisma and the institutional resources at his disposal enabled him to create a niche unconstrained by the requirement of addressing problems of immediate clinical relevance, in which innovations could accumulate. The work of Marjory Stephenson at the Dunn Institute illustrates how institutional niches can favor the accumulation of innovations leading to the emergence of research specialties, themselves constituting potential resources for building other, related disciplines. Just as Hopkins's early work in chemical physiology had originally been nurtured within Michael Foster's institute of physiology, Stephenson found encouragement within the Dunn Institute. Originally choosing to work on vitamins and hormones, Stephenson was encouraged by Hopkins to work on bacterial biochemistry. In most British laboratories at the time, she might have been encouraged to develop lines of research with direct and obvious medical relevance. 36 Instead, at the Dunn Institute she was explicitly charged with the task ofshaping a program ofbacterial biochemistry congruent with Hopkins's vision of a comparative biochemistry that brought together the perspectives of enzymology, comparative physiology, and evolutionary biology. Stephenson departed from the perception of bacteria typical among medical chemists in conceiving them as having a complex regulatory physiology rather than as consisting of bags of enzymes. Her biological perspective and training in enzymology enabled her to exploit the opportunity presented by new developments in enzyme adaptation, a hot focal problem in I 9 3o- 3 I following discoveries made by Karstrom, Dubos, and Avery. Work in this area suggested the study of variability and adaptation as the keys to cellular regulation, and she took up the investigation of enzyme adaptation as a strategic experimental system for exploring the primitive stages of the evolution of regulatory mechanisms. In the course of her career leading up to this work, Stephenson had been supported by Hopkins and Fletcher to go outside the Dunn Institute to learn the skills ofbacteriologists in Manchester. She also worked at the Rockefeller Institute and at Cornell, where she learned techniques for isolating pure cultures from single cells. The crucial point is that the Dunn Institute provided a supportive niche in which Stephenson and her research group were able to bring together a variety of skills and techniques as well as the theoretical perspectives of several research fields in a sustained interaction that led to the distinctive new research field of bacterial physiology.3 7 The main elements in the formation of disciplines suggested by

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Kohler's work on the history of biochemistry are: (r) the creation of an institutional niche in which a distinctive style of work is done; (2) the translation and insertion of that style of work into service roles within the existing institutional context as part of a disciplinary program promoted by an institution builder; and (3) the role of ideologies and political goals as well as the constraints of the institutional context in shaping the content of the disciplinary program. Both in Britain and in the United States, special local circumstances were responsible for the early development of general biochemistry. It developed as part of an unusual pattern of institution building, involving a visionary entrepreneur and connections with external patrons. Its survival depended on the preservation of these conditions, for there was no external market demand for general biochemists. Hopkins's disciplinary program was not immediately emulated, and his immediate successors lacked his ability to protect the niche he had carved out. Hopkins was thus the promoter of a disciplinary program, but he was not the father of a discipline. Only after World War II did a new generation of biochemists, some of whom had been trained earlier in the Cambridge Institute, succeed in routinizing Hopkins's vision. The wider availability of government funding diminished the structural importance of service roles in traditional departments of medicine and physiology and opened links to a broader spectrum of biomedical fields, enabling general biochemistry to emerge as the basis of the ·discipline. 38 The example ofbiochemistry illustrates that disciplines are not monolithic structures, but heterogeneous families of social, organizational, and scientific-technical practices packaged as disciplinary programs to take advantage of the allocation of resources within a specifically configured political economy of institutions and neighboring disciplinary fields. Disciplinary programs are strategies for organizing parts of the scientific field through developing channels of recruitment, establishing service roles, training, and building political alliances with neighboring fields. The conditions for success of the program depend, therefore, not only upon the quality of the knowledge and skills produced, but also upon the market for those skills within the political economy of practices. Political and ideological movements affecting the institutional context of science thus play a constitutive role in the power of disciplinary programs. For example, the American movement at the turn of the twentieth century symbolized by the Flexner Report (on the need to reform clinical medicine by introducing basic science into clinical training and practice) created a market for the disciplinary program of clinical biochemistry, while

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general biochemistry, with its biological, physiological, and agricultural orientation, languished until a new environment emerged a generation later in which graduate training for a number of academic scientific specialties increased the variety of service roles a program in biochemistry could exploit beyond those of clinical medicine. 39 The central claims regarding disciplines that I derive from the works of Foucault and Bourdieu are: No one creates disciplines; we ought to examine, instead of monolithic disciplines, disciplinary programs adapted locally to the political economy; disciplinary programs are instruments for defining society by organizing and packaging economies of practice for specific clienteles; disciplinary programs, as institutions demarcating boundaries of expertise and hierarchies of competence, are generated simultaneously within political discourse and ideological discourse, and are therefore best understood as discourses of power as well as instruments ofknowledge production. Outside In: Carl Ludwig and Experimental Physiology The last two examples I will treat focus particularly on the role of disciplinary programs as constitutive elements within political and ideological discourse concerning the definition of society and its goals. I re-examine one of the classic origin myths in the history of scientific disciplines: the role Carl Ludwig and his institute in Leipzig played in shaping physiology as a medical discipline, first within Germany and eventually internationally. For a disciplinary history focused on founder myths and disciplines as monolithic and universalizing institutions, the significance of Ludwig's institute is two-fold. First, the institute has served to support an argument about the autonomy of science pursued um sich seiher willen (for its own sake), independently of either pragmatic economic or politicalideological concerns. According to this view, the competitive German academic system was organized to reward talent, creating a "seller's market'' in which persons like Ludwig could demand institutional and material resources in the form oflaboratories, instruments, and assistants. Only secondarily did these institutions become relevant to disciplinary concerns. In this account, issues related to discipline were not at all constitutive elements of Ludwig's institute. Second, this view sees Ludwig's institute as embodying an integrated approach to physiology, bringing together histology, experimental physiology, and medical chemistry as

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parts of the same enterprise. Here, founder mythology and the conception of science as operating autonomously in a free-market economy are mutually supportive, for by granting the resources Ludwig required to practice his brand of integrated physiology as an inducement to lure him to Leipzig, the Saxon state inadvertently provided the model responsible for the growth of science-based medicine. The perceived relevance of Ludwig's brand of physiology in training physicians made it the standard organizational model for physiology as a medical discipline emulated in numerous sites in Europe and the United States. I want to challenge ~oth of these claims, first, by suggesting that, contrary to legend, Ludwig was not the author of this integrated approach to the field, and that it may be problematic to think of him as authorial subject of his own institute in Leipzig; and second, by underscoring the discipline-constituting interactions between the political economy and the efforts of institution builders to define society. 40 Just as Kohler found that at the Dunn Institute in Cambridge a niche for bacterial physiology existed before Stephenson had worked out the program to fill it, I find that in Leipzig a niche for an integrated approach to the discipline existed before Ludwig drew up the blueprint for his institute. Although the specific organization of the institute and its cognitive program were established in close consultation with Ludwig, the general shape of that institute was worked out before Ludwig came to Dresden to negotiate with the Saxon minister of culture and education, Falkenstein, in January I 86 5. To understand the reasons for this conjuncture of political niche and institution building, we must look to the political econmny. In the 186os a

new ideological climate began to prevail in most German states. This ideology reflected the growing consensus among the ruling aristocratic and bureaucratic elites that the "productive segments of the middle classes" (as the elites referred to the new entrepreneurial and industrial leadership) had to be incorporated into the structure of power. The general mood, represented in numerous articles in the popular press and political journals, rejected the reactionary and repressive political tactics of the post-I848 period to pursue what was described as the "politics of material interests." The new consensus was that by attending to their economic problems, improving production and charting a course for industrialization, German states would solve their political problems as well. Falkenstein, who as minister of finance in the pre- I 848 period had advocated liberal projects such as constructing railroads and the Zoll-

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verein (Customs Union), was convinced that the best path was Justus Liebig's prescription for harnessing science to the needs of agriculture, industry, and medicine. The opportunity to fill a chair of chemistry vacated in I 86 3 provided Falkenstein with an opening to implement this organizational plan. Falkenstein's chief criterion for the position was that the professor be primarily an organic chemist, and while he hoped the new appointee would stimulate local industry, Falkenstein's principal goal was to create an institutional synergy between chemistry and medicine. One of Falkenstein's major objectives as an institution builder was to strengthen the program of clinical medicine at Leipzig. Carl Wunderlich, the director of the Leipzig clinic, was one of the leading lights in the new science-based medicine. He labeled his own disciplinary program "physiological medicine," and was intent upon establishing a close relationship between physiological theory and medical practice. In the I 86os Wunderlich was deep into his work on clinical thermometry, and was pressing hard to gain the appointment of a physiological chemist interested in developing chemical diagnostic techniques as well as teaching medical students how to think chemically. Because the medical faculty was the main source of the student clientele in Leipzig, Falkenstein was keen to accommodate Wunderlich's program in order to strengthen the medical faculty and its links with the clinic. With the imminent retirement of the professor of anatomy and physiology, Ernst Heinrich Weber, Falkenstein created this opportunity by splitting the two subjects into separate chairs. Falkenstein proposed that Weber continue to teach anatomy and that a search for a young, high-powered physiologist be undertaken. As the appropriate candidate, Falkenstein proposed Vienna's Carl Ludwig. The discussion thus far illustrates that interdependencies between disciplinary neighbors within a local context can structure a niche within which a particular disciplinary style can flourish. We also see the role of outside facilitators in bringing the selective forces of the political economy to a pragmatic focus. I turn now to the creator of the disciplinary program itself, Carl Ludwig. Apart from Ludwig's own growing fame as a physiologist, there were good reasons why he would have appealed to Wunderlich, whose advice was crucial to Falkenstein. Ludwig was perhaps the leading pioneer in the development of the grapbic method in physiology, a method Wunderlich was beginning to adopt in his own approach to clinical thermometry. Ludwig's work style resembled what Wunderlich was promoting as "phys-

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iological medicine." From Wunderlich's point of view, Ludwig could serve as a resource for further developing Wunderlich's own disciplinary program. Actually, before coming to Leipzig, Ludwig had paid scant attention to the medical implications of his work. But he was working on problems in respiration, heartbeat, and kidney function, all of which interested scientifically trained clinicians, and Wunderlich in particular. In light of these considerations it is not surprising that Carl Ludwig's was the only name on the list of candidates for the directorship of the new physiological institute. Ludwig was the only German physiologist who met both the disciplinary and the institutional needs in Leipzig. Other outstanding physiologists-Helmholtz and Du Bois-Reymond, for example-were quite open about their interest in the position. But neither of these men shared the integrated view of physiology that increasingly surfaced in Ludwig's work. Critical in the crystallization of Ludwig's integrated approach to physiology, however, was a political strategy for its concrete realization, a strategy that transformed an evolving cognitive program into a resource for the construction of a disciplinary program. Constandy frustrated by the inadequate facilities for expanding his style of physiology in Vienna, Ludwig, more than the other professed members of the reductionist school, began to appreciate the importance of placing his physiology in the service of medicine rather than defending its relevance as a philosophical discipline; his letters from r 864, just prior to beginning negotiations with Falkenstein, contain frequent references to the potential fruitfulness of working more closely with clinicians. By the early r 86os Ludwig was developing a style of physiology much

broader in orientation and methodology than the original physical reductionist program he had enunciated together with Du Bois-Reym