The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science

297 Pages·1995·23.4 MB·English

by  Andrew Pickering

The Mangle of Practice

The Mangle
of Practice
Time, Agency, and Science
Andrew Pickering
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Andrew Pickering is professor of sociology, criticism, and interpretive theory at the Uni
versity of Illinois. He is the author of Constructing Quarks and the editor of Science as
Practice and Culture, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1995 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1995
Printed in the United States of America
04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 95 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN: 0-226-66802-9 (cloth)
0-226-66803-7 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pickering, Andrew.
The mangle of practice : time, agency, and science / Andrew
Pickering.
p. cm.
Includes bibiliographical references and index.
1. Science-Philosopy. 2. Science-Social aspects. I. Title.
Q175.P522 1995
501-dc20 94-44546
CIP
@ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the Ameri
can National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Li
brary Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
For Thomad ano Alex

Contents
Preface ix
1 The Mangle of Practice / 1
1.1 Science as Practice and Culture / 1
1.2 Representation and Performativity / 5
1.3 Agency and Emergence / 9
1.4 The Mangle of Practice / 21
1.5 More on the Mangle / 27
PART ONE
INSTANTIATIONS
2 Machines: Building the Bubble Chamber / 37
2.1 Building the Bubble Chamber / 38
2.2 The Mangle and Material Agency / 50
2.3 The Mangle and Intent / 54
2.4 The Mangle and the Social/58
2.5 Actors, Interests, and Constraints / 63
3 Facts: The Hunting of the Quark / 68
3.1 The Hunting of the Quark / 71
3.2 Emergence and Posthumanism in Empirical Practice / 90
3.3 Multiplicity, Heterogeneity, and Association / 93
3.4 Representational Chains / 96
3.5 Discipline / 101
VII
Vlll CONTENTS
4 Concepts: Constructing Quaternions / 113
4.1 Disciplinary Agency / 114
4.2 From Complex Numbers to Triplets / 121
4.3 Constructing Quaternions / 126
4.4 Concepts and the Mangle / 139
4.5 Science and the Mangle / 144
4.6 Postscript: Mathematics, Metaphysics, and the Social / 147
5 Technology: Numerically Controlled Machine Tools / 157
5.1 Numerically Controlled Machine Tools / 158
5.2 The Mangle and the Social / 165
5.3 The Mangle, Social Theory, and Limits / 169
PART TWO
ARTICULATIONS
6 Living in the Material World / 179
6.1 Realism / 180
6.2 Incommensurability / 186
6.3 Knowledge and Us / 192
6.4 Objectivity / 194
6.5 Relativity / 201
6.6 Historicity / 208
7 Through the Mangle / 213
7.1. Antidiscipline: A New Synthesis / 214
7.2 Cultural Studies and the Mangle / 217
7.3 Performativity and Historiography: The Big Picture / 229
7.4 Macromangling / 234
7.5 Postscript: Nonstandard Agency / 242
7.6 Postscript: The TOE Mangle / 246
References 253
Index 275
Preface
One good thing about writing a book is that you get two tries at the
introduction. Chapter 1 is a self-contained preview of the issues that
concern me, how I propose to address them, and what I think my ex
amples show. Here I take a more biographical route. It might help in
reading the book to have an idea of how it arrived at its present shape.
I have been fascinated for a long time by knowledge. Since my school
days, I have wondered about how knowledge relates to the world
about the problematic of realism, as philosophers call it. Having gained
quite a bit of knowledge, eventually as an elementary-particle theorist,
in 1976 I joined the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh,
where I discovered that there were other people like me. The unit was
one of the centers of a small community of people developing a sociol
ogy of scientific knowledge, and I tried as best I could to join in the
absorbing but very difficult arguments that swirled around that topic. I
worked through several case studies of my former discipline and finally
wrote a book on it, Constructing Quarks (1984). By the time of that
book, I had come to the conclusion that it was no use trying to think
about knowledge in isolation. To understand why people believed what
they did, it seemed one had to understand how specific items of knowl
edge fitted in with the practice of their producers and users. Indeed,
Constructing Quarks tried to display the historical development of par
ticle physics over a twenty-year period as instantiating a simple model
of scientific practice. After the book, I was left with one nagging con
cern. The problem I started with had not been solved. I now felt clear
enough on how knowledge related to people, but not on how it related
to the world (except that it was implausible to imagine that scientific
ix