pinch pickering

Andrew Pickering; Keith Guzik (Editors). The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming .The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming by Andrew Pickering; Keith GuzikReview by: By Trevor PinchIsis, Vol. 101, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 460-462Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655746 .Accessed: 18/05/2013 02:21

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Isis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 120.28.126.235 on Sat, 18 May 2013 02:21:57 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

malism and the Radiation of the Animals follows adifferent, more forthrightly argued, pattern. Here,Sterelny tackles what was a widespread view ofmacroevolution in fairly recent times, minimal-ism. This is the viewwhich, as Sterelnynotes, is a close cousin of the selfish geneviewthat macroevolutionary changes are sim-ply a large-scale version of microevolutionaryones. Sterelny examines the well-known allegedcase against minimalism based on the BurgessShale fossils with a careful and critical eye. Buthe then argues against minimalisms ability toaccommodate all of what John Maynard Smithand Eors Szathmary call the major transitionsin evolutionfor example, the emergence ofmulticellular animals (The Major Transitions inEvolution, [Freeman, 1995]). Many of thesetransitions, Sterelny argues, need to be ex-plained in terms of changes in the developmen-tal matrix rather than in the frequency of genes;as he puts it, microevolution is the explorationof possibility, but the major transitions are theexpansion of possibility (p. 188). I would saythat Sterelnys article is one of the best in thebook. Tim Lewenss article, Adaptation ishighly commendable for similar reasons.

Less commendable is the tendency of somecontributors to discuss their allotted topics inways that apparently reflect their own philo-sophical preoccupations, leading to results thatare somewhat idiosyncratic for a volume that issupposedly an overview. For example, MaureenKearneys article, Philosophy and Phylogenet-ics frames a discussion of the disputes betweencladists and their opponents in terms of time-honored philosophers of sciences disputesabout scientific methodologyfalsificationism,verificationism, Bayess theorem, and so forth.But it is not at all clear to me why these latterdisputes are particularly relevant specifically tothe issue of phylogenetics any more than to anyother scientific issue, including most of thosediscussed in this book. At one point, Kearneytells us, one of the main arguments againstBayesian inference methods in phylogeneticshas been the selection of prior probabilities,which are subjective (p. 221). But I wouldhave thought that this is one of the mainarguments against Bayesian inference meth-ods tout court, and not especially in relation tophylogenetics.

Many people outside philosophy of biologyoften wonder why the field does not have moreto say about bioethical issues, in particular thoseto do with fertility, embryonic research, and thelike. It is certainly true that bioethicists wouldoften profit from knowing what philosophers ofbiology say that is of relevance to their field. It

is good, then, to see Jane Maienscheins articleWhat is an Embryo and How Do WeKnow? which should prove extremely valuablefor bioethicists. This is another article that Iwould say is one of the best in the book.

The editors deserve high praise for their ju-dicious choices of authors to cover the varioustopics. David Buller and Andre Ariew, for ex-ample, were excellent choices to cover evolu-tionary psychology and teleology respectively,and their contributions do not disappoint. Oneworry I have is that it is unclear what potentialaudience the book is intended for, or what au-dience it would be suited for. On the one hand,the overview nature of the articles suggests thatthey are intended for non-specialistsperhapsstudents or philosophers and scientists who areunfamiliar with the philosophy of biology andwould like to know more about it. It has alwaysbeen my understanding that this was the purposeof the Cambridge Companion series as a whole.But on the other hand, many of the articles arealso highly technical and involve disputes that,however important they may be, are likely to bereadily comprehensible to few but specialists.Moreover, some articles, such as the one byKearney mentioned above, are rather laden withunexplained technical jargon. However, a per-sistent and patient reader who has access to anup-to-date biological dictionary will derive a lotof information from this volume, and it providesa detailed snapshot of a field in what appears tobe a period of transition.

BRIAN GARVEY

Andrew Pickering; Keith Guzik (Editors). TheMangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becom-ing. xiv 306 pp., illus. Durham and London:Duke University Press, 2008. $23.95 (paper).Every so often Science Studies conjures up abody of work which might putatively interest awider range of scholars. Andrew Pickeringsearlier book, The Mangle of Practice (1995),was such a volume. Pickering used that book todraw a wedge between conventional sciencestudies approaches, such as the EdinburghStrong Program in which he had been trained, todevelop a new approach known as the mangle.The old approach was cast as a representa-tional idiom, treating scientific observations asmatters of human interpretation, thereby firmlyfalling within the camp of humanism; the newapproach adopted an active performative idiomto treat ongoing practices by scientists as ac-commodating to material resistances in an on-going process of emergencethe dance of

460 BOOK REVIEWSISIS, 101 : 2 (2010)


agency between humans and non-humans hecalls the mangle.

Pickerings mangle is one of several posthu-manist approaches developed by scholars suchas Katherine Hayles, Marilyn Strathern, DonnaHaraway, and Bruno Latour and Michel Callon.The posthumanist move usually ascribes someform of agency, and often rights, to nature andanimals. Posthumanism has been given freshimpetus by animal rights advocates and thewider environmental movement for whom thepractical and political problems of delineatingand disentangling the human from the naturalare legion.

This edited volume includes a new essay byPickering as well as several essays by his formerstudents and other scholars that explore furtherimplications of the mangle. The scattershot ofcase studies cover the relationships between hu-mans and wildfires, changes in the technologyof pig farming, new practices of policing domes-tic violence, rational expectation theory in eco-nomics, Chinese medicine, encroachment of thesea upon an ancient church in Denmark, andlastly, in Pickerings own essay, the mangle-ish paintings of de Kooning (contrasted withMondrian) and the Mississippi river and its re-lationship to the city of New Orleans.

One of the questions addressed is whether themangle is, as suggested in Pickerings earlierbook, a theory of everything. Pickering makesclear that by a theory of everything he did notmean a set of equations that would solve everyproblem. Rather the goal is to show that there issomething demonstrably wrong with the hege-monic mainstream interpretative frameworks inthe humanities and social sciences, preciselythat they obscure the posthuman coupling be-tween people and things and the omnipresenceof temporal emergence and becoming (p. viii).The route Pickering offers to pull back the veil(his gendered metaphor) from the modernist du-alism between humans and nature, in order todecenter the analysis of practice relative toboth humans and non-humans, is to locate suchstudies amidst the thick of things, or to gowith the flow, and learn from the experimen-talism of the 1960s. A dash of New Ageism andreferences to Buddhism and Hinduism completethe picture. The dance of agency is revealed asnever before for its countercultural roots and isbest consumed with maximum inhalation.

Pickerings posthumanism is actually quiteconservative. He postulates, unlike Latour andCallon, that only humans can have intentions,although as Carol J. Steiner points out in herimaginary dialogue between Pickering and Hei-degger (time for another spliff), Heidegger

would question this notion of intentionality. Butonce one has got the idea that humans interactwith non-humans and accommodate to them inthe course of practices (the dance) leading tonew emergences, one is left very much with aso-what feel. I tried substituting the word re-lationship for dance of agency and found itworks pretty well. Going with the flow seemsto be merely the recommendation that in study-ing ongoing practices one needs to understandthe relationship between humans (with their dis-ciplines, interests, and so on) and nonhumans.

Several of the authors in this collection them-selves worry about the dance metaphorifchoreography is the way to go then surely thedance steps need to be delineated further? But abigger problem lurks here. There are far morenon-humans in the world than humans and alsomyriad different ways whereby humans andnonhumans interact. This problem means thatsimply locating yourself in the thick of thingswill not alone be enough. What is needed issome sort of methodological strategy to get usbeyond the Wow man, its the dance of agency!discovery. Reflexive mangling or moral ontologymoves, such as coming down on the side of non-humans, wont work as Casper Bruun Jensen andRandi Markussen point out in their perceptive es-say examining many of the approaches on offer inthe volume. They criticize Pickerings provocativeproposal to side with nature and just allow theMississippi River to follow its natural course.Even if one could intentionally enter a process ofbecoming, once the dualism between becomingand stasis has been abandoned, it seems unclearhow one could consistently side with one side oranother of a false dualism.

Several of the authors in this book enlist Hei-deggers theory of technology which contrastedthe Greek notion of poeisis with the enframingcharacter of modern technology. Appeals to a pre-modern ontology or offering a non-modern ontol-ogy as Pickering does, all in contrast to modernistdualisms, seem to resurrect problems of positingnew dualisms (as Barbara Hernstein-Smith hasnoted). It seems more productive to start to trackdifferent ontologies as they unfold, but then thespecifics of the case studies and the different sortsof non-humans involved become crucial, and weare back into the thick of science studies. Episte-mology will, of course, not go away. How do weknow which non-humans to focus upon, and whattheir relationships with us are?

Paradoxically, one way forward may comefrom the social sciences (such as criminologyand sociology) that usually handle the humans.Thinking about how specific, well-studied hu-man practices change in quite specific contexts

BOOK REVIEWSISIS, 101 : 2 (2010) 461


makes for one of the best essays in the book:Keith Guziks study of new policing methodsbetter aimed at dealing with violence towardswomen. He nicely shows how the police in re-sponding to calls have evolved new practicesthat use the materiality of the homes they visit ininteresting new ways. This nuanced study en-ables concerns with materiality and how it fig-ures in interaction, to be tied in with more tra-

ditional themes such as changing notions of thepublic and private.

Materiality and performativity are key con-cerns of science studies and ought to be for otherhumanities and social sciences. Whether thewide array of areas and topics covered in thisbook really need mangle studies is still anemerging question.

TREVOR PINCH

462 BOOK REVIEWSISIS, 101 : 2 (2010)


pinch pickering

Documents