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Karin Knorr-Cetina: The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory: On the Relationship between Experiment and Laboratory in Science
Science as Practice and Culture. A. Pickering (ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 113-138

Notes:
In course of the reorientation in sociology which brought the core scientific activities into light, the laboratory as a concept jumped from a state of complete neglect to being the centre of the analysts attention The notion of a laboratory stands in many ways for stands for what in history and methodology of science has long been the notion of an experiment. o Is there a theoretically interesting difference? Or does it both merely signify an orientation to knowledge production? The paper has two parts: o 1) Summarization of the theoretical relevance of the notion of a laboratory Not just the physical space, where experiments are conducted Carries a systematic weight in our understanding of science linked to the reconfiguration of natural and social order o 2) Exploration of how the instrumental shape of laboratories differ across the scientific landscape Association with a technology of experimentation Theoretical relevance of laboratories: The malleability of natural objects o It seems that experiments have until recently carried much of the epistemological burden in explaining the validity of scientific results and rational belief in science. An experiment has been supporting the validity of scientific knowledge methodologically: Through disentangling variables and testing in isolation; comparison and replication; excluding experimenters bias Capable of (dis)establishing hypotheses and decide between theories (crucial exp.) Remained largely unexamined o The laboratory under the sociological scrutiny Experiment laboratory :: methodology cultural activity of science Allowed to take into consideration the experimental activity within the context of equipment and symbolic practices within which the conduct of science is located Full picture of knowledge production It showed that scientific objects are not only "technically" manufactured in laboratories but are also inextricably symbolically or politically construed through the political stratagems of scientists in forming alliances and mobilizing resources, or through the selections and decision translations which "build" scientific findings from within. the awareness that in reaching its goals, research "intervenes" (draws from?) not only in the natural world but also in the social world. Products of science have to be seen as cultural entities rather than natural givens discovered by science 1

simon.fiala@seznam.cz The laboratory opened up as a venue of abundance of cultural practices (transgressing mere concerns with methodology or organization) a new field of investigation along with a framework for analysing it BUT: The laboratory itself became a theoretical notion in understanding of science An important agent of science Imply a reconfiguration of system of self-other-things of the phenomenal field in which experience is made within science Temporarily changes the structure of symmetry relationships which obtains between the social order and the natural order, between actors and environments. In ways which yield epistemic profit for science. The reconfiguration of system of self-other-things Merleau-Ponty: The system of self-other-things is the world-experienced-by or the world-related-to agents Laboratory studies suggest that laboratory is a means of changing the world-relatedto-agents in ways which allow scientists to capitalize on their human constraints and sociocultural restrictions The laboratory is an enhanced environment which improves upon the natural order in relation to the social order Laboratories extract and change objects. They work with object images or with their visual, auditory, electrical, etc., traces, with their components, their extractions, their purified versions Three features that the laboratory does not need to accommodate o The object as it is less literal or partial substitute suffices o The object where it is anchored in the natural environment o The event when it happens artificial occurrences, simulations The laboratory brings objects home o The detachment of the objects from a natural environment and their installation in a new phenomenal field defined by social agents. Laboratories upgrading the natural order Astronomy o Deployment of imaging technology science surveying natural phenomena becomes a science which processes images of natural phenomena in laboratories Detaches objects of study from their natural environment Miniaturizes through making literal Stellar time scales become social-order time scales. Available to anyone at all time o Yet astronomy has not become an experimental science merely a laboratory science Objects are removed from natural conditions, their analysis is subject to contingencies of local situations only Processes are brought home, subject only to local conditions of the social order natural conditions subjected to social overhaul o Laboratory derives its epistemic effects from enculturation of natural objects 2

simon.fiala@seznam.cz Laboratories upgrading the social order o Social often considered as extraneous to science Bloor: Only the incorrect scientific facts are being explained sociologically The new sociology of science (Latour): stress on interweaving of social and scientific interests social and political strategies considered and part of scientific conduct o The social is not also there it is being capitalized upon and upgraded to become an instrument of scientific work o Laboratories synchronise the social and natural in the phenomenal field in which scientific knowledge is produced Create reconfigured workable objects in relation to agents Installs reconfigured feasible scientists in relations to these objects agents enhanced in various ways so as to fit a particular emerging order of self-other-things, a particular ethnomethodology of a phenomenal field New emerging order, which is neither social nor natural, an order whose components have mixed genealogies and continue to change shapes as the work goes on That is local to the laboratory, but cannot be quite contained o A scientist deploys intentionality in order to resolve circular relationship between procedure and outcome: to optimize a methodological procedure one would have to know its outcome, but of course to get to know the outcome is the whole point of optimizing the procedure. Scientists function as instruments or collective bodies within the laboratory Types of reconfigurations: from laboratory to experiment o Where experiments come into the picture: Experiments embody and respond to reconfigurations of the natural and social order, which are shaped in relation to the kind of work that goes on in a particular laboratory o Experiments and laboratories become very different entities and enter different kind of relationships in various scientific fields They can encompass more-or-less distinctive, more-or-less independent activities They can be assembled into separate characters which confront and play upon each other, or disassembled to the degree to which they appear to be mere aspects of one another o There are diverse meanings of "experiment" and "laboratory" which are indicated in different reconfigurations Differential significance and mutual relationships in three situations differentiated by whether they use: A technology of representation o The objects are representations of real-world phenomena 3

simon.fiala@seznam.cz A technology of treatments and interventions o O: processed partial versions A technology of signification o O: signatures Not meant to signify an essential difference rather a categorization Experiments (almost) without laboratory: construing objects as representations E.g. a sand table used by the Prussian generals The modern equivalent is a computer simulation; the computer being the lab Experiments in social sciences E.g. a mock jury Often very simple laboratories Problem: generalizable? All relevant respects ought to come close to perceived real-time processes o Design of experimental reality exemplifies and deploys a technology of representation The entitivity of the simulating laboratory The laboratory exists only when it is activated, otherwise it is a room o The laboratory is a virtual space, mostly coexisting with the experiment Laboratories come of age: the construal of objects as processing materials E.g. cathedral builders using actual building as instrumental prototypes System of surveillance designed to locate and build upon previous mistakes Experimenting with design manipulation with the object under study E.g. contemporary molecular genetics Not attempting to build a representation of real-time processes somewhere else. Rather trying to extract and modify relevant substances Deploys and implements technology of manipulation Treats natural objects as processing materials, as transitory object states Objects are decomposable entities, working material, ingredients The main thread of the laboratory is the processing program o They generate or explore effects The entitivity of the interfering laboratory Continual existence of a laboratory as a distinct entity o A workshop and a nursery o Surrounded by technical devices o Continuously feeds into the experimentation Social and political structures with highly refined division of labour o Two-tier structure emerges: laboratory level and experimental level The entitivity of an experiment, however, is short and is dissolved in the working of the laboratory Parts of larger networks A laboratory is located within a circuit. Through the traffic researchers exchange of material, information, results, personnel, 4

simon.fiala@seznam.cz Not even the wider circuit of material, surveillance and information is wholly contained - has implications beyond the borders of a lab if the laboratory has come of age as a continuous and bounded unit that encapsulates internal environments, it has also become a link between internal and external environments, a border in a wider traffic of objects and observations o Laboratories vs. experiments: when objects are signs E.g. psychoanalysis symptoms are indicators of deeper processes in play, traced by a complicated detour It is not processing material objects but processing signs; it is reconstructing the meaning and origin of representations. E.g. CERN particle physics Reconstruction of underlying processes using statistical methods In particle physics experiments the natural order is reconfigured as an order of signs, which shapes the whole scientific procedure Particle physics: A closed universe in which knowledge derives from the internal reconstruction of "external" events The use of language as a plastic resource and with its play upon shifts between language games as a technical instrument in reconstruction As they reconstruct an external world from signs, they constantly transcendthrough their play upon languagesign-related limitations o a language-transcending technology of signification New separation between laboratory and experiment: the laboratory becomes technically, organizationally, and socially divorced from the conduct of experiments CERN: laboratory provides a collider, experimenters design, maintain and run detectors segregated providers and interceptors of signs Organizationally, science is conducted in experiments, while laboratories provide the (infra) structure for the conduct of science Sharp division of labour - Experiments become relatively closed, total units, and laboratories become total institutions o internal life world encapsulated within experiments o represent a tremendous political force The configuration model claims that science derives epistemic effects from a particular reconfiguration of the natural order in relation to the social order, from, for example, reconfiguring agents and objects in ways which draw upon, yet at the same time transcend, natural courses of activities and events. o Diverse features, various reconfigurations o Various sciences endorse different strategies of construction of their objects In terms of laboratory-experiment relations which respond to these constructions, some sciences display themselves as experimental sciences which manage almost without laboratories, others appear to be laboratory sciences in which experiments dissolve into streams of research tasks continuous with laboratory work, and some are sciences in which laboratories and experiments are institutionally separate units which enter into "uneasy partnerships" with each other

simon.fiala@seznam.cz We need to understand the transformations of natural and social orders of the wider context in which and onto which laboratories are built o Huserl: Science tends to forget its rootedness in everyday life o Everyday life a common ground sciences share with everything else