Fundamento de la gravimetría

to discuss.

(Hacking 1999: vii) One of the crucial issues to arise from the problems discussed in 1.6concerns the relation between the natural and the human sciences. Broadly speaking, we may characterise the issue thus: if Williams’s account is correct, then the cultural sciences focus on different enti- ties altogether than the natural sciences; if, conversely, McLuhan’s concerns become the model of the cultural analysis of technological entities, then no such division of the ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ sciences is viable. Since the 1980s, the character of this division of scientific labour has received renewed focus through the field known as Science and Technology Studies (STS). This simple fact attests to the crucial relevance of the McLuhan–Williams debates, which continue, as we shall see, to map the available positions in this newer field. The problem with a media studies that follows Williams’s model of ‘cultural science’ is that it eliminates any relationship at all between cultural and natural phenomena. Because STS has drawn renewed attention to this problem, it is a corrective to any presumed insulation of cultural from natural phenomena.

This is not to argue, however, that all practitioners of STS occupy the McLuhanite posi- tion; quite the contrary. The historian Steven Shapin, for instance, a notable participant in the STS debates, announces ‘I take it for granted that science is a historically situated and social activity’ (Shapin 1996: 7). Although he may take this for granted, Shapin nevertheless deemed a statement of this fact to be necessary. It is the fact of the statementthat is impor- tant to the constitution of STS. Accordingly, it will be helpful to characterise STS as that field for which the relation of the natural and cultural sciences remains a problem, and STS itself therefore as a problem field. A brief examination of howthese problems have been discussed will therefore provide a useful outline of STS from its inception to its more recent forms.

STS is generally held to have begun with the journal Radical Science(cf. Haraway 1989: 7) and the work of the ‘Edinburgh School’ (see Barnes, Bloor and Henry 1996) in the 1970s, followed by the ‘Bath School’ of what was called the ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’ in the 1980s (see Collins and Pinch 1993).

Although both schools might be broadly characterised as favouring the orientation Williams offers towards a specifically cultural science, arguing (again, generally speaking) for a species of social constructivism (5.1.9–5.1.10), the two founding schools of STS dispute the isolation of cultural from natural science, at least by submitting the latter to cultural analy- sis. Importantly, while thereby relativising the practice of science to historical and social locations, neither school advocates the extension of such a constructivism to the conclusions reached by those sciences. Rather, they seek to demonstrate that while the social domain importantly includesthe address to physical nature, and while this fact entails the applicabil- ity of sociological modes of analysis to scientific practices and institutions, it does not entail that natural phenomena are therefore nothing more than cultural products.

An instructive example of the approach of these schools is provided by Barnes’ Interests and the Growth of Knowledge(1977) and Collins and Pinch’s Frames of Meaning: the Social Construction of Extraordinary Science(1982). These works follow the philosopher of science

Imre Lakatos (1970) in proposing that sociological constraints (teaching and research insti- tutions, politics, funding, and so forth) play a decisive role in establishing scientific research programmes. This means that there is no such thing as pure research into nature, since such research is always conducted under the auspices of social pressures. Facing this problem, however, scientists differentiate between what is internal and what external to scientific prac- tice and research, insulating a scientific ‘core’ from a social ‘periphery’. What became known, following David Bloor (1991: 3–23) as the ‘Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge’ therefore seeks to demonstrate the socially and scientifically complex ‘framing’ of scientific cores, and to draw out what this means for the constitution of scientific knowledge. However, acknowledging this social dimension to the construction of scientific research programmes is entirely different, as Hacking (1999: 68) notes, to ‘doubting the truth . . . of propositions widely received in the natural sciences’. Science studies actual nature, albeit in an irreducibly social context.

Its influence on Cultural Studies in North America is marked (often through the work of Donna Haraway), though its emphasis on the operations and agency of technology and other material phenomena marks its difference from the articulations of technology and the human usually offered by the (social constructionist – see below) humanities and social sciences. Anne Balsamo (1998) and Jennifer Slack and J. Macgregor Wise (2002) offer accounts of the influence of STS on North American Cultural Studies. It has yet to register significantly in British Cultural Studies and has – as yet – had little to say on computers, and next to noth- ing on popular media or media technologies. It does though offer rich theoretical resources for theorising relationships and agency in popular new media and technoculture.

The approach pioneered by these sociologists of scientific knowledge remains very much alive, as illustrated by the opening of archaeologist and STS contributor Marcia-Anne Dobres’ Technology and Social Agency: ‘This is a book about technology. It is therefore, first and foremost a book about people’ (Dobres 2000: 1). Just as Dobres’ forerunners did not extend the social construction of scientific research programmes to a socially constructed natural world, Dobres does not think that the priority she considers must be accorded human actions and intentions in the analysis of a technology-rich environment entails that all agents are nec- essarily human. In ‘making and remaking of the material world’ is included the manufacture of agents (2000: 3). Similarly, although Dobres is clear that her book is primarily concerned with people and their interaction – with, that is, the cultural dimension – this culturalist per- spective must be augmented, ‘as all archaeologists know’, by the materialdimensions of culture. In consequence, Dobres’ book ‘places special emphasis on the intertwined social- ity and materiality of technology’ (2000: 7; emphasis added); she proposes, that is, that culture is necessarily informed by its physical (natural and technological) context. Clearly, it is the combination of attention to physical and social reality that distinguishes these approaches.

Many notable recent contributions to STS have followed Bruno Latour (1993) in taking as their focus the problem of how exactly this combination occurs. Although Latour began his contributions to STS with a constructionist focus on the function of inscription in science (cf. Latour and Woolgar 1979), in subsequent work he has pursued what he calls ‘a more real- istic realism’ (1999: 15), developing what has become known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT). ANT is premissed on two main points: that social actors are not exclusively human; and that it is not things but networksthat constitute actors, human and non-human. It is pre- cisely because the human and social sciences take it for granted that social agency is exclusively human that Latour’s first thesis strikes many in those fields as ‘treacherous’, as he puts it (1999: 18). To be a social actor is, for such sciences, to be capable of reason, and

therefore of choice. At root, agency rests on a notion of free will, that is, of a will uncon- strained by physical causes external to it. Since technological artefacts are incapable of such a will, they cannot be social agents. Latour’s counter to this is that social networks, the envi- ronments in which humans act, are already technological, physical, andcultural, opening We Have Never Been Modernwith a list of the items singled out for attention in an edition of a daily newspaper: strikes, the threats of war and famine, transportation systems, the HIV virus, photographs taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, political speeches, sports, arts, and so on. Realistically, reality is made up of networksof human and non-human things, rather than being divided into entities that are or are not agents regardless of their contexts. Latour’s work therefore moves from the constructionist focus of Williams’s cultural science to the socially determining pole occupied by McLuhan.

While ANT proposes that reality is made up of nature and culture, rather than one or the other, it arguably does not answer, as Sardar (2000: 41) has noted, the question of ‘the degree to which . . . construction’ is constrained by some objective reality ‘out there’. In con- sequence, ‘science wars’ still rage, polarising the sciences and the humanities so that, as Hacking (1999: vii) sadly notes, ‘you almost forget that there are issues to discuss’ – almost, but not quite. STS has become a vibrant critical forum for the important exchanges between the natural and the human and social sciences, capable of combining with important phe- nomena such as stem-cell research or the ‘visible human project’ (Biagioli 1999 is a superb anthology showing the diversity and energy of contemporary Science Studies) from scientific, historical and cultural perspectives

It is precisely because STS reorients cultural attention towards its forgotten physical dimension that it reveals the contemporary impotance of the debate between McLuhan and Williams. Rather, therefore, than amounting merely to an interesting historical curiosity, these debates are core to the future of cultural and media studies. It is precisely because Williams’s account of cultural science crucially informs the settled form of cultural and media studies, that STS highlights the ‘blind spots’ (5.1.1) and assumptions inherent in such approaches to technology. STS not only provides an important corrective to such approaches, but becomes a vital contributor to the cultural study of physical and technological phenomena.

Among the issues that remain in the light of this brief history of STS, the problem of the precise relation between nature and culture remains to be interrogated. If, according to ANT, social networks are assembled from technological, physical, political, intentional and discur- sive elements, do these networks themselves owe their existence to nature or to culture? Are some elements more essential than others? Even if we assume that networks have priority over elements (that is, that elements do not exist without the networks that make them), we still do not know whether these networks can be said to exist without culture. Although there- fore ANT provides what many agree is a ‘realistic’ and thought-provoking description of reality, the question Latour’s ‘more realistic realism’ has yet satisfactorily to answer, concerns reality itself.