Doing Science + Culture

Roddey Reid, Sharon Traweek, Roddey Reid, Sharon Traweek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135221638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Doing Science + Culture is a groundbreaking book on the cultural study of science, technology and medicine. Outstanding contributors including life and physical scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, literature/communication scholars and historians of science who focus on the analysis of science and scientific discourses within culture: what it means to "do" science.

1/Transnational Science and Globalization

Faultlines

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Sharon Traweek

About 125 years ago west European intellectual debates, modes of argument, and classifications of knowledge began to circulate globally through the new research universities that were established on the European model in most of their then current and former colonies, as well as in some countries eager to emulate the powerful Europeans. Smart, educated people around the world began to learn to have the same standards and tastes in the arts, sciences, and ideas. We also learned to believe that our local knowledges were vernacular, decidedly provincial, and “anecdotal,” if not exactly primitive. The name of this set of assumptions about single, universal standards for beauty, truth, and logic has come to be called “modernity.”

As we launch our new debates, modes of argument, classification systems, and modes of inquiry, we have come to see the provinciality of those ideas once thought to be universal or, alternatively, exhibiting the highest universal standards. Our violations of the boundaries of the disciplines violate, too, the nineteenth-century hierarchies of those nation-states. One hundred years later some are building ideas in those despised borderlands, without hierarchies, binary oppositions, or categorical thinking. Some political economies, careers, and universities are also moving away from those models, using other organizing strategies. What follows is a sketch of an argument on how knowledge is being defined and made at the edge of the times and places called modernity, all within the confines of my allotted 10,000 words. My gloss on the histories of these ideas are matched with political economies, university structures, careers of professors, and the world of the arts, all of which I see as tightly interwoven. I am particularly interested in the periods when these arrangements become unstable. How do the new patterns and symbols emerge, enabling us to see new compositions and find them satisfying? Who made these new tools, and what do they displace?

The Industrial and Information Revolutions and the Knowledges They Engender

Many economists agree that by 1975 Germany and the United States, then the richest countries of the world, had begun moving away from manufacturing-based and toward information-based economies, where computing is crucial; these countries' manufacturing industries have been increasingly sent to the “third world,” where educational systems are now adequate for producing substantial numbers of industrial workers and industrial managers (as the U.S. and Japanese educational systems were designed to do well over one hundred years ago). The richest countries are now trying to revise their own educational systems so that they can generate information workers and managers instead.

In financial terms this transition in global political economy is marked by the rapid decline in nation-states' ability to control their currencies' exchange rates; computing begins to facilitate the stunning expansion in daily worldwide currency flows, utterly unregulated by nation-states. Subsequent decades see massive innovations in “financial instruments” worldwide. The era is also marked by rapid escalation in the global circulation of popular culture and the marketing of that culture, as well as in the global circulation of human populations of all social positions.

Many political economists also argue that the United States, especially, is about twenty-five years into a political, social, intellectual, and cultural revolution that might be akin to the turmoil at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England. In that period other countries, once smug that their worlds were more stable, have since entered into this turmoil. Germany, due to the costs of unification, is moving more slowly in this direction than it was before the end of the Cold War; Japan is increasing its pace.

I want to recall, for a moment, that earlier revolution. That is, along with the development of a factory system in Manchester, England, from 1775 to 1850, there were many dislocations and realignments of political, social, intellectual, cultural, and economic priorities, criteria, and resources, followed by similar changes throughout England. Cities quintupled in size, new religions formed to comfort the migrants, and social classes took shape, as did new forms of cultural production, constituting and reflecting the new kinds of personae and social worlds that their audiences were experiencing. Similar but interestingly different shifts occurred in France and Germany circa 1825–50, and eventually these practices spread to Japan, Russia, and the United States during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. They have continued to spread to every industrializing region of the world.

These changes occurred differently in different regions of the same country; places that were once insignificant or peripheral became central in a new way. Similarly, relations between these formerly peripheral sites in various countries themselves became powerful webs of connections, surpassing the influence of older ties. Small towns in the New England region of the United States became sites for textile factories, drawing on rivers for power and the local surplus farming population (mostly women) educated well enough for industrial labor. In Japan the same thing was happening at the same time in the farming areas at the edge of the fertile Kanto plain around Tokyo. Textile manufacturing using women factory workers remains a standard device for beginning industrialization, whether in Indonesia or Mexico. The factories continue to be built first where the local population is least in a position to object.

I have become interested in how these massive shifts in political economy affect the kinds of questions intellectuals begin to find interesting at such periods, the kinds of resources amassed to investigate their questions, the kinds of curricular and pedagogical changes generated, and the new modes of investigation. That is, what else is going on when there is a change in what counts as a good question, an interesting mode of inquiry, way of teaching and learning, and the infrastructure needed for pursuing these emerging forms of knowledge making? Who resists these changes; how do they resist?

For instance, many historians have argued that a relationship exists between the kinds of physics and physicists encouraged at Manchester University and the Industrial Revolution, begun in Manchester. Others have said the same about the new kinds of historical research being developed in Germany a few years later. Similarly, the emergence of the academic field of anthropology has been historically situated in that political economy. Intellectually and culturally, during the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s there are clear signs of new kinds of expertise, new kinds of curricula, new kinds of careers, and new kinds of ideas for those who were studying the phenomenal and social worlds. Those once new forms are still in place today in our universities' current organization of disciplines, curricula, examinations, and criteria for promotion.

By the second half of the nineteenth century the richest industrial areas had already begun to turn the rest of the industrializing world into their customers, exporting equipment, techniques, institutions, and social structures globally for manufacturing, finance, government, public health, education, research, transportation, and so on. Simultaneously, a set of initiatives emerged among researchers in various fields to identify universal standards, measures, and criteria for evaluating what had previously been studied as discrete, diverse phenomena. Those in the humanities focused on defining universal standards of beauty in the form of great books and masterpieces of art and music.

The French mathematician and philosopher Auguste Comte coined the word positivism in the 1830s to describe a way of thinking he expected would bring a host of practical benefits to society. The word embraced a certain kind of logic, a certain kind of observation, a certain kind of experimentation, a certain kind of measurement, and a certain kind of analysis. A specific model for the presentation of research began to be widely used in all fields. All of these changes have produced a world we have called “modern.”

Modernity and Industrial Political Economy

Most people in Europe and North America associate the word modern with current, as opposed to traditional, practices. That usage began about 1585 in England, but its meaning then was to differentiate the current approaches from the earlier, medieval and ancient ways. Professional historians of Europe consider the “early modern” period to begin with the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century (1618–48); a mercantile economy begins to thrive in Europe, leading to the formation of new markets, new financial instruments, and new modes of exchange and capital accumulation, as well as the emergence of nation-states to regulate these new economic practices. With “voyages of discovery” many of the emerging European nation-states began to build their worldwide empires; the competition for empires characterized much of the nation-state period. The imperial countries and the nations emulating them controlled empires for the next three centuries. Cities and their bourgeois cultures enlarged and became more complex. Historians argue that the early modern period extends to the French Revolution, and that the “modern” history of Europe begins in 1815 at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when an industrial political economy was launched. Often the “modern period” refers to the entire three and a half centuries since 1648.

Art historians have long used the terms modern and modernist to define a shift during the late nineteenth century away from “classical” subject matter in the arts and toward formal questions about the representation of human visual or aural processes. In the visual arts these questions took the form of experiments that would later come to be called impressionism, pointillism, and cubism. Debates about how to represent the human perception of space and light shaped the visual arts of the industrial world for about seventy-five years; those debates (and the artifacts associated with them) are usually referred to as modernism.

In the same time period literary artists were concerned with issues in the representation of narrative time, as, for example, in the work of Virginia Woof, James Joyce, and Thomas Pynchon. Composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Anton von Webern were concerned with the representation of time and harmony. “Postmodernists” and “poststructuralists” characterize modernism as having certain defining features, including a commitment to the notion of universal standards in logic, values, and aesthetics, standards that now appear to be actually based on specific European traditions.

Of course, many intellectuals, academics, and researchers have not heard of these phenomena and these labels. Many of those people strongly identify with west European modernist values and goals, and they strongly object to the belated news that the modernist period ended four decades ago. Many young intellectuals learned to love the modernist aesthetic during the post—World War II period. Most became familiar with the ideas and aesthetics of modernism when that style moved into popular culture during the 1950s, just as modernist architectural forms and furniture designs became mass produced. When their incomes permitted, they decorated their bodies and their houses modernly. They did not know that the style was already dying, like Camille, when they fell in love with it.

Although few elite artists have produced modernist art since the 1960s, modernist music, painting, architecture, history, and literature obviously are not defunct. We are surrounded in our cities, museums, libraries, and university curricula by modernism's monuments and practices, which remain lucrative. Obviously, my date for the end of modernism refers to the cutting edge, or the most innovative changes. Many aspects of society remain immersed in the earlier values and activities, just as in the eighteenth century many parts of English society remained agricultural thirty to fifty years after the Industrial Revolution began. Consider, for example, the provincial, largely agrarianworld depicted in Jane Austen's novels, sited not many miles from the center of the concurrent industrial revolution. Even so, the readership Austen relied upon for her romantic tales was itself a creation of that industrial revolution: the new middle classes defined themselves in part by a domestic world managed by literate women. Attachment to a certain romanticized nostalgia actually marks the emergence of a new ethos. Further instances of nostalgia defining a new ethos abound: William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites in England, the Green brothers and the Craftsman style in California architecture, and the folk craft movements in Japan all could have happened only in rapidly industrializing societies.

Was it Noël Coward who said that nostalgia is what happens when you lose your sense of irony? By now, with or without irony, modernism has become a retro fad among the cognoscenti (including teenagers) around the world. The most influential of the arts auctioneering firms, such as Sotheby's, have begun to sell surviving modernist works in furniture and the arts at very high prices.

Arts and Sciences at the End of Modernity

To recapitulate, most researchers use modern and postmodern to refer to the social, political, artistic, economic, and intellectual, features of two distinct historical periods in western Europe. In all these arenas the transition out of the modern period occurs between 1960 and 1975. Arts of the second period, 1960 to the present, are considered postmodern, although during the past decade and a half the term contemporary has been often invoked to name the period that comes after modernism.

By the early 1960s a new set of questions began to attract the attention of intellectuals and artists; many in the arts, humanities, and sciences began to challenge the modernist focus on representation and universality. Those activities and artifacts associated with the end of modernism have usually called attention to the process of how the appearance of certain spatial, temporal, or harmonic unities are created. For example, the 1960s saw a strong interest in the “flatness” of the actual surface of images, and in the 1970s much painting focused on reflective surfaces and on images that referred to other images. Visual artists who worked in that period, like the Fluxus group, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Graves, Robert Irwin, and James Turell, remain influential today; those who are alive have continued to be innovative over the subsequent decades.

Because architects work at the intersection of the elite arts, the business world, and public culture, I will illustrate my point with examples from architecture. Architectural postmodernists often called attention to the process of invoking architectural devices from other periods and places; some became intrigued with formulating queries about the details of intersecting surfaces. For example, during the 1960s many architects decided to disrupt the smooth, sleek, regular, reflective surfaces associated with modernist architecture. Some, like Arata Isozaki in Tsukuba and Michael Graves in San Diego, chose to reintroduce classical motifs ironically; Isozaki notes he imagined how his buildings for the center of a new science city would look as ruins. Others, like Renzo Piano in his design for the Pompidou Center in Paris, concentrated at first on puncturing the facades with different, often playful shapes. Yet others began to use local traditional design motifs in their work, rejecting the global uniformity of modernist architecture and design; that movement has been labeled “regional vernacular.”

A few also designed buildings to reveal the means of constructing those smooth, modernist facades used all over the world. Frank Gehry, for one, began to use mass-produced industrial materials openly and inventively, playfully calling attention to the mass production of modernist design. These 1960s movements all had their analogs in the other ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Researching Researchers
• 1/Transnational Science and Globalization
• 2/Emerging Subjects
• 3/Postdisciplinary Pedagogies and Programs
• Index