The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science by Andrew Pickering

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 815 The Mangle ofPractice: Time, Agency, and Science. By Andrew Pickering. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. xiv+281; illustra­ tions, figures, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 (cloth) $17.95 (paper). Most of us probably still have, maybe in nicely labeled albums, more likely tucked away in an assortment of slowly decaying shoe boxes, photographs of our lives. Some of them are those painfully posed group shots—a nursery school class, faces to which, after nearly halfa century, we can more readily attach names than to some of our colleagues from last week. Others are photographs of us and stuff, also instantly and vividly remembered: Mommy’s new Buick, a bicycle, a fish, an outboard motor. This book argues that these sets are not two genres, but one: its thesis is nicely summarized in the caption to a photograph of a series of bubble chambers, together with the particle physicistswho created them: “The 72-inch chamber is on the right of the front row, Luis Alvarez is second from the right in the back row” (p. 48). The claim is simply that our customary distinction between people and stuff is artificial and fallacious, that the lives we live and the world we know are the joint products of ourselves and our things. What differentiates Pickering’s claim from fashionable bons mots of the same ilk is the care and precision with which he crafts his argument—which is why historians of technol­ ogy, who are likely positively disposed toward such notions anyway, ought to pay attention. The Mangle ofPractice is really an extended theoretical essay rather than a conventional history: its four topical case studies, all drawn either from Pickering’s own prior work or from secondary sources (most notably the work of Peter Galison and David Noble), make up a little over half the book. That reliance does nothing to compro­ mise the importance or insight of Pickering’s argument. Pickering is determined to find a middle way between what he characterizes as the extremes of social constructionism and of actor network the­ ory. In Pickering’s view, the “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and the “social construction of tech­ nology” (SCOT) are both unhappily reductionist and “humanist.” Each seeks an explanation for the content ofscientific knowledge, or of technology, in some set of invariant, external human “interests,” institutions, or social structures outside and “above” the plane of practice. (Orthodox philosophers of science commit a similar sin by seeking some universalistic set of epistemic rules, or some method or rationality, similarly “outside” the field ofpractice, as constitutive of “good” science.) Alternatively, actor network theory, while recog­ nizing that all stabilized sociotechnical networks are made up of both human and nonhuman “actants,” bollixes the distinction be­ tween the humans, with their apparent volition, goal-directedness, and intentionality, and what Pickering calls “material agency,” which realistically has none of those attributes. 816 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Pickering’s middle way is “the mangle ofpractice.” The metaphor is to passing cloth (household linen, for example) through rollers to smooth and flatten it. Pickering’s meaning is that new scientific knowledge (or new technology) results from a “mangling” of het­ erogeneous elements: prior culture (scientific theory, experimental equipment and practice, metaphysics, technology), individual inter­ ests, intentions, whims, and commitments, institutional and disci­ plinary interests, and “material agency.” What emerges from this mangle of practice is temporally contingent and path dependent. Nothing—no method, no epistemic rules, no ontology, no personal, social, or economic “interests”—stands outside this plane of prac­ tice; everything is subject to the mangle. “Material agency” itselfhas no independent reality to which we have access: our only knowledge of it is through the machines of our design and operation, which purport to capture it. It too is an emergent product of the mangle. (This view of “nature” parallels to a degree that of philosopher of science Arthur Fine.) What really distinguishes Pickering’s account is its self-proclaimed historicity. Here Pickering stakes out a novel and interesting posi­ tion: What counts as scientific knowledge, or as successful technolog­ ical practice, is emergent, contingent, and temporal. His view is ontologically...