Tag Archives: Michel Foucault

Georges Canguilhem’s influence on life sciences philosophy and ‘it’s all about Kant’

This July 5, 2023 Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) press release by José Tadeu Arantes (also on EurekAlert but published on July 3, 2023) slow walks us through a listing of French intellectuals and some history (which I enjoyed) before making a revelation,

The constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. The definition dates from the 1940s, but even then the thinking behind it was hardly novel. Similar concepts can be found in antiquity, in Eastern as well as Western societies, but in Europe, the cradle of Western culture, the view that mental well-being was part of health enjoyed little prestige in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries owing to a reductionist understanding of disease as strictly somatic (relating only to the body). This outlook eventually began to be questioned. One of its leading critics in the twentieth century was French philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995).
A disciple of Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), a colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Paul Nizan (1905-1940) and Raymond Aron (1905-1983), and a major influence on Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Canguilhem was one of the foremost French intellectuals of the postwar years. Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) were among the thinkers who took inspiration from his ideas.
Canguilhem began studying medicine in the mid-thirties and earned his medical doctorate in 1943, by which time he had already taught philosophy in high schools for many years (having qualified in 1927). Another significant tack in his life course occurred during World War Two. He had long been both a pacifist and an antifascist. Following the French surrender in 1940, he refused to continue teaching under the Vichy regime and joined the Resistance, fighting with the rural guerrillas of the Maquis. In this historically and politically complex period, he apparently set out to train as a physician in order to have practical experience as well as book learning and to work on the history of the life sciences. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille da la Résistance for organizing a field hospital while under attack in the Auvergne.
In an article published in the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Emiliano Sfara, who has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Montpellier and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil from 2018 to 2022, argues that Canguilhem’s concepts of “technique”, “technical activity” and “practice” derived from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) and influenced Canguilhem’s decision to study medicine.
“Earlier historiographical research showed how Kant influenced Canguilhem, especially the concept of ‘knowledge’ developed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as the unification of heterogeneous data by an organizing intellect, and the idea of the ‘organism’ as a totality of interdependent and interacting parts, inspired by the Critique of Judgment. I tried to show in the article the importance, and roots in Kant, of a third cluster of ideas relating to the concept of ‘technique’ in Canguilhem’s work, beginning in mid-thirties,” said Sfara, currently a researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology for Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (INCT IN-TREE), hosted by the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).
“Section 43 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment makes a distinction between technical capacity and science as a theoretical faculty. Technique is the subject’s concrete practice operating in a certain context, a vital movement of construction or manufacturing of objects and tools that enable a person to live in their environment. This is not reducible to science. Analogously, Canguilhem postulates that science is posterior to technique. Practice comes first; theory arises later. This movement is evident in art. True, the artist starts out with a project. But the development of the artwork isn’t confined to the project, which is reconstructed as the process unfolds. This practical element of the subject’s interaction with the environment, which has its roots in Kant’s theories, was very important to the evolution of Canguilhem’s thought. It even influenced his decision to study medicine, as well as the conception of medicine he developed.”
Sfara explained that while Canguilhem espoused the values of the Parti Radical in his youth, in the mid-thirties he moved left, without becoming a pro-Soviet Stalinist. Later on, according to some scholars who knew him and are still active (such as the Moroccan philosopher and mathematician Hourya Benis Sinaceur), Canguilhem gave primacy to the egalitarian principles symbolized by the French Republic’s motto Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
His main contributions were to medicine and philosophy of science. His most important work, The Normal and the Pathological (1966), is basically an expansion of his 1943 doctoral thesis. “In his original thesis, Canguilhem broke with part of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French medical tradition and formulated ideas that are very much part of medicine today. [emphasis mine] Taking a purely analytical and quantitative approach, physicians like François Broussais (1772-1838) believed disease resulted from a surplus or lack of some organic substance, such as blood. Bloodletting was regularly used as a form of treatment. France imported 33 million leeches from southern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Canguilhem saw the organism as a totality that interacted with its environment [emphasis mine] rather than a mere aggregation of parts whose functioning depended only on a ‘normal’ amount of the right organic substances,” Safra said.
In Canguilhem, the movement changes. Instead of transiting from the part to the whole, he moves from the whole to the part (as does Kant in the Critique of Judgment). He views the organism not as a machine but as an integral self-regulating totality. Life cannot be deduced from physical and chemical laws. One must start from the living being to understand life. Practice is the bridge that connects this totality to the environment. At the same time as it changes the environment, practice changes the organism and helps determine its physiological states.
“So Canguilhem implies that in order to find a state called normal, i.e. healthy, a given organism has to adapt its own operating rules to the outside world in the course of interacting concretely and practically with the environment. A human organism, for example, is in a ‘normal’ state when its pulse slows sharply after a period of long daily running. A case in point is the long-distance runner, who has to train every day,” Safra said.
“For Canguilhem, disease is due to inadaptation between the part, the organism and the environment, and often manifests itself as a feeling of malaise. Adaptive mechanisms in the organism can correct pathological dysfunctions.”
The article resulted from Sfara’s postdoctoral research supervised by Márcio Suzuki and supported by FAPESP.
The article “From technique to normativity: the influence of Kant on Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy of life” is at: link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40656-023-00573-8.
This text was originally published by FAPESP Agency according to Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND. Read the original here.https://agencia.fapesp.br/republicacao_frame?url=https://agencia.fapesp.br/study-shows-kants-influence-on-georges-canguilhem-who-anticipated-concepts-current-in-medicine-today/41794/&utm_source=republish&utm_medium=republish&utm_content=https://agencia.fapesp.br/study-shows-kants-influence-on-georges-canguilhem-who-anticipated-concepts-current-in-medicine-today/41794/

Even though you can find a link to the paper in the press release, here’s my version of a citation complete with link,

From technique to normativity: the influence of Kant on Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy of life by Emiliano Sfara .History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences volume 45, Article number: 16 (2023) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00573-8 Published: 06 April 2023

This paper is open access.

DARPA and the Panopticon

Baba Brinkman crowdsourcing his DVD–an appeal from the heart

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The Vancouver-based rapper, Baba Brinkman, who sometimes raps about science is currently trying to crowdsource funding for an enhanced DVD of his Rap Guide to Evolution. Here’s a rough video of the rap from Brinkman’s visit to the Centre for Systems Biology, University of Birmingham, England,

I have a much posher video version of one of Brinkman’s evolution raps in my Aug. 4,2010 posting about him.

Pasco Phronesis (David Bruggeman) has been campaigning for Brinkman’s project (from his Jan. 7, 2011 posting),

The DVD is being produced, and the videos for the songs (which you can hear online for free, and download for naming your price) have been filmed. The Crowdfunder drive is to get 10,000 pounds to make the DVD better. As Baba describes it:

“The additional funding from Crowdfunder will allow us to produce original animation and digital effects and license high-quality nature footage from the BBC, to make the vision of each video really come to life.

If you donate 10 pounds (roughly $15.55 with today’s conversion in USD), you get a digital download of the DVD.

If you want a physical copy, that’s 20 pounds.

If you want your face in the DVD (as part of the digital animation the crowd money will cover), that’s 30 pounds.

If you’ve got a thousand pounds and enough to cover Brinkman’s travel, he’ll come perform for you sometime this year, depending on his schedule. Those of us without deep pockets will have to wait and see if his off-Broadway production of Rap Guide to Evolution takes flight.

The songs are peer reviewed, and with no slight to most of the science music I’ve promoted here, it’s Brinkman, They Might Be Giants, and the stuff Tom McFadden from Stanford has been involved with. Everyone else is too far back to eat their dust. (Bill Nye, of course, is in the hall of fame and not currently active)

The music is good, Brinkman is a compelling performer, and the science is sound. If you’re still stuck on a thirty pound donation, think about it as getting a high-quality DVD and donating to help science education. Because that’s what you’ll be doing. And if you’re looking for a little red meat in all of this, Brinkman has it for you (posted December 13):

“On Friday we filmed an epic breakdance battle with Darwin facing down his intellectual rivals, Michel Foucault (representing social constructivism), Sarah Palin (representing the christian right), and God (representing Himself, of course). It was a satirical reconstruction of the evolutionary culture wars on the dancefloor and Darwin reigned supreme!”

If you are so moved, you can go here to help fund the project.

Ideas becoming knowledge: interview with Dr. Rainer Becker (part 2 of 2)

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ETA Mar. 11, 2013: I was notified by Rainer Becker that his participation was cancelled and the organizers took the project in another direction. Consequently, much of what follows is no longer relevant. However, Dr. Becker had a few questions for me which are answered here.

Before getting to part 2 of Dr. Becker’s interview, I’m including this abbreviated introduction for anyone who hasn’t had a chance to read part 1 yet. From the April 22, 2010 news item on Nanowerk,

How do sensational ideas become commonly accepted knowledge? How does a hypothesis turn into certainty? What are the ways and words that bring results of scientific experiments into textbooks and people’s minds, how are they “transferred” into these domains? Science philosopher Dr. Rainer Becker has recently started dealing with such questions. Over the next three years, Becker will accompany the work of Professor Dr. Frank Rösl’s department at the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ), which studies cancer-causing viruses. He is one of three scientists in an interdisciplinary joint project which is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with a total sum of approximately € 790,000.

…

In his future project, the philosopher [Becker] will study in real time, so to speak, how natural science data are being obtained, processed and communicated. As a “researcher of science”, he will observe the laboratory work from the perspective of the humanities and cultural science, he will do research in archives and will interview scientists.

In part 1, Dr. Becker discussed the interdisciplinary nature of the whole project and some of the theorists who’ve influenced his own work. Now on with part 2 of the interview about Dr. Becker’s project about how ideas become knowledge. ETA Mar.25.13: Photograph of Rainer Becker removed at his request.

5. I see mention of archives and scientists in the news release about your project and am wondering if you will be considering groups who are not scientists, e.g. clinical medical personal and/or patients as well. And if you do, how will you go about this?

A: Though the study will be more on knowledge (and according practices) and not so much ‘sociological’ in a broad sense, I already attended several formal and informal interviews with scientists (ranging from traditional to the point of focus group approaches in my own talks/seminars) – and, of course, non-scientists in the field, for example, as you mentioned, personal (so called ‚TA’s, also‚ simple workers’) and their special perspectives on the field.

Contact with patients though is a bit hard not least due to several concerns – at least of the institution I observe (and that at the same time formally is my employer) in my field, the DKFZ, do exist something called the ‘Krebsinformationsdienst’ – a phone-service for interested on the wide topics surrounding cancer. As I learned it is not a potential link to patients – because of privacy concerns. Though it would be a necessity – not at least a theoretical and practical one (you might recall Foucault’s topic of the ‘doublette’) – to talk with patients, it could become a little bit hard. I plan on talking to organized groups of concerned persons but have not done it yet. Also it could be interesting if scientists and patients could meet in a new way (not so much the ‘from bench to bedside’ way is done).

Another interesting field: All the concepts of ‘patient action groups’ etc. – they constituted a while back. All this groups and their relation to professionals surely changed the last 30 years: this could also be a field of inquiry. I’ll have to take a look. And: Surely I am highly interested to talk to patients, but its not so simple to get contacts…

6. How will the results be disseminated? I expect you will publish the study and present at conferences but are you planning other means of disseminating the information as well? e.g. a blog

A: Beside the publication of a study and presentation of the results first of all we are planning to do a book series – 8 to 14 books, a round 100 pages each (German-speakers might know the ‘Merve’-format: this is something we are thinking about); we have some titles yet, the first and second one is in the making. I progress writing on my first text for the first book in the series (on ‘strangeness’).

Blogs could be an option, but not yet – and if so, it would rather be a secondary option. Maybe – or relatively sure – we’ll open a internet-page with newest infos (with rss-feed).

7. Is there anything you’d like to add?

A: The last answer could also be my first Question: what do you do? what is your interest in a study like mine? What is your ‘mission’ (statement) – esp. of your blog? And what do you think: what significance do blogs have today in the field of science and its ‘communication’ (or ‘critique’ and each digital ‘companions’)?

Thank y0u, it’s an unexpected treat to be asked questions and very disconcerting as I’m not used to it. Plus, it’s hard work coming up with answers.

(a) What do you do?

I’m a writer who specializes in science and technology topics and for the last few years I’ve focused on nanotechnology. I suppose you could also call me an independent scholar as I’m not associated with an academic institution and I occasionally give presentations at academic conferences about nanotechnology, new media, writing, and storytelling.

(b) What is your interest in a study like mine?

It is a long and winding story, which I will cut down as best I can:

In the 1990s, I was working on contract for a large telecommunications company and had the privilege of working for them a few times over a number of years. The time between the contracts was broken up so there were periods of 6 months or more where I was working on contracts for other companies. I noticed when I’d return to the telecommunications company that people would tell me I was using the terminology incorrectly. At first, I thought I’d misremembered but it kept happening and eventually I realized that I had (more or less) preserved the terminology’s meaning while the people working for the company had continued to develop it.

This notion was borrowed from something I came across about 20 years ago. I was working towards my undergraduate communications degree and while working on a paper about linguistics and cultural issues I came across this notion about preserving/changing language and meaning over time in the context of immigrant communities. One of the more dramatic examples is in Quebec (where my mother is from) which hosts a population that has managed to preserve language and culture over a couple of centuries while the parent culture and language in France kept changing.

Also like most Francophones I’ve met, I’m always been interested in language and in my case that includes how words accrue meaning. My interest in your study is that the process of ideas becoming knowledge would seem to have a natural affinity with linguistics and communication, i. e., how words accrue meaning and how we communicate that meaning.

My own mission statement or ‘raison d’être’, in its most general sense, is to assist communication between groups that don’t communicate well. Specifically, I am interested in taking science concepts and facilitating communication about them with and between various communities or cultural groups. Although sometimes I find that the communication is already taking place but it’s unrecognized as it’s occurring by means that are not privileged as ‘science communication’.

To this day, I’m not sure how I became so interested in nanotechnology which has been my focus for the last 3.5 years. I suspect it has to do both with the sound of the prefix ‘nano’ and its scale as scientists work directly with atoms and molecules. In high school, I used to fantasize that atoms were planets and that there were multiple universes existing at different scales and that the planet earth might really be an atom. As for those fantasies, I may have been influenced by Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ as well as science fiction television programmes that had people popping in and out of various time periods.

This blog is a way of expressing some of my ideas about science and technology, in this case nanotechnology, while noting and linking to the range of discussion that currently exists. I like to include pop culture (and, occasionally, high culture), business, science, philosophy and more because I view the process where words accrue meaning and/or meanings as one that requires communal engagement from a wide range of sectors. This blog has also allowed me to explore new ideas and connect with people of similar and new interests. Unexpectedly, I sometimes find myself engaged in a discovery of and discussion about Canadian science policy and another one on copyright, patents, and trademarks.

(d) And what do you think: what significance do blogs have today in the field of science and its ‘communication’ (or ‘critique’ and each digital ‘companions’)?

I have long been interested in the impact that new technology has on writing and thinking. (During that communications degree, I was forced to read Walter Ong’s book, Orality and Literacy, loathed it and dismissed it. In subsequent years, I have become haunted by it and the thesis that writing itself is a technology which affects thinking [the kinds of thoughts we have and the way in which we think them]. This also links to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but going into that will make this a much longer posting.) It seems to me that this too has an affinity with your study of ideas passing on into knowledge.

In any event, I ended up taking a master’s degree in Creative Writing and New Media (at De Montfort University in UK) where we discussed some of these ideas and more while exploring various media.As I learned, there are a number of discussions taking place about this technology and writing issues from a number of perspectives (I am getting to the science but it’s part of this larger movement).

What impact does using icons instead of words have on reading and writing? Are we using more visual data to communicate where words would have been used previously? (Note: I recently saw a visual data abstract for an article I was reading in a peer-reviewed science journal.) Are we gong to call this mashing together of words, visual, and auditory data transliteracy or multimodal discourse or something else? (The naming of things is important because while words can accrue and change meaning they also impose it.) Are the media which allow and encourage us to mash words, visual, and auditory data exerting influence on the science discussion and on the research itself? Those are some of questions that influence me and by extension this blog.

Given that I’m not particularly inclined to the technical, my own projects default to simpler technologies such as blogs and wikis while I keep an eye on more elaborate projects such as the math group that meets in 2nd Life (virtual reality) to play around with data in 12 dimensions, at least that’s their aim. There was also a nanotechnology project on 2nd Life’s Science Island. (I haven’t heard much about that one recently.)

Elsewhere on this blog, I have noted a science songs website (somewhere there’s one for medical songs) and that the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) ran a ‘Dancing with scientists’ contest in 2009 while the American Chemical Society (ACS) ran a couple of video contests that same year. One of the winning ACS videos was called, The Nano Song where you could learn about nanotechnology concepts from singing puppets. (It’s meant for adults and it does a pretty good job of explaining things.) YouTube hosts any number of science videos from business and academic institutions as well as from individuals.

As for where blogs (software) and ‘digital companions’ (hardware) belong in the science discourse, I’m going to make reference to two recent studies that have focused on the science discourse and the internet. The first suggests that people who learn about science concepts on the internet (e.g. reading blogs) tend to be better informed than people who learn about those concepts via traditional media such as newspapers and television. The second study suggests that Google may be affecting the online science discourse by nudging search strategies in particular directions. While the specific focus is nanotechnology, something about the larger science discourse can be inferred from the data.

If you’re interested in these studies, here are the references (I’ve copied these from my previous posts on these studies):

(1) Citation: Anderson, Ashley A.; Brossard, Dominique; Scheufele, Dietram A. The changing information environment for nanotechnology: online audiences and content. Journal of Nanoparticle Research (DOI 10.1007/s11051-010-9860-2) forthcoming May 2010 issue.

(2) Dietram Scheufele, member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s research team, posted more about this newest paper on his nanopublic blog (May 7, 2010—I’ve tried to provide the link to the individual posting but if this doesn’t work, you have the date). For anyone interested in reading the team’s paper (Narrowing the nano discourse?), Scheufele provides a link for seamless guest access (click on the post’s title) to the paper on the Science Direct website.

As for information about ‘digital companions’, I haven’t come across anything yet although I am curious about the impact these much smaller screens have and it seems to me that Twitter (a true child of mobile phones and digital companions) which forces concision is a likely area of future study for its impact on science discourse.

In any event, this blog allows me to gather and link information together in ways that stimulate my thinking and, hopefully, my readers’ thinking. The comments are hugely helpful in this process. The blog also acts as a repository and allows me to revisit my ideas months or even years later with fresh eyes.

Thank you for your time. [to Rainer]

Thank you for your interest! [from Rainer]

Ideas becoming knowledge: interview with Dr. Rainer Becker (part 1 of 2)

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ETA Mar. 11, 2013: I was notified by Rainer Becker that his participation was cancelled and the organizers took the project in another direction. Consequently, much of what follows is no longer relevant. However, the discussion about knowledge and ideas and Becker’s theorists may be of some interest.

I’m very pleased to publish this interview (part 1 today) with Dr. Rainer Becker on a topic (how an idea becomes knowledge in the field of science) that has long interested me. First, some information about the research project and Dr. Becker from the April 22, 2010 news item on Nanowerk,

How do sensational ideas become commonly accepted knowledge? How does a hypothesis turn into certainty? What are the ways and words that bring results of scientific experiments into textbooks and people’s minds, how are they “transferred” into these domains? Science philosopher Dr. Rainer Becker has recently started dealing with such questions. Over the next three years, Becker will accompany the work of Professor Dr. Frank Rösl’s department at the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ), which studies cancer-causing viruses. He is one of three scientists in an interdisciplinary joint project which is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with a total sum of approximately € 790,000.

…

Becker’s mission in Heidelberg is part of a research project entitled “Transfer knowledge – knowledge transfer. About the past and present of the transfer between life sciences and humanities.” The project is carried out by DKFZ jointly with the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, ZfL) in Berlin. Project leaders are Professor Dr. Frank Rösl of DKFZ and Dr. Falko Schmieder of ZfL. It comprises three individual projects in which forms of knowledge transfer related to three different constellations of science history are studied in a cultural-scientific approach.

Dr. Becker’s project,

The third and final project, which is pursued by Rainer Becker at DKFZ, deals with the question of the relevance of current knowledge concepts such as the one that understands and experimentally studies cancer as a consequence of viral infections.

“I am pleased that we will explore the relevance of tumor virology across disciplinary borders and I hope we will gain fundamental insights into how scientific discourses develop and how they are ultimately accepted in scientific thought collectives,” said departmental head Frank Rösl about the relevance of the current project.

This is not Dr. Becker’s first such project, his doctoral thesis touched on some of the same themes of how scientific discourse develops,

Rainer Becker wrote his doctoral thesis while he was employed at the Institute of Philosophy of Darmstadt Technical University. There he made parallel studies of the social history of the computer and the “universal science” of cybernetics. Back then he already chose a topic that transcends borders between humanities and natural sciences. “While I was working on my doctoral thesis, I explored the question of ‘transfers’ – namely between technology, natural sciences and philosophy in the 1940s: The development of computers and cybernetics would not have been possible without prior conceptual and metaphorical ‘transfers’ between life sciences and technical sciences.”

In his future project, the philosopher will study in real time, so to speak, how natural science data are being obtained, processed and communicated. As a “researcher of science”, he will observe the laboratory work from the perspective of the humanities and cultural science, he will do research in archives and will interview scientists. It is for good reason that the project is located at DKFZ, because this is the place where findings from basic biological research become relevant for medicine and the public. Thus, the Nobel Prize-winning discovery by DKFZ’s former Scientific Director, Professor Harald zur Hausen, that particular viruses cause cervical cancer has led to a vaccine against this type of cancer.

Now for the interview:

1. First, congratulations on receiving funding for such a fascinating line of query. When does the project start and what is the period of time during which it will run?

A: Indeed, the funding delighted all of us. My sub-project in Heidelberg started in late October 2009, it will be supported for 3 years.

2. Will you be working alone or will you be working with an interdisciplinary team?

A: Currently I am doing my study in Heidelberg on my own, getting assisted locally by one of the project leaders, a biologist highly interested in interdisciplinary work: Prof. Frank Roesl, head of the department where I am doing my research. The other project leader, Dr. Falko Schmieder and two other science philosophers support me in Berlin, at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL). Like me, both of them work on their own sub-projects while getting support by Dr. Schmieder: he does ensure the convergence of the sub-projects. We discuss the topics during our regular meetings – but also via email, skype, wikis for sharing documents etc.

Because the main focus of the project is historical, both of the other sub-projects work –like me in the past – in a more historical way: they try to elucidate the current situation in the Heidelberg lab of 2010 – molecular biological work on supposedly tumourgenic viruses – by working in archives, on in part comparable fields, but different time scales: (a) Dr. Birgit Griesecke – mainly doing studies on Ludwig Fleck – is working on the 1930s, (b) PD Dr. Peter Berz – researching contexts esp. around Jacques Monod – is working on the 1970s. Both help me to understand the current scientific situation in the corresponding historical context.

We also try to get additional funding options for one or two other researchers (e.g. sociologists, communication scientists) supporting our work in a interdisciplinary way.

3. Are there any theorists that have influenced how you are approaching this project?

A: The whole project is closely related to the work of the Polish bacteriologist and sociologist of science Ludwig Fleck. Its main theoretical references point to him – by as well trying to ‘refresh’ his approaches in ways more adequate to the current scientific situation: not only everything that happened after the ‘linguistic turn’ and all the concerns on ‘media’, but also dealing with questions on the significance of ‘things’ in the labs around 2010. This confrontation of Fleck with the present research raises several questions, for example:

Do apparatuses reflect or even materialize special sorts of scientific ‘thought-styles’?

Do specific ‘thought-collectives’ gather or even get constituted around special lab equipments to what extent do they form prior styles of thinking – what kind of ‘migration-background’ has each ‘thing’ with what implications and what styles of local adoption?

What exactly is the correlation between assemblages of things, humans, animals, discourses and what Mary Douglas coined ‘worlds of thought’ – and their inhabitants / participants?

What is their contribution to the specific local – and the same time globally connected – scientific way of worldmaking (in the field of cancer research)?

What political implications potentially are embedded in all that fields – from specific ways of problematisation to its effects?

My own theoretical background was mainly influenced by the philosophical tradition of structuralism and so called ‘post-structuralism’, especially Michel Foucault – so phenomenological traditions also interest me. Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, J.-F. Lyotard, M. Serres and M. de Certeau framed my more traditional approaches to political philosophy on the one hand (from Plato, Hobbes, Kant, Nietzsche, Weber, Arendt to the early/middle Frankfurt School, French Postmodernist to current debates on ‘radical democratic’-thinkers as well as philosophical experiments like tiqqun) but on the same time on the other hand to different fields of knowledge, esp. concerning the relation technology – art – bios (I wrote my dissertation on a ‘coevolutionary’ history of the ‚universal machine’/ computers and ‘first’ cybernetics in connection to what Foucault termed ‘biopower’ – coming from Canguilhem and handing this concept over to E. Fox-Keller, I. Hacking, D. Haraway and L. Kay).

In my field, a biological laboratory dealing with viruses and cancer, Michel Serres’ thoughts on different phenomena of ‘inbetween’/’3rds’ as well as Foucault’s spatial approaches in their connection to knowledge/power (heterotopia, taxonomy/order, diagrams like ‘panoptism’) currently form reflections of my experiences more and more – as well as my contention with prominent ‘first wave’ researchers in the field of science/laboratory studies, e.g. B. Latour (esp. the ‘early’), K. Knorr-Cetina, H.J. Rheinberger (esp. beyond his Heidegger-References), P. Rabinow (both theoretical and practical work) and D. Haraway (esp. ‘when species meet’), flanked by what could be coined a wide field of ethnology in the broadest sense (C. Lèvi-Strauss, M. Douglas, C. Geertz, E. Goffman): ethnology of the own, western culture interested me since my first contacts with poststructuralism/Nietzsche. In that range, scientific and everyday practices and their relation to ‘strangeness’ of the field (for the lab-practitioners, for me) more and more comes to focus (think of the concept of ‘problematisation’) – and also theorist of ‘practice’ keep framing my attention (A. Pickering, K. Sunder-Rajan, M. de Certeau). I hope the projects (my colleagues and mine) will contribute something at least in that latter field.

4. The description in the press release for how you plan to go about your project reminded me of Bruno Latour’s Laboratory Life where he described the creation of a ‘scientific fact’. Obviously you won’t be repeating that work, so I’m wondering if you could describe your process and goals in more detail.

see (3)

Tomorrow: more details about the project and how the research will be disseminated.

FrogHeart

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