Bernal Award Acceptance
Auteur(s): JASANOFF Sheila
Date de publication: août 2004
I would like, first of all, to express my deepest thanks to Rob Hagendijk and the Bernal Award Committee and to all of the 4S membership for this great honor. There is hardly any recognition I can think of that could have meant so much to me, and the place and topic of this year’s meeting make this award that much more special. I still remember the first time I ever went to a 4S meeting—back in 1986, in Pittsburgh. It was, I believe, one of those busy four-societies affairs, where it seemed that everybody knew everybody else, and most had better reasons to be there than me, then not even a member of 4S. I felt very much an outsider, looking in.
There was much less to look into then as well. 4S itself was a smaller, less self- confident organization. The partnership with EASST was not nearly so well developed. The participants were mostly North Americans, or so it seemed to me. Tonight, on a river boat in Europe’s glamorous City of Light, in the company of so many hundreds of colleagues and friends from several continents, I feel that our two host societies—4S and EASST—have truly arrived. Could one ask for more compelling public proof that science and technology studies has become a genuine field, or that it is here to stay?
How appropriate, then, that “public proof” should be the theme of this year’s joint meeting. It was an inspired choice, and we must thank our 4S president Bruno Latour and the other members of the organizing committee for thinking of it. Everywhere we look in public life today proof seems to be an issue. Last night, in the 4S-EASST presidential plenary, we heard a lot about rhetorics of proof in connection with the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. More mundanely, this year’s presidential election in the United States is turning on public proofs. At stake in the campaign, as Senator John Kerry said in New York earlier this week, are truth and truthfulness. It seems electoral politics can make science studies scholars of us all. We should applaud Mr. Kerry for seeing that truth and truthfulness are separate analytic categories, even as we marvel at the American genius for associationism that has produced overnight an oppositional group to test Kerry’s own truthfulness: the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which has become an instant conduit for massive flows of anti- Kerry campaign funds. Maybe after tonight’s adventure on the Seine, we should all claim membership in our own association of “swift boat veterans for truth”; that would certainly make “truth” the subject of a different kind of debate, one more consistent with our community’s professional objectives.
As STS scholars, we have written and spoken a lot about the truth—about how we come to know it, see it, deploy and defend it, in science and elsewhere. But it is truthfulness that I want to talk about more tonight. For when it is public proofs that concern us, then it becomes important to assay our world more for truthfulness than for truth itself. In a multiply mediated world, how do we come to hold others as authentic truth-tellers? How are tests of public truthfulness conducted in the rough arenas of politics? And how do judgments of political truth-telling relate to the truths we uncover about the natural and social worlds? The credibility of science and scientists has long been a central part of our scholarly repertoire, but how should our methods and analyses change if we begin to investigate the question of credibility on a more complex terrain— outside the experimental laboratory, in the messiness of everyday life?
Performativity is key, of course. We can thank the great classical dramatists for that insight. Antigone was about a form of public proof, and Shakespeare put public proofs at the heart of Hamlet. In Antigone, Sophocles pits the morality of King Creon’s decree that Antigone’s brother Polyneices should not be buried against the morality of Antigone’s defiant decision to bury her brother anyway. The tragic plot, in which Creon loses his wife and son along with Antigone herself, offers public proof that Antigone’s private ethical judgment found more favor with the gods than did Creon’s royal edict.
Hamlet brings English empiricism into play to test the truth of supernatural events. On hearing of his uncle Claudius’s treachery from his father’s ghost, Prince Hamlet sets up an assay to test the ghost’s truthfulness. He stages a play, perhaps the Jasanoff best known play within a play in English literature. A play in name, it has to function in deadly earnest as a de facto murder trial. It is a reenactment of Hamlet’s father’s murder, as described by the father’s ghost, and its intent is to provoke his living brother Claudius into betraying his guilt. “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” Hamlet famously says. So confident is he of the technical merits of his assay that he is prepared to consign the ghost to perdition if the test fails. If Claudius does not blanch at the key moment—if his body does not reveal its fratricidal complicity—then, as Hamlet confides to his friend Horatio, it is “a damned ghost that we have seen.” In the event, the uncle who could “smile, and smile, and be a villain” rises and leaves the room at the very moment when the players enact the poisoning scene. The proof satisfies Hamlet, and sets in train the play’s tragic denouement.
But there were reasons to doubt the ghost’s veracity, as we know from another famous fiction, whose action played out in Dublin exactly one hundred years ago this year. In Ulysses, James Joyce produced a brilliant riff on Hamlet, speculating on the play’s autobiographical significance for Shakespeare. And the ghost puzzled Joyce. The dead father’s spirit tells his son, Joyce noted, that his brother had killed him while he lay asleep, with poison poured into the porches of his ear. But, asked Joyce, how then did the ghost know what had happened to him? “Those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with that knowledge in the life to come.” The ghost’s own living body, in Joyce’s imagination, betrayed him. By claiming sentient knowledge, even though he had been self- confessedly asleep, the ghost had failed a crucial forensic test of truthfulness.
Fittingly enough, Joyce’s own truth as a novelist was eventually put to forensic tests. His book, one of the most celebrated if least read works in the English literary canon, was banned from the United States for a dozen years, until a New York federal court decided in 1933 that the subject matter of Ulysses was not obscene. It was another case of public proving, but how did Judge Woolsey reach his conclusion?
Well, bodies and their truthfulness were again at the heart of the story. To start with, the good judge did his homework well: “I have read ‘Ulysses’ once in its entirety and I have read those passages of which the government particularly complains several times.” Based on these readings, Woolsey concluded, “I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist.” The judge, however, was not content to rely on his own unaided powers of discrimination in deciding so weighty an issue. He roped in other bodies to help make the case.
“The meaning of the word ‘obscene’ as legally defined by the Courts,” Woolsey wrote, “is: tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts.” He continued: Whether a particular book would tend to excite such impulses and thoughts must be tested by the Court’s opinion as to its effect on a person with average sex instincts—what the French would call l’homme moyen sensuel—who plays, in this branch of legal inquiry, the same role of hypothetical reagent as does the ‘reasonable man’ in the law of torts and the ‘the man learned in the art’ on questions of invention in patent law. The risk involved in the use of such a reagent arises from the inherent tendency of the trier of facts, however fair he may intend to be, to make his reagent too much subservient to his own idiosyncrasies.
This was a danger Woolsey was determined to avoid.
Child of the Enlightenment, steeped in the culture of objectivity, Woolsey not surprisingly looked for controls. He turned to two friends—or “literary assessors” as he called them—“men whose opinion on literature and on life I value most highly.” He avoided cross-contamination between his two reagents; neither was told that he had consulted the other. Both had read the offending novel and were unconnected with the cause of action, and hence lacked any obvious bias or interest in the outcome. As it happened, the assay worked as the judge had hoped. Both men averred that Ulysses “did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts.” Rather, “its net effect on them was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.” Ulysses, then, was not pornography but art—“undoubtedly somewhat emetic” but in no way an aphrodisiac. The novel therefore could be admitted into the United States, there to continue its work of making literary history. Q.E.D.
But what should we collectively make of all this, you may ask. Hamlet and Antigone are pre-modern tales, resting on outmoded beliefs about nature, even if the moral quandaries they present still resonate in our time. The Ulysses story is amusing enough, but that too was then—1933—and this is now. Have we not grown out of such naïve, unreflexive, gendered faith as Judge Woolsey reposed in his friends’ supposedly autonomous reactive bodies? My short answer is “no.” Look about you, and everywhere you turn you will observe the ancient, universal practice of making truthful bodies still in progress. Public proof demands the continued production of truthful bodies, and the ways in which these are produced remain disparate, unexpected, sometimes poignant, and often strange. And highly relevant to science studies.
Let me offer a few examples. O.J. Simpson, the American football star accused of murdering his wife and her friend, was acquitted when a tell-tale glove “failed” to fit his hand; he was found liable in a civil suit when a shoe with distinctive markings did fit his foot. Bodily evidence counted for more than the damning DNA “fingerprints” with which the prosecution had hoped to nail him. Michael Dukakis, former Massachusetts governor and Democratic candidate for president, was jeeringly dismissed as a potential commander-in-chief when his head did not rise sufficiently above the rim of the tank he was riding; George W. Bush, meanwhile, sought to reinforce his credentials for the same role through a staged landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. The cyborg body of Christopher Reeves, the paralyzed actor who played Superman, was showcased in 2004 to represent the Olympics as games for humanity. And two Greek sprinters who possibly faked a motorcycle accident in order to avoid subjecting their bodies to a drug test thereby disqualified themselves altogether from the games; their bodies could no longer be regarded as truthful performers under the ground rules of Olympic competition.
I am not, of course, trying to set up a false dichotomy between truth and truthfulness—the former a matter of logic and cognition, the latter the preserve of bodies, both social and material. Much more, I am saying that—in the arenas of public proof— truth and truthfulness are inseparably linked in a complex choreography of co- production. To establish the truth in public, you must have truthful bodies—and making both truth and truthfulness entail substantial social work. The latter, moreover, demands a wider array of cultural resources than the former. Following the scientists provides only partial glimpses into the making of political truths in public arenas. Other bodies and other actors, too, deserve our attention.
I will give one more example which, I believe, is particularly relevant to the future intellectual agenda of our field. Twenty years ago this year there was a disastrous chemical accident in Bhopal, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. As nearly as anyone could count, as many people died on that December day in 1984 as on September 11, 2001 in the United States. The event was less consequential for the world as a whole, and yet the case refuses to close, in Bhopal, in India, and in the international processes of medicine and law. Among the major victims’ organizations in Bhopal there is a persistent sense that justice has not yet been done, even though the Indian government reached a $480 million settlement with Union Carbide some ten years after the accident. Recently, the victims opened a new front in their continuing battle for redress. They want Dow Chemical, the new owner of Union Carbide, to clean up the environmental mess left by the plant. Only, to do this, they first had to persuade the Indian government to agree that the state had not preempted their right to pursue this issue as private citizens. And the state proved difficult to move.
So what did the victims do? They filed the relevant legal papers, putting together a transnational network of lawyers and activists, but in the time-honored Indian tradition of non-violent protest, a small group of leaders also went to Delhi and staged a fast. But this was a most scientifically designed fast. They undertook it, one of the protesters said, because time was short and a legal cut-off date was rapidly approaching—and a fast had “worked” before, when they were trying to get the government to agree to pay out the interest that had accrued on the settlement funds. They fasted without water, because a dehydrated body is a more powerful moral reagent than a hydrated one. It shows the effects of deprivation in three days, not the six needed if bodies are watered—and time, in their modern, bureaucratic, law-regulated world, was in short supply. The fasters, too, were intensely aware of themselves as not only moral but also medical bodies. They had attending physicians with them, and when the doctors advised that they were at risk of kidney failure, they decided to start taking water rather than undergoing dialysis. Scientifically deployed and managed, the fast “worked” again. India disavowed a broadly preemptive intent and allowed the private environmental claims to proceed.
What does a case like this mean for us as students of science and technology? From a purely historical viewpoint, the answer is obvious: Bhopal was an episode of massive technological failure, and we owe it to ourselves and others to keep on rendering true accounts of what happened there until the event ceases to resonate in the world. That kind of closure has not yet happened. It may not happen for a long time. But there is more to say.
I am suggesting, to begin with, that our field’s central engagement with the truth should march hand-in-hand with an equally robust concern for truthfulness. And while the former may be usefully, and practically, studied mostly in the workplaces of science and technology, engineering and medicine, the latter requires us to wander into less familiar territories: courts and agencies, social movements, political campaigns, the mass media, to name a few. The questions we ask then must also shift. What are the registers of truthfulness in different societies, cultures, and times that make truth itself become palpable? Why is it that some bodies, instruments, objects, and styles of representation possess—or are endowed with—the quality of truthfulness, while others are not? Put more concretely, why do fasting bodies in Delhi move a state to action, while Irish prisoners in British prisons are allowed die by the dozen, and a fast by Israeli prisoners ends in the prisoners’ capitulation? Why, as well, does a British agriculture minister’s attempt to show that British beef is safe to eat, by feeding his little daughter Cordelia a hamburger in public, provoke only derision? Why do the political bodies of John Gummer and his aptly named daughter (the namesake, as it happens, of King Lear’s famously truth-telling youngest child) not inspire a nation’s confidence? And how is the truthfulness of bodies linked to power? Whose truth counts? Which expressive and performative gestures are accounted truthful, and which are not? We recall that when the enlightened Judge Woolsey of New York’s southern federal district wanted to correct for his own possible biases with appropriate human “reagents,” he picked, without apparent irony or second thought, two friends whose opinions on most matters he trusted as much as his own.
Language games, for instance, have played an important part in our field, as they have at this meeting—as theory, object, ad method of inquiry—and this leads me to my concluding reflection. We’ve heard Dutch and French, classical Greek and English at this conference, but what about Bengali, the fifth most widely spoken language in the world and accounted by many of its speakers as the most beautiful of all literary languages? Would speaking Bengali at this celebratory occasion enhance my truthfulness, as scholar and human being, or would it be dismissed, as it once was by a close and still cherished friend as “speaking gibberish”? The point is simple. Public proofs that matter most in today’s regimented, high-tech, globalizing world can be offered only in some forms to be accounted universal: for example, in English, not Bengali, and through force, not fasting. If we want to use the study of public proof as a means for advancing our normative understandings of science and society, then should we not be asking how some forms of proof get to be universal while others stay irretrievably mired in culture?
We can’t answer these sorts of questions by being parochial in our research methods or narrowly scientistic in our choice of topics. In reaching for breadth of vision, we should be careful not to sacrifice the thing that unites our wonderfully heterogeneous company—our shared and necessary focus on science and technology, medicine and engineering. But let us also bring into our studies the resources we can reasonably muster from our friends and colleagues in other areas of humanities and social sciences— law and politics, history and philosophy, anthropology and critical theory, art history and literary analysis. For in the end what makes science worth studying is that it is a paramount process of human creativity, and our study of it should be correspondingly humanistic in inspiration. Only by widening our embrace of science as a part of culture, and by similarly expanding the resources with which we study it, will we live up to our distinguished president’s claim—and my own conviction—that science and technology studies is the best field there is, indeed, for me, the only one worth doing.
Thank you all again, on this most wonderful occasion, for the chance to say this, publicly.
Discours de remerciement de Sheila Jasanoff pour le Bernal Award
Langue(s): anglais