Performative Articulations of STS: On Representation, Materiality and Politics

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a classic case of a text that exemplifies itself. Stephen Daedalus undertakes a quest for a new form of novel and the resultant novel is written in the new form which he discovers (Joyce and Egoist Press. 1917). Before James Joyce wrote this book he completed his first novel, Stephen Hero, in which the protagonist undertakes a quest for a new form of novel, but the novel itself does not instantiate the temporality and materiality proposed therein (Joyce and Spencer 1944). Joyce viewed the fact that the representational style in his first novel did not match the complexities it described as an acute dissonance. In this paper we explore what has been perceived as a similar incongruence in science studies literature. Contingent, heterogeneous, and relative histories of everyone and everything are written, yet when the transformations of our own field is considered, the stories that are told tend to be relatively smooth, linear and progressive. To Joyce, an adequate rendering of his protagonists' quest required a new form of writing. Both the problem he perceived and the solution he posed bears similarities to issues, which, in STS, have been raised by reflexivism. Thus, the discrepancy between analysis and mode of writing can be viewed as a variant of " ontological gerrymandering " (Woolgar and Pawluch, 1985) – and new modes of writing have been proposed for STS have pointed out this solution is based on a specifically representational understanding of the relationship between text and world (see also Lynch 2000). Reflexivists, Latour argued, severed the link between word and world, but never questioned the received representational view according to which the two were separated in such a way as to require this link in the first place. This is the view according to which the job of the scientific text, first and foremost, is to adequately represent the world. With a performative approach, however, the scientific world is not seen to be concerned primarily with representing. Rather, it is concerned with operating on the world, conceived as a field of heterogeneous agencies. But this would then be the case not just for the science that STS studies, but also for STS itself. Consequently, the field and its practitioners would also have to be conceived as performative entities operating in the world, rather than as striving to represent what is going …