ABSTRACT
The history of science comes from the Middle Kingdom. That is, it stems from the interstices, the spaces between science and literature, science and philosophy, and science and science. At the same time, it studies interstices: the changing interfaces and relays that connect experimental set-ups, laboratory desks as well as published texts, but that also divide those from one another. In other words, historians of science investigate the development of heterogeneous couplings that exist or are created between instruments and organisms, numbers and curves, images and concepts, in order to construct new knowledge and deconstruct the old – and vice versa. Interstices in this sense can always be found where the production of scientific knowledge is tied to specific material cultures: to the laboratory, the observatory, the museum, or the archive. However, they also exist in discursive formations and metaphorical tropes that facilitate but sometimes also complicate exchanges between one scientific discipline and another, between science and the broader public, as well as between contemporary science and its past. The history of science, then, works on, at, and with these interstices. It is a discipline from the Middle Kingdom, an interdiscipline, and arguably the interdiscipline par excellence. The interstice as leitmotiv for this historiography is not radically new. Since the
beginning of the twentieth century, the “in-between” separating and binding You and I, perception and movement, cause and effect, has been a focus of theoretical attention, in authors as diverse as Martin Buber, Eugène Dupréel, Erwin Straus, and Hannah Arendt (see Theunissen 2004). “Life lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the brain,” notes Alfred NorthWhitehead (1960: 161) in Process and Reality, while Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes in his phenomenology of speech that “the sense appears only at the intersection of and as it were in the interval between words” (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 243-44). In similar ways, traditional science studies, historical as well as sociological,
have used the concept of the interstice and/or the interval, even if they did not apply the exact term. The most famous example of this is the idea that, under the conditions of a scientific crisis, “Gestalt switches,” akin to radical shifts in the interpretation of an ambiguous visual perception, lead from one paradigm of
scientific practice to another (Hanson 1958; Kuhn 1962). But the same holds true for the notion that epistemological “ruptures” (coupures) separate sensorial knowledge from scientific knowledge, as well as today’s science from its nonscientific past (Bachelard 1940). In both cases, in Thomas Kuhn just as in Gaston Bachelard, gaps and pauses appear as essential elements marking the collective process of acquiring scientific knowledge. Recent studies in the history of science have rephrased this leitmotiv in
forceful ways. Focusing on single laboratories and experiments, historians of science have filled the empty time between the paradigms and epistemes. They have replaced the relatively closed world of Gestalt-switches and epistemological ruptures with an open universe of micro-fissures residing in the space between diverse laboratories and their local milieus, between experimental things and experimental texts, between measuring instruments and model organisms, even between single scientific statements and images. One of the results of this remarkable change has been that historians no longer characterize the progressions of science as revolutions, but as gradual displacements that occur within circumscribed constellations of scientific practice, leading from states of productive precariousness to states of reproductive stability, and vice versa (see, e.g., Pickering 1995; Rabinow 1996; Rheinberger 1997; Stengers 2000). At the same time, the image of science that has emerged from this shift
emphasizes materiality and chance as key elements of scientific practice. It thereby contradicts the classical view of science as based on strictly organized and clearly programmed practices. Instead, recent studies in the history of science highlight the fundamental role of encounters, appropriations, and deviations as epistemologically relevant events. But where does this new image of science stem from? What are the encounters and events that have produced these novel approaches to writing the history of science? There is no comprehensive history of science history that would provide an answer to this question. Given the proliferation of methods and topics in recent times, it has even become difficult to survey the entire field (however, see Kragh 1994; Golinski 1998; Daston 2001; Kelley 2002; Biagioli 2009). All one can say is that, besides traditional philosophical and structural accounts, there are now social and cultural histories of science, and that besides general or encyclopedic investigations, there is a rapidly increasing number of micro-histories and case studies, i.e. historical accounts of science focusing on specific discourses and disciplines, individuals and instruments, images and inscriptions. In this proliferating situation, a short sequence of exemplary observations
concerning the genesis and structure of history-of-science discourses should help us glimpse some of the reasons why the contemporary state of this kind of inquiry is characterized by productive diversity and even disunity, and why this heterogeneity is the perhaps paradoxical but certainly stimulating basis for its constantly changing identity. Eventually, I suggest, it is science itself that is speaking to us here.
