ABSTRACT
The topic of this section – new forms of knowledge production – can be construed in a number of ways. It can, for instance, refer to the changing configurations of the life sciences, shifting, for instance, from investigations within small laboratories to large-scale initiatives made possible by the establishment of extended collaborative networks. But it can also refer to the emergence of new forms of governance, involving the mobilisation of actors and institutions traditionally absent from the discussion of biomedical matters. Governance is here to be understood not merely as a form of regulation that intervenes after a given biomedical technology has been produced and adopted by practitioners but, rather, as a set of related although not necessarily consistent or coherent practices that affect not only the use but the content, production, circulation and translation of biomedical innovations. Yet another understanding of this section’s topic privileges the political economy of the life sciences by examining how biomedical activities have become progressively enmeshed in commercial relations and have correlatively acquired different cultural meanings. ‘Techno-science’, ‘bio-sociality’, ‘bio-capital’ are some of the terms that have been coined to label these processes (Latour 1987; Rabinow 1992; Sunder Rajan 2005). Beyond the incantations provided by reference to these fashionable labels, the authors in this section strive to provide overviews of the ‘state of the art’ of these different approaches. Far from being purely descriptive, these overviews adopt an explicit perspective, leaving the readers to decide whether they are mutually consistent or, to the contrary, represent a different ‘take’ on the shifting picture of contemporary life sciences. The present introduction does not go against this rule: far from summarising the content of each chapter, it provides a ‘frame with a view’ for the section’s topic. One of the most often-cited results of the field of Science and Technology Studies
concerns the ‘situatedness’ of scientific practices. In contrast to widely shared assumptions about the intrinsic universality of ‘the scientific method’, the development of scientific facts has been shown to be closely tied to local circumstances, although, admittedly, the transition from ‘data’ to ‘facts’ corresponds to the severance of indexical links. For instance, in his pioneering work on the sociology of biomedical knowledge, Fleck (1979) argued that such a transition takes place in a literary space extending from specialised scientific journals to handbooks and popular science magazines, while Collins (1992), several decades later, linked it to the social distance that separates the ‘core set’ of
scientific workers investigating a particular problem to the wider scientific or scholarly community, and the early Latour (Latour and Woolgar 1986, Latour 1987) tied it to a semiotic space in which the modalities qualifying initial scientific claims are sequentially dropped until a statement attains the unqualified status of a fact. Universality and generality are thus an achievement resulting from operations performed on statements, but also on the material components of scientific activities, as evidenced by the long chain of intermediaries that link each small step of an experimental sequence.1
