Ivan Tchalakov

Dep. of Applied and Institutional Sociology,

University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria
PAST Center Tomsk State University, Russia

The Amateurs Action: On the Limits of

Actor-Network Account about resistance and
endurance in scientific research
EASST Conference, Torun, 17-19.09.2014

Contents

Endurance in science - evidences from research

ANT account of endurance the notion of heterogeneous microcommunity

The entrepreneurial and other science (Pasteur v/s McClintock)

The limits of traditional notion of action

The endurance and forgotten amateur roots of modern science

Discussion

ANT notion of heterogeneous associations

In 1990s and even till now it is a common claim that stability and

solidity of as-sociations is largely due to the nonhuman/hybrid actors

in it

I remember when observing holographic lab in Sofia in early 1990s

one scientist said: We are working with JENA lasers. The company
stop producing them and not supply spare parts anymore, while we
had no money to by new ones. When the lasers cease to work, this

will be the end of our research.

Yet they managed to keep the lasers working ten years more until
eventually bought new lasers

Endurance in science - evidences from research

1993 survey on science brain-drain in Bulgaria

Under what circumstances could you stop doing science

Endurance in science - evidences from research

2011 Job Announcement: Rojen National Astronomical
Observatory (NAO) is seeking to employ a young researchers.
The successful candidates should:

possess university degree in physics or other natural sciences;

possess computer skills, incl. Windows and Unix operational
systems; programming in C/C++, Java, PHP, Perl, etc.;
be able to analyze visual data using IRAF, MIDAS, and IDL
software,as well as IDL astro-libraries
to have experience in web-page
creation and maintenance
write and communicate in at least
two foreign languages, incl. English
- to possess driving license.

Endurance in science - evidences from research

2011 Job Announcement at Rojen NAO (continued). The
successful candidates are expected
to live at NAO at 1750 meters above the seat and 10
kilometers from the closest village
to learn to operate NAO telescopes and related equipment
to participate in daily maintenance of the equipment and
research infrastructure
to help NAO engineers in maintaining and improving the
telescopes and other equipment
to participate in planned night observations of astronomical
bodies and events
to communicate in Bulgarian and English with media and the
public day and night (to meet visitors, to give them short
lectures on NAO facilities and research activities)

Endurance in science - evidences from research

2011 Job Announcement at Rojen NAO (continued).

The above activities comprise 50% of the work load. The

remaining 50% should be devoted to researchers own
scientific activity on specific topic and publishing the
results of it (at least 1 paper per year at international
astronomical journals).The working time is flexible since
NAO is operating round the clock 7 days at week.

The month salary - 364 BGN or 186 .

Application deadline October 10, 20111.
Please send a CV, motivational letter and address of
two people able to provide references at
office @ astro.bas.bg. More information at tel. (+359 2) 9741910

 The moral equivalence principles

A passion for knowledge, idle curiosity, altruistic

concern with the benefit to humanity, and a host of
other special motives have been attributed to the
scientists. The quest for distinctive motives appears
to have been misdirected [There is] no satisfactory
evidence that scientists are recruited from the ranks
of those who exhibit an unusual degree of moral
integrity The objectivity of scientific knowledge
[does not] proceeds from the personal qualities of
scientists.(The Sociology of Science, 1973, pp.267-278)
=> Nothing special with the scientists what matter
is not personal motives, but institutional setting,
norms in science

 The moral equivalence principles in the cultural context

of mid-XXth century
The moral equivalence of scientists is now a commonplace, but it was
NOT a commonplace at the time Merton begin to voice it. It was a claim
against the background of widespread sentiment to the contrary (moral
integrity, priests of truth, another way to serve God, calling, personal
devotion)
This was, among other things, a tactics in building an academic
discipline justifying its procedures and bounding it from other disciplines
(psychology) and from what was taken as the matter-of-fact individualism
of the common culture In doing so Merton became precursor of
Foucaults celebrated identification of the typical post-WW II figure of the
specific intellectual but whose role was now defined by providing
particular expert services to power. (Steven Shapin 2008, p.22)

Moral equivalence principle outcome

NSF: There are not many working scientist left who exert
much spiritual power over their disciplines. However
personally and professionally ethical prominent latter-day
scientists may be, they have lost the halo of incorruptibility and
unimpeachable integrity that many of their predecessors once
projected.
In fact, it seems pretentious nowadays for senior scientist to act
as the exemplar of an admirable person worth emulating, when
the role of arbiter of integrity and good manners in scientific
conduct has been taken over by impersonal organs such as the
U.S. Public Health Services Office of Research Integrity.
=> 50 years after Merton: instead of presumption of morality
in science apparatus of institutional surveillance!

=> The residual sentiments about the special motivational

constitution of the modern scientist or about the personal
moral basis of the scientists cultural authority were one of the
major obstacles to a properly sociological story about
modernity
The moral equivalence thesis could be considered as site
there some of the tensions of tectonic cultural change became
visible. (S. Shapin, p.23)

But it wasnt always like that

"The early modern scientist was, almost without exception, not a
professional but an amateur. He was understood to do it not
because it was a job but because, in some irreducible sense, he
wanted to do it, or even because he was called to do it...
The integration of science into structure of power and profit was
never more than partial in the XIX century. The figure of the man
of science as an amateur, conducting inquiry without expectation
of remunerated career did not disappear. The most famous
scientist of the century was a gentleman-amateur: Charles
Darwin was never employed to produce scientific knowledge...
In Britain alone, the list of amateur-scientists in the late eighteen
and nineteen century included some of the most influential figures
in all the sciences". (Shapin 2008:35)
Let us keep for a while this link

The price paid by Mertonian sociology

Sociology has deserted from studying the content of
scientific work, the process of acquiring new
knowledge: we shall NOT deal with the substantive
findings of sciences (hypotheses, uniformities,
laws)...

In choosing this paradigm, sociology had proposed a

division of labour with other disciplines such as
history, linguistics, ethnography, or philosophy.
The cognitive content, discourse, cosmology and
ontology of modern institutions were left to these
fields. (Karin Knorr 1991)

 Sociology of scientific practice

The notion of laboratory signifies a form of life in

which the scientific objects are not simply
technically created but are also symbolically and
politically constructed. (Knorr 1994)

The lab is a place of local reconfiguration of the

experience, where new embodied skills, artifacts
and codified texts come into being (Callon 1996).

I. Tchalakov, Aleksanteri
Institute, April 15, 2010

Observational critique of STS notion of laboratory

Early in my field work I was surprised that almost every
researcher had a nickname that inevitably contained as an
essential element the name of the object he was studying:
o Margarita with photorefractive crystals;
o Clement with rainbow holograms;
o Methodius and Rositza with in-phase lenses
The same was found during our student research practices at
National Astronomical Observatory Rojen in 2012 and 2014:
o Grigor with twin stars
o Nikola and Peter the Slunchars (Sunny boys)
o Sevinch with quasars, etc.

=>Laboratory signify rather big organizational entity. To set it

up, prior to that micro-communities between humans and
nonhumans must be established!
I called it coupling.

 The heterogeneous micro-communities (definition)

Elementary forms of reconfiguration of the [social] order. It

is the place where new configurations and mediators first
will be produced.
The scientist - a spokesperson for the nonhuman he or she
has coupled with, its messenger in the "large society."
Constitutive elements of the laboratory. The largest group
of this kind has consisted of two or three researchers with
(sometimes) a Ph.D. student and a [few] laboratory
assistants.
=> However, this definition describes coupling from the
outside - it leaves untouched he problem of what
cements concomitance in the couple, what supports it,
and what stabilizes it. (Tchalakov 2004)

How is heterogeneous microcomunity constituted? (continued)

a body is to learn to be affected, meaning effectuated,

moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or nonhumans The body is thus not a provisional residence of
something superior an immortal soul, the universal or
thought but what leaves a dynamic trajectory by which we
learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is
made of
there is no sense in defining the body directly, but only
in rendering the body sensitive to what these other elements
are. (Latour 2004: 2006)
=> Yet he too miss the problem of what sustain the
concomitance in the process of being affected, recognizing
passion as insufficient condition

 Negative definition of heterogeneous micro-community

The concept of heterogeneous couple has meaning

only if it indicates a new type of relations, a new
layer in the interaction between humans and
nonhumans, which oversteps the activist ontology.
Knorr is talking about unity and sharing as well
as about the disappearance of self-consciousness
and about subjective fusion of the researcher with
his "knowledge objects", about turning the object into
a subject (Knorr, 1996, p. 16)

 The potential of notion heterogeneous micro-community

What cements concomitance in the couple, what

supports and stabilizes it?
How is the elementary heterogeneous relationship between a
human and a nonhuman constituted when for most fellow
humans the nonhuman partner in the relationship simply does
not exist?

Barbara McClintock story

Fox Keller, E. - A Feeling for The Organism. The Life and Work of Barbara
McClintock, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1983

Methodius story
Tchalakov, I. (2004) The Object and the Other in Holographic Research.
Approaching Passivity and Responsibility of Human Actors, in: Science,
Technology & Human Values, vol.29 No.1

 ANT (and STS in general): a cultural framing of entrepreneurial

science; a strange link to Mertons moral equivalent principle

Key feature of modern science the emancipation and the

increase of the proper role of methods and techniques of
study in the process of research. The strong link is not
between researchers and nonhuman agents immediately, but
between researchers and hybrids, i.e. the technical
artifacts, equipment and procedures they are using in this
process.
=> The mastering of specific method (tool) and its transfer
into new area of research gives the newcomer competitive
advantage to the indigenes of the field (such as farmers and
veterinarians Pasteur has found in his study of anthrax).
(Tchalakov & Kapriev 2005)

 ANT (and STS in general): a cultural framing of entrepreneurial

science; a strange link to Mertons moral equivalent principle

knowing about Nature was no longer lime

knowing divinely written book, but like knowing
how car engine worked. The automobile mechanic
like natural scientists can be regarded as an
expert, even a highly valued, powerful, and wellremunerated expert, but nothing uplifting. (Shapin
2008: 25)

 ANT (and STS in general) as cultural framing of entrepreneurial

science; a strange link to Mertons moral equivalent principle (continued)

Entrepreneurial science and the way the problems

are formulated:
Scientists came to fields where the research
problems were already articulated, the debates were
going on, and the interested parties outlined. Coming
with their methods, the scientists in fact transform
(or translate) the old problems - translation always
presupposes a text (or story) that is already available,
an existing configuration of actors and interests.

 The Other type of science

Science, guided by patient, laborious, and uncertain efforts for

acquaintance of a new agent or unknown features of an existing
agent and where the methods of study are secondary. This is a
science, where you continue probing into your study when the
colleagues you are working with are leaving in despair, or switch
to other problems, or some of them even manage to prove that the
elusive entities you are studying are nonexistent.
This is a science too, maybe not as successful as the
entrepreneurial one, but indispensable for the development of
knowledge and for the evolution of human ways of engaging with
the world. This is the science of Pasteurs colleagues from the
crystallographic lab that have remained there searching the
problems interesting for their tiny community only. (Tchalakov &
Kapriev 2005)

 The amateur link to Other type of science

Shapin stresses the close link between vocation (calling) and
amateurism in the development of modern science, but
science amateurs are not just an early modern phenomenon:
- low-cost sandbox holography in 1970s (S. Johnston 2007)
- Mars Society at its Desert Research Station in Utah, USA. The
amateurs producing research results interests to NASA
- fruitful exchanges between professional astronomers and
amateurs (Callon, Lascoumes et Barthe 2009, ch.1) or
astronmer-amateur at NAO Rojen, integrated in research;
- science amateurs at Luxembourg Museum of Natural History,
studied by s Morgan Meyer (Meyer 2008 2010)
- amateur science movement do-it-yourself biology (DYTbio)
in USA and other developed countries (Meyer 2012).
the persistence of these relationships, which somehow
preserved and transfer over the centuries the initial sense of
doing science as calling and deep personal involvement

 To restore the asymmetry between human an nonhuman actors, if on a different, non-Cartesian ground
Possible strategies:
Non-orthodox phenomenology:
o

Bodily interactions with closer material environment wild layer of intercorporality (Merleau-Ponty)
o passivity and responsibility of the human actor (E.
Levinas responsibility to other (non) human)
Pragmatic theory of regimes of engagement (L. Thvenot)
Sociology of amateurs (sociology of attachment) - A. Henion
Reconsidering the sociological notion of action - the Aristotles
notion of (energy) with its Byzantine interpretation

Thank you for your attention!