Hawking Incorporated

Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject

Hélène Mialet

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780226522289, 9780226522265
• eBook ISBN: 9780226522296
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: Biological Sciences

These days, the idea of the cyborg is less the stuff of science fiction and more a reality, as we are all, in one way or another, constantly connected, extended, wired, and dispersed in and through technology. One wonders where the individual, the person, the human, and the body are—or, alternatively, where they stop. These are the kinds of questions Hélène Mialet explores in this fascinating volume, as she focuses on a man who is permanently attached to assemblages of machines, devices, and collectivities of people: Stephen Hawking.

Drawing on an extensive and in-depth series of interviews with Hawking, his assistants and colleagues, physicists, engineers, writers, journalists, archivists, and artists, Mialet reconstructs the human, material, and machine-based networks that enable Hawking to live and work. She reveals how Hawking—who is often portrayed as the most singular, individual, rational, and bodiless of all—is in fact not only incorporated, materialized, and distributed in a complex nexus of machines and human beings like everyone else, but even more so. Each chapter focuses on a description of the functioning and coordination of different elements or media that create his presence, agency, identity, and competencies. Attentive to Hawking's daily activities, including his lecturing and scientific writing, Mialet's ethnographic analysis powerfully reassesses the notion of scientific genius and its associations with human singularity. This book will fascinate anyone interested in Stephen Hawking or an extraordinary life in science.

NOTES

Introduction

1. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Oxford University Press, 1988), 160.

2. Ibid., 162.

3. Ibid., 163–64.

4. The doctor gave him two years to live after the first symptoms appeared; he has now been living with the disease for more than forty years.

5. Jeremy Hornsby and Ian Ridpath, “Mind over Matter,” Telegraph Sunday Magazine, October 28, 1979, 44.

6. John Boslough, “Stephen Hawking Probes the Heart of Creation,” Reader’s Digest, February 1984, 39.

7. Leon Jarroff, “Roaming the Cosmos,” Time, February 8, 1998, 34.

8. Jerry Adler, Gerald C. Lubenow, and Maggie Malone, “Reading God’s Mind,” Newsweek, June 13, 1988, 36.

9. Michael White and John Gribbin, Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (New York: Dutton, 1992), 135.

10. Simon Schaffer shows how the term genius was applied to natural philosophers in the late eighteenth century. The Romantic genius, he explains, possessed extraordinary, even mystical, power that enabled the natural philosopher to divine nature and discover its secrets. See Simon Schaffer, “Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nick Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 82–98. Steven Shapin has written an important essay on the theme of solitude, "The Mind Is Its Own Place: Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-Century England,” Science in Context 4, no. 1 (1991): 191–218.

11. Shapin, "The Mind Is Its Own Place,” 210. For an inquiry into the changing notions of science as a vocation, see also Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

12. See for example, Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); otto Sibum, “Reworking the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26, no. 1 (1995): 73–106; Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979); Simon Schaffer, “Making Up Discovery,” in Dimensions of Creativity, ed. Margaret Boden (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 13–55.

13. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1972), and Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).

14. See, for example, Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life; Michael Lynch, Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Karin Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

15. Thus, for example, there is no radical difference between a physicist and a baker as far as the cognitive operations mobilized are concerned. The difference derives mainly from the objects they handle.

16. For Bruno Latour, “An actor in ANT is a semiotic definition—an actant—that is, something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of human[s] in general. An actant can literally be anything, provided it is granted to be the source of an action. . . . If a criticism can be leveled at ANT, it is on the contrary its complete indifference for providing a model of human competence.” “An Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications,” paper presented at the Center for Social Theory and Technology workshop, Keele University, UK, May 2, 1997, 4.

17. The principle of generalized symmetry has been extensively discussed and debated. See, for example, the article by Harry Collins and Steve Yearley, “Epistemological Chicken”; Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, “Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley,” in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. A. Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and also the controversy between David Bloor and Bruno Latour in the following three articles: David Bloor, “Anti-Latour”; Bruno Latour, “For David Bloor and Beyond: A Reply to David Bloor’s ‘Anti-Latour’ ”; and David Bloor, “Reply to Bruno Latour”; all published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30, no. 1 (1999): 81–112, 113–29, and 131–36. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Science de la science et réflexivité (Paris: Editions Raisons d’Agir, Collection “Cours et Travaux,” 2001); Hélène Mialet, “The ‘Righteous Wrath’ of Pierre Bourdieu,” Social Studies of Science 33, no. 4 (2003): 613–21.

18. See, for example, Harry Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Barry Barnes, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974).

19. I take this quotation from a draft paper eventually published by Michel Callon and John Law as "After the Individual in Society: Lessons on Collectivity from Science, Technology and Society,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 22, no. 2 (Spring 1950): 169. The published version is worded differently; I prefer the draft version.

20. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991).

21. Yes, we say (and he says), because to do theoretical physics, one does not need to have a body, just a good mind.

22. For many, being or knowing is synonymous with doing (see, for example, Annemarie Mol, Andrew Pickering, John Law, Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, Antoine Hennion, Judith Butler, Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway, to cite a few). Thus, understanding what doing is becomes crucial.

23. Indeed, if in the rationalist tradition the driving force of knowledge is inscribed in the subject, this subject is devoid of subjectivity: a subject that is transparent for Descartes, desingularized by Kant, or evacuated in Popper. See for example, René Descartes, Méditations métaphysiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), and Discours de la méthode—pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences, (plus) la dioptrique-les météores et la géométrie qui sont des essais de cette méthode (Paris: Fayard, 1987); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) see also the analysis by Evelyn Fox Keller, “The Paradox of Scientific Subjectivity,” in Rethinking Objectivity, ed. Allan Megill (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994): 313–31; Henry Michel, Généalogie de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 61: “Une subjectivité privée de sa dimension d’intériorité radicale, réduite à un voir, à une condition de l’objectivité et de la représentation.” See also Allan Megill, “Introduction: Four Senses of Objectivity,” in Rethinking Objectivity, ed. Allan Megill (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 1–20, at 10: “Insofar as one stresses the universality of the categories—their sharedness by all rational beings, one will see Kant as a theorist of absolute objectivity, an objectivity stripped of everything personal and idiosyncratic.”

24. I deliberately play with the singularity of expert, intellectual, scientist, and human versus the plurality of laypersons, workers, technicians, and nonhumans.

25. In this sense I would argue that philosophy and sociology, for opposing reasons, deny the necessity of the situated body of the scientist. Some readers may be surprised to hear that sociologists of science “deny the necessity of the situated body of the scientist,” when one of the principal contributions of the social and cultural studies of science has been the work of “reincorporating” scientific intelligence into its environment. For example, see Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, eds., Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Nevertheless, I would like to underline that insofar as scientific knowledge has been reincorporated into the social world (as an antidote to rationalist/individualist conceptions of science, for example), the “situated and singular” character of a body endowed with its own idiosyncratic competencies tends either to be dissolved into a “collectivity,” or to be “black-boxed” as, say, “tacit knowledge.” On this point, see Hélène Mialet, “Reincarnating the Knowing Subject: Scientific Rationality and the Situated Body,” Qui Parle? 18, no. 1 (2009): 53–73. On Haraway’s notion of “situated knowledges,” see Charis Thompson, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), chap. 2, where she notices that “partiality, embodiment, and ‘mobile positioning’ share sensibiliti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. The Assistants and the Machines
• II. The Students
• III. The Diagrams
• IV. The Media
• V. Reading Hawking’s Presence An Interview with a Self-Effacing Man
• VI. At the Beginning of Forever Archiving HAWKING
• VII. The Thinker Hawking Meets HAWKING
• Conclusion—A Recurring Question From Exemplum to Cipher
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index