Absence in Science, Security and Policy

From Research Agendas to Global Strategy

Brian Balmer, Brian Rappert, Brian Balmer, Brian Rappert

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137493729
• eBook ISBN: 9781137493736
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the absent and missing in debates about science and security. Through varied case studies, including biological and chemical weapons control, science journalism, nanotechnology research and neuroethics, the contributors explore how matters become absent, ignored or forgotten and the implications for ethics, policy and society. The chapter 'Sensing Absence: How to See What Isn't There in the Study of Science and Security' is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

Part I
Ways of Seeing, Ways of Not Seeing

OPEN

1

Sensing Absence: How to See What Isn’t There in the Study of Science and Security

Brian Rappert

What is not of concern in social and political life is the ever-shifting shadow to what is of concern.¹ At any one time only certain topics will garner the limelight in public discussions. Yet, what remains off the agenda can be judged to be equally, if not more, important than what is so. This is perhaps most obviously evident in the manner priorities change over time and across locations. Swine flu, human trafficking, animal experimentation, HIV/AIDS, and Ebola outbreaks are just some instances of topics that have waxed and waned as matters of apprehension.

Much the same can be said about how any topics come to be understood. While issues or events could be described in almost any number of ways, only certain framings are likely to be prevalent at a given time and place. Yet which ones are widespread can be highly consequential in suggesting what is at stake. As, for instance, James Revill and Brett Edwards note in their chapter in this volume, disfiguring acid attacks frequently perpetuated around the world are rarely described as chemical weapon attacks within the parlance of international diplomacy. Through the connections made and not, ways of seeing can obscure or sideline considerations. In this sense, presence and absence come bundled together in what is concealed within what is revealed.

With any newfound heightened awareness, regard can be cast on the reasons for past indifference or apathy. For instance, some have argued that ethical, legal, and social analysis of science has often been reactive to scandals, catastrophes, experiments, and so on (rather than proactive in setting out a positive future agenda), and has tended to focus on new technologies (rather than the major public health problems measured in terms of burden of disease).² Likewise, avoiding “strategic surprise” by learning from the past has long led to soul-searching about disciplinary preoccupations in areas concerned with national security (see Walker’s chapter on technological surprise).

With any level of attention, regard can be given to the consequences of that attention. Individuals, organizations, professions, and publics can be blind to an issue because of the lack of concern, can be blinded to aspects of an issue because of how attention gets selectively focused,³ or can be blinded by an issue because it detracts regard from other matters.

Within the study of social and political life then, regard for what is being attended to needs to be combined with what is not: what issues are not considered, what is not said, what matters are rendered hidden, what grievances never get formed, what paths are never pursued. That might be because some questions never get asked, pertinent information is never shared, forums for collective discussion do not exist, some individuals actively work against others knowing, and so on. All such social processes characterized by absence are—at least in principal—open to empirical and theoretical investigation.

Absence in Science, Security and Policy poses a basic question: How can those examining the ethical, legal, and social implications of science become more mindful about the implications they are not addressing? A starting point for this proposal is the contention that key challenges for the examination of modern science, technology, and medicine include: (i) how issues are identified as matters of concern; and (ii) how they become formulated as problems in need of redress. The basic move proposed in this volume is a shift, in a sense, backward. The aim is one of attending to the whys and hows associated with what is not: for who, when, and under what circumstances are matters not treated as significant. A number of sub-questions that address themes of ethical blindness, taken-for-granted assumptions, and the social construction of reasoning will be central, including:

• How have some ethical, legal, and social implications of science become rendered (and not) issues of concern?
• What are the everyday routines, practices, social structures that shape whether and how topics become (dis-)regarded?
• How have scientists and others fostered attention to or distanced themselves from the questionable applications of their work?

While the central aim of Absence in Science, Security and Policy is simple in its formulation, addressing it is not. A starting assumption of this volume is that questioning taken for granted activities is indispensable in approaching absent concerns. At stake in forwarding our analysis of this topic of “non-concerns” are complex considerations of how facts, figures, concepts, and arguments should be made sense of and by whom. As will be contended, this requires asking critical questions about the preoccupations guiding social research too. Rather than being reactive and probing the overt and obvious, inquiry should aim to cultivate thinking afresh. To do so requires more than asking whether this or that topic has been given sufficient regard. Rather, it requires inquiring into the conditions that structure what is or is not missing. In other words, “how” and not just “what” must be examined, but in a way that questions the contingencies and commitments of “how.”

The composition of the chapters in this collection exemplifies this imperative to question the priorities of social research while we utilize it to make sense of the world. One long-standing divide in social studies of the life sciences has been between those who are concerned about ELSA (ethical, legal, and social aspects) or ELSI (ethical, legal, and social implications) and those concerned about its security dimensions.⁴ Overall, the latter largely has been the purview of those working within international relations, peace studies, and security studies, whereas the former have become mainstays within sociology, politics, anthropology, and ethics. The result has been a weak cross fertilization of ideas. In contrast, Absence in Science, Security and Policy seeks to bring together security and nonsecurity-related analyses in order to ask how they can learn from each other.

This introductory chapter challenges us to think afresh about these matters through the following structure: the next section opens up what it means to suggest that there is concern or not through unpacking the basic descriptors of absence and presence. As will be contended, these two notions are often treated as opposites; however, this distinction is difficult to sustain. Instead it is necessary to ask how presence and absence are interrelated. When this is done, as a dichotomous designator, “non-” is likely to be crudely blunt if not downright unhelpful. Answering the question “What is absent?” requires attending to questions such as “Absent for whom?,” “When?,” “In what manner?,” and “By which practices?.” Contrasts between in-group and out-group, front stage and backstage, public and private, as well as official and non-official, are just some of the possible starting lines for cleavage. The third section also asks to what extent the social and ethical analysis of science is absent regard for what is missing from it.

On the basis of a nuanced sense of absence and presence, the fourth section then considers what it can mean to talk about “concern” and “non-concerns” as well as the necessary cautions associated with inquiring about them. This discussion, in turn, provides the basis in the fifth section for asking what kind of empirical and conceptual sensitivities might be needed for this volume.

The tension that runs throughout this chapter is how to handle, on the one hand, the desire to question the meaning of notions such as “absence,” “presence,” and “(non)-concern” while, on the other hand, necessarily trading on a sense of their meaning. Rather than somehow seeking to resolve this tension, the intention is to develop sensitivities for appreciating what is at stake in order to open up possibilities for thought. As part of fostering such sensitivities, this chapter (as with the other in Part I) reflects on what new metaphors might guide our investigation. I advance the metaphor of the autostereogram in the final section as one way of fostering re-appreciations—to create a space through attending to absences.

Through its varied preoccupations, this chapter touches on wide-ranging aspects and literatures. For that reason it will likely demand much of the reader. This situation very much exemplifies the topics under investigation. The more one opens up to absences the more they abound, but the appreciation of their prominence does not leave us lesser, but rather richer.

The interweavings of presence and absence

In asking how those groups or individuals attentive to ethical, legal, and social implications of science can become more mindful about what they are not addressing, the arguments in this volume are infused with the descriptors of “absent” and “present.” This section offers an appreciation of the relation between the two. This then provides the basis for a nuanced understanding of what it means to describe a topic as (not) “of concern” in the next section.

To start, it can be noted that “absence” and “presence” are often understood in terms of degrees. If the question is posed: “Is X present?,” then the answer need not be only “yes” or “no.” Even if we take that question as pertaining to physical perception, the response can be “more or less.” Over time all sorts of things—mountains, civilizations, ideas—gradually come and go. Perhaps controversially, the existence of an individual life itself can be approached as a matter of degree—with near conception and end-of-life conditions confounding neat binary classifications.⁵ The assertion that everything exists in degrees—including “whole” numbers such as 1, 2, 3 … —was a foundational tenet for the fuzzy mathematics that underpins the operation of many of our modern adaptive electronic devices.⁶

In part because of degrees, the relation between the descriptors of “absent” and “present” is complex. What is on show often defies any simple characterization. The physical world provides numerous examples of this. Vacuums may be devoid of substance, but they can be pulsating with energy. The chairs on which people write and read books generally seem solid enough. At an atomic scale though, they are characterized by material emptiness—“99.9999999999999 per cent empty space” to be roughly exact.⁷ At a subatomic scale, the protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nucleus are themselves characterized by material emptiness.

Attention to degree can be used to prompt attention to aspect. It might well be argued that what counts is not how much “material” is taken up by electrons, protons, and neutrons, but rather the sense of substance for us generated by the natural forces at work. The application of the term “absence” and “presence” then turns on what feature of something is deemed relevant. As a result, both terms might be used for description, but for different reasons and in multiple ways. Memorial is the activity of trying to keep present in thought that which is not proximate for perception. Take another example more closely related to the themes of this volume. For those with dementia, Schillmeier has argued that objects in the world can be both present and absent. They are present to hand as observable things out in the world. And yet, they are only—and merely—present. With no remembered past relations to those with dementia, objects have no future. With no past or future, objects “lead into nothing and to nowhere.”⁸ They are absent of meaning. In these ways, “demented objects” can be said to be both present and absent at the same time.

Complexity also derives from the manner in which determinations of absence and presence can be relative. That is to say, they are made on the basis of comparison. To contend a topic is missing from the 10 o’clock news, for instance, involves making a judgment about how much it should be covered in the first place. Determinations about whether there is silence—that is an absence of noise—depend on expectations of what sound there should be. This is not likely to be a matter of universal accord and would almost certainly vary by setting. It is the potential for conflicting judgments about whether a given something is “there enough” that enables individuals to ask what sort of regard should be given in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I Ways of Seeing, Ways of Not Seeing
• Part II Practices of Inattention
• Part III Sights and Sensitivities
• Index