Reflexivity+(Schaffer)

=Reflexivity=

= = I am going to leave the lights on and speak softly. I am going to write some stories for you, and I will be in some of them; I want you to know how I came to learn about these scientists and I want you to understand how the stories some anthropologists of science write might be different from what you expect. (Traweek, 1992: 430)

Sharon Traweek describes her presentation style to contrast it against that of the high-energy physicists she studies and the anthropologists she works with. These researchers present on overhead projectors in darkened rooms, their backs to the audience. They obscure their own involvement in their research and present their findings as “narrative leviathans,” creating huge, universal, explanatory tales.

Traweek's presentations – soft spoken and well-lit – place her own involvement in the viewer's plain sight. She engages her work reflexively, accounting for its production. Instead of examining the tales of great men and great findings that scientists tell, Traweek examines the processes that make and spread these tales.

I am trying to add another voice to our repertoire of expansive and reductive interpretive strategies: an ironic reversal of scientists' and engineers' epic tales of great men, great machines, great laboratories and great ideas, to discuss their diverse strategies for producing epic tales about themselves, their tools, and their desires, to discuss why their epics have a second awed audience that supports their storytelling, and to explore their contempt for their audience, which most certainly includes all of us. (430)

In the social sciences, **reflexivity** is the ability of an account to explain its own formation. Reflexivity plays a particularly important and complex role in science studies because of the recursivity inherent in the field. Social scientists of science use scientific methods to study science; a certain uncertainty emerges in this kind of matryoshka doll explanation-within-an-explanation. In order to escape this methodological looping, many STS scholars choose to incorporate themselves and their practices into their own accounts. In Malcolm Ashmore's terms, STS scholars attempt to “develop, articulate, and utilise a series of 'new literary forms' in and by which reflexivity can be permanently sustained //without// the analysis thereby degenerating into a form of 'stagnatory autoelism'” (26); the goal is to account for one's own account without losing sense in all this accounting.

The quest for reflexivity has taken scholars in many different theoretical directions. It means different things to different scholars, and different scholars find different means of achieving reflexivity. Ashmore provides a particularly insightful map of reflexivities, and charts their varying dangers.

Ashmore identifies three forms of reflexivity, though he rarely uses their names and I have decided to abandon them in favor of arguably more evocative names: self-reflexivity that accounts for the positioning of the observer, process-reflexivity that accounts for the formation of the methods and theories that the observer uses, and circular or ethnomethodological reflexivity, in which the observer's account and reality co-constitute one another, and so embed reflexivity in the observation.

He further splits process-reflexivity into that of the epistemological right and left. At the right end of this scale there is unreflexive natural science, closely followed by certain SSK theorists. At the left end is the sort of reflexivity practiced in discourse analysis, and the hyper-reflexivity of radical relativism.

While SSK has demonstrated a lack of reflexivity on the part of natural scientists, SSK theorists often avoid reflexivity in their own work. Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch actively argue against reflexivity as a practice in SSK:

the reflexive argument rests on the prescription “treat sociological knowledge as being like scientific knowledge,” and this seems an arbitrary, unnecessary, and undesirable prescription. (41)

Collins and Pinch refuse the reflexive prescription because they view their job as studying scientists, not sociologists; accounting for sociology of science can take place in a sociology of sociology of science. Collins and Pinch necessarily espouse a kind of sociological exceptionalism; their position is only tenable if they believe that sociology and the natural sciences work on two different sets of principles.

The knowledge of the natural world produced by the scientist is described as “problematic—a social construct rather than something real”. SSK's knowledge is that Science's knowledge is a form of fasle consciousness; Science is deceived in its unproblematic realism. Collins's call to mimic such an approach becomes a call for a paradoxically self-conscious false consciousness. (43)

If Collins and Pinch represent the epistemological right, we can veer toward the epistemological left with the work of French literary critic Roland Barthes, who presents all text as reflexive because it supports its own creation:

Because it //stages// language, instead of simply using it, literature [text, writing] feeds knowledge into the machinery of infinite reflexivity. Through writing, knowledge ceaselessly reflects on knowledge, in terms of a discourse which is no longer epistemological, but dramatic. (36)

Or in the work of discourse analysts who effort to analyze the discourse of their own analyses. Fuhrman and Oehler argue that “the exclusive concern with writing reflexive texts, that is, texts which display their own modes of construction, reflects a narrow and limited conception of reflexivity” (46). This sort of focus on reflexivity ends up moving towards that stagnatory autoelism that so concerns Ashmore.

But the over-reflexive position can cross the line into hyper-reflexivity, a tendency that doesn't just render studies irrelevant, it renders them destructively relativist. Nick and Hilary Rose describe the terror of hyper-reflexivity:

For the new sociological relativism the metaphor must be that of the onion. First, reflexivity usefully peels the skin away, then hyper-reflexivity takes over and strips away the remaining layers until nothing—for an onion has no kernel—remains. (55)

Hyper-reflexivity necessarily entails the kind of relativism that led to the science wars of the 1990s. Ashmore cautions against this with some gusto.

Latour provides what is perhaps the most elegant expression of process reflexivity: “in sociology of science, the observer and the informant are doing exactly the same thing: fabricating information into a scientific field” (59). For Latour, the congruence between the work of the observer and the observed allows for the observer to simultaneously examine her own tools while examining those of her subject.

Ashwell's explorations in reflexivity are telling, but I wish to close by returning to Traweek's work.

In including herself in her presentations, in presenting the means by which she (an American woman, not an engineer) was able to get into such close contact with the engineers she was studying, Traweek engages in a critical self-reflexivity, accounting for her own involvement.

She also engages in process-reflexivity, by acknowledging the ties between the leviathan-tales of physicists and the leviathan-tales of her anthropologist colleagues. Rather than craft a grand narrative about the crafting of grand narratives, Traweek shares her own experiences relating to the crafting of grand narratives; in so doing she is able to explore the smaller narratives that form the big ones. This allows her to link together the practices that give rise to objectivity and subjectivity, to link facts and stories. Within this linkage, she is able to view new systems of meaning.

If ambiguities move from the repressed margns to center stage, what are they? In those ambiguities, we find strings of associated meanings, **not recursive, not redundant, but reverberating**. We find local principles of association and disassociation, we find paradox and poetics, we find local strategies for making sense, making names, making stories. (446).


 * See also**

Reflexivity (Banks)


 * References**

Ashmore, M. (1989). //The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting Sociology of Scientific Knowledge//. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Traweek, S. (1992). Border Crossings: Narrative Strategies in Science Studies and among Physicists in Tsukuba Science City, Japan. In //Science as Practice and Culture//, ed. Andrew Pickering, 429-466. Chicago: Chicago.