Symmetry, Inscriptions, and the Epistemological Residue of Writing A Deconstructive Reading of Laboratory Life

Abstract

This chapter starts with an analysis of Latour and Woolgar's deconstruction of the distinction implicit in social studies of science between ‘the social’ and ‘the technical’. The next section focuses on one of the methodological and narrative tools used by Latour and Woolgar to deconstruct the opposition between the social and the technical, namely the introduction of the anthropologist observer as part of the narrative. The chapter demonstrates that this attempt deconstructs itself by creating an epistemological residue, that is, an invisible omniscient narrator that observes both the scientists and the observer, a gaze that resists any act of reification. By reifying the observer, Latour and Woolgar fail to account for the epistemological residue in the interval between the observer (which is part of the narrative) and the narrator observing the observer. Finally, the chapter shows that Latour and Woolgar operate with two conflicting notions of inscription that partly undermine their own argument of the social as part of the technical.