Table Of ContentThe Mangle in Practice
Science and Cultural Theory
A Series Edited by barbara herrnstein smith and e. roy weintraub
The Mangle in Practice
Science, Society, and Becoming
andrew pickering and keith guzik, editors
duke university press • durham and london • 2008
© 2008 duke university press
all rights reserved.
printed in the united states
of america on acid-free paper ¥
designed by katy clove
typeset in quadraat by achorn international
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
appear on the last printed page of this book.
Contents
Preface andrew pickering vii
New Ontologies andrew pickering 1
part one: studies
A Choreography of Fire: A Posthumanist Account
of Australians and Eucalypts adrian franklin 17
Crate and Mangle: Questions of Agency in
Confinement Livestock Facilities dawn coppin 46
Soul Collectors: A Meditation on Arresting Domestic Violence keith guzik 67
Resisting and Accommodating Thomas Sargent: Putting Rational Expectations
Economics through the Mangle of Practice esther-mirjam sent 92
The Mangle of Practice and the Practice of Chinese Medicine:
A Case Study from Nineteenth-Century China volker scheid 110
Mrup Church and the Politics of Hybridization: On Choice and Becoming
casper bruun jensen and randi markussen 129
part two: reflexivity
Going with the Flow: Living the Mangle through
Environmental Management Practice lisa asplen 163
A Manglish Way of Working: Agile Software Development brian marick 185
The Docile Body of the Scientist yiannis koutalos 202
part three: theory
The Mangle of Practice or the Empire of Signs: Toward a Dialogue
between Science Studies and Soviet Semiotics maxim waldstein 221
Ontological Dance: A Dialogue between Heidegger and Pickering
carol j. steiner 243
References 267
About the Contributors 293
Index 297
Preface
This book contains a set of essays written from a variety of perspectives and
concerns in a wide range of fields and areas including history, philosophy,
sociology, geography, literary theory, biophysics, and software engineering.
The chapters are unified by their connection to the analysis of scientific prac-
tice I set out in my book The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (1995),
and their cumulative impact is to show that the notion of the mangle is not
simply an analysis of paradigmatic natural sciences. Instead, it suggests a
coherent and productive approach across the humanities, social sciences,
and beyond that is interestingly different from more mainstream and famil-
iar perspectives.
The first chapter in the collection, my “New Ontologies,” aims to sketch
out the contours of the mangle and some of its implications in as accessible
a fashion as possible. Here, however, it might be fruitful to follow a differ-
ent path, starting with observation that I found The Mangle a difficult book to
write. My difficulty with the book, and my interest in it, lay in the unfamiliar-
ity of the analysis of scientific practice that I was developing, an unfamiliarity
that condensed around two key ideas: that the analysis should be a posthuman-
ist one, as I called it, and that it needed to come to grips with temporal emergence.
The first idea stemmed from my conviction that any convincing analysis of
scientific practice had to be decentered, relative to both human actors (scientists
and engineers) and nonhuman ones (material instruments and machines).
We need, I argued, to think of scientific practice as an open-ended, recipro-
cally structured interplay of human and nonhuman agency, a dance of agency,
in the process that I called mangling. The second concept—temporal emer-
gence—signaled my conviction that mangling has a truly evolutionary charac-
ter, rather than a causal one. Just as it is impossible to predict what sparrows
will become in the future, so it is impossible to predict or explain fully what
the contours of human or nonhuman agency will turn out to be in scientific
practice.1
Preface
I arrived at these points in my efforts to understand empirical case stud-
ies, and in The Mangle I tried to convey my ideas about posthumanism and
emergence through detailed analyses of four case studies, including Donald
Glaser’s invention of the bubble chamber, Giacomo Morpurgo’s experimen-
tal searches for free quarks, William Rowan Hamilton’s construction of the
quaternion system in mathematics, and the introduction of numerically con-
trolled machine tools in production at General Electric. By the time I finished
the book I was convinced that I was right—that my analysis was fully general
and applicable everywhere, not only to human practice and cultural evolution
but also to the nonhuman world. This idea was central to the book’s second
postscript in which I described the mangle as a “theory of everything”—and
this gets us back to the present book.
I recognize that a handful of case studies is not really enough to sustain a
theory of everything, so I was very pleased when other people found inspira-
tion in the mangle in their own research. My ground-zero reading of this book
is thus that it provides reason to think that I was not so far wrong when I de-
scribed the mangle as a theory of everything.2 The chapters in this book exem-
plify insights that can be gained in topics in science studies that I had never
before thought about, such as pig farming and software development, and in
topics that lie outside the usual purview of science studies, such as domestic
violence and Australian national identity—the territory of the mainstream so-
cial sciences. This, of course, makes me happy, but it also encourages me to
enter a qualification.
After writing The Mangle I realized that there are two possible senses of “a
theory of everything.” One comes, like the phrase itself, from contemporary
physics. There it evokes a dream of finding the fundamental equations of mat-
ter from which all of the visible world can be derived. This sense is not the one
I needed. My claim was not that The Mangle solved all problems. My idea, in-
stead, was that there is something visibly and demonstrably wrong with the
hegemonic mainstream interpretive frameworks in the humanities and social
sciences, precisely in that they obscure the posthuman coupling between peo-
ple and things and the omnipresence of temporal emergence and becoming.
The Mangle was, then, not a claim to have found the fundamental equations
of culture and practice (which everyone should now spend the rest of their
lives solving), but rather an argument for a shift in interpretive sensibilities,
an argument that scholars should take an interest in decentered and emergent
viii
Preface
processes rather than recycling implausible devices to obscure their existence.3
This shift to a different gestalt from the mainstream social sciences and hu-
manities was what I sought to advocate by describing the mangle as a theory of
everything. And what many of the chapters in this book show, I feel, is the vi-
ability, coherence, and promise of making such a shift, not only in science and
technology studies but in the social sciences and humanities more generally.
The possibility of this sort of open-ended extension of a mangle-ish approach
beyond science studies is an important argument of this book as a whole.
• • •
Each of the chapters that follow stands on its own, but we have sought to im-
pose a loose structure on the book as a whole. The first chapter is my “New
Ontologies,” which provides an introduction to the mangle that does not re-
quire of the reader a detailed familiarity with my earlier book. In this chap-
ter I seek to evoke the sensibilities discussed above by appealing to examples
drawn not from the history of science but from the history of painting and of
struggles with the Mississippi River.4 Hopefully, these examples serve imme-
diately to indicate the broad viability of a mangle-ish analysis. Beyond that,
the chapter also aims to open another topic for reflection: ontology—ques-
tions of what the world is like and of our place in it. This is a topic that has
come to be of great concern to me. After writing The Mangle I realized that my
analysis entailed, in effect, reading sciences such as modern physics against
the grain. The ontological vision at which I had arrived, of the world as a place
of open-ended emergence and becoming, was one that was constitutively
denied by the sciences I was analyzing. This is not, of course, an argument
against the modern sciences, whatever that might mean—one cannot fail to
be awed by their achievements. At the same time, however, this recognition
implies an active curiosity about the possibility of knowledges and practices
that explicitly adopt rather than deny a mangle-ish ontology. “New Ontolo-
gies” points to a range of approaches in art, philosophy, spirituality, engi-
neering, and science that are reflexive to the mangle, and it suggests why we
might be interested in them, politically as well as intellectually.5
The rest of the book has been divided, in a rudimentary fashion, into three
parts. Part 1 consists of empirical studies, though none of these are merely—
that egregious word—empirical. Adrian Franklin’s “A Choreography of Fire”
continues and extends the concerns of “New Ontologies,” though the
ix
