Andrew Pickering; Keith Guzik (Editors). The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming .

The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming by Andrew Pickering; Keith Guzik Review by: By Trevor Pinch Isis, Vol. 101, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 460-462 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655746 . Accessed: 18/05/2013 02:21
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BOOK REVIEWSISIS, 101 : 2 (2010)

malism and the Radiation of the Animals follows a different, more forthrightly argued, pattern. Here, Sterelny tackles what was a widespread view of macroevolution in fairly recent times, minimalism. This is the viewwhich, as Sterelny notes, is a close cousin of the selsh gene viewthat macroevolutionary changes are simply a large-scale version of microevolutionary ones. Sterelny examines the well-known alleged case against minimalism based on the Burgess Shale fossils with a careful and critical eye. But he then argues against minimalisms ability to accommodate all of what John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary call the major transitions in evolutionfor example, the emergence of multicellular animals (The Major Transitions in Evolution, [Freeman, 1995]). Many of these transitions, Sterelny argues, need to be explained in terms of changes in the developmental matrix rather than in the frequency of genes; as he puts it, microevolution is the exploration of possibility, but the major transitions are the expansion of possibility (p. 188). I would say that Sterelnys article is one of the best in the book. Tim Lewenss article, Adaptation is highly commendable for similar reasons. Less commendable is the tendency of some contributors to discuss their allotted topics in ways that apparently reect their own philosophical preoccupations, leading to results that are somewhat idiosyncratic for a volume that is supposedly an overview. For example, Maureen Kearneys article, Philosophy and Phylogenetics frames a discussion of the disputes between cladists and their opponents in terms of timehonored philosophers of sciences disputes about scientic methodologyfalsicationism, vericationism, Bayess theorem, and so forth. But it is not at all clear to me why these latter disputes are particularly relevant specically to the issue of phylogenetics any more than to any other scientic issue, including most of those discussed in this book. At one point, Kearney tells us, one of the main arguments against Bayesian inference methods in phylogenetics has been the selection of prior probabilities, which are subjective (p. 221). But I would have thought that this is one of the main arguments against Bayesian inference methods tout court, and not especially in relation to phylogenetics. Many people outside philosophy of biology often wonder why the eld does not have more to say about bioethical issues, in particular those to do with fertility, embryonic research, and the like. It is certainly true that bioethicists would often prot from knowing what philosophers of biology say that is of relevance to their eld. It

is good, then, to see Jane Maienscheins article What is an Embryo and How Do We Know? which should prove extremely valuable for bioethicists. This is another article that I would say is one of the best in the book. The editors deserve high praise for their judicious choices of authors to cover the various topics. David Buller and Andre Ariew, for example, were excellent choices to cover evolutionary psychology and teleology respectively, and their contributions do not disappoint. One worry I have is that it is unclear what potential audience the book is intended for, or what audience it would be suited for. On the one hand, the overview nature of the articles suggests that they are intended for non-specialistsperhaps students or philosophers and scientists who are unfamiliar with the philosophy of biology and would like to know more about it. It has always been my understanding that this was the purpose of the Cambridge Companion series as a whole. But on the other hand, many of the articles are also highly technical and involve disputes that, however important they may be, are likely to be readily comprehensible to few but specialists. Moreover, some articles, such as the one by Kearney mentioned above, are rather laden with unexplained technical jargon. However, a persistent and patient reader who has access to an up-to-date biological dictionary will derive a lot of information from this volume, and it provides a detailed snapshot of a eld in what appears to be a period of transition. BRIAN GARVEY Andrew Pickering; Keith Guzik (Editors). The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming. xiv 306 pp., illus. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. $23.95 (paper). Every so often Science Studies conjures up a body of work which might putatively interest a wider range of scholars. Andrew Pickerings earlier book, The Mangle of Practice (1995), was such a volume. Pickering used that book to draw a wedge between conventional science studies approaches, such as the Edinburgh Strong Program in which he had been trained, to develop a new approach known as the mangle. The old approach was cast as a representational idiom, treating scientic observations as matters of human interpretation, thereby rmly falling within the camp of humanism; the new approach adopted an active performative idiom to treat ongoing practices by scientists as accommodating to material resistances in an ongoing process of emergencethe dance of

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BOOK REVIEWSISIS, 101 : 2 (2010)

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agency between humans and non-humans he calls the mangle. Pickerings mangle is one of several posthumanist approaches developed by scholars such as Katherine Hayles, Marilyn Strathern, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour and Michel Callon. The posthumanist move usually ascribes some form of agency, and often rights, to nature and animals. Posthumanism has been given fresh impetus by animal rights advocates and the wider environmental movement for whom the practical and political problems of delineating and disentangling the human from the natural are legion. This edited volume includes a new essay by Pickering as well as several essays by his former students and other scholars that explore further implications of the mangle. The scattershot of case studies cover the relationships between humans and wildres, changes in the technology of pig farming, new practices of policing domestic violence, rational expectation theory in economics, Chinese medicine, encroachment of the sea upon an ancient church in Denmark, and lastly, in Pickerings own essay, the mangleish paintings of de Kooning (contrasted with Mondrian) and the Mississippi river and its relationship to the city of New Orleans. One of the questions addressed is whether the mangle is, as suggested in Pickerings earlier book, a theory of everything. Pickering makes clear that by a theory of everything he did not mean a set of equations that would solve every problem. Rather the goal is to show that there is something demonstrably wrong with the hegemonic mainstream interpretative frameworks in the humanities and social sciences, precisely that they obscure the posthuman coupling between people and things and the omnipresence of temporal emergence and becoming (p. viii). The route Pickering offers to pull back the veil (his gendered metaphor) from the modernist dualism between humans and nature, in order to decenter the analysis of practice relative to both humans and non-humans, is to locate such studies amidst the thick of things, or to go with the ow, and learn from the experimentalism of the 1960s. A dash of New Ageism and references to Buddhism and Hinduism complete the picture. The dance of agency is revealed as never before for its countercultural roots and is best consumed with maximum inhalation. Pickerings posthumanism is actually quite conservative. He postulates, unlike Latour and Callon, that only humans can have intentions, although as Carol J. Steiner points out in her imaginary dialogue between Pickering and Heidegger (time for another spliff), Heidegger

would question this notion of intentionality. But once one has got the idea that humans interact with non-humans and accommodate to them in the course of practices (the dance) leading to new emergences, one is left very much with a so-what feel. I tried substituting the word relationship for dance of agency and found it works pretty well. Going with the ow seems to be merely the recommendation that in studying ongoing practices one needs to understand the relationship between humans (with their disciplines, interests, and so on) and nonhumans. Several of the authors in this collection themselves worry about the dance metaphorif choreography is the way to go then surely the dance steps need to be delineated further? But a bigger problem lurks here. There are far more non-humans in the world than humans and also myriad different ways whereby humans and nonhumans interact. This problem means that simply locating yourself in the thick of things will not alone be enough. What is needed is some sort of methodological strategy to get us beyond the Wow man, its the dance of agency! discovery. Reexive mangling or moral ontology moves, such as coming down on the side of nonhumans, wont work as Casper Bruun Jensen and Randi Markussen point out in their perceptive essay examining many of the approaches on offer in the volume. They criticize Pickerings provocative proposal to side with nature and just allow the Mississippi River to follow its natural course. Even if one could intentionally enter a process of becoming, once the dualism between becoming and stasis has been abandoned, it seems unclear how one could consistently side with one side or another of a false dualism. Several of the authors in this book enlist Heideggers theory of technology which contrasted the Greek notion of poeisis with the enframing character of modern technology. Appeals to a premodern ontology or offering a non-modern ontology as Pickering does, all in contrast to modernist dualisms, seem to resurrect problems of positing new dualisms (as Barbara Hernstein-Smith has noted). It seems more productive to start to track different ontologies as they unfold, but then the specics of the case studies and the different sorts of non-humans involved become crucial, and we are back into the thick of science studies. Epistemology will, of course, not go away. How do we know which non-humans to focus upon, and what their relationships with us are? Paradoxically, one way forward may come from the social sciences (such as criminology and sociology) that usually handle the humans. Thinking about how specic, well-studied human practices change in quite specic contexts

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makes for one of the best essays in the book: Keith Guziks study of new policing methods better aimed at dealing with violence towards women. He nicely shows how the police in responding to calls have evolved new practices that use the materiality of the homes they visit in interesting new ways. This nuanced study enables concerns with materiality and how it gures in interaction, to be tied in with more tra-

ditional themes such as changing notions of the public and private. Materiality and performativity are key concerns of science studies and ought to be for other humanities and social sciences. Whether the wide array of areas and topics covered in this book really need mangle studies is still an emerging question. TREVOR PINCH

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