Culturing Bioscience: A Case Study in the Anthropology of Science 9781442604636

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Culturing Bioscience

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Culturing Bioscience

UDO KRAUTWURST

Copyright © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2014 Higher Education Division www.utppublishing.com All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5—is an infringement of the copyright law. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Krautwurst, Udo R. (Udo Rainer), 1959–, author Culturing bioscience / Udo Krautwurst. (Teaching culture: UTP ethnographies for the classroom) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-4426-0813-9 (bound).—ISBN 978-1-4426-0462-9 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-4426-0463-6 (pdf ) 1. Life sciences—Social aspects—Case studies. 2. Life sciences—Political aspects—Case studies. 3. Life sciences—Economic aspects—Case studies. 4. Life sciences—Government policy—Case studies. I. Title. II. Series: Teaching culture QH333.K73 2014

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For Günther and John, both of whom helped me realize particular possibilities.

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Contents

acknowledgments

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introduction intraduction xi A Beginning Is Always in the Middle of Something

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Bioscience in an Out-of-the-Way Place: How It Got Started The Organization of the Book: Magnifying Currents

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Science Studies: A Brief Outline of Newtonian and Quantum Versions Thirty Years of Bioscience in Action

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a theoretical and methodological intralude xxxi An Indeterminate List of Agential Realist Concepts xxxi Thinking through Methods, Thinking Methods through xxxv

chapter 1

Intra-Action and Doing Science: Experiments, People, and Technology 1 Investigating Neuroscience 2

chapter 2

Re-Visioning Scientific Practice through the ACCBR 29 32 Structure and Practice, or, Space. . . . the Final Frontier? 39 The Near Future of the ACCBR 46 A Vision: From Cooperation to Collaboration

chapter 3

What Can You Do in, to, and with a University? 49 Anthropology and the Call to “Study up” 53 The University in Transformation 62

chapter 4

Science and/as Development 77

Science and/as Science Policy: The Triple Helix, Modes 1 and 2, and Business Clusters Culturing Bioscience on Prince Edward Island

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chapter 5

Globalizing Bioscience and/as Biocapital 107 110 Bioscience, Biocapital, and Business Clusters: Intellectual Property on PEI 120 Global Biocapital and/as Community

concluding: lessons from an open concept lab 133 appendix 1: a parable on changing assumptions, or, how to approximate agential realism 141 appendix 2: fieldwork in the academy, and the ethics of ethics references index

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Acknowledgments

In the midst of the fluid movement we call living it is easy to forget that writing something down gives the words the appearance of something that has an entirely separate time, space, and motion from the milieu through which it emerged. The written word, of course, is not so disconnected, nor is the writer. My name may be on the cover, but in no way are the contents of the book mine alone. There are many people and other beings to thank for the many different ways in which they contributed to the realization of this project. I sincerely thank them all for letting their efforts appear under my name. The responsibility this places on me is not trivial. Dr. Andy Tasker and the staff of the Atlantic Centre for Comparative Biomedical Research, pseudonymous in the text, generously hosted me for nearly three years. They put up with my many questions, my requests to hang out and get involved, and, when necessary, just worked around me. They did all this in a spirit of patience, friendship, good humor, and curiosity. I am grateful for all they have shared and all they have facilitated. During the course of my fieldwork I also benefited from several discussions with senior administrators at the University of Prince Edward Island, Rory Francis of the PEI BioAlliance, civil servants of the Province of Prince Edward Island, and Mike Gibson of Holland College. Their openness helped situate my investigations in wider fields. Numerous colleagues at the University of Prince Edward Island gave encouragement, comments, and suggestions over the years it took to put this volume together. I am especially indebted to one faculty member I call Alex in the text, for the interviews and background shared in the pharmaceutical industry. Although a heartfelt thanks

goes out to what would be a long list of people I work with on my campus, I must recognize the particular contributions of Jean Mitchell and Jim Rodd. Anne Brackenbury, Executive Editor of the Higher Education Division at the University of Toronto Press, has unwaveringly supported this project from the outset. She has endured numerous delays with a warmth and grace that deserves recognition, if not an award. I suspect that it was with some relief that she was able to pass me on to the very able and professional production staff at the University of Toronto Press after having received the revised manuscript. The final manuscript itself owes much to two reviewers for suggestions that were genuinely helpful and supportive. None of this project would have been possible without my daughters Choyce and Jaz, or without Wendy, my partner in everything. They have sustained me in more ways than I can express, although the unconditional love, the cheerleading, the lifting of my spirits when I felt low, and the occasional (but well deserved) kick in the pants to keep me focused is a good place to start.

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Introduction Intraduction

a beginning is always in the middle of something The mood was one of palpable excitement that blustery late November day in 2007. With the requirements for hard hats and safety shoes temporarily lifted, some small groups of a dozen or so were given tours of the new 57,000 sq. ft. addition to the Atlantic Veterinary College (AVC) annex at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI). Although moving personnel into the expansion was still weeks away, fume hoods were already being installed and boxes of new equipment were everywhere. These curious tourists, including administrators, members of the Faculty of Science, and others, were drawn from all over campus but they were mostly people expecting to move into the new space, such as contingents from the Department of Biomedical Sciences and the Department of Pathology and Microbiology of the AVC, the Lobster Science Centre, and the Atlantic Centre for Comparative Biomedical Research (ACCBR). In one group there was also an anthropologist. As we wandered through still unfamiliar hallways, offices, and laboratories a voice from behind piped out, “This is just like Christmas!” The anticipation and excitement of new beginnings, of our Euro-American enchantment with newness in general, was abundant. Partway through the tour, once many of our group temporarily scattered to inspect the labs and rooms of their own, the guide turned to me and asked what my area of research is. “Science and scientists,” I responded. “I’m doing a study of the ACCBR.” Puzzled and taken aback, the rising intonation of “Really??!!” could barely escape her lips before being quietly followed by “But why?!” It was neither the first nor the last time I encountered this question, a question that often expressed within it dismay or disdain, but usually just a measure of surprise. Why, indeed? What could be more obvious than science? What could anyone

possibly say about it after years of exposure in elementary and high school education? After all, it is universal and objective and cumulative, isn’t it? The scientific method is what unites everything from astrophysics to zoonosis, right? Sure, there are all kinds of technical details, and the technological instruments that go along with them, to learn in any of several fields of study but the basic activity of science— separating truth from falsity—is surely stable? Well, that is certainly one version of the matter, a very widely accepted one. It is not, however, the only version. Some years ago the historian of science Simon Schaffer (2009a) asked a very important question: “What happens when you study science scientifically?” A short answer is “a great many unexpected phenomena.” A longer answer is what I aim to accomplish in the rest of this book. This alternative version of science is not easily approached all at once. There always seems to be a little more to do or say to make this version of science presentable. So, rather than trying to say it all at once, I’ll make use of what has come to be called “Wittgenstein’s ladder” by some. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once made a statement in his major work, the Tractatus (2001), to the effect that he was purposely distorting his presentation of a phenomenon in such a way that you would eventually come to understand the phenomenon better if you come to ignore the distorted process of presentation, even though this process of presentation helped enlarge understanding. Or, as he put it, the reader must throw away the ladder after climbing up it. Throughout the remainder of the book I will add more rungs or approximations as I go along, but for the moment we can begin with some necessary background. (For those seeking a sense of where the rungs on the ladder will take us, see Appendix 1: A Parable on Changing Assumptions, or, How to Approximate Agential Realism.)

bioscience in an out-of-the-way place: how it got started Like many recent PhD graduates, I found myself teaching at universities in shortterm contract positions while seeking a tenure-stream position. (Some of the reasons for this state of affairs is discussed in chapters 3, 4, and 5.) In 1999 the University of Prince Edward Island still had the character of a small liberal arts school, though it differed from its many counterparts throughout North America by having attached to it one of Canada’s four fully accredited veterinary schools, equipped to provide both clinical and research-based instruction. I did not know at the time that several people in the provincial government, industry, and academia were lobbying to expand the profile of the biosciences in PEI as a means to promote economic development and diversify the economy. My focus then was colonial and post-colonial Africa, and, having fulfilled my teaching contract, I did not know if and when I would return. xii

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That indeterminacy would be resolved in the summer of 2003 with the offer of a tenure-stream position. Four years was not long at all in some respects, but in others it was clear that a sea change was taking place. The provincial government and the University of Prince Edward Island had concluded a deal with Canada’s federal government to locate the National Research Council Institute for Nutrisciences and Health (NRC-INH) on campus and the plans for the annex to the AVC were revealed. Even more was on the way, though I didn’t know it then: a lobby group would coalesce into the nonprofit PEI BioAlliance, Inc. in 2005; the province launched a five-year Island Prosperity Strategy in 2008; a bioscience business park operated by the province, the BioCommons, was scheduled to open in 2011; the province’s two postsecondary institutions would relocate from the Department of Education to a newly created Department of Innovation and Advanced Learning in 2008. It was this series of events that got my ethnographic curiosity aroused. The effort to bring a biocluster of related business enterprises and institutions into being was happening under my nose and I just could not let such an opportunity pass by. The beginning of my research on the ACCBR in late 2007 was evidently in the middle of something I was a part of. You might ask, at this point, what has this to do with science? If you are working with the first version of science mentioned earlier—I’ll call it the Newtonian version of Science throughout the rest of the book just for ease of reference—then not very much at all. Sir Isaac Newton’s accomplishments are many and well deserved and I certainly don’t plan to rehash them here. Newton, and others since the first stirrings of Europe’s Scientific Revolution, operated on certain assumptions. One assumption is that Newton claimed the universe is governed by “laws” that are fixed and stable, and that they apply to phenomena independent of context and the observer. This is a caricature, to be sure—one of the first of several I’ll make in the pages that follow—but also note that this broad acceptance of Science seeking laws assumes that these laws already exist, waiting to be discovered. Most of us have been taught that these laws cannot be known if the research or researchers are somehow contaminated. This version of Science is about removing contaminants to achieve an understanding of some phenomenon that is presumed to already exist in a pure state. That is to say, this Newtonian version of Science is distinct from politics or economics, for example, and you leave the latter behind when you pass through the doorway into a laboratory. Newtonian Science, then, is about making representations of some phenomenon coincide with the phenomenon. This would make for a very short book, if only because we know it so well. For my part, I’ll propose that different economic arrangements, different political frameworks, even representations of science and so on, do influence sciences. The sciences of which I am speaking here are the sciences in the act of doing them, and not some ideal image. By the same token, different sciences-in-the-doing have an intraduction

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influence on economics and politics and representations. One of the main assumptions I am asking you to accept, if only provisionally, is that everything—and I do mean everything—has an influence on everything else. This means that everything is in some kind(s) of relationship(s) with everything else, often summarized by the term relationality. It does not mean, however, that any given phenomenon influences any other phenomenon to the same equal extent or in the same equal way. I’ll use a simplified shorthand—what I call quantum science—to contrast this version of science, based largely on the work of Karen Barad, with Newtonian Science. As I proceed through the book I’ll be asking you, the reader, to pull out Wittgenstein’s ladder from time to time as I speak of moving toward quantum science.

Karen Barad Dr. Karen Barad earned a PhD in theoretical physics. At the time of writing she was a Professor in the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) is not simply an extensive discussion of her theory of agential realism (see the Theoretical and Methodological Intralude), it is also an example of its practice in that it makes original contributions to feminist studies, history, philosophy, physics, science and technology studies, and other fields of knowledge production because she uses each through the others. This manner of knowledge production is an important challenge to common Euro-American practices of constructing and maintaining boundaries and identities. As such it is also anthropological in significant ways.

the organization of the book: magnifying currents Before I sketch the fields of science studies and anthropologies of sciences as I will use them, I thought it useful to outline the organization of the book and suggest why it is put together the way it is. The summaries of science studies in general, and biosciences in particular, as they are presented below are by no means intended to be comprehensive or exhaustive. Rather, the aim is to provide you with several tools of analysis, instead of complete toolkits, and to suggest ways these tools of analysis have been used elsewhere and will be used in this study. Although additional tools of analysis will be introduced as we go along, the broad message of the remainder of this chapter emphasizes that extreme xiv

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connectedness, labeled relationality above. Practicing that relationality is in large measure one of the things the rest of the book aims to do. Two major metaphors flow through the entire book, though they are not the only ones, of course. One is visual in character, particularly in terms of magnification. The progression moves from very local and particular activity in chapter 1, with its focus on details of two experiments in process, and “zooms out” more in each succeeding chapter so that some kinds of detail seemingly disappear as other kinds of detail come into view until we are dealing with biosciences in an increasingly globalizing world. I could just as easily have started, however, with a global view and “zoomed in.” The other frequently used metaphor is drawn from fluids in motion, what engineers call fluid dynamics, such as the motion of currents and eddies in rivers and oceans. Historically speaking these are arguably the two predominant streams of images in Euro-American representations. Because the relationship between languages, representations, and realities are assumed here to be complex, it seemed important to let you know they are being used here with certain ends in mind. Like all metaphors, these two have their limitations, but they also have the advantage of avoiding the discreteness and stability associated with notions of “steps” or “stages,” notions more suited to the assumptions of the Newtonian, not the quantum, version of science. In the place of stability and distinct boundaries, magnification implies a relative scale such that something is magnified or minimized in relation to something else. Similarly, fluids in motion are moving in relation to something else also in motion. Moreover, you can magnify in fractions in a way you cannot for discrete steps: you can magnify an object 2.73 times, but your foot pushes on either the second or third step of a staircase. This fragmented (fractal?) quality will allow us to think of sciences-in-the-doing in very interesting ways. The first chapter, then, focuses on parts of two experiments, not two experiments in their entirety. Both of these experimental fragments are investigations into the rapidly expanding field of the neurosciences. The important questions raised in this chapter concern the relationship between investigator and the technologies used, and how different techniques and results within and across experiments are made commensurable. In other words, how does one distinguish between acceptable variations, unacceptable variations, and outright failure in data collection? Chapter 2 zooms out to locate those two experimental fragments in the Atlantic Centre for Comparative Biomedical Research. This facility is an “open concept laboratory,” a scientific vision that, I will argue, can be considered an extension of other people’s laboratories. It is not a laboratory in its own right, but is designed to offer several technological suites and trained technicians to researchers who don’t have the necessary equipment and/or skills for their own investigations. It is not simply a designated space, an ensemble of technicians, or a collection of state-of-the-art equipment. intraduction

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Importantly, it is also necessary to discuss the relationships among them all, yet at the same time the ACCBR is also a fragment that complements and extends into other scientists’ laboratories, even as it is an extension of theirs. As we will see, the ACCBR is a series of (potential) relationships waiting to be related. The experimental fragments discussed in chapter 1 and performed through the ACCBR took place on the campus of the University of Prince Edward Island. The campus environment, as will be argued in chapter 3, is not a “neutral” space within which research events occur. It is an actor or agent, and not merely a metaphoric one, that shapes science-in-the-doing as well as being shaped by those sciences. This chapter considers some of the changes universities have experienced over the last three decades in their modes of organization and operation, some of them due to the very scientific advances and practices they in turn came to influence. These changes are important to consider not only for the natural sciences, but also for the human sciences (often referred to as the social sciences and humanities in North America). It is for this reason I take the opportunity to discuss in Appendix 2 some of the challenges and rewards of conducting ethnographic research among colleagues and friends. In anthropological parlance, this is as much about studying “across” as it is about studying “up” (Nader 1974). For academic biologists as much as anthropologists, the university is a condition of work in the multiple senses that term conveys. A further enlargement of scale of analysis in chapter 4 leads to a consideration of the geographic region where this was taking place, specifically the province of Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province, located in the Atlantic Ocean’s Gulf of St. Lawrence. The chapter begins with discussion of the concept of a “Triple Helix” (Etzkowitz 2003) to address some of the changing relationships occurring between government, industry, and postsecondary schools. The increasing entanglements of these three institutions have led to a concerted effort to diversify the province’s economy, an economy historically dependent on agriculture, fishing, and tourism. Only in recent years has there been an effort to “culture bioscience” on PEI not only in the sense of growth, but also socio-historical identities and life ways. It is an initiative to promote economic development in a manner sensitive to Islanders’ sensibilities, with all the potential for friction that a planned change introduces to people’s sense of self. Finally, in chapter 5 we come to consider global currents of biotechnoscience. Prince Edward Island is far from being the only or the first place to consciously encourage economic development through the potential human and animal health benefits claimed to derive from what some call “biocapitalism” (Franklin 2003; Haraway 2008; Helmreich 2007b, 2008; Rajan 2006). In ways large and small, people in places as diverse as Iceland, Singapore, India, Cuba, and China as well as North America and Europe are investing huge sums of capital, time, and other resources in an effort to xvi

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create a thriving “biocluster” (Porter 1998a, 1998b) that provides products of medical or agricultural benefit and direct and spin-off jobs to local citizens. Conversely, this chapter also asks to what extent new inequalities may be promoted and what other possible futures may be curtailed in the global shift toward “knowledge economies.” What are some of the effects of increasingly commodifying certain forms of knowledge, such as genomics? To conclude, I will reinforce the assumption guiding my ethnographic investigation that each of the elements discussed in these pages already imply all the others—or better, always already, to use a certain philosophical phrase emphasizing relationality. Science as we usually think of it, in my account, is already economic and political and cultural and religious and so much more! It is “embedded,” to use Karl Polanyi’s term (1957). Change is not something we bring from outside into “science” or “culture” or “politics.” We are already, always already, in the middle of them, and they in ourselves. We never have to go far to effect change, though sometimes we have to go to great lengths to do so responsibly and with accountability for the changes we effect (Barad 2007, 2010, 2011b; Haraway 2008).

science studies: a brief outline of newtonian and quantum versions As I implied at the outset, the study of science by scientific means has been done in a variety of ways by a variety of people. In the course of your high school education most of you were taught a version of Science largely in keeping with a Newtonian version— a River of Science if you like. Here Science is about knowing and how to know about things waiting to be discovered—in other words about epistemology—and as we perfect that epistemology we can then better approach the essence, or ontological core, of some object or event. But let us pay attention to what we assume in this version of science. We assume that epistemology and ontology are separate from one another, that “knowing” and “being,” representation and reality, have no bearing on one another. At the same time, however, the aim of science with this version is to make these two separate entities somehow coincide by making the epistemological process more and more invisible. We assume “the scientific method” erases itself through results. In addition, we assume the essence of objects are unchanging, but our knowledge about them improves or progresses if we develop more accurate epistemologies. Things and events, in essence, pre-exist and are outside time, but knowledge and representations and understanding are in time, that is, history. We can detect in this assumption the famous philosopher of science Karl Popper’s (1959) notion of falsifiability: We may not be able to establish absolute Truth, but we can always discard representations whose inaccuracies have been demonstrated. Finally, this version assumes the split between intraduction

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the natural sciences and the human sciences is irreconcilable because the former can be falsified while the latter cannot. The quantum version works under a different set of assumptions. This version is not “truer” or more accurate than the first (to claim it is simply catches you in the Newtonian version again), but operates with different guiding principles. The assumptions are simply those “givens” that you accept or not when deciding on an epistemological strategy for generating knowledge. By what principles does one choose one set of assumptions over another? That is a political, moral, and ethical question whose answer I will postpone for the time being. For the moment I will focus on comparing the effects of different sets of assumptions. Some of the most important assumptions I make here I have already mentioned: that everything is connected (relationality); that connections are not all equal or the same in character or degree of influence; and that everything is in motion and therefore changes (and does not pre-exist in some determinate way). This would suggest, first of all, that ontologies or the question of “being” can be multiple; second, that epistemologies, as modes of knowing, can be multiple; and third, that both can and do influence one another. Put more simply, I assume representations are part of reality rather than independent of a single reality that exists beyond human consciousness. In other words, human consciousness, whatever its faults or virtues, is part of all that “is.” The questions pursued are not “What is it?” (common in the natural sciences) or “What does it mean?” (common in the human sciences), but “How does science-in-the-doing get done?” and “What effects does it have on all related elements, human and non-human?” By this point some of you may be feeling a little frustrated. All of this might be well and good, but it sounds more like philosophy than anthropology or science studies. You might think: “This all seems so abstract, but I want something concrete, even empirical.” All I can do is beg your patience for a few more pages. Some of you might even be wondering “How did he even come up with this stuff ?” The simple answer is I didn’t. Whatever idiosyncratic spin I might give to this version of analysis, there are many, many, practitioners from the natural sciences as well as the human sciences who have delved into these streams of thought before me, without any concern for disciplinary boundaries or the dam that seems to separate the human and natural sciences. I cannot possibly introduce in a few pages all the important issues, theories, concepts, and concerns in the anthropology of science and the field of science studies, even as a caricature. Instead of a general overview, I will concern myself with elaborating some of the ideas set out in this section, especially those of going beyond the natural/human science distinction, the idea of “objectivity” as a singular thing, and the increasing concern in critical scientific analysis to come to grips with “doing” (practicing, performing, producing) beyond some end results, product, or meaning. This will be done especially, but far from exclusively, through the work of Karen Barad. xviii

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To describe her approach and analyses of the world, or even her identity, in terms of the Newtonian version raises some of these issues that seem merely, or only, philosophical. For example, she has been described as a “feminist (theoretical) physicist.” Some might bristle at such a description, but probably more unsettling for most would be describing her as a “physical feminist.” Modern Euro-American civilization is not in the habit of using the adjectival form of people who practice the natural sciences to describe a person, whereas this is not so much the case for the human sciences. A “Marxist sociologist” and a “sociological Marxist” are easily understood as more or less equivalent in a way that a “socialist chemist” and “chemical socialist” is not. My point? Well, two actually. First, language, and representations more broadly, does not just describe reality, but is part of the reality it describes and therefore changes language and the rest of reality in the act of using it. There are increasing numbers of neuroscience studies indicating how language alters not only “thinking,” but the very structure of the brain, for example. Boroditsky (2009) offers a fascinating account of a cross-cultural study of grammar that undermines the separateness of the word and the world position. Emily Martin (1991) has shown how gender, language, and biology came together in portrayals of human ova and sperm. This is not just word play, which brings me to my second point: the uneven relationship between the human sciences and the natural sciences. Historically the presumption has been that natural sciences are “hard,” fact-based, clearly defined, and consistently approaching naked reality, while human sciences are portrayed as “soft,” ideologically tinged, fuzzy, and more concerned with “the meaning of life” rather than external reality. My suspicion is that somewhere over the last 300–400 years, the medieval liberal arts were transformed by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment from a convenient contrast into a competitive duality.

Emily Martin (1991) on the Egg and the Sperm A distinction between science and ideology, fact and fiction, and truth and distortion (if not outright falsehood) is a longstanding feature of how EuroAmerican youth are scientifically enculturated in public schools. By considering the language used to describe reproduction in biology and biomedical textbooks, Martin demonstrates how the teaching and learning (and by extension practice) of biology and medicine is simultaneously anthropomorphized and gendered. She suggests there is no way to separate science from its myriad connections to other phenomena. The anthropomorphizing of ova and sperm, following the subtitle of her article, shows How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male–Female Roles. Rather than calling this

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a contamination of science, she usefully asks what other imagery and models can be used to speak of the activities of ova and sperm, and to be aware of the effects of what she calls “sleeping metaphors.”

In 1959, the then-prominent physicist and novelist C.P. Snow (1987) wrote an essay entitled “The Two Cultures,” in reference to the split between the natural and human sciences and what he perceived as the devaluation of the natural sciences in favor of the arts. Why, he wondered, could people recite Shakespeare but not the laws of thermodynamics? That essay sparked a debate in Britain that lasted several years. Today, many people in the human sciences feel the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, such as Martha Nussbaum in her (2010) work on the devaluation of the humanities in society. Snow, however, wrote a follow-up essay several years later entitled “The Third Culture” (1987). Many different interpretations of what a “third” scientific culture could be or should be have emerged over the years, though all agree that the competitive dualism between the first two cultures is counterproductive. Some thinkers have sought to incorporate one culture into the other, creating a third culture as a (disproportionate) blend of the first two, while others seek to take only portions of the previous two in an effort to create a third culture that is substantially different. I suggest it is the latter approach that Barad, and others, have been working toward. Before moving on, I also need to mention one other debate that emerged in recent years, the so-called science wars of the 1980s and 1990s. It is a debate that is in many ways a product of the Two Cultures debate of the previous intellectual generation. The “science wars” are often associated with a confrontation between practitioners of “realism”—the notion that Science increasingly comes to terms with material reality independent of (the limitations of ) human thought, often summarized through the term “objectivity”—on one side, and practitioners of “social constructivism”—the argument that Science cannot escape the cultural, historical, and social conditions of its production and consequently that its knowledge is not necessarily cumulative— on the other side. Not surprisingly, most “realists” tended to be natural scientists and most “social constructionists” tended to be human scientists. In retrospect, the resulting name-calling (and worse!) smacked of a tempest in a teapot. To be sure, some on both sides are willing to continue to pursue the debate, but others are quite ready to move on. What else could human knowledge be if not a “social” product? By the same token, our species’ sociality is quite “natural.” Barad writes, “[the] fact that scientific knowledge is constructed does not imply that science doesn’t ‘work,’ and the fact that science ‘works’ does not mean that we have discovered human-independent facts about nature” (2007, 40).

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Part of the difficulty flows from the implicit “nature vs. culture” opposition contained within the “natural vs. human science” split. If we think about it from the vantage of a Third Culture, we need to affirm that “culture” is “natural” for humans and at the same time affirm that “nature” is a concept initially produced in European “culture” a few centuries ago (Barad 2011b; Kirby 2010; Sahlins 1976). Sciences study a socialized nature; sciences are naturally social. As a result, sciences are a part of what they study. The consequences of this are enormous, as many feminist scholars and others on either side of the Two Cultures divide have pointed out for three decades now. Many writers, following the lead of Haraway (2003, 2008) have adopted the term “natureculture” to indicate not only their unwillingness to abandon the original two terms, but also their unwillingness to give in to epistemologies that make an absolute and unbridgeable break between human societies and the rest of existence. This kind of intellectual apartheid has made it easier for all kinds of people to attempt all kinds of “ethnic cleansing” in the realms of knowledge production, that is to say, engage in all kinds of analyses that try to reduce existence to only our imaginations or only our genetics or only whatever. In short, the common belief that Science is separate from Society and separate from the Nature it studies is problematic. That would put us back at the Newtonian conception of knowledge production. Nonetheless, if we persist toward a quantum approximation, matters can become disorienting. For example, if we accept naturecultures, what happens to objectivity? There are two points to consider in this respect. First of all, objectivity neither disappears nor is “just an illusion.” Rather, the River of Objectivity is rethought as rivers of objectivities. As historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007, see also Daston 1999) have argued, in Euro-American thought over the past 400 years quite different ways of doing “objectivity” have emerged, accumulated, and persisted into the present. What it “is” and what has been demanded of it has changed without ever completely replacing earlier currents. Odd as it may seem, objectivities have not been getting progressively more objective (what might it mean to even say they were?!), but have been collecting liked sedimented layers or rings on a tree. Quite simply, as Barad suggests, objectivities work. All of them. This leads into the second point (which will be explored further in chapter 1). If knowledge does not occur in a vacuum, within what does it occur? Objectivity, observers, and objects of study all need to be situated in context as far as that is possible (Haraway 1991), and the relationships among them have to be positioned in particular ways (Barad 2007). At this point some of you may be somewhat skeptical, and I don’t blame you. It is important to keep in mind that this is not physics applied to society or the dilution of physics by society (Barad 2011a). Quantum physics is a point of departure, a wellspring whose consequent flows are taken seriously. Could similar things have been said by research practitioners in other fields, or using other versions of quantum intraduction

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physics? Broadly speaking, yes, as long as we understand that the differences among other fields of sciences, or even other modes of knowing-as-doing altogether, sometimes matter more than others. The biosciences, for example, can be and have been understood through agential realism. By the same token, they can also be taken as a relatively separate phenomenon that can alter the agential realist framework (e.g., Schrader 2010). Let’s consider what this might entail in somewhat general terms before moving into specifics in later chapters. How to be “objective,” however you may define it, use it, or do it, flows into matters of method. As you might suspect by now, Newtonian methods and quantum methods approach matter and/as matters differently. Newtonian methods seek to mirror Nature, to accurately reflect to human consciousness things “as they really are” (Rorty 1979), whereas Karen Barad, following Donna Haraway, prefers diffractive methods. Instead of reflecting human consciousness off the mirror of Nature (and thus assuming it is outside it), she aims to diffract phenomena through one another the way waves do. For us this will entail, in broad terms, considering how certain (largely) social phenomena on PEI, Barad’s approach to physics, and my approach to anthropology and science studies move through each other while changing each other as they do so.

thirty years of bioscience in action Anthropology has had a long relationship with modern biology over its 150 years as a formalized discipline, a relationship sometimes harmonious and sometimes troubled, but never very far away. At times it has sought to become biological, hence the subfield of biological or “physical” anthropology found in North America; at times it has been very critical of biology, as in the race science of the early twentieth century; at times it has used biology as a model or metaphor in its theories, such as the concepts of structure and function borrowed from morphology and applied to other concepts such as “society” and “culture.” Sometimes the anthropologized versions of biology were reincorporated into biology and then borrowed back again (Sahlins 1976). In more recent decades the subdiscipline of medical anthropology has had fairly obvious connections to modern biology as well as medicine. It is only in recent years, though, that ethnographers in anthropology or sociology or science studies have undertaken studies of people designated as, or who self-identify as, biologists (broadly defined). The period of the late 1970s into the 1980s is a significant one because some fairly substantial changes occurred at that time intellectually, politically, and economically around the globe. In the field of science studies, as mentioned earlier, the analytical shift to practice and quantum entanglement from the predominance of Newtonian historians and philosophers of science really got underway. In anthropology too, major disciplinary refashioning was the order of the day, including the beginnings xxii

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of a major disciplinary self-assessment set in motion by the demise of colonialisms, the dissolution of Soviet regimes in eastern Europe and Russia, and the rise of feminist and anti-racist movements in the advanced capitalist countries. Within this latter group of countries workplace computing started expanding (home computing about 15 years later), there was a broad shift to the right in the political spectrum (what has been referred to as the rise of neoconservatism), and there was a general return to economic policies favoring minimal state intervention or regulation of business and industry (often termed neoliberalism). The late 1970s was also a period of major change in biology as a discipline through the introduction of new technologies and techniques that more or less coincided with the changes just mentioned (Rabinow 1996a; Rose 2007a, 2007b). Although none of these events in any sense “caused” any of the others, their fluid relational entanglements and intra-actions generated differences or diffraction patterns that continue to make a difference; these are phenomena that continue to emerge or become, even as they change in that process of becoming. At this period the key developments were in, or related to, molecular biology. Now, molecular biology, as the effort to understand life through the structures and functions of molecules in living organisms, and its diverse forerunners have been around for about a century (Burri and Dumit 2007; Rheinberger 1997). The solidification of the field came as Watson and Crick ended the debate surrounding the structure of DNA by convincing the scientific community it was a double helix. Thereafter, molecular biology largely concerned itself particularly with the study of genes and related proteins, enzymes, and so on. For a quarter century afterward, the pace of understanding was relatively slow for a variety of reasons, including amounts of funding available, national priorities in a Cold War context, available lab technologies, the size of the molecular biology research community, the size and scope of research projects, and so on. The phenomenon of molecular biology and the fluid relational entanglements which contributed to it and to which it contributed were significantly altered after the late 1970s. In fact, I would suggest that after this time molecular biology became a different phenomenon. This was in large part, but not exclusively, because of the rise of biotechnologies in conjunction with some of the other changes mentioned above. Biotechnologies allowed a certain (limited) industrialization of the laboratory space by allowing the scale of research on selected molecules to grow exponentially over the years. As Rose writes: “The laboratory has become a kind of factory for the creation of new forms of molecular life. And in doing so, it is fabricating a new way of understanding life itself ” (2007b, 13). Among the earliest of these new technologies is the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), itself modified several times since the early 1980s, as a means to duplicate intraduction

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segments of DNA in large quantities (by laboratory standards) for testing its properties or to be applied as a phenomenon in other investigations. Within this, the account of the “making of PCR” by Paul Rabinow (1996a) indicates why we might want to consider molecular biology as becoming a different phenomenon than it had been before. It wasn’t that it emerged by chance, which happens in scientific practice frequently, nor was it due to its status as technology. Scientists have been engaging and engaged by technology for as long as we have had science. The difference that makes a difference is that people began to do and speak of “technoscience,” an entanglement of science and technology so relationally fluid they could no longer be easily pried apart (Haraway 1997b; Latour 1987). As Rabinow put it, “the truly astonishing thing about PCR is precisely that it wasn’t designed to solve a problem; once it existed, problems began to emerge to which it could be applied” (1996a, 7). Other biotechnologies have shared that status of technoscience since that time, but for the moment I want to draw attention to two items. First, when you start looking for new problems to already existing “solutions” rather than solutions to already existing problems, you think about your object of research differently. You have shifted, in this instance in molecular biology, from a Newtonian toward a quantum approximation. Second, this shift relates with and through the other changes mentioned above in politics, economics, culture, and so on. It was quickly realized that “solutions” seeking problems could be capitalized, literally and figuratively. Although greater attention to these shifting relations are the concerns of chapters 4 and 5, for the moment let us say that “the gene” became a phenomenon of renewed interest not just in the biosciences, but also in the human sciences, various levels of government, industry, the financial world, and others. Health care in Euro-American societies in particular, but also broadly globally, is a major source of investment and expenditure economically, to be sure, but also politically, socially, affectively, and religiously. The new technologies promising better understanding of genetics, the broad political shift rightward, the decline of government regulation in markets, and the rise of information technologies all contributed to creating new possibilities in these areas. Specifically, they contributed to the actualization of some of those possibilities, and therefore also the non-realization of other possibilities in the course of their relating. The attention paid to the gene was one such possibility that was actualized. For example, the United States had committed about 11 per cent of all federal research and development funds into biomedical research, which was three to four times more than other Euro-American countries in the late 1970s (Rabinow 1996a, 23). By the 1990s similar investments in bioscience and biotechnology were made in Canada (Bibeau et al. 2007) and European economies. The widespread belief arose among policy makers, publics, and even bioscientists on occasion, that if a catalog of all human genes xxiv

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and their variants—the human genome—could be assembled, then rapid advances in health care would follow. This is indicative of Newtonian assumptions by which “policy makers and most scientists believe that a lack of definitive evidence necessarily marks an uncertainty,” whereas it may very well be the case that “an epistemological uncertainty is in actuality an ontological indeterminacy” (Barad 2011b, 134; see also Barad 2011a). In retrospect, it was too much of a simplification to expect “the gene” or “genes for” everything from autism to violence to be identified, with some form of diagnostic tool or treatment to come shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, it was a simplification many different groups of people accepted for many different reasons within and across these intraconnected groups. I raise this point not to indicate how far “we” have come in 30 years, or how misguided “they” were at the time. It is more important, I think, to have a sense of the currents of thought and action set in motion, the superpositions, and how they continue becoming (and becoming something else) in our present. No one would deny that the Human Genome Project (HGP) was of tremendous biomedical importance. But its importance did not stop or start there, and if we follow Barad’s quantum assumptions it could not stop or start there. Consider the statement to the US Senate in 1990 by Leroy Hood, one of the coconstructors of the automated DNA sequencer: “This [the HGP–UK] is the first biological project that has as a major imperative developing new kinds of technologies” (cited in Fortun 2008, 36). This statement gives us a sense of what it means to say that a technology is a “solution” waiting for a problem. Within different social, political, economic, or environmental arrangements a new technology is a difference that may or may not make a difference. (It is worth remembering that pre-conquest Andean States had the wheel but little to no use for it, while Euro-Americans frequently worry about having to “reinvent the wheel.”) Another way to suggest this is to say that PCR, DNA sequencers, and the whole array of biotechnoscience is always already political, economic, cultural, and so on. It requires engineers, child caregivers, policy makers, lawyers, janitors, entrepreneurs, and many others, both human and nonhuman. It requires many already existing technologies to bring a new one into being, changing the use and place of the “old” technology in the process. Leroy Hood’s statement, then, alerts us to entanglements not in the abstract, but in their doing and becoming if we accept the assumptions of what I’ve termed the quantum approach. The (ongoing) process of doing the human genome the first time is itself a telling story of the kinds of matters where some of the changes outlined above diffracted into new patterns still among us. Originally a project of the US National Institutes of Health conceptualized in the late 1980s, the “map” of the human genome was originally performed by government and academic researchers in several countries until Celera Corporation announced its intention to create the map faster, using less money, intraduction

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and with an intention of patenting genes. Despite outright competition for scientific honors initially, the HGP and Celera eventually settled into an uneasy partnership. The first draft of the “map” was completed in 2000, with refinement and filling in still continuing (Palsson 2007). In many ways this intersection of government, industry, and academy was an early indication to the public at large that substantial shifts in, among, and through all three were taking place. Debate about the desirability, extent, and intent of the relationships among them continue to this day. No less contentious, the HGP was also significant because five per cent of all funds were to be spent on addressing ELSI—the ethical, legal, and social implications running throughout the production of the “map” (Palsson 2007). Certainly one issue that becomes evident here is that “pure science,” as most of us are taught it in grade school, is an unattainable ideal. Influence, a flowing in and flowing within, is inescapably part of becoming or doing. To be clear, I am not relating what Rabinow calls a “corruption tale” to you (1996a, 10). Universities and businesses and governments have been shaping one another from their beginnings. What I am suggesting is that the kinds of relationships among them changed substantially about 30 years ago. The “Book of Life,” as the human genome was often referred to, was presumed to be written in genetic code. Crack the code and many human afflictions were destined to disappear in our lifetime . . . or so the thinking went. What seems to have happened is that codes have codes, too. It would appear that what we know about genes, which is considerable, is that we know a lot less than we thought we did (Fortun 2008, 46; Haraway 1997b, 142). Human genes were expected to number in the hundreds of thousands, maybe 150,000–200,000. The whole notion of a “gene or genes for” every physical and behavioral trait quickly disappeared as researchers became aware that even single genes performed multiple functions. Genetic agency, the agency of genes in and through their relations, has compelled bioscientists to reevaluate genetics and genomics in theory and practice. Genes were not stable, isolated entities waiting to be discovered. Insofar as we can speak of genes at all, they are in the process of “becoming” and “doing,” and they exercise their capacity to compel action. They do not simply wait for Science to “discover” them or force them to reveal their “secrets.” Above all, they compel us to redefine what a gene is, does, and means (Keller 2000, 2009). After the first draft “map” in 2000, the representation promising the stability and predictability of Newtonian Science, investigators have been compelled to investigate in terms more approximating quantum approaches. In fact, you could argue that genes have coaxed researchers to look away from genes in and of themselves and focus more on the structure and function of proteins (proteomics) (Myers 2008; Roy 2008). Genes have also coaxed a return to the study of the cell as a dynamic (constantly changing) xxvi

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entity (Landecker 2007), and, of course, the very complex relationships among them. While the “century of the gene” may be passing (Keller 2000), proteins and cells are theorized much more relationally in terms of their becomings, becomings that are increasingly presumed not consistent over time. In grossly simplistic terms, it is not only that genes code for cell production, but cells, via the production of different proteins at different times, code for the production of different genes at different times. Here again, we can see that entanglements and diffractions are not flows of abstraction, but can and do perform the messiness of the actual world. In an agential realist account, cells change not as “things in themselves,” but also in and through the relationships to their surroundings, including observers. Cells literally become different entities before and after acceptance of Darwinian evolution, Mendelian genetics, the structure of DNA, and the molecular biology revolution, just to mention obvious examples. In any of those moments they were not simply different natural phenomena, but different naturalcultural phenomena. The issue is not only what we do to or for them, but also what they do to or for us. In the mid-twentieth century they were, in a sense, the background stage to the gene as actor in the performance of heredity. By the beginning of this century they had become, that is, measured as, prominent actors in their own right. Cells are no longer what they were, and neither are we: each has shaped the other as we act upon, enact, each other at the same time. One increasingly accepted result within and beyond the biosciences is that a primary, single candidate for the role of “building block” of life is unlikely. It is not genes, proteins, enzymes, physical environments, or prodding researchers as separate entities so much as the relationships among them, each of which can contribute differences that make a difference in the coming together of a biological phenomenon. What goes for cells can also be applied to bodies as well. Obviously most of us accept that complex organisms, such as ourselves, are composed of many different cell types and that over the course of a lifetime individual cells die and are replaced. Quite literally none of us are who we were from one moment to the next, and I suspect most of you would not find that statement problematic. But how, then, do we distinguish the “life” of a cell and the “life” of the organism of which it was a part? What do we mean by “life” (Barad 2008; Landecker 2007)? What do we mean by a “body”? Was “it” waiting there all along in the embryonic stem cells, cells whose indeterminacy can somewhat exemplify superposition in biology the way electrons can in quantum physics (Bennett 2010)? Or was “it” waiting to be shaped by the history that would become “you”? Perhaps the issue is not waiting but doing, becoming, in short, intra-acting (see page xxxiv of the Theoretical and Methodological Intralude). Some of you may be thinking that this process of measuring having an influence on the phenomenon as it emerges may be the case in quantum physics, but in the biosciences? Would this work for cells? proteins? bodies? Fortunately for me, much of this has intraduction

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been convincingly argued by Annemarie Mol, among others, in the case of bodies (2002) and in a manner somewhat similar to Barad. She, too, is concerned with practice, what people and things are doing and how they are relating.

Annemarie Mol (2002) on the Body Multiple To summarize Mol’s book all too quickly, a hospital lab test and a physical exam for atherosclerosis, in practice, do not refer to the same disease, even though they may use the same term. Similarly, the blood of the patient sent to the lab and the leg of the patient examined by the physician do not refer to the same body in practice. Neither atherosclerosis nor the body it inhabits preexist diagnosis. In short, a Newtonian body, the River of the Body in terms of the parable in Appendix 1, has been reconsidered as rivers of bodies. As contradictory as it may seem, phenomena may be best thought of for the time being as singular multiplicities. In one sense the patient is singular: there is only one body. But in another sense, with different people looking for, and doing, different activities the body literally becomes different things; a single patient is made multiple. The body is enacted as a multiple singularity. The challenge, as we will see in the following chapters, is to understand when differences make a difference and when they do not. Remember that just because everything is intraconnected, it does not follow that they are intraconnected in the same way or to the same extent. Drawing manageable boundaries is a practice that we, humans and nonhumans alike, all engage in multiple ways in any given moment. This is why theories and methods of observation (which are always more than observation) shape the outcome of phenomena instead of simply representing it. Mol writes: “[T]he singularity of objects, so often presupposed, turns out to be an accomplishment” (2002, 119, emphasis mine). Or, if you like, it is possible to ignore some differences, collapse others into one another, or have differences generate “working misunderstandings” (Hvalkof 2006) in the course of all the elements of a phenomenon intra-acting. There is also Mol’s version of thinking complementarity (see page xxxii of the Theoretical and Methodological Intralude), the mutual exclusiveness of ethnographically tending to the object of interest, or the means of ethnographic techniques, by discussing what she observed of atherosclerosis in a Dutch hospital on the top portion of each page of her book, and discussing the many techniques of observation brought to bear in her study on the bottom portion.

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To summarize, the divide between nature and culture, or science and ideology, is assumed to be relative, not absolute. There is an effort to move away from epistemologies that are only concerned to get representations of reality “right,” and therefore to move away from assuming that representations and what they refer to are stable, timeless, and fully independent of one another. There is a concern to attend to ontologies or “essences” as becomings . . . things and their observers are always already in motion because their relationships are. Chapter 1 considers how this applies to two neuroscientific research projects in practice, but first some theoretical and methodological elaboration.

notes 

That the project itself was conceptualized as a map, a common Western metaphor for the mirror of Nature, is a powerful indicator of Newtonian thinking.  It is important not to overemphasize the affinity between Barad’s and Mol’s thinking. The differences separating them are differences that matter in all senses of the term (Schrader ), especially regarding the indeterminacy not only of “subjects” and “objects,” but also the indeterminacy of the relationships among and through them. Nonetheless, in terms of what I’d like to accomplish in this ethnography, Mol serves as a very useful rung on Wittgenstein’s ladder. As such I will emphasize Barad’s and Mol’s similarities despite their very important differences.

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A Theoretical and Methodological Intralude Historically an interlude was a part of some theatrical performances. It is a performance nested between sections of a larger performance. It is entertainment between entertainment, one form of play between another form of play. An intralude, therefore, shifts from “between” to “within.” It is one form of play within another form of play, and in most intellectual fields, academic or otherwise, it is a good way to describe the relationship of theory to evidence or data, or the relationship of form to content. I think it describes ethnographies especially well in the sense that ethnography, as ethnography, is a theory about a theory (Nader 2011). Many texts for beginners in a field, such as standard introductory textbooks, present theoretical concerns as distinctive units, for example, theory chapters. They have the appearance of being disconnected from major concepts or issues or facts. In a word, theory is portrayed as an interlude. An ethnography directed at those new to a field, such as science studies, has to contend with this pull in opposite directions of interlude and intralude. What I propose here is an example of Wittgenstein’s ladder in action. This brief section on the major concepts used in Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism is a distortion to both her theory (insofar as the concepts are treated in relative isolation from their use) and ethnographic form (insofar as I am using an interlude to encourage the use of intraludes).

an indeterminate list of agential realist concepts Below are the concepts from Barad’s works that will feature regularly throughout the rest of the book. I’ve placed them here in a separate section so that you, the reader, can refer to them readily as needed.

Barad’s own currents of thought try to account for (some versions of ) physics and (some versions of ) feminism and (some versions of ) philosophy and much else besides in a single, yet flexible and open-ended, analytic process. She wants to initiate ways of thinking and/as doing that move away from representations that mirror reality in a way that separates representations from reality. Although her work is much more subtle, nuanced, and open than the rough and grainy image that follows, the six concepts below will provide us a place to start or a view that can be brought into sharper focus in later chapters. It is an effort, to play on the title of her major work, in “meeting the universe halfway.” 1. Entanglement: “To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence” (Barad 2007, ix; see also Barad 2008, 2010, 2011b). Entanglement and our earlier concept of relationality can be used interchangeably for our purposes. When everything is related or entangled with everything else we need to be careful to remember that relationships—relationships connecting people to people, people to other organisms and nonliving objects, but importantly also relationships connecting nonhuman organisms to each other and objects to each other—are “things” as well, not simply abstract ideas representing things. This is part of what it means to take what I’ve called quantum assumptions and quantum physics seriously. We are always in the thick of things, or better, we are always already in the thick of things, because even space and time are things, relationships, with which we are entangled. In other words, there is no outside or beyond to natureculture from which to consider it. Naturecultures emerge in and through the doing. Objectivity, as most of us have come to use the word, assumes that our relationships to the things investigated are inconsequential because it is a matter of finding what is already there. Quantum physics, on the other hand, assumes that investigations do impact, which is to say are an integral part of, what is investigated, as we will see. 2. Complementarity/Superposition: Barad’s version of quantum physics (yes, there are multiple versions) is based significantly on the work of Neils Bohr. The principle of complementarity Bohr put forward (in contrast to the more widely known uncertainty principle of Werner Heisenberg) is closely tied to the issue of superposition, so it may be useful to start here. Perhaps in high school physics classes you observed the motion of waves in water, such that when crests and troughs of roughly equal height encountered one another they momentarily cancelled each other out, or when two crests came together they built on each other. This classical approach to superposition can be augmented with quantum approaches, as in whether photons or electrons are particles or waves (they can behave like both), or the famous thought experiment by Schrödinger, where (hypothetically) a cat is placed in a sealed box with a xxxii

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device with a 50 per cent probability of killing it in an hour (death and life are superimposed until measured) (Barad 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011a, 2011b). Superposition in these cases involves, without going into detail, the possibilities of two or more mutually exclusive relational states coming into existence. Superpositioned possibilities are just that. They are not predetermined “things” waiting to be found or not. Rather, they are indeterminate, to use Barad’s terms, even if the possibilities are not infinite. But, if an additional relationship of evaluation or measurement is added, only a single state is obtained. The hitch is that you can’t account for the relationship of evaluation and all the other relational states at the same time. Complementarity thus entails “either you think about something, in which case that something is the object of your thoughts, or you examine your process of thinking about something, in which case your thoughts about what you are thinking (about something), and not the something itself, are the object of your thoughts” (Barad 2007, 21). This applies to naturecultures of all kinds as much as electrons or photons. 3. Diffraction: Diffraction patterns follow both logically and actually from superpositions, and are offered by Barad as an alternative method to the more common visual metaphor of reflection, with its implication that it is a representation of reality distinct from the reality it is mirroring. Mirroring as method is that Newtonian approximation where Science reflects Nature, but assumes a separation from it. It assumes that Science copies (some portion of ) the same thing as the Natural phenomenon. Diffraction, in contrast, relies on differences and multiplicities, as in the resulting pattern of waves made by two stones thrown into a river when their ripples overlap (Barad 2007, 29, 36, 72–83). But it is not difference for the sake of difference that is important here. These differences have to matter, in all senses of that term, which is to say they are differences that make a difference; they are entangled differences, superimposed and complementary. Furthermore, these differences should not be confused with the effects of their coming together in diffraction patterns, just as we would not confuse the size, shape, and location of the two stones with the waves they produce in the river. Even though “there is a deep sense in which we can understand diffraction patterns . . . to be the fundamental constituents that make up the world . . . at times diffraction phenomena will be an object of investigation and at other times it will serve as an apparatus of investigation; it cannot serve both purposes simultaneously” (2007, 72–73; see also 2003, 2010, 2011a). 4. Phenomenon: Unlike the everyday usage of the term, based on empirical knowledge obtained through the senses (or their extensions), Barad extends the term in a way consistent with our quantum approximation. Phenomena are not “things” in and of themselves, separate and distinct from the rest of reality and its observers, waiting to be brought forth by the appropriate methods, as in the Newtonian approximation. For her, “phenomena are ontological entanglements . . . they are the a theoretical and methodological intralude

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basic units of existence” (Barad 2007, 333; see also 2003). What might this mean? Well, it suggests that understanding phenomena requires considering more than the knowledge produced by various methods (epistemology). Conceptually phenomena also require a shift in thinking about the essence(s) or nature(s) of Being(s)—in other words, ontology. More to the point, if we take the notion of entanglement seriously, individual “things” or phenomena don’t have a stable, single essence of their own, but are shaped by all the other essences always already in motion. Consider, for the sake of simplicity, the following example. In the world of pastries, doughnuts are essentially (more or less) round with a (more or less) round hole in the center. It is the presence of an absence, the hole, in its entangled relationship to the circular fried dough that ontologically characterizes the doughnut. Odd as it may sound, these relationships, in their potential state, have to exist before the actual doughnut (2007, 333–34). In this sense, it is more useful and more accurate to speak of becoming instead of being, or, if you like, becoming becomes the essence of being. This suggests we approach the notion of cause and effect differently than in a universe assumed to be fixed and stable. When everything is in motion, becoming according to its potentials, “objects” only exist in a relative and relational, rather than absolute, sense—“objects” (i.e., phenomena) stop being discrete entities in favor of “practices/doings distributed in space and time” (2007, 444). 5. Intra-action: Where phenomena are one means to discuss the question of what, intra-action is a means to broach the question of how. If you accept that we are always in the middle of things, the things we are in the middle of are phenomena. The relatively distinct entities within a phenomenon are a product of entangled actual and potential becomings. Rather than a series of unrelated things coming together and then interacting, as in the Newtonian approximation, Barad proposes that if everything is always already connected then actions are not “between” (inter), but “within” (intra). Beyond that, remember that everything influences everything else (though not necessarily in the same way or to the same degree). This influence, or agency, is a relational capacity or potential to act and/or compel action. Importantly, Barad is careful to note agency is not a property of humans, or any other objects, living or not (2003, 826–27). Intra-action, then, “ratifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (2007, 33). “A phenomenon is a specific intra-action of ‘object’ and the ‘measuring agencies’; the object and the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them” (2007: 128). The consequence of this shift in thinking, as she points out numerous times, is quite profound. Science and scientists don’t describe a reality independent of human consciousness; they describe phenomena of which they are a part by virtue of their investigations, changing themselves and what they are investigating in this process (or practice or becoming or doing). Different intra-actions result in different phenomena. xxxiv

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6. Agential Realism: The previous five concepts, and others yet to be mentioned, taken together in their entangled intra-actions, become a powerful theoretical framework that Barad summarizes in the term agential realism. So far I have mentioned some of the effects this current of thinking has for questions of how to know (epistemology) and the constantly changing notions of what things are (ontology). There is also, however, an ethical and political dimension to this that is also part of the intraactions of any phenomenon under investigation. If agency is a relational process of doing common to everything, a process influencing and influenced by all other agencies, then “we,” individually and collectively, are responsible for our part in the differences we enact, that is, the phenomena we are part of yet help bring into being and becoming, and the phenomena we prevent from becoming. (Actually, this is not quite an accurate portrayal of what Barad proposes, but will do until we’ve used Wittgenstein’s ladder a little more.) For the moment I would emphasize that agency is relative and relational, not absolute; we have neither complete free will nor are we so determined by past and present context that our behaviors are no more than knee-jerk reflexes. We have a responsibility for our enactments because we have a responsibility with and within the phenomena in which we (literally) find ourselves. Summarizing, Barad puts forward agential realism “as an epistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides an understanding of the role of human and non-human, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social material practices, thereby moving such considerations beyond the well-worn debates that pit constructionism against realism, agency against structure, and idealism against materialism” (2007, 25–26; see also 2010, 2011b).

thinking through methods, thinking methods through One of the hallmarks of scientific writing of any variety, whether in books, reports, or journal articles, whether in the human or natural sciences, is that there is always a more or less formal or informal discussion of methods used in the collection of evidence. The sciences aiming to produce ethnographic studies are certainly no exception. A touchstone of ethnographic methods has been participant observation, a technique developed by anthropologists early in the twentieth century and often associated with the work of Bronislaw Malinowski. As a means of data collection, participant observation can be characterized as an experiential study of relationships by and through relationships (Lederman 2006a; Strathern 2005). Classic norms in ethnographies (Rosaldo 1980), especially anthropological ones in the period roughly from 1920 to 1970, made three assumptions that have, in the decades since, come under increasing challenge and scrutiny. There has been a shift from nonreflexive to reflexive a theoretical and methodological intralude

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analysis by ethnographers; there has been a shift toward greater recognition of power in the fieldwork situation; and, most recently, there has been a movement away from anthropocentrism. I’ll briefly say a few words about each of these shifts because they are so important to how my own fieldwork was conducted and how this book was conceptualized. I don’t think anyone should underestimate what is entailed in conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the workplace where the ethnographer is employed. As I discuss in greater length in chapter 3 and Appendix 2, there is no easy way to escape or avoid the awareness that you are part of the very “field” you are studying (Krautwurst 2013). Classic ethnographies usually portrayed the anthropologist as an absent presence, a “fly on the wall.” E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s (1969 [1940]) famous study of Nuer, for example, only gives the briefest mention of the British colonial presence in Sudan in the 1930s and a similarly brief mention of his personal relations with Nuer early in his fieldwork. After that, one would be hard pressed to find discussion that didn’t try to approximate the Newtonian ideal of objectivity, such as writing in the third person, and a reluctance to consider how the investigator’s presence altered local dynamics (Hutchinson 1996). In a word, reflexivity, or methodological self-awareness, was actively discouraged. For many years ethnographic analysis could be dismissed by the accusation of “subjectivity.” Interestingly, as Barad (2007) points out, quantum physicists wrestled with a similar issue (and with that you already have a hint as to how I will wade into the Two Culture problem). I don’t mean to suggest that reflexivity solves the problem of objectivism (Fabian 1991; Lynch 2000; Rosaldo 1980), but that ignoring the presence, significance, and actions of the researcher created its own problems. Anthropology learned that lesson in the 1960s and 1970s during the wave of global decolonization outside the West, and to a lesser extent through Western social movements such as the civil rights, gay rights, and women’s rights movements. These events made clear that ethnographers cannot be “flies on the wall.” For my own case I had to be aware that studying a facility on the campus where I work poses particular challenges. I would be researching colleagues, friends, and people I interact with on a frequent and regular basis. In addition, the University of Prince Edward Island itself is located in a demographically and geographically small place that maintains, in some respects, a small town ambience. Because Charlottetown, the provincial capital, has roughly 40,000 of the island’s 140,000 inhabitants, social circles overlap much more tightly than in large, or even medium-sized, urban centers. Some Islanders have joked that where others are connected through six degrees of separation, on PEI it is six minutes. At any rate, methodologically speaking, reflexivity compelled me to consider not only what I observed, and not only what I did during the participant observational xxxvi

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phase of the research, but also how I represent what I saw and did. In other words, how I portray (human and nonhuman) others and myself matters, in the widest sense of the term, as much as portraying what they and I did. Even more, it leads into considering what not to portray. Repercussions can be large in a small place, and there is little to be gained from pretending otherwise. Representations are not only a matter of political or ethical responsibility, as anthropologists and others have been aware for several decades. They are also a matter of scientific responsibility, and one of the reasons I find Karen Barad’s agential realist framework so compelling. More will be said about this in the pages to follow. Around the same time that anthropologists became more reflexive about their research and writing practices, they became more sensitive to their involvements in relationships of power and authority. Power, in this sense, is to be understood not only in a formal or big sense, such as the way governments, transnational corporations, or large religious institutions can influence people’s behaviors, though these certainly shouldn’t be ignored either. Rather, the conception of power I am referring to is much more small-scale and intimate. One could even say quantum, as long as we understand this usage to be another rung on Wittgenstein’s ladder. Many anthropologists were influenced in this regard by the French social theorist Michel Foucault, who, among other things, convincingly argued there is a complex relationship between truth, power, and authority (see, e.g., 1978, 1979, 1980). Controversially—a controversy far from settled today—he was among the most forceful of a group of thinkers to suggest that the West’s much valued objective/subjective distinction leading to a singular, timeless “Truth” was a product of particular truth and power relationships, and not something outside of those relationships. For Foucault, “Truths” were/are “true” because they can make, rather than explain, things like “facts,” which is exactly where the issue of power is important. Many anthropologists came to appreciate that the truths they expressed about colonized groups or Western minorities were based, at their simplest, on the ability to be there to study in the first place (Asad 1973; Clifford and Marcus 1984; Said 1979). How many !Kung San or Yanomami, to use two iconic examples from introductory anthropology texts, have come to Toronto or New York to tell the world, and not only ourselves, the “Truth” about Euro-American civilization in a way that is globally accepted as common sense? Perhaps more importantly, how many could if they had the inclination, that is, how many are in a position to challenge the “truths” anthropologists and others have spoken about them for decades? These are the kinds of relationships of power that unsettled many anthropologists and other ethnographers. It’s not that the truths spoken by anthropologists were necessarily untrue (a silly and self-defeating idea) or mean-spirited (though sometimes they were/are), but that there was and is no truth in isolation from the many a theoretical and methodological intralude

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relationships that bring it into being. All this is to say that truth and the rules for deciding truth from falsity are constructed. Truth is something you do, not something you find. Recall, at this point, the earlier quote from Barad (2007, 40): “the fact that scientific knowledge is constructed does not imply that science doesn’t ‘work,’ and the fact that science ‘works’ does not mean that we have discovered human independent facts about nature.” What has all this to do with my study of the Atlantic Centre for Comparative Biomedical Research (ACCBR)? Plenty. The people I studied—neuroscientists, lab technicians, graduate students, university administrators, government officials, and more—are certainly capable of representing themselves, and frequently do so. Even more, most are in a position to challenge what others—including, significantly, ethnographers—say about them in a way that colonized groups or Western minorities usually did not and do not. The relationships of power to knowledge are different in the two situations, therefore the truths that emerge are different. Not only is truth not uncovered, whole and intact, not only is it constructed or made through relationships, it is negotiated. In these negotiations some are better positioned than others. No doubt some of you readers are questioning my credibility, if not my sanity. Others of you might be willing to grant such methodological concerns for social issues, but not natural ones. This all-too-brief discussion on power and truth has been flowing toward the problem of what anthropologists call “studying up.” Laura Nader (1974, 1997) coined this phrase as part of a challenge for anthropology to investigate non-marginalized groups because they were (and largely still are) understudied. It also entailed a challenge for the discipline to raise awareness of the privileges held by its practitioners, and by other academics and intellectuals more broadly. Here also, Barad’s agential realist framework, as I elaborate it in the pages that follow, addresses this matter of studying up, and not only for the human sciences.

Laura Nader (1972) on Up the Anthropologist Anthropology’s histories as an academic discipline, especially its socio-cultural currents, can’t be separated from the period of Western colonial expansion in the wake of Columbus’s journeys (see, for example, Asad 1973; Wolf 1982). Although the discipline in its first century focused primarily on people from beyond the artificial borders of the European continent, it never completely neglected the study of Europeans wherever they located themselves, including its relatively affluent streams. In regard to the latter, Laura Nader’s essay argued that the study of privilege in all its guises should be a greater priority for anthropology.

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She identifies three reasons in particular that ethnographers should study privilege, including their own. First is a pedagogic function: issues of local or immediate interest to students are rarely investigated. In her words, “the things that students are energetic about they do not study” (1972, 283). Second, it is responsible scientific practice—what she terms scientific adequacy—to explore as many connections and relationships as practicable regarding a phenomenon, not simply those that are convenient or are less resistant to investigation. Significantly, she notes the influence the fieldworker has on the field as an important aspect of scientific adequacy. Finally, she suggests that studying up and writing for wider publics than the academic one can promote democratic practices because it informs people of how institutions—especially institutions considered opaque or unapproachable—work. For Nader, anthropologists and other ethnographers have responsibilities for what they study as well as whom and how they study. On this basis her argument flows toward what Marcus (1995) calls multi-sited ethnography (see box, p. xl) in that, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz, she encourages ethnographers to study villages, and not only in villages.

My immediate point about studying up in a geographically and socially small space, about researching tightly connected and overlapping economically, politically, or socially privileged groups of which I am a part, is that responsibility to the people you write about imposes itself in ways that you can’t simply reach because of the objective/ subjective divide. Of course, in hindsight, anthropologists and other ethnographers perhaps should have been striving for this level of responsibility all along. Take, for instance, my interviews with some members of UPEI’s Senior Management Group (SMG), the top administrators at UPEI. These interviews took place in the charged atmosphere of a university that is changing what it is and does, with many groups on campus and off campus contesting the changes taking place (there was, e.g., a faculty strike in 2006). These changes were, and remain at the time of writing, a sensitive issue for all concerned. Even though I have given SMG members pseudonyms because of the potential for personalized conflict between faculty and top administrators, I cannot ignore that the struggle to define “the truth” of what UPEI is and does is at stake. What I do or don’t say, and how I do or don’t say it, has the capacity to affect people on campus in different ways, including myself, in terms of their work and work environment. This, then, gets at that fine-grained relationship between truth and power that Michel Foucault was talking about. Just as importantly, it indicates that this complex relationship is also one of ethics and responsibility (see Appendix 2). A simple

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notion of objective vs. subjective does not even begin to deal with this dynamic and is one reason I prefer Barad’s concept of entanglement. Now we come to the third methodological concern in fieldwork mentioned earlier, that of anthropocentrism, or human-centeredness if you like. Compared to the entanglements of power, truth, and reflexivity, and most definitely in relation to the norms of classic ethnography, it is a relatively recent preoccupation in anthropology. It is in this area that anthropology has much to learn from the science studies literature of the last three or four decades. Quite simply, the problem of anthropocentrism in anthropology is not that it is too people-oriented, but is rather the manner in which it is oriented toward people. We have all come across those blanket definitions of anthropology as the academic discipline that studies humanity through the widest possible lens. This in itself is not the concern. What has increasingly become problematic is the way that everything that is considered nonhuman (however that is defined) is subordinated to human concerns. Putting it somewhat differently, the problem of anthropocentrism in anthropology (and not only anthropology!) is that the discipline is still too Newtonian and insufficiently quantum. If I may be allowed to mix metaphors for a moment, anthropology needs its Copernican Revolution that displaces the concept of “Man” from the center of the moral and physical universe. What I am referring to was once neatly summarized by Clifford Geertz. Discussing classic norms in ethnography he wrote: “Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighbourhoods . . .); they study in villages” (1973, 22). The assumption, in stark terms, is that human and nonhuman elements are completely separated from one another, and that anthropologists (and by extension other ethnographers) study the former and not the latter. The relationships that allow or facilitate the human/ nonhuman divide to form, and therefore have to precede it, are ignored. But what if we assume these relationships are important? What if we assume these relationships are dispersed in a way that dimensions of space and time emerge through them? What if we assume the lines separating animate from inanimate, living from dead, and human from nonhuman are arbitrary, and that nonhumans may be interested in some ways but not others? If we accept those assumptions, fieldwork practices move toward the production of what has been called multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995).

George Marcus (1995) on Multi-Sited Ethnography The 1995 article in which the concept of multi-sited ethnography was presented, “Ethnography in/of the World System,” brought together and articulated

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some of the important methodological changes occurring in anthropology since the 1960s. In contrast to the closed, self-contained systems of culture and society associated with functionalist, (cybernetically) homeostatic, or otherwise bounded accounts, Marcus drew attention to the importance of following connections, associations, and relationships of all sorts, and not only those of humans. The ethnographer is encouraged to follow the metaphor, the people, the thing, and so on. This effort to follow connections is not as much a theoretical matter as a methodological one. For Marcus all fieldwork is always already potentially multi-sited if you accept the assumption that any ethnographic practice is a part of the activities to which it refers, changing both itself and what it refers to in the process. Whatever it is that multi-sited ethnographers are “following”—metaphors, humans, nonhumans, things, and more—the multi-sited “object of study is mobile and multiply situated” (1995, 102) in such a way that the local vs. global distinction becomes problematic. More than that, he adds that multi-sited studies do not simply “study up” to make whole single-sited research that “studies down.” The object of study is more complex than that because the ethnography and ethnographer is part of that object. Conducting multi-sited research leads to “all sorts of crosscutting and contradictory personal commitments” (1995, 113) that I will touch upon in Appendix 2.

Methodologically this study of the ACCBR aims to be multi-sited in several of the ways Marcus outlines. The ACCBR is not only a physical space, or the equipment and supplies in that space, or the people in it, though in some respects it is all these things. It is also many relationships, such as the relationships among people, material things, animals, and abstractions such as ideas and institutions. Most importantly, these relationships are open-ended. As I will argue in greater detail later on, the ACCBR aims to take scientific practices in certain directions in an effort to generate new scientific relationships while at the same time opening itself to indeterminacy in multiple ways. This open-endedness is one way that relationships, and therefore the “things” they are related to, change. To return to Geertz’s quip, multisited ethnography is about the study of villages and study in villages, and how the lines of differentiation across and within them are drawn. In recent years researchers in Science and Technology Studies (STS) have carried forward some of the ethnographic methodological issues that have been the focus of socio-cultural anthropology in recent years.

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Science Studies Science Science has been an object of study long before the field of STS came on the scene. Historians, philosophers, and sociologists have addressed several natural science disciplines, notable scientists, discoveries, and the like for decades. Each of these human sciences applied its tools and techniques to the institution of science (or parts of it), largely understood in terms of the natural sciences. As such they implicitly accepted the human science/natural science divide. Beyond that, their analyses tended to concentrate on how science ideally should be done, or on the social contexts in which results or discoveries were made (Schaffer 2009b; Shapin 2009). There was an insistence that power, as discussed above, would eventually give way to “Truth,” the “really real.” Until the 1970s the practices of science studies, and the conception of “Science” it studied, was largely Newtonian. There was little evidence gathered or presented as to what people actually did in the course of their research. One of the reasons the actual practices of what was being done were excluded was because of a certain assumption, a corollary if you like, that built on the assumption of a hard and fast line separating human from natural sciences. This additional assumption was that scientific knowledge would transcend, or tend toward transcending, its social production to achieve an absolute objectivity. Because of this, one was justified in drawing a hard and fast line between Science and (the rest of ) Society (Shapin 2009). From the late 1970s onward there were two currents of research practices that increasingly questioned the Society/Science and natural science/human science divides. The matter is put very well by Steve Shapin, a prominent historian of science. He recalled: I think it was interesting that each of us at the Edinburgh Science Studies Unit had some considerable science background. And I think temperamentally, together with that science background, there was a willingness not to idealize . . . [T]he test we tended to run is . . . Did it meet the test of giving an account of what it was like to do science in a chemistry lab, for example, on a wet Monday? And against that standard we considered that quite a lot of the stories that had been told by historians, philosophers and sometimes by emeritus scientists were idealizing stories. (Shapin 2009, 138) Shapin describes a shift where there was a blending of knowledge-making practices from both natural and human sciences to examine a discipline or field such as chemistry or neuroscience with the addition of a reflexive concern to understand how the knowledge was made. This in turn required methodological tools drawn from elsewhere. Reflecting on this period of the 1970s and 1980s Simon Schaffer, Steve Shapin’s xlii

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sometime collaborator, noted: “We were using field methods, in other words, borrowed entirely from the field sciences, except this time, instead of looking at lemurs we were looking at physicists. Instead of looking at Trobrianders we were looking at Californians” (2009: 18).

Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1986) on Science as Practiced One of the earliest studies of what research biologists do on a routine basis, Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar 1986) was originally conducted in the late 1970s in a neuro-endocrinology lab at the Salk Institute in California by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, two ethnographers respectively trained in philosophy and sociology. The significance of this study at the time was that it applied to “natural science,” what anthropologists did in mostly non-Western fieldsites since the 1920s—that is, they observed what people actually did in the context of the everyday instead of relying on the reports of third parties. As well, they took seriously local accounts of what was done and why, which does not exclude an alternative accounting by the ethnographer, though at times that could be problematic. In a postscript to the 1986 edition of the book (originally published in 1979), they address some of the criticisms and concerns directed toward the first edition. I have been mindful of two in particular while writing this book. First, they constructed a hypothetical “observer” in the lab as a narrative device rather than situating themselves as themselves. This limited the way they could address issues of reflexivity, participant observational methods, and ethics in relation to, and through, one another. Second, perhaps because so little had been written previously about what people actually did at the lab bench, the study left the reader with a sense of a hermetically sealed environment upon which the rest of the universe never impinged or from which the universe was never impinged upon.

Contemporary science studies, then, has come to challenge the Two Culture model in favor of seeking some kind of Third Culture, a Third Culture that is an ongoing project. This, in turn, brings us to “why Karen Barad’s approach?” Much of that question has already been broached briefly in the previous pages. But I’ll be specific for a moment and spend the rest of the book elaborating on that specificity. For many years now she has been clear that her life as a particle physicist and the rest of her life cannot a theoretical and methodological intralude

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be separated, so why artificially separate them? One portion of her life is never “outside” the other portions. The joy and the beauty in it is that she uses and does physics to demonstrate, as is appropriate to disciplinary physics and beyond, that matter and motion is about “things” moving through “things” within “things.”

notes  A useful summary of quantum mechanics can be found at Project Cassiopeia, http://www.cassiopeiaproject.com/.  In particular, we need to be careful not to confuse agency with (human) consciousness or intentions (Latour , ). Agency, in Barad’s agential realism, “is about changing possibilities of change” (, ; see also , b), requiring thinking about relationality rather than properties and attributes. If while hiking in the woods we come across an eight-ton boulder, agency compels us to consider possible relationships intra-actively. Possible relationships expressed through hiker and boulder would include walking around it, walking over it, or stopping the hike.  Gisli Palsson () encountered similar concerns as an Icelander doing a study of deCode Genetics, Inc. in Iceland.  For a more elaborate discussion of a history of ethnographic methods in science studies see Kontopodis, Niewöhner, and Beck ().

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Chapter 1

Intra-Action and Doing Science: Experiments, People, and Technology Hannah, an experienced technician, had previous experience with High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) equipment in a different lab, and in early 2009 was looking forward to getting a mothballed system operating again. Her work at the ACCBR oscillated between periods she described as interesting or boring. Boring times were not periods of inactivity, but periods of routine work such as filing reports or placing orders for supplies or loading the autoclave to sterilize used flasks, beakers, and the like. These were periods of keeping the facility in “research readiness,” as demanded by the organizations that funded much of the ACCBR’s equipment. By contrast, interesting times took her to the laboratory benches to practice skills she knew and enjoyed, or to learn new skills for operating equipment about which she was curious. It was in the midst of one of these “boring” intraludes that she learned of the prospects for doing some HPLC analysis again, prospects which considerably lightened her mood for a few days. The optimism about doing some interesting work came to a halt when she learned that the most important liquid medium she would need, acetonitrile, had quadrupled in price and that there was a worldwide shortage of the product. The major economic current of the day, the global recession which was in full swing by 2008, was by early 2009 creating a major restructuring and downsizing of the North American automobile industry. The chemical was a by-product of the manufacturing process of plastics used in automobiles. Certainly the entangled nature of these phenomena and/as processes indicates that concepts like “global” and “local” are thoroughly intra-active. They are superpositioned analytical categories that emerge through one another, and only “make sense,” in those terms. Although increased costs were certainly an important consideration for the research project, what ultimately put it on hold for several weeks was an inability to secure a steady supply of acetonitrile for the several weeks the

HPLC system would need it. Once started, the process of getting everything calibrated and optimized has to go to completion or, if stopped, start again from the beginning. By summer, the obstacles had been overcome, so Hannah set to work assessing the state of the equipment, which had not been used for about three years. Rather than using the cyanide-based acetonitrile as the primary constituent of the mobile phase, a decision was made to use a methanol solution instead. So one way to understand the agency within the phenomenon as an integrated unit is to examine the negotiations between Hannah and the HPLC system over a period of several weeks as each sought to compel the other to (intra-)act on their own terms. This began with cleaning and checking the major components of the HPLC system to see whether any parts required replacing or service. The whole idea of “servicing equipment” or buying “service contracts” from a manufacturer is already suggestive of the idea that the human user is in some sense subordinate to the equipment, while in other senses it is quite clearly the reverse. In an everyday, ordinary sense this is treated as “just a metaphor.” Although I don’t deny a metaphoric element is operative here, I would suggest through Barad’s material-discursive framework there is more than only metaphor at work here. The give and take between Hannah and the HPLC equipment is what Barad means by an apparatus. It is not merely material technology taken off the shelf, nor is it technical skill in and of itself. It is their movement, their intra-action, their ongoing relationship in mutual transformation, which creates an apparatus.

investigating neuroscience One of the issues that emerged in the Intraduction can be summarized this way: In the Newtonian approximation, stability is assumed, and change or movement is what is to be explained; in the quantum approximation, change and movement are assumed, leaving (relative) stability and (relative) unity to be explained. Each broad current of thought generates different phenomena, in Barad’s sense—the River of X vs. rivers of multiple x’s, as outlined in Appendix 1. Addressing how doing science achieves a degree of stability and unity while in motion and generating difference is one of the aims of this chapter. I’ll be doing this by discussing and comparing two methods or techniques of data collection I observed among bioscience researchers in the ACCBR. The first of these will be focused on electrophysiology, a means of applying and/or detecting minute electrical currents in biological tissues as large as an organ or muscle, such as a heart, or as small as an individual brain cell or a neuron. In fact, it is the latter case I will be discussing below. The other method of data collection I’ll address is High Pressure Liquid Chromatography, a means of separating mixtures to see their biochemical composition and/or a means of seeking the presence or absence of particular molecules (dopamine in the two cases presented below). 2

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Both of these techniques were used in the course of neuroscientific investigations, and, that being the case, it is not beside the point to say a few words about the field of neuroscience itself before discussing the two technoscientific instances of it in action. Biological research into the operation of the brain and the nervous system has been going on since the eighteenth century. The fields of histology (the structural study of thin slices of tissue and cells) and embryology (the study of how organisms develop) have historically been closely associated with the study of the brain, such as the late nineteenth-century debate as to whether brains were made of individual cells or fused into one single entity over the course of development. Landecker (2007) relates how the study of nerve cells was intimately related to developing techniques that allowed cell cultures to grow and perpetuate independently of the living organism from which they were drawn. Like Mol’s study of atherosclerosis, this new way of doing/practicing cells redefined a “body” and a “cell” as multiple. Cells, even the “same” cells, such as neurons, came to be distinguished on the basis of whether they were in vivo (“in life”), which is to say in a living body, or in vitro (“in glass”), or in more contemporary terms in an artificial environment. In each case the “brain” also doesn’t simply mean something different, but becomes something different. It becomes multiple, too. Biologists have long recognized that in vitro and in vivo cells cannot easily be translated (Callon 1999) into one another (i.e., the differences between them were not only differences that made a difference), they are in some regards unbridgeable differences that don’t allow for a relative stability and unity to emerge. In Barad’s terms, they are considered (relatively) separate phenomena with (relatively) separate intra-actions. The historical development of cell cultures also provides another example of how a technology comes to be a solution looking for problems (Landecker 2007, 34), but has become so widespread and accepted a practice that it is not usually considered in these terms anymore. In this case the “translation” has been more successful: “The body was not replaced by the cell, nor reduced to it; rather, this technique substituted an artificial apparatus for the body and generated new views of the autonomy and activity of cellular life” (Landecker 2007, 33). In short, in vitro cells had become models (or representations) of, and for, bodies, and they had become technologies in their own right. As technologies they couldn’t be translated, but as models they could. Despite years of research into the brain, we cannot properly speak of the neurosciences until the 1960s, when the term was first used (Abi-Rached and Rose 2010). This is not simply a change in name, but the development of a style of thinking, doing, and a “way of seeing” (Berger 1972) that Abi-Rached and Rose term the “neuromolecular gaze.” As suggested in the Intraduction, in the case of molecular biology these kinds of phenomena are not isolated, but emerge through a series of intra-actions through other phenomena. The rise of the neurosciences rather than some other manner of doing “the brain” was by no means a foregone conclusion. Many of the factors intra-action and doing science

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mentioned previously, such as changes in economic, political, and social practices, favored the actualization of “neuroscience” rather than some other superpositioned possibility in studying the brain.

Joelle Abi-Rached and Nikolas Rose (2010) on the Neuromolecular Gaze The concept of “the gaze” has long been associated with psychoanalysis, especially the work of Jacques Lacan, and also with the intimate connections among power and knowledge discussed by Michel Foucault (Lutz and Collins 1993; Sturken and Cartwright 2009). It is simultaneously a way of knowing, a way of doing, and a way of looking. It assumes that seeing is neither passive nor a means to approach an unmediated “objective” reality consistent with Newtonian assumptions. It is not a simple matter of “seeing is believing,” but a complex matter of how to see, how to be seen, and the many potential and actual relationships that are part of an emerging phenomenon. As such the concept flows into matters of embodiment, epistemology, identity, ontology, and more. A neuromolecular gaze, then, is a way of seeing and/as doing evidence that shapes the phenomenon of neuroscience and/as neuroscientists through intra-action. As Abi-Rached and Rose (2010) discuss, neuroscience is a product, an historically retrospective construction built through eddies of intra-actions among changing sciences of the brain, the molecular biology revolution, changing forms of governance in states, new funding structures and policies for the conduct of biosciences, transformations in capitalist bioscience industry, shifts of epistemological emphasis in bioscience research, and more. One of the important consequences of this that Abi-Rached and Rose point out is that there is no singular, self-contained, entity called neuroscience with a single, linear, historical trajectory. Nonetheless, the effort and desire to establish a uniform way of seeing and/as doing neuroscientific evidence is what gives the unstable eddy of neuroscience an appearance of stability and centeredness.

Molecular biology was also a necessary ingredient, as was a selected borrowing of concepts, techniques, and practices from a variety of academic disciplines, especially the “psy” fields of study (Abi-Rached and Rose 2010). Although the approach can be usefully considered to be holistic, it can also be considered reductive (the reduction of complex entangled phenomena to single—often simplistically conceived—causes) in that the brain was often reduced to the workings of purely biochemical causes. 4

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(Interestingly, during the 1960s and 1970s anthropology also approached “culture” holistically, but frequently limited analysis to particular causes with rigid, unchanging boundaries.) However, by the time the Human Genome Project was completed, many, if not most, neuroscientists recognized that molecular reduction was no longer a viable option, for reasons discussed previously. Even so, the shift away from a “molecular underpinning” (Abi-Rached and Rose 2010) is gradual. In other words, neuroscience emerged from the confluence of several other currents. The coming-together of the latter creates an eddy of neuroscience, an eddy whose fluid boundaries blend into other phenomena. As Mol observes: A fluid space, then, isn’t quite like a regional one. Difference inside a fluid space isn’t necessarily marked by boundaries. It isn’t always sharp. It moves. And a fluid space isn’t quite like a network either. In a fluid elements inform each other. But the way they do so continuously alters. The bonds within fluid spaces aren’t stable. (2002, 142) As proclaimed by the United States’ National Institutes of Health, the Decade of the Brain (the 1990s) seemed to seamlessly follow from the Decade of the Gene (the 1980s) in terms that can only be described as fluid, or increasingly quantum. Genetics, genomics, molecular biology, and cell biology were all necessary, but in no way was neuroscience a foregone conclusion. Each field is a stream of study; each is a technology. As each emerges from the intra-actions of the phenomena which historically came before it, it redefines the others as both technology and realm of research. (For this reason some people, such as Latour [1987] or Haraway [1997b], speak of technoscience, suggesting the inseparability of the two.) For example, just as print technology “written in stone” altered the technology of the spoken word without replacing it, so digital technologies alter print and spoken technologies, even as we recognize the latter two will persist. In the digital era nothing is “written in stone” because they can be “typed over” or “Photoshopped,” but—and this is the important part—only to an extent, because certain habits of speaking and reading/viewing influence what is credible. Consider, in this regard, the Society for Neuroscience characterizing the human brain as “a network of connections that far surpasses any social network and stores more information than a supercomputer” (2012, 4). The metaphor is one of postindustrial information science, and yet, insofar as the brain sometimes performs as other computers do, it is not only or simply a metaphor. At the same time it is not “just a computer” at all. What computer has software that physically alters the hardware, which in turn modifies the software, and so on? One could describe Western intra-action and doing science

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economic “post-industrialism” in parallel terms: machines and heavy industry have not been replaced so much as displaced. With the coming of the “knowledge economy” and the growth of information technologies, we shouldn’t be surprised that brains are characterized not only as complex machines (think of all the times you’ve seen images of the brain as a clockwork), but also as a computer. Similarly, our understanding of “mind,” “consciousness,” and “culture” (among other things) has been altered but not replaced by neuroscientific pursuits, and yet at the same time it was certain notions of mind, consciousness, and culture, along with much else, whose diffraction patterns, turbulences, and eddies made neurosciences as we know them possible. Let’s draw some of this and the Intralude together. The relationships intra-acting among cells (specifically neurons and glial cells), brains, minds, bodies, and consciousness are quite fluid. Considered as an eddy, as a patterned effect of diffraction, any of the actualities mentioned here is a superpositioned entanglement (Barad) or a multiple singularity (Mol), where no one element reduces to any of the others, but by the same token no one element could be what it currently “is” without the others. This is part of what moving in the direction of a quantum approach tries to indicate. Eddies, I’ve been intimating, are movements within movements, portions of which move at different speeds and directions to the “larger” movements of which they are a “part” while also affecting that larger movement. As an illustration, think of satellite images of a hurricane—a very large eddy—moving up the Atlantic seaboard of North America. The “larger” trend is usually northeastward, but winds can and do blow southwestward or northward in “part” of the hurricane, which itself forms and moves according to a wide variety of factors. Even if there are still moments of Newtonian assumptions, and Newtonian reductionism, the “larger” movement in the study of the brain is toward a relationally conceived holism, or entanglements in Barad’s terms. However, one of the most persistent counter- or cross-currents in this respect (generating further eddies) is that mind or consciousness or body reduces to the brain. For some, “mind is what the brain does” (Rose 2007b, 192). Or consider Francis Crick’s blunt statement that “you’re nothing but a bunch of neurons” (cited in Rose and Rose 2009, 14). It has the effect of creating that odd feeling that “you” somehow communicate with this other entity, “your brain” (Bauchspies et al. 2006, 144). On the other hand, the shift to a more entangled conception of the brain has the consequence of generating new phenomena (or eddies if you like) or redefining old ones. For example, the mind, the brain, and consciousness can simply be approached as always already integrated in the body (understood as multiple bodies), so that it is bodies that think, rather than only brains, and bodies for humans are social bodies. This suggests that social groups collectively think through individual bodies (Bauchspies et al. 2006, 115), keeping in mind that individuals and 6

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groups are themselves phenomena entangled with myriad nonhumans. Neuroscience itself is also “distributed” within and across phenomena, generating new effects. The entangled brain manifests itself in a rather straightforward fashion (much to your relief, I’m sure!) by simply having the prefix neuro- indicate a variety of becomings. You can study neuropsychology or neuropsychiatry, which is in keeping with the “psy” connection, but also neuroanthropology to explore the intricacies of brainculture relationships as each helps build the other, and neuroeconomics and neuromarketing as a means to further understand capitalist consumer practices and behaviors. Because of the kinds of intraventions in the brain that molecular techniques have made possible, recent years have seen a knowledge of neuroethics emerge, and as the moralities debated become regulated (or not), a corresponding field of neuropolitics emerges. What all this points to, as Nikolas Rose (2007b) suggests, is that our very sense of Self is changing, becoming something different. These recent neuro-knowledges should not be thought of as flaky, fluffy, or faddish. Quite the contrary, they are evidence of differences that have made, and continue to make, differences. They are phenomena within and through other phenomena, intraacting to continuously bring each other about. Most importantly, the knowledges they generate are truthful, even if not The Truth we’ve come to expect with our Newtonian assumptions. Nonetheless, for the moment I will remind you that their truths, even though truthful, come at the expense of other potential truths not actualized in the past, and that from them new possible truths will emerge in the future. Truth, in the sense used here, is intra-active; agential realism is about a reality that is a singular multiplicity always already in motion; objectivity is a process, not a result. Keeping in mind what was just said about truth and reality we can turn again to the issue of representations, especially those that go under the name of models. Models are particular kinds of representations found in a variety of sciences, both “human” and “natural” (Creager 2007), which attempt to replicate observed phenomena in a limited fashion. Among the biosciences, for example, are model organisms (such as worms, fruit flies, rats, mice, etc.) and in vitro cell cultures. What is important for our purposes is that model organisms and in vitro cells do not try to reproduce the “really real.” They are quite full of their own phenomenal reality. Models in the biosciences are not models of some organism, human or otherwise, but models for some organism so that certain selected elements can be understood better (Creager 2007; Rheinberger 1997). In other words, models of make Newtonian assumptions, where stability is assumed as well as representations being independent of reality, while models for assume phenomena are in motion and representations are part of reality. Phrased differently, models of presume that model and reality are identical, models for presume the model and (the rest of ) reality are somehow equivalent. ($2 of oranges and $2 of apples are economically equivalent, but hardly identical.) This is why I suggested intra-action and doing science

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earlier that we cannot do without representations. The difficulty and danger is not to confuse models of and models for, or identity and equivalence, though this does happen on occasion to people inside and beyond the laboratory. So it seems that representation is itself a practice that can be practiced differently. If representation is about meaning to some extent, the “doing” of meaning, then there are different ways of practicing meaning-making and different practices of approaching meaning. If you assume meaning is fixed and stable and that representations are distinct from their referents, as in the Newtonian approximation, then you likely deal with objects and their meanings as separate entities. You use an “and/or” logic, such as science and/or nature, science and/or culture, nature and/or culture, and so on. The entanglements presumed in an agential realist approach, though, use an “and/as” logic, as in science and/as culture, science and/as nature, nature and/as culture, and so on (see also Rheinberger 1997, 104). In other words, meaning is also part of a phenomenon in its becoming; representation and referent emerge intra-actively from one another within phenomena (Barad 1999, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011b; see also Bennett 2010; Kirby 2010; Haraway 1997a, 1997b, 2008). Just as Barad uses the conjoined term natureculture to indicate their relative separateness (as confusing as that sounds), she also uses the hyphenated terms material-discursive or material-discursive practices to indicate their relative separateness. Using “and/as” will simply serve as a shorthand for indicating the indeterminacies of entangled practices, including representations, rather than an unbridgeable gap between “words” and “things” as we have come to expect in a Newtonian universe. The notation and logic of “and/as” may be cumbersome, but it is a way of indicating that the tension between relative stability and movement as phenomena are approached diffractively through one another. The conjunction “and” suggests difference among two or more things, “as” suggests both literal and metaphoric similarity, while “/” draws attention to the gap or hinge (Derrida 1977) that simultaneously separates while it joins together. In an agential realist account, the challenge is to account for the relative stability when everything is in motion. The two ways I will consider for the time being are what Rheinberger (1997) calls an “experimental system,” a concept close to Barad’s phenomenon, and the concept of the “black box” (Latour 1987), which has some similarities to, but also important differences from, Barad’s “apparatus.” Because we are concerned with practice, what is done, we should consider that forms of relative stability are an achievement, a phenomenon wherein human and nonhuman agencies cooperate to produce “facts,” those rather fickle material-discursive entities where efforts to constrain them usually don’t last long. Just think back to what was said about genes. Over the last century or so the “facts” of genes have gone from being hypothesized entities to actual entities to entities that are, well, not very 8

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gene-like (Keller 2000, 2009; Weber 2007). In each case they are quite “real,” their agencies intra-acting with human and other agencies, in creating separate but related phenomena that had a certain stability for some time. This issue of time, according to Rheinberger (1999), is an important component of the relative stability of what he calls an experimental system. Relative stability is not practiced in time, as if time itself was a single homogeneous thing. Instead, consider an experimental system and/as time, wherein, time, too, can be multiple; it can be considered a current with its own intra-active turbulences as part of phenomena coming into becoming. Every experimental system “may also be said to possess its own intrinsic, or internal time” (Rheinberger 1999, 419; see also Abi-Rached and Rose 2010).

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997, 1999) on Experimental Systems How can an experimental system be described? To begin, it must be an “open” system, in keeping with the idea that there is never an absence of change, as assumed in Newtonian assumptions. Stability, or reproducibility if you like, in an open system is a question of managing (and being managed by) all the agencies that make up the system/phenomenon. But it must also be open in the sense that it cannot be entirely predictable. If the results were known there would be no need for experimentation! Scientific phenomena (i.e., experimental systems) aim to generate new phenomena (“data,” “results,” “facts,” “technologies”). They aim to actualize superpositioned possibilities in a way that can be replicated (more or less) by others, or, as Rheinberger puts it, “[s]cientific objects have the precarious status of being absent in their experimental presence” (1997, 28). It is similar to the relationship between doughnut and doughnut hole that I described when intraducing the concept of phenomena in the Intralude. Here too, the relationship between the research object and the experimental system has to exist in a potential state before they can be actualized. Furthermore, it is very rare for these relationships and/as research objects to show themselves all at once. And perhaps most importantly, this “potential state” is itself always changing. A single instance or experiment by itself “proves” little, if anything. It is instead a system of experiments, an experimental phenomenon or apparatus in its becoming, that scientific researchers try to develop. (This comes out rather nicely in an article by Collins [1999] where he discusses the difficulties physicists faced in trying to get a new kind of laser operating consistently.) This is why the tension between reproducibility (or “sameness”) and openness

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(or difference or “otherness”) is so important. The stability in the system, then, is a relative stability in producing differences that make a difference by being relatively similar. When differences that make a difference are exhausted (i.e., no longer produce, or are considered to no longer produce, novel “data,” “results,” “facts,” or “technologies”), the experimental system stops working.

Stability of “fact” comes through agreements (Latour and Woolgar 1986; Shapin and Schaffer 1989), as when researchers replicate a process within certain conventionalized limits of deviation. These conventionalized limits of deviation are historical indications of standardization by a group empowered to set standards (Daston and Galison 2007; Shapin and Schaffer 1989). Stability can also be achieved through a process of “working misunderstanding” (Hvalkov 2006), as when environmental groups, government agencies, and logging companies in Peru agree on forestry practices, each actor assuming that the other two accept the epistemological and ontological foundations it uses. Finally, stability can be achieved by resisting having contradictory or highly contrastive results come into contact with one another, as in the different enactments of atherosclerosis Mol observed in a Dutch hospital (2002). Regardless of how stability of “facts” is achieved, if it persists over time it slowly moves from the foreground to the background, like a lens temporarily focused on an object that blurs and leaves the field of vision entirely as the focus shifts to new objects at a different scale of magnification. This accepted background status of a technology is often referred to as “black-boxing” (Latour 1987).

Bruno Latour (1987) on Black-Boxing What the case of black-boxing in particular suggests is that it is a form of stability that operates according to Barad’s concept of complementarity—that is, the focus can either be on the absent but potentially actualizable research object(s), or it can be on the processes that measure whether objects have been actualized. Furthermore, we also need to recognize that black-boxes are not simply technological things, but are still “becoming” even when they are not the focus of attention. Latour (1987, 131) suggests black boxes are themselves composed of multiple phenomena (which are themselves often black-boxed, and then “made to act as one” entity). Their power flows from being a “can of worms,” as the old expression goes. In other words, challenging the way a black-box works requires challenging the many phenomena of which it is composed and the many phenomena to which it contributes (Latour 1987; Stengers 2000b). 10

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For example, if you wanted to argue that computers distort data in the course of scientific investigation, you would have to demonstrate the limitations of certain forms of mathematics, computer programming and language, principles of electronics and electrical engineering, the material properties of certain metals, and many, many more. Beyond that, you would have to raise doubts among all those people who have usefully used computers in the course of their own investigations. Challenging all those agencies in the past, present, and future of computers would be quite an undertaking! This does not mean it does not happen, but it is a rare occurrence. It is the stuff of which scientific debates are made, as Latour has proposed in numerous publications. Most people are content to learn appropriate use of the black-boxed technology and leave aside the question of how it works. This also is a kind of stability within movement. For this reason black-boxing can easily draw us back toward Newtonian assumptions. As such it is a matter that matters, requiring thoughtfulness and care. “Thinking outside the box” is a great slogan many people don’t want you to take seriously for all kinds of reasons.

It is also important to point out that technology, whether black-boxed or not, is not confined only to material instruments. Any phenomenon’s agential forces—whether a tangible artifact, a skill or knowledge set, or even your body—can be disregarded or left unquestioned. Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999) describes how researchers’ bodies can and do operate as “experienced bodies,” bodies that have learned and anticipate through movement, eventually to a point where this kind of knowledge, usually not considered scientific but indispensable to scientific practice, becomes black-boxed. As such, it is pertinent to appreciating what is entailed with quantum assumptions. Think, for example, of learning to ride a bicycle. It is a process that no number of physics textbooks can prepare you for, because it is not just your consciousness but your entire body that must learn to experience, to balance on, two wheels in motion. Once that knowledge is internalized, you no longer think about it. You just ride. As we will see, this is also the case in bioscientific research spaces. What I’ve been saying in the last few pages is a means to elaborate another of Karen Barad’s concepts: the apparatus. As an agential realist reconceptualization of the term, it shows—is entangled with and through—elements of the concepts of experimental system and black-boxes mentioned above. In fact, for my purposes here, I will disregard some of the important differences between the three terms (even though I would not do so in other circumstances) to suggest that an apparatus can be understood as the intra-acting of experimental systems and black-boxes. Note that in doing so

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I am asking you, as a reader, to assume forms of relative stability I also mentioned earlier—that is, to “black-box” black-boxes, experimental systems, and apparatuses as the portions of an eddy temporarily distinguished from the larger current. We have found ourselves on another rung of Wittgenstein’s ladder. So what are some of the characteristics of an apparatus? Well, to begin, “apparatuses are themselves phenomena” (Barad 2007, 170; see also Barad 2003), which indicates they are not preexisting “things,” like “technologies” as used in everyday speech, but becomings or enactments or doings. Specifically, they are material-discursive phenomena; they are embodied conjoinings of concepts and physical entities in practice. It is through their intra-action that meanings, boundaries, and characteristics are determined. It is not a question of words or things, but words and/as things. Because they are not “technologies” in the everyday sense, they do not hold a middle ground between subjects (scientists) or objects (nature) (2007, 231). Rather, it is through intra-activity that subjects and objects are actualized within the phenomenon. An apparatus always already embodies other apparatuses and/as phenomena, human and nonhuman agencies, and meanings. Intra-activity does not “discover” a preexisting referent or “object of research,” it actualizes a real possibility from a variety of relationships and/as practices. We also need to recall from the Intraduction and Intralude that measuring practices or using an apparatus affect how the phenomenon emerges or becomes. All this is to say that if the subject/object divide is reformulated in Barad’s terms, then what objectivity “is” and “does” also changes from the more common uses of objectivity (Barad 1999, 2007). It does not imply that objectivity is an illusion, that everything is “merely subjective,” that it is not real. Instead, Barad asks us to replace the assumptions of Isaac Newton’s physics and Rene Descartes’s philosophy with assumptions that emphasize motion and becoming and relational connectedness of all things, including the relationships of observation and measurement. The kind of objectivity preferred here is what Donna Haraway (1991) terms “situated knowledge.” It is a kind of objectivity that fits our quantum assumptions in that if you could change your size or location in a river (see Appendix 1) you would alter the river’s movement in different ways. In other words, different differences make a difference (or not) in the river. With everything said so far in this and the previous chapter about science in general, bioscience, and neuroscience, it is time to take Michael Lynch’s advice: Stop talking about science! Go to a laboratory—any laboratory will do—hang around for awhile, listen to conversations, watch the technicians work, ask them to explain what they do, read their notes, observe what they say when they examine data, and watch how they move equipment around! Although such an experience can raise innumerable doubts about how [human sciences] can hope 12

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to identify, let alone explain, what goes on in the thickness of the technical routines of another discipline, it should be sufficient to answer the question, Do you see anything other than bricolage [tinkering], ordinary discourse, and situated actions? (1993, 315) The Artisanry of Electrophysiology and Whole Cell Patch-Clamping It takes an anthropologist in the laboratory to note the strangeness of what has become quickly routinized or banal to its practitioners. (Landecker 2007, 3) You may have wondered if I was ever going to get to “the real science,” but if you have accepted the assumptions of agential realism, assumptions whose effects I’ve tried to explain through currents and eddies, a parable of student and mentor, and Wittgenstein’s ladder, you would recognize the outline of the apparatus I am using in my practice of discussing neuroscientific practice. You might also recognize that “real science” has been there all along (or always already) as have politics, economics, and a good many other things. I cannot pretend that my time at the ACCBR had no effect on practices that took place there, be they large or small. I was not a “fly on the wall” or a disembodied “view from nowhere” (Ingold 2008), but I was in the river intra-acting in the neuroscientific current of process and practice, and I continue to generate eddies, however large or small, through this ethnographic account. Lynch (1993), who I just quoted above, noted about 20 years ago that ethnographic lab studies were relatively rare. They still are, if you expect research and analysis by an observer and/as scientist to stop at the laboratory door, an approach that I consider too quickly limits the number and extent of entanglements (see box, p. xliii). Nonetheless, the difficulties laboratory ethnographers faced two decades ago still resonate in the present, though perhaps not as loudly. Lynch (1993, 104–05) highlighted three concerns in particular. First, access to leading-edge labs is difficult, both in the sense of permission to enter and in the sense of making complex experimental systems accessible to ethnographers and their audiences. I would add that it is more difficult to gain entry into the labs of private industry or government agencies than to labs in academic settings. A partial exception, though, is in the realm of genomics, where ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) or Genomics and its Ethical, Environmental, Economic, Legal and Social Aspects (GELS) practices have become more common. It is a potential Third Culture practice I would like to see spread. Second, and related, is that the linguistic elements of material-discursive phenomena require learning technoscientific languages, at least to an extent, to convey what is going on in a “rich” or “thick” manner. Just as many nonnative-speaking anthropologists intra-action and doing science

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get some basic language instruction before developing their skills further at their fieldsite, I found myself in a neuroscience class to help make sense of projects I followed in the ACCBR. Passing on and situating some of this information and myself, even if simplistically (some might say too simplistically), is needed to provide a context. Finally, Lynch mentions that the division of the academy into the human and natural sciences works against doing lab ethnographies because the rate of publication is slow relative to the amount of time invested. This, I think, has been changing, though there is still a residual sense in which many people think such research is not “serious” (and works on the presumption we all “really” know what science is and does). This study differs from that of classic laboratory studies, such as those of Traweek (1988) or Latour and Woolgar (1986) in that the ACCBR is not a laboratory in the usual sense of the term. It is not associated with a particular researcher or a particular line of research. Although the ACCBR’s status as a facility will be discussed more in the next chapter, I will say for now that as an open-concept multi-user facility it presumes the incompleteness of other labs and the incompleteness of their experimental systems, even without encountering any one in particular. It is always already entangled in a superpositioned sense and justifies its existence through actualizing potential relationships by making available expertise and/as equipment not available in the “home” lab. It is, from the perspective of other experimental systems, an absent presence and present absence. Although I observed, and sometimes participated in, a variety of technical procedures, and in that sense contributed to the actualization of phenomena, I did not witness an entire experiment in the everyday sense of the term. Too much of it was (always already) being practiced elsewhere. One of the practices I observed at length was electrophysiology as applied to certain types of brain cells (glial cells). More specifically, the investigations focused on particular potassium ion channels of these cells. Ion channels on the cell membrane or surface function to maintain an electrochemical balance within the cell so that it can perform the duties appropriate to that cell type. Positively or negatively charged chemical elements—positively charged potassium ions in this case—flow through openings specific to their type. Too many or too few ions over an extended period may result in permanent damage to the cell or even its death. Clearly the situation is far more complex than these few words can indicate, but they will suffice for our purposes. Dr. Andy Tasker, director of the ACCBR, is also one of several dozen users of the facility. His lab—“the Tasker lab”—extended into the ACCBR and vice versa. Part of his program of research, his experimental system, has been to study the relationship of domoic acid, a neurologically toxic acid associated with shellfish poisoning, to epilepsy and other brain disorders. He is investigating epileptogenesis, the onset of epilepsy, and trying to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms operating 14

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between the time epileptogenesis occurs and the time clinical symptoms of epilepsy, such as seizures, manifest themselves. This time period may well extend into years. If the mechanisms of onset were better understood, then perhaps preventive measures and/as treatments could be developed. A portion of these investigations of the effects of domoic acid on certain potassium ion channels in brain cells were conducted by Abraham, a research associate hired on a one-year contract with previous experience in both cell culture and electrophysiology. His arrival at the ACCBR required him to develop a cell line of rat brain cells and to reconstruct and upgrade electrophysiology equipment that had been sitting idle in storage for some time. Having the opportunity to watch Abraham over a period of several weeks rebuild the electrophysiology unit, fine-tune the equipment, and then apply it to in vivo and in vitro rat brain cells gave me ample opportunity to think about how many elements of scientific practices maintain an artisanal or craft-like quality in which experiential body knowledge became entangled with formal scientific knowledge. The former without the latter is a skill without a purpose (and so why would you learn it?), while the latter without the former simply could not happen. It is particularly the former that is my concern here, even as I recognize that doing so is an artificial imposition on my part. This focus will allow me to elaborate on some of the ideas raised earlier. In a sense, my concern was to follow how Abraham (re)converted a piece of equipment back into a functional black-box capable of intra-acting within a fluid experimental system as part of an emerging effort to constitute, to “do,” part of an epileptogenesis study. The eddies of his ongoing experience were necessary to the current phenomenon of potassium ion channels not as an addition to something already there, but as a becoming: the emergence of his “subjective experience” and the “objective ion channels” is part of the same movement/phenomenon. Over the course of those weeks I asked him how he became familiar with electrophysiology and the patch-clamping technique that allowed him to attach a micropipette of just a few microns (millionths of a meter) to an individual cell by suction, administer very small doses of electricity measured in millivolts, and then record the response. Not surprisingly, his initial exposure to electrophysiology was a brief introduction early in his PhD program, when he observed and eventually was tutored for a few days by other students skilled in the techniques. This barely constituted an intraduction, I should add, but that brief exposure in 1991 was enough to get “a grasp about things,” in his words. A couple of years later Abraham was ready to embark on his own pharmacological research for his PhD dissertation, which was to include an electrophysiological component, specifically involving whole cell patch-clamping. There were multiple problems to be overcome along the way. The equipment had been in storage for quite some time, there were no other graduate students with the skills to share, the faculty themselves were minimally familiar with the equipment, and, intra-action and doing science

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perhaps most daunting for him at that time, learning the currents of patch-clamping required learning the currents of cell culture. It is an example of how eddies form at the intersection of currents. The intricacies of cell culture had to be learned first so that there would be appropriate cells available for patch-clamping, which presented its own challenges. Other labs, as well as the one he was in, had been struggling to establish viable live cell cultures. “When I look back, I see how exciting that experience was . . . four people doing the textbook reading on cell culture, trying to follow every step, and they couldn’t get a live culture.” Just as implied through the example of learning to ride a bicycle, learning cell culture, electrophysiology, and patch-clamping cannot be done solely through “textbook reading,” what Abraham also called “passive learning.” This kind of learning requires the experience gained from practice, practical experience in the narrow sense of the term, or what Abraham referred to as “active learning.” As Knorr-Cetina points out, this kind of knowledge is embodied. Collins (1999, 102) notes, “The major point is that the transmission of skills is not done through the medium of the written work” (see also Myers 2008; Kontos 2006; Langlitz 2010). To take it back to our earlier discussion, it takes more than just a “bunch of brain cells” to do brain research! It requires thoroughly entangled “thinking bodies” and much else besides. We can also take a moment to compare the outcome of this episode to Newtonian assumptions. If Abraham had fully accepted that the textbook reading was completely separate from, yet fully representative of, cell culture, his investigations would never have gotten any further. Reality would not have matched the representation. Instead, as Lynch put it, there was bricolage, ordinary discourse, and situated actions. Abraham relates: “I modified the protocol [instructions or “recipe”] because I thought we were harsh and hard on the neurons . . . I reduced the time of filtrations and tried to be more gentle and very careful . . . [it was a] situation of being very rigorous.” On top of that, we need to consider the cells themselves. They were quite real, and they exercised their relational agency. They don’t like to be treated harshly. If we accept that cultured cells are technologies (and cultured in all senses of the term) (Landecker 2007), then we should carefully consider that we not only use technologies, but that technologies also use us (Haraway 2008, 249; Stone 1996). Abraham and the neurons negotiated with each other and shaped each other through evolving relationships. More accurately, the intra-actions through the enacting of potential relationships helped emerge what I am referring to as “Abraham” and “cells.” Success came by both moving with and against several currents. Cell cultures are and do eddies. This brings us to another concept we have encountered before, i.e., complementarity. Barad, you may recall, proposed that you are either thinking about something or you think about how you are thinking about that something. In the early 1990s Abraham’s focus was to think about producing a viable cell culture. It is 16

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only in retrospect, about 15 years later, that he was evaluating or measuring—in other words, thinking—about how he thought about that process of embodied learning. As he said, “when I look back I see how exciting that experience was. . . .” This may, to some extent, suggest why embodied knowledge tends to be excluded from the methods sections of scientific publications; that, and the pressure to conform to representational (Newtonian) standards of objectivity (Langlitz 2010). So what we can gather from this tiny moment of Abraham’s history (and not only his history) is an instance of the many influences in agential realism operating at a given moment. These influences are always already operating—not the universe in a grain of sand, but and/as a grain of sand. Embodied knowledge or experience, then, is a vital element in generating stability within an experimental system. It is informally recognized as essential to establishing phenomena—after all, Abraham was hired for his past familiarity with the technique—but is formally excluded from officially recognized accounts, such as conference presentations or journal publications. Methods sections may even list brand names and model numbers of equipment, but not the differences in embodiment necessary to use them with acceptable results. (A protocol for scrambled eggs may mention the type of whisk used, but not how to flick your wrist.) Stability, in other words, is about inhibiting certain differences so other differences can be exhibited; it is the measuring and/as dividing of differences that make a difference and those that do not. Abraham was quite clear that every new “rig” had to be stabilized. In fact, replacing a piece of equipment, or even a component of an instrument, was enough to set in motion a recalibration of all elements to make the entire apparatus capable of bringing forth or enacting desired phenomena. “When you move the array from this room to next door, just five meters away,” he generalized, “you have to start from the beginning again for noise, for vibration, for anything.” Three examples of stabilizing in this regard will suffice: changes in the amplifier, changes in the micropipette equipment, and the actual patch-clamping process itself. Abraham did his doctoral work in Scotland, where he used an amplifier to detect minute electrical currents from cells. The amplifier, a HEKA EPC7, was wired into a computer whose software was written by a faculty member at his university. When he came to do postdoctoral work in Canada he encountered a much newer model. He recalls that “the old one was manually controlled, and this one was controlled by the software, the computer software. Other than that, the principles were . . . basically the same, but having a different amplifier, working with different software, took some time to learn and to use.” Two months’ worth of time, as it turns out. Certainly Abraham’s experiences indicate that black-boxes don’t just come as ready-made pieces of technology off the shelf. Black-boxing, as a form of stability, is an ongoing achievement intra-action and doing science

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and precarious process. Diffraction patterns, to think of it slightly differently, do not preexist the phenomena, but are effects that emerge through intra-action. Micropipette pulling is also an example of the process of black-boxing, and how “high-tech” science can still be very artisanal in its practice. Glass micropipettes are essential to the patch-clamping technique in electrophysiology since the glass tip of the micropipette is what comes into contact with the cell. According to Abraham these micropipettes tend not to be sold prefabricated for several reasons, most prominent among them their fragility, the ease with which they may be partially or fully clogged by dust or other contaminants floating in the air, and the need for different size openings, as different cells come in different sizes depending on type and species. Over the several weeks in 2008 that I watched Abraham prepare for and conduct patchclamping, I never saw him prepare more than six or eight tips at a time, always placing them on some putty in an enclosed case as soon as they were ready. Like the new amplifier, he also had to negotiate the particularities of a new micropipette puller, another case of technician and technology each adapting to the other. A newer model of a puller he had used in his postdoctoral work before coming to the ACCBR, one of its major differences was that it was semi-automated in “pulling,” while the previous model he worked with was entirely manual. The process itself involves placing a 3-inch-long (7.5 cm) glass capillary tube 1 mm in diameter through a circular filament and fixing it in place on a weighted platform. The filament is then turned on and very quickly heats the area of the glass capillary it surrounds. As this occurs the glass begins to liquefy, allowing the weight to which the tube is attached to pull the tube. The middle of the tube is stretched another 1 inch (2.5 cm) or so, simultaneously reducing that portion of the tube’s diameter as it is “pulled,” somewhat like the way an hourglass is “pinched” in the middle. The now narrowed central portion of the tube is heated a second time at a slightly lower temperature, causing the tube to separate into two pieces, each with an open-ended tip that mirrors the other. A great deal of the artisanal activity itself is in monitoring and modifying the two temperature settings. If the temperature is too hot or too cold during the initial pull, the tapered length of the shank or shaft becomes too long or too short, which in turn interferes with the way the micropipette will attach to the micromanipulator (an “arm” which moves in three dimensions), the way it will attach to the cell, and the way fluid moves in and through the tip opening (necessary to conduct and record electricity). The second heating must be just as carefully observed, because if the temperature is too hot or cold the tip opening may be too large or too small for the kind of cell to be tested, or it may simply fuse shut. Abraham explained that each filament had its own unique characteristics that require one to two weeks of mutual adjustments before consistently pulling micropipettes to the right size and shape. Even then, he described filaments as “dynamic,” which is to say always changing, and thus requiring 18

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temperature adjustments every few days. Filaments and their electrical transmission of heat are rivers in motion, or—better—currents intra-acting with technicians and/ as currents, creating eddies and/as micropipettes. After pulling and separating, each tip is exposed to a special heater (a microforge) to “polish” the end smooth. If a tip has a rough end, even if otherwise appropriate, it will not form a complete seal (a gigaseal) on the cell membrane. Again, too much or too little heat would ruin the tip. Creating a usable tip and functional electrophysiology rig already requires a considerable amount of embodied knowledge, and this also applies to the activity of patchclamping itself. Under a microscope the prepared brain cells are placed in a liquid bath, a small area in which glass slides holding the cells, as well as a fine electrical wire to form part of a circuit, can be placed in a solution. The micropipette is then attached to the micromanipulator, partially filled with the same fluid as the bath, and can now complete the electrical circuit. When attaching a micropipette to a cell a slight vacuum pressure is applied, causing the tip to “clamp” on to a “patch” of the cell membrane and pull it slightly inside the tip. Potassium ion channels (in this case) on the cell membrane would open and the resulting change in electrical charge would be recorded. Certainly as a simple description it seems a straightforward activity, yet it required what Deborah Heath (1997), in a slightly different context, called “good hands.” A great deal of embodied skill is required to maneuver the micromanipulator onto a cell. My participant-observational efforts in this activity were a complete and utter failure. I simply could not get “the feel” of moving objects in a three-dimensional space only a few cubic microns in size. The magnifying power of the microscope left me with the impression I had much more room to move the tip than I actually had. It may seem odd, but it left me with the sensation of floating in the water after taking a tumble while waterskiing. There is that peculiar moment while you wait to feel which way is up so that you don’t swim deeper by mistake. The difference, though, was that peering through the microscope I never got my bearings. I forced the tip ever downward, crashing into the slide, shattering the tip into dozens of minuscule shards, and splattering cytoplasm and nucleic innards across a space many times smaller than the eye of a needle. Over the course of those weeks in the summer of 2008, Abraham mentioned more than once that patch-clamping required good eyes, good hands, even better hand-eye coordination, but most insistently of all he emphasized the quality of patience for anyone wishing to learn the technique. He related that over the years he had seen several people who never acquired the knack for patch-clamping, having to rely on the skills of others if this technique was required or desired for data collection. Initially I was somewhat surprised by his informal psychologizing, but really I should not have been. Self-reflexivity, or methodological self-awareness if you like, is no less entangled than any other phenomenon. It was an episode that served to remind me how deeply intra-action and doing science

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ingrained certain habits of thinking and/as practice are in scientific undertakings: that emotions, dispositions, and values should ideally be kept segregated from reason and rationality when accepting Newtonian assumptions. This does not mean that bioscientific reporting can or should gush with affect or sentimentalism. That would simply be going to the other extreme. When Barad suggests that science be responsible, or Haraway proposes that our knowledge production be situated, this is partly what is at stake. That the stakes can be high is indicated by the case of Barbara McClintock, whose explicit statements about developing a “feeling” for genes in the corn genome led to her professional marginalization for many years (Fox Keller 1983).

Evelyn Fox Keller (1983) on Barbara McClintock A Feeling for the Organism (Fox Keller 1983) is an account of bioscience very much in keeping with the currents of thought promoted here. From the outset Fox Keller establishes that she is less interested in writing a standard biography than in recounting the decades-long evolving relationship between corn and Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock. McClintock, in this telling, is shown to be aware—exceptionally aware— that scientific practice is at its most responsible and productive when it avoids being reductive, too narrowly focused, or bounded in its conception and execution. Relative to her colleagues in the mid-twentieth century, she did science differently, and for that she was stigmatized, neglected, or even ostracized. Novel practices led to novel results that were against the flow of genetic sciences at that time. Through what has recently been called “slow science,” McClintock aimed to understand corn genetics and genomics by understanding, and then making allowance for, corn rhythms and temporalities rather than only scientific or scientific-entrepreneurial rhythms and temporalities. She was aware that scientific knowledge needed to be supplemented with other ways of producing knowledge in order for the science to be “good,” or responsible, science. Flowing from this was a recognition that the relationship of researcher and researched had to be one of negotiated equivalence in movement, not an imposed and static identity. The relationship had to be affective as well as effective. Perhaps more accurately, the relationship had to be affective and/ as effective. In Fox Keller’s words, McClintock had to develop a feeling for the organism to learn that corn genes moved—literally and not only metaphorically— decades before her contemporaries, and without the technoscientific assistance of the molecular biology technologies that eventually supported her ideas.

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The point I am trying to make is that Abraham is quite aware of the variability of human dispositions, that embodied knowledges are not evenly distributed, even if that reflexive knowledge is effectively black-boxed in day-to-day lab practice and excluded from formal presentations of results. Whole cell patch-clamping, then, is a very tactile set of practices. It is very “handson” in a literal sense, making it easy to demonstrate the embodied or artisanal character of lab techniques. Any of several other practices could have been presented (and more will be below), but the important issue for the moment is that “doing” science, as opposed to idealized representations of it, always involves more than one kind of knowledge simultaneously, even if some of those knowledges are excluded after the fact to fit the current (Newtonian) conventions of scientific representation. HPLC: Looking for the Right Stuff High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) is a commonly used lab technique for establishing the composition of compounds in a solution or determining whether particular compounds are present or absent in a solution. The technique in practice, as I observed it for two technicians working on two separate projects, will allow us to expand on some of the ideas and themes mentioned above. Like electrophysiology rigs, each HPLC system—even the same model produced by the same manufacturer— takes on its own characteristics, has its own agential force. These characteristics are further complexified by additional instrumentation and/as technicians. Before elaborating on that, though, I’ll offer a few words about the basic set of elements associated with any contemporary HPLC system. 1. The L in HPLC is a liquid solvent that will receive the substance of interest after it has been dissolved. It is referred to as the “mobile phase” because this is what moves in the process of analysis. 2. The HP is a pump that moves the mobile phase at very high pressures, typically several thousand psi (pounds per square inch), or even tens of thousands of psi in Ultra High Performance Liquid Chromatography. 3. This requires high-pressure tubing to carry the mobile phase throughout the system. 4. The substance of interest, dissolved if necessary, enters the mobile phase through an injector, whose most important feature must be allowing no mobile phase to escape (which would create a drop in pressure) while putting the sample of interest into the flow. The “column” is a hollow tube, usually stainless steel, which is packed with tiny particles, often silica beads. The particles, referred to as the “stationary phase,” are often anywhere from 2 to 10 microns in size. The mobile phase containing intra-action and doing science

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the sample is forced through the stationary phase because of the tremendous pressure. As it is forced through the column, the larger molecules in the sample get “bumped” or temporarily delayed more often than smaller molecules, ultimately causing them to be partly or completely separated into distinct groupings. It is no exaggeration or mere metaphor to say that we are talking about currents and/as eddies. At this point it should be quite clear that the speed by which the separation occurs depends on the pump pressure, the size of the stationary phase particles, the length of the column, and the diameter of the column. 5. After the mobile phase leaves the column, a detector, in recent years attached to a computer, collects data on the separated compounds. The beginning time, end time, and intensity of each compound detected is gathered by the computer and translated into numerical terms and graphic terms via a chart called a chromatogram. 6. Finally, the mobile phase and sample are deposited in a waste collector. Getting underway required checking to make sure all the components of the Shimadzu Corporation’s HPLC system were properly connected. All the high-pressure tubing and high-pressure fittings needed to be checked for leaks, so the system was first manually flushed to get rid of air pockets. Then over the course of a couple of days a 15 per cent methane and distilled water solution was run through the system, gradually increasing the pressure until the pumps were nearing their 3000 psi limit. Of course, adjustments were made along the way, which is one of the reasons why the process could not be completed in a couple of hours. As I was to find out, it was the constant process of adjustments for each element of the equipment and/as technician that created a rhythm lasting several weeks. With so many variables, all of which were constantly shifting, Hannah was looking to bring the entire apparatus into a period of relative stability—a period, I was informed, that would last no more than a few weeks before degrading to a point where one had to begin again. Like eddies formed by your hands or legs when swimming, this relative stability was an indication, a diffractive effect, of being propelled in some direction. A central focus throughout this initial activity was the column. In the early preparatory phases of getting the system working, an old column that was nearing the end of its functional life was used. Over time the densely packed particles in the column will collect impurities in the mobile phase and the injected sample because absolute purity is impossible. As the column slowly gets clogged, it loses its capacity to separate the chemical compounds being forced through it. Using an old column in the early stages of getting the HPLC system temporarily stable for data collection is simply an effort to prolong the life and sensitivity of the new column for the samples of interest later on. Nonetheless, the old column was sufficiently operative to also allow testing of the detector to be used. 22

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The HPLC system at the ACCBR has three detector types available: a photodiode detector, a fluorescent detector, and an electrochemical detector. Which one gets used depends on the nature of the chemicals to be used or sought. In this case, because the neurotransmitter dopamine was the molecule of interest, the electrochemical detector was used. Large concentrations of dopamine were injected early in the stabilization process partly because the old column was no longer as sensitive as it once was, and partly so the detector would register a notable “spike” or “peak” on the chromatogram. Concentrations were decreased over a period of weeks. During this time Hannah was sometimes exclusively devoted to HPLC, but most often punctuated this activity by shorter or longer periods at other tasks expected of her at the ACCBR. Observing this process I began to appreciate what Alluquere Stone meant when she asked, “[W]hat kind of system [apparatus] is using [her] to become realized?” (1996, 31; see also Haraway 2008, 249, 262). Satisfied that all the components were working as they should, Hannah installed the new column, setting in motion the movement by which the entire apparatus was to find its temporary equilibrium. In one sense this was the agential balance negotiated between technician, HPLC components, sample, and necessary supplies, as indicated in the Stone quote. But in another sense it was the balance negotiated between time of expression, pounds per square inch, the methanol/water solution in which the dopamine was dissolved, and the concentration of dopamine as recorded by the detector. (No doubt there are even more variables at play than I have listed here.) The former balance is desired practice, the latter balance is desired effects; the former is the intra-active diffraction, the latter is the pattern; the former is the confluence of several currents, the latter is the eddy with its own movements within the larger movement. Of course, we need to keep in mind the “always already” that makes any boundary provisional: effects and/as practices; patterns and/as diffractions; eddies and/as currents. What were the results of the apparatus in early 2010? I can’t mention them all, but here are two. One result was that on that day a Shimadzu Corporation HPLC system programmed to use its electrochemical detector on a mobile phase composed of 8 per cent ultrapure methanol in distilled water pumping at 1420 psi was injected with a sample of appropriately processed rat brain tissue that resulted in a chromatogram indicating the presence of dopamine from about 8.5 to 9.5 minutes (as measured in millivolts), and clearly separated from other chemical compounds in the sample. Another result was that the chromatogram’s distinct and noticeable “spikes” were described as “beautiful” by those who had followed the process. Affect and aesthetics are not outside technoscientific practice, though they are frequently removed from consideration in formal presentation. They had been part of the intra-actions to bring forth the phenomenon all along. The two results are inseparable, but are artificially divided by intra-action and doing science

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a series of Newtonian scientific and/as social practices (of which more will be said below). Shortly after Hannah finished with the HPLC system, researchers from a bioscience company specializing in neuroscience arranged to use the equipment. This is the sort of thing the ACCBR was designed to accommodate. Here again the division of labor had Eva, the lab technician hired by this company, preparing the system as a black-box while the “principal investigator,” that is, the research scientist, was concerned with the larger experimental system. Comparing and contrasting Eva’s and Hannah’s experiences will allow us to think further about creating a flow, or eddy, of stability in terms of equivalence and identity. Most of us were taught in grade school to think of the Scientific Method as a means to reproduce results of an experiment that are identical to each other, not “merely” (in Newtonian language) equivalent (Roy 2004). As we go on we are taught about exceptions to the rule of identity, or places where we can bend the rule, but the rule itself is treated as golden. Is good, meaningful, scientific practice and/as scientific result possible through efforts to achieve equivalence rather than identity? Within the terms of moving toward a quantum approach I would suggest there is no other way to be(come) scientific. Having had a large portion of the HPLC equipment already “tuned up,” as it were, by Hannah, Eva’s task was largely confined to establishing the temporary stability in the equipment caused by the introduction of a new methanol and water mobile phase and a new column. The column was the same make and model as the one Hannah used, with the same dimensions, the same 5-micron silica particles packed together to leave the 120-angstrom pores for the mobile phase to be pushed through. The whole idea of “the same” here is quite stretched, as you might imagine. We are working at a scale here where even small differences in manufacture have a proportionately larger effect than, say, replacing a car door after an accident with one from the local junkyard, where 1 or 2 millimeters difference in fit won’t substantially impede or enhance overall performance of the vehicle. Beyond the inevitable differences in the column, a major difference that made a difference was the methanol. Hannah ran her sample as an 8 per cent methanol solution, while Eva was using 11.5 per cent. Although their explanations differed as to why different concentrations were necessary (Eva tentatively suggesting the need for higher concentrations lay in the extraction matrix by which dopamine was extracted from tissue, Hannah more confidently contending that Eva’s methanol had more impurities that had to be compensated for), both aimed for dopamine spikes on the chromatogram to peak at about 9 minutes. In the face of these differences, what was important for both technicians was to achieve a similar timing for separation of chemical compound peaks on the chromatogram. Other differences were allowable, such as the different methanol solutions, to achieve similarity of result. So it seems identity can give way to equivalence to 24

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approximate a (representational) identity in result. As I’ve tried to suggest here, what is practice and what is effect, or what is phenomenon and what is apparatus, are never fixed but always fluid. And what about the artisanal character of the technicians? I’ll finish this chapter with a brief comparison of Eva’s and Hannah’s practices within HPLC, and with Abraham’s activities in whole cell patch-clamping. Let us begin with the latter. Karin Knorr-Cetina, like Mol, proposes a body multiple, a “thing” that is always more than one thing, specifically a techno-scientific black-boxed body multiple composed of a researcher’s acting body, sensory body, and experienced body (Knorr-Cetina 1999, 95). These three bodies are, of course, not absolute nor are they merely analytical categories. They are producers and products of different kinds of knowledge because of different kinds of doing and/as measuring. They are practical bodies, bodies as practiced, sometimes overlapping and sometimes more distantly connected. More than that, new kinds of bodies are always becoming enacted (Hacking 2006), changing the relationships of and to bodies already being practiced. If we accept the relational assumptions of agential realism, “the minimum self for humans is multispecies and multihuman” (Fuentes 2012).

Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999) on Bodies of Research In a section of a chapter of her book given over to “the black-boxed body of the scientist,” Karin Knorr-Cetina questions the notion of tacit knowledge, understood since the time of Michael Polanyi (1958) as “the model of a thinking knower . . . applied only to the person’s unarticulated knowledge” (1999, 99). In this stream of thought, a body is nothing more than a machine for expressing unconscious forms of knowledge. Instead, she proposes that “with regard to molecular biology . . . scientists act like ensembles of sense and memory organs and manipulation routines onto which intelligence has been inscribed” (1999, 99, emphasis added). She makes evident that in the doing of bioscience molecular biologists do indeed black-box their own and their colleagues’ bodies. She is aware that tacit knowledge is a useful concept insofar as it gestures to multiple forms of knowledge that are irreducible to one another, but at the same time it is a concept that affirms the Cartesian mind-body split and its manner of privileging or granting precedence to mind over body. Tacit knowledge refers to the black-boxed body as both of secondary importance and a whole. Although she maintains the Cartesian mind-body distinction to an extent, by asking two seemingly simple questions she has invited us to climb further up Wittgenstein’s

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ladder. She asks “What happens when the body is privileged over the mind?” and “What is the body expected or intended to do and by what means?” The result is that Knorr-Cetina’s body of the scientist, with its acting body, sensory body, and experienced body, goes beyond the notion of tacit knowledge and shows a strong resemblance to Mol’s body multiple. Where tacit knowledge refers to a body knowledge without awareness or consciousness, Knorr-Cetina’s “body multiple” of the bioscientist suggests several entangled knowledges that are different yet related.

With Abraham and patch-clamping we have already encountered the main elements of an experienced body. This is not to say Hannah and Eva do not rely on past experience, for they certainly do. It is, rather, a question of emphasis and temporary stabilization. I am proposing that different technologies—HPLC and electrophysiology— are suited to different kinds of bodies (and vice versa). Patch-clamping and micropipette pulling agentially demand a tactile bodily familiarity through repeated practice that, while not entirely absent, is much more diminished in the case of HPLC. Instead HPLC makes a greater demand on the sense of sight (and to some extent hearing) than does patch-clamping. The frequent visual inspections of settings and pump pressure, the looking for signs of leaks or blockage, the matter of being attuned to squeaks or changes of pitch in the hum of the machinery are much more foregrounded aspects of the relationship between technician and technology in HPLC. This is the sensory body at work, the body that relies more on the five senses instead of the experienced body with its ingrained movements cultivated through repetition. The distinction between them, while small—the development of habits require senses, while senses become habituated to work certain ways—is nonetheless important. Nevertheless, in both cases, “[i]f anything is indeed irrelevant to the conduct of research in molecular biology, it is the sensory body as a primary research tool. . . . [T]he senses, especially vision, are crucial as silently presupposed support mechanisms [emphasis added] in every other aspect” (Knorr-Cetina 1999, 95). She is referring here to a shift from the researchers’ body, as an experimental system in times prior to Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, to a black-boxed body with the rise of the modern versions of reason, rationality, and objectivity. Either way it was never a “complete” apparatus, because incompletable, but the role and purpose of the researcher’s body has gone through changes wherein currents have become eddies, and eddies currents. This is one way, as Daston reminds us (1999; Daston and Galison 2007; see also Langlitz 2010) that different kinds of objectivity are entangled and expressed.

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This brings us, then, to the acting body, as performed by Abraham, Eva, and Hannah. All three investigators used their body as what Knorr-Cetina referred to as an “information-processing machinery” (1999, 17), a body “trusted to pick up and process what the mind cannot anticipate” (1999, 98), a body habituated to sense first and analyze later. It is the body that processes information before the mind is aware or capable of expressing what has been done. The acting body is the body that quite literally does what “feels right” regardless of what our consciousness or the instrumentation is telling us. It is, to use the common phrase, a gut feeling or “hunch” we act upon, even if we can’t clearly say why. It is experiential and sensory, but more, a je ne sais quoi that goes beyond rationality and reason. For this reason all scientific activity, regardless of discipline or training in the human or natural sciences, remains, at least in part, a craft activity (Collins 1999; Bray 2007; Myers 2008), an activity that moves by feeling in its multiple senses. From here it is but a small leap to the matter and mattering of aesthetics in scientific practice. “Aesthetics,” as you may be aware, has two major meanings in English language. There is the predominant meaning of aesthetics as a matter of beauty, refinement, and taste in a particular cultural context, but also an important meaning in terms of bodily sensory awareness (hence the need for an anesthetic before surgery). Although in everyday life these two meanings may seem far apart, in scientific practices they come fairly close together. Indeed, one major meaning of aesthetics is feeling, as suggested above. Myers (2008) suggests scientific investigators do precisely that in the course of their research: they invest something of their embodied Self, their identity, in the models or representations they make and use. This may be yet another reason why comparing data or experiments between similar apparatuses or phenomena may be equivalent, but not identical. This personal investment between technicians, in the cases I observed, and the unique characteristics of the equipment used, such as the differences between the “same” make and model of column on the “same” HPLC equipment, suggest that the relationships involved, relationships that allow the apparatus to become, are “affectively entangled” (Myers 2008, 179) or “engaged” (McCarthy and Wright 2004, 69). In this way nonhuman affect matters just as much as human affect (Bennett 2010; Kirby 2010). This affective entanglement emerges with and through the apparatus. It is not simply a matter of bringing a preformed emotion or attitude to the bench because it too is part of the intra-actions helping to actualize some phenomenon (McCarthy and Wright 2009, 83–85). Nor, it should be added, is affective entanglement always strongly positive. When tasks, techniques, and technologies become routine or repetitive or lack challenge they can become boring, to use Hannah’s term, but they are no less affectively entangled for that.

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The few brief observations on HPLC and whole cell patch-clamping here are just a few of the many activities I encountered, and even practiced, at the ACCBR. They provide a shadowy or ghostly sense of how different matters, and mattering, can be within the disciplinary field called “neuroscience.” Only a little imagination is needed to appreciate how much more different matters can be when extended across other natural (and human) science disciplines. A little more imagination might have us questioning whether we want to continue to practice with and through disciplinary currents the way we presently do. The currents and eddies of neuroscience, through the tiny portion of it mentioned here, suggest we can, if we care to do so, abandon the Scientific Method for fluid, entangled scientific methods. Early in this chapter, I said I wanted to convey a sense of the practice of neuroscientific activity without necessarily following an entire lab or experimental system from beginning to end. The ACCBR exists as a potential addition, a series of openended relationships, a real(istic) possibility, to several locally situated private, government, or campus labs or experimental systems. The next chapter will elaborate on the potentials this facility makes possible and how it meets or deviates from its original intentions.

notes  Recall from the Intralude that all phenomena have agency, though not necessarily human intentionality. The act of negotiating the relationships is one reason to think we are dealing with artisanal or craft skills.  The performance artist Laurie Anderson pokes fun at this odd Western cultural practice in her song “Baby Doll.”  See the excellent blog of the same name (http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropol ogy/).  A common term used by many to express a similar idea is “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi ). Knorr-Cetina argues that tacit knowledge is a body knowledge that the possessor is unaware of. In contrast, she proposes that all knowledges in a body operate more intra-actively than this notion suggests (, –).  For a useful example elaborating “discourse,” see the case of the bricklayer described by Laclau and Mouffe ().

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Chapter 2

Re-Visioning Scientific Practice through the ACCBR

My field notes for October 19, 2007, indicate that day was the inaugural meeting of the ACCBR personnel. Present were Andy, Anil, and June as principal investigators for their research projects, Hannah as the overall coordinating technician for the ACCBR, and Lynn and Brad as the technicians for the cancer and neurodegenerative disease platforms. Abraham had yet to be hired for the epilepsy project. Some of this group had known each other for years, while others were meeting each other for the first time. Present, too, was one of the ACCBR’s first “users,” which is to say, myself. Although my presence as an anthropologist is addressed further in the next chapter and Appendix 2, for the moment I would like to raise two issues that connect to the phenomenal becoming of the ACCBR as I narrate it. First, as was suggested under our quantum assumptions, my presence did make a difference to the currents of the River ACCBR. What I cannot say with any certainty is whether my presence over nearly three years was a difference that made a difference. In this regard Barad’s concept of complementarity is helpful: either I think about the ACCBR’s becoming from superpositioned potentials, or I think about my presence. I cannot do both during the fieldwork process . . . at best I can think about one or the other after the fact. Reflexivity, or methodological self-awareness, is one of those additional relationships of evaluation or measurement that produces a single state from a superpositioned state. Second, a moment’s reflection would suggest that Barad’s concept of phenomenon works well to describe the ACCBR, that is, that entangled, superpositioned, potential relationships precede their actualization and/as becoming. A mouthful? Yes, absolutely, but with the intention of reminding you that there is no way of knowing what the ACCBR was/is becoming or doing if a promising researcher had not died, or if funding structures or amounts had been substantially different, or if I had never been

there. Different intra-actions would have produced different ACCBRs, and there is no way of knowing precisely how different (though more or less well-considered guesses could be made). Now back to the inaugural meeting. If funding currents are one way for individuating forces to shape the eddy of the ACCBR, another is the flow of space allocation on campus. As Rabinow noted, “the spatial organization of [a] lab [is] an important part of the technology” (1996a, 142), and, I would add, the kind of open-concept facility emerging in the North Annex. Change the spatial configuration and you change the apparatus and/as phenomenon. As I will elaborate shortly, a cultural style of individualism predominates in Euro-American society at large, and in bioscience labs on campuses in particular. Shifting from an individualist and cooperative mind-set to a collectivist and collaborative one requires time and/as support. The cultures of practice in the sciences do not simply change overnight. Why mention this here? At that inaugural meeting held two weeks before the official moving date into the North Annex, Andy reported some office space and bench space had been lost to another unit in the Atlantic Veterinary College on orders “from above” (at UPEI the allocation of physical space is administered by the Dean of your Faculty or School). This loss was taken as an indication of a larger, long-term concern with space. As Andy put it, “thirty seconds after the place opens people will be looking for additional space. I guarantee it.” Indeed, over the period I spent there, the politics of space showed themselves on more than one occasion. Some of you might wonder why space is so important. From the perspective of an individual lab, cramped quarters have many drawbacks. There may be difficulties of access, there are times when people get in each others’ way, impacting social and physical comfort, or placing equipment where it fits rather than arranging it to facilitate a smooth flow of work. Perhaps most importantly, physical space puts a limit on the kinds and amounts of equipment that can be requested in research proposals to funding agencies. As Kleinman (2003) suggested, availability and access to equipment has a large bearing on the form and outcome of an experimental system. From the vantage of an individual lab, the cultural style is not changed, but simply enlarged to “do” science. The relatively large amounts of space occupied by the ACCBR would seem vast, underutilized, and aimed at a new cultural style of scientific practice that had not proven itself (locally), and would require years to do so, if ever. From the perspective of the ACCBR as an open-concept facility, maintaining the degree of office, lab, and bench space is crucial. Spaciousness is here meant as an enticement to shift to a more collectivist and collaborative cultural style of doing bioscience. Equipment was organized as much as possible according to a rationality of work flow rather than a rationality of the maximum utilization of space. (As anthropologists have long understood, there is no shortage of rationalities in the world, but a 30

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proliferation of rationalities often are at cross-currents with one another.) Through the ACCBR individual labs would be encouraged to extend themselves rather than enlarge themselves, to turn their inherent incompleteness from a vice into a virtue. The difficulty and challenge, of course, is that cultural practices and attitudes can frequently require long periods to change, much longer than the three-to-five-year period of most bioscience research grants in Canada. Should this model of practice prove successful, then the centralization of office space near the bench space is essential, but until short-term cooperation transforms into longer and larger collaborations, much of the space necessary in the future will seem underutilized from an individualist stance in the present. At the same time, collectivist pressures will continue to grow as the sheer scale of complexity in genetics, genomics, proteomics, and epigenomics comes to be increasingly appreciated, necessitating not only more sophisticated and expensive equipment, but more sophisticated (i.e., larger and more complex) experimental systems. The ACCBR is an eddy of the confluence of individuating and collectivizing forces, but it is also an index of the eddy of these forces at a larger scale, such as the PEI bioscience cluster (discussed at length in following chapters). Such is the materialdiscursiveness of a phenomenon. The mutual dependence of each upon the other, and the mutual relationships influencing each other, make distinctions like local vs. global (or regional or national) appear simplistic. These kinds of binary divisions are more appropriate to Newtonian thinking. I should make clear that the individuating and collectivizing forces mentioned here should not be simplistically or mechanically projected onto bioscientists as persons. There is no group of asocial, greedy, and opportunistic researchers directly opposed to a group of altruistic and gregarious researchers. None of us, I think, are so onedimensional. We are speaking here of forces (Knorr-Cetina), or relationships (Barad), or, in our terms, currents and eddies that can and do operate in and through people. As Barad goes to great lengths to demonstrate, “people” and “things” (including various social currents and/as forces) do not arrive pre-formed at a “place.” Rather, “people,” “place,” and “things” emerge through intra-action. That said, individual researchers may be moved more by one current or the other in any given circumstance, and also over time. These currents, then, form an important part of the process shaping the ACCBR as a phenomenon right from the outset. Even so, they were not usually apparent on a day-to-day basis. The everyday functioning of the facility is one where Andy as director and the bioscientists who used it to extend their experimental systems were more often than not in the background, though they were never entirely absent. It is a world primarily given over to the lab technicians and, to a lesser extent, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Since I was able to follow the ACCBR’s becoming in re-visioning scientific practice through the accbr

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the early period of its actualization from November 2007 to August 2010, I got a rare glimpse into how “the collaborative choreography of laboratory life” (Rapp 2003, 134) became routine, how “research readiness” is not a state so much as a series of practices or currents that change over time.

Rayna Rapp (2003) on the Collaborative Choreography of Laboratory Life “Life and death at the molecular level have their own rhythms dependent not only on DNA sequences and their manipulation but on the collaborative choreography of laboratory life” (2003, 134). Succinctly summarized in this sentence is Rayna Rapp’s suggestion that the global or macro scale of the molecular biology revolution appears more unified, full, inevitable, and fast-paced than is the case when the ethnographer zooms in to a local or micro scale of laboratory practice. “When viewed from the lab bench, the work is methodical and repetitive, involving schedules for sharing. . . . Most of the experiments in which scientists engage involve a large number of unsuccessful trials before a technology or a process is perfected” (2003, 134). We already have an abstract sense of this from Rheinberger’s discussion on experimental systems, but also more concretely from the previous discussion of electrophysiology and HPLC practices. What Rapp usefully draws attention to is the importance of relationships among and through lab technicians with other humans and nonhumans alike. In short, the collaborative choreography, this communal writing by patterned movements, both links and undermines the opposition between macro and micro. The connections among these movements, the directions they flow, and the provisional results they generate are neither the same nor equal.

a vision: from cooperation to collaboration It is late September 2008. The regular seminar hosted jointly by the Department of Biomedical Sciences and the Department of Pathology and Microbiology is earlier than usual that Friday morning. At 8:20 am there are barely a handful of people in the room, most of whom are already affiliated with the ACCBR in one way or another. Andy Tasker busies himself with booting up the computer and warming up the projector. Fingering and fidgeting the flash drive that holds his slideshow presentation on the “Overview of the ACCBR,” he casually mentions that people do not walk through 32

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the door until the last possible moment. And sure enough, at 8:25 only another handful has arrived, but by 8:28 a steady stream of faculty, graduate students, technicians, and post-docs, among others, are filing through the doors. The hour-long seminar is to be divided between a history of the facility and a presentation of the equipment available for those interested in using it, along with procedures for booking time to use the equipment. With the audience settled and welcomed by Andy, he moves from the title slide of his presentation into its substance. The ACCBR, an “open-concept” or “multi-user” facility, we are told on the first slide, represents “a new paradigm for fostering research into human and animal health”—new, at least, for the University of Prince Edward Island—as well as “a major boost to the UPEI research capacity.” The Centre exists as an extension to the inherent incompleteness of other researchers’ labs, offering further apparatuses and the potential to expand an experimental system. All this is to say that the facility is an extension of, in, and through relationships. It is, of course, more than simply an extension, and Andy’s use of the “paradigm” concept, usually associated with historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1970), is quite apt. The ACCBR was initially conceived to be more than a centralized repository of equipment. The intention was to promote new ways of doing bioscience at UPEI through the availability of a wide range of equipment and personnel familiar with that equipment. The aim was to provide additional means of communication and collaboration to supplement those already available at the Atlantic Veterinary College and the Faculty of Science within the university, not to mention increased ties with the National Research Council’s Institute of Nutrisciences and Health, and local, national, and international bioscience firms. In Barad’s terms, the Centre offers the potential to extend the scope and scale of bioscientific entanglements, phenomena, and intraactions. Its presence on campus creates diffraction patterns and is a consequence of them. It is a phenomenon that is a product of differences that make a difference, and that aims to make bioscientific (and other) differences that make a difference. That its effects go beyond the purely bioscientific is one of my primary claims. Additional slides in the presentation mention that the ACCBR seeks to promote greater dialogue among “clinical” and “basic” researchers, and among human and animal bioscientists. (Given the presence of the veterinary school in what is otherwise a predominantly undergraduate institution, the extent of bioscience research devoted to human health and biology is noticeably lower than the amount devoted to animals.) In short, the Centre’s vision is not simply to expand already existing local scientific practice and/as culture, but, significantly, an intra-active re-visioning of the phenomenon of local scientific practice and/as culture. The ACCBR can be thought of as an apparatus composed of potential apparatuses for researchers. Andy Tasker’s biggest wish for the facility is to have it become a black-box. re-visioning scientific practice through the accbr

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Open-concept facilities are certainly not new to modern science in general, with physicists being among the first to use them, but over the years have been spreading through many disciplines. Though particulars vary by time, place, and research aims, there can be little doubt that the increasing size and cost of technology have contributed to this trend (Kleinman 2003). Small labs or teams of researchers cannot easily justify expensive pieces of equipment that only get used rarely, even if at crucial points in investigations. This applies broadly to academic, government, and private institutions. Since resources are always at a premium, even if the motives differ somewhat between privately and publicly funded research, the cost effectiveness of purchases is always up for scrutiny. Expensive equipment purchases are always easier to justify when several research groups can make use of the same piece of equipment, or when a nearby centralized facility reduces costs or waiting times for data simply by being close rather than sending samples elsewhere. Although a hard and fast distinction would overstate the case, in broad terms the first situation works well in research groups that are part of medium- or large-sized corporate or government entities, while the second situation fits better for academic institutions and small- to medium-sized public and private entities. I would locate the ACCBR within the second group. In one sense facilities such as the ACCBR are eddies that form at the confluence of several currents. The molecular biology “revolution,” the more expensive and sophisticated machinery it required, and the rise of neoliberal economic policies all intra-acted from the late 1980s onward in a way that gave scientific and economic competitive advantages to research teams in medium to large enterprises in the biosciences compared to their academic or small-scale government funded counterparts (Rabinow 1996a). Entities such as the ACCBR exist both as a response to and as a resource for larger and established bioscience firms (see chapters 4 and 5 for elaboration). They are a response in the sense of providing noncorporate or small-scale researchers with access to research capabilities on a par with those of larger private companies. They are a resource for the corporate world insofar as many academic scientists are encouraged to economically develop their findings through start-up companies, which, if successful, are usually bought by larger and more established companies. Kleinman’s study of a bioscience lab at the University of Wisconsin led him to conclude that a “decision to proceed with an experiment in a specific way or with a particular experiment may be determined less by universal criteria of procedure than by the availability of a particular piece of equipment, the need to justify a specific expense, or the need to use budgeted material before the end of a fiscal year” (2003, 47). Open-concept facilities that are available to small or “out-of-the-way” labs, whether public or private, are one way to address what Kleinman terms “a complex resource dependence relationship” (2003, 101). Small labs often have to restrict the scope of their

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investigations to the equipment available locally, or they have to send samples away for analysis, which adds to costs in terms of time and money. At this point two issues are pertinent: the technology and/as apparatus, and the potential for collaboration across research teams. The status of the technology in the ACCBR makes it easier to appreciate Barad’s concept of apparatus as it was outlined in chapter 1. There I suggested that a technology becomes an apparatus in practice, that meaning and use of equipment cannot be determined in advance, even for the “same” piece of equipment. It is a dancer in the collaborative choreography of which Rapp speaks. For an example, think back to our discussion on HPLC. Two different technicians (with different degrees of lab experience), two different columns (even of the “same” make and model), two different mobile phases (in terms of purity and concentration), two different experimental systems (one directed toward epilepsy, the other toward Parkinson’s disease) led to different relationships with the Shimadzu system and vice versa. It was, in effect, two different HPLC systems under our assumptions that take us from a Newtonian toward a quantum analytical approach. In the context of the ACCBR, then, technology is both inherently flexible and incomplete. Until a “user” in the facility puts it and is put, agentially, to work in actualizing a phenomenon (of which the user is both a “part” and “product”), it may as well not exist at all. Another element of open-concept labs is that they are intended to promote scientific collaboration. Various participants frequently have to change how they share in the belief that scientific practices occur in “a culture of no culture . . . a world without loose ends, without temperament, gender, nationalism, or other sources of disorder” ( Traweek 1988, 162). Collaboration, as an ideal, takes place within “an extreme culture of objectivity” ( Traweek 1988, 162); it is an ideal consistent with the world of Newtonian assumptions. As Shrum et al. (2007) point out, collaboration and cooperation can be usefully distinguished in this kind of environment. The former is concerned with shared goals or aims among two or more researchers, while the latter is about the process of taking the interests of others into account as you pursue your own. Collaboration is, if you like, a cultural style of intra-action that may shape the phenomenon produced but is not directly connected to the intentions motivating the production of a phenomenon.

Sharon Traweek (1988) on Cultures of Scientific Practice Sharon Traweek’s celebrated ethnographic study of two particle physics communities, one in the United States and one in Japan, demonstrates the extent to which the ideal of scientific objectivity revealing a fixed, stable, preexisting object of knowledge is a representation that doesn’t easily coincide with scientific

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practices. These practices both influence and are influenced by larger phenomena in which they are entangled. She speaks, for example, of how particle physicists’ discourses, and not only the physicists themselves, are gendered in a manner similar to Emily Martin’s examinations of discourse regarding ova and sperm in biology textbooks (see box, p. xix). In terms of the discussion on open-concept laboratories, Traweek’s work on some of the national differences between Japanese and American particle physics communities in practice is quite instructive. Japanese society, broadly speaking, is more collectively oriented than American society with its greater emphasis on individualism. These different styles of relating and/as relationships of style infuse their respective scientific practices. In North America, what Knorr-Cetina termed individuating forces makes scientists uneasy about collective and thoroughly collaborative projects. Traweek mentions a case of how suspicions and misunderstandings around a joint project were a consequence of “the gap between Japanese and American culture” (1988, 154–55). These different styles of relating and/as relationships of style, then, gesture to the realistic possibility of doing science differently as well as indicating some of the challenges and resistances to implementing changes in practice.

Over the months I observed the formation and operation of the ACCBR, it became evident that scientific collaboration may be the intended purpose of the facility, but it required the development of cooperation and trust first. Beyond that, it also became clear that cooperation, collaboration, and trust could not be applied to scientific practice alone, but had to extend to funding agencies, governments, university administrations, and more. For this reason I suggest that the establishment of open-concept facilities ideally promote new varieties of scientific and/as cultural practices, which in turn effect changes in practices in institutions such as funding agencies, universities, and government departments. What I have yet to mention is the resistance to the emergence of new practices. In places where the cultural practices of sciences have not become habituated to frequent and large-scale collaboration or cooperation, as in the particle physics community associated with the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, several “individuating forces” (Knorr-Cetina 1999, 171) assert themselves in a way to resist that kind of collectivization. The various streams of molecular biology are a good case in point. Although collaborations of 3,000 researchers can occur at the CERN physics facility in Switzerland, and publications list each collaborator alphabetically by name and country (Merali 2010), the popular stereotype of the lone scientist still seems to hold

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sway for the public at large and also within many science communities generally. Even so, the forces of individuation, such as conventions for authorship in publications or the expectation that cooperation and collaboration should be project-specific, come up against what I will term “forces of collectivization,” such as sharing equipment that is both singular and expensive. These two currents of individuation and collectivization can come together in distinctive ways to form eddies, such as the ACCBR, in which the two sets of forces manifest themselves, like diffraction patterns, through intra-action. This is partly because when the two currents came together they were not of equal force. The individuating tendencies are stronger here not just in terms of scientific practice but throughout the society. Despite many calls over the years for large-scale interdisciplinarity within and across the Two Cultures mentioned by C.P. Snow, the policing of identities, both disciplinary and personal, continues largely uninterrupted in most Euro-American settings. The rare instances that challenge that trend, therefore, are all the more remarkable. The long-standing cooperation and collaboration of the particle physics community or the Drosophila fruit fly community in biology may have seemed for a long time to be freak occurrences, but there are signs this can occur on a larger scale elsewhere. For example, one of the effects of the (sometimes strained) cooperation and collaboration leading to the mapping of the Human Genome at the turn of the millennium is the persistence of ELSI, or ELSI-like, contributors to genomics projects throughout the global North. Genome Canada and its regional affiliates, for example, require all projects funded through them to direct a portion of the grant to consider the ethical, economic, environmental, legal, and social effects of the project (referred to as GELS). There have also been recent efforts to spread this model into some synthetic biology projects. As fragile and unstable as these kinds of collaborations are, at present they are phenomena that offer a model for a possible future of a Third Culture scientific practice. They point to a possibility of a widespread new set of practices or cultural style sometimes called an ethical plateau (Fischer 2003, 2009). Nonetheless, these kinds of efforts are far from being common practice at present because the individuating forces that Knorr-Cetina and Traweek identify predominate across disciplines and across society at large. After all, it is no secret that Euro-American societies promote and encourage individualism over collectivism, which, to be clear, should not be construed as an absence of collectivism in science or elsewhere. This is in strong contrast to the practices of physics in Japan that Traweek discusses, where broader cultural practices already value collectivism and, by extension, certain forms of collaboration beyond mere cooperation. As the technological machinery involved to do cutting-edge science increases in cost, the pressure to collectivize the practice of science will increase, re-visioning scientific practice through the accbr

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too. This in turn, as Traweek (1988, 2) notes for the physics community, may affirm or increase the cultural value the public assigns to the activity on the assumption that cultural value can be translated into economic value (Bourdieu 1986). This issue of “open-concept labs” raises the question of openness: What is it that is open? I’ve already mentioned an inherent incompleteness of labs, suggesting openness to extension, to more and other kinds of relations or connections. Open-concept facilities, then, are open to the openness of extending a lab. But this is not the only sense in which “open” operates. Openness can also refer to its own incompletability: that it needs the incompleteness of other labs, and as such cannot complete itself either. This relationship is often framed in economic terms as much as personal or scientific terms. The ACCBR is open for business. But openness often entails more than incompleteness. It is suggestive of a moral stance we often encounter in a phrase like “open-minded.” Those considered openminded are open to an expansiveness or scalability that meshes with these other senses. If that seems too abstract, or just plain weird, think of it this way: “open” has become a much used new catchphrase early in the twenty-first century. The moral sense has connotations of democracy and equality, transparency and accountability, which should not be underestimated. “[T]he more scientific research projects engage with their social environments in egalitarian discussions,” Harding (2008, 97) writes, “the higher the quality of results.” Certainly this is so in the field of information technology, for example; “open source” carries that implication, as does “open innovation” in commerce, or “open science” models of information exchange (Cooke 2007). What may not be immediately evident, though, is that “open” may not be open to everyone in the same way, or, more immediately, to the same scale. Openness does not preexist intra-active doings. Collaborations may use the language of equality to reinforce greater hierarchy in practice (Shrum et al. 2007). Another way to think of the issue of scalability is in terms of the relative strengths of individuating and collectivizing currents in spatial terms at their confluence. At the time of writing, the number and volume of “open” spaces in the biosciences was relatively small on PEI. The planned construction of a BioCommons Research Park, a provincially operated crown corporation housing a variety of bioscience firms in various stages of maturity, size, and growth near the provincial capital of Charlottetown, is expected to expand the extent of open facilities considerably (Casper et al. 2010). The extent and manner(s) in which it will practice “openness” is an open question. Even so, the collectivist challenge of going from cooperation between public and private labs to collaboration among private and public labs—a shift from interactive practice to intra-active practice—remains large. Casper et al. (2010) note that resistance to the BioCommons on PEI is posed in the form of alternate spending proposals for these public funds, such as enlarging “basic 38

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science capacity” through recruiting more world-class researchers and/or expanding graduate programming in fields feeding the biosciences at the university. In short, the resistance takes the form of maintaining the scientific cultural status quo of expanding the number of individual labs, and in this sense maintaining the individuating forces operating in the biosciences on the Island. As we will see shortly, this manifests itself as a diffraction pattern over control of physical space. At an even larger (fractal-like?) scale, similar arguments can be broadly made for the development of an economic biocluster, as will be explored further in chapters 4 and 5.

structure and practice, or, space. . . . the final frontier? Perhaps the best place to begin a discussion of the daily events at the ACCBR that can be presented as “typical” is with the spatial layout. When the three stories of the 57,000 sq. ft. North Annex to the Atlantic Veterinary College complex was completed in 2007, 8,000 sq. ft. of space was allocated to the ACCBR. Most of that space is devoted to a series of rooms and suites on the third floor, with the remaining space spread over a couple of rooms on the first floor. The annex itself is square in shape. All three floors of the annex, consequently, follow this broad pattern: a central square within the square of the annex is taken up with bench space for labs and lab suites; surrounding this central square is a square hallway, unencumbered by anything except periodic emergency showers—a potent reminder of the need to be attentive to what you and others are doing in research spaces; and, flanking the hallway, an outer square composed of offices for faculty, visiting researchers (including a lone anthropologist), technicians, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers, as well as stairwells, reception areas, and interaction rooms. The research suite that formed the physical core of the ACCBR is a series of three connected rooms separated by glass doors. General Laboratory 1, the room with the most bench space, contained two fume hoods, a purified water system, small centrifuges, several scales, a plate reader, PCR units, three refrigerators, a variety of instruments for preparing electrophoresis gels, and a variety of instruments for reading and imaging electrophoresed gels; General Laboratory 2 housed the ultra-high-speed centrifuge, the autoclave, and a shaker; and the Analytical Lab contained the HPLC system, the fluorospectrometer, the spectrophotometer, and a refrigerator-freezer. There were also four small rooms accessible only through General Laboratory 1, including the Electrophysiology room, the Pre-and Post-PCR rooms, and a Tissue Culture room. In addition, separate rooms on the third floor were allocated to Histology, General Laboratory 3, Radioisotope, Image Analysis, another Tissue Culture room, and a freezer room. Elsewhere in the annex were the Behavioral Suites for animals and the Biomechanics room. re-visioning scientific practice through the accbr

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A Historical Summary How did this open-concept facility come to be? What is it in the process of becoming? These are the questions that the rest of this chapter addresses. As is the case for so many other phenomena, past currents of various sizes and intensities, and their confluences and eddies, shaped and continue to shape possible futures. Over the course of the seminar mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, Dr. Andy Tasker provided an overview of major events leading up to the formal opening in 2008. In the academic and fiscal year of 1999/2000 Canada’s veterinary schools began lobbying federal and provincial governments for resources to expand the scale of their programs. This ultimately led to the construction of the North Annex. Without this physical space there would not have been any place on the UPEI campus to house a facility like the ACCBR. As that stream of activity unfolded among university administrators and government bureaucracies, several faculty begin to imagine possibilities for cooperation and collaboration. These members of the Atlantic Veterinary College and UPEI’s Faculty of Science envisioned a space on campus where comparative biomedical research would be ongoing into the foreseeable future, and so plans to realize the facility began to take shape. Even at this stage, though, the individuating forces flowing in and through the biosciences broadly shaped the extent to which the collectivist aspirations of an openconcept facility could be actualized. Quite simply, Canada’s (and not only Canada’s) funding structure for the (human and/as natural) sciences assumes individual labs or projects for the most part (though this has been changing somewhat). Open-concept research spaces, while recognized as desirable, do not easily fit funding structures that assume projects and personnel are discrete and bounded entities with well-defined goals and time lines. Put another way, funding structures assume a Newtonian world in terms of bioscience practices and take for granted Euro-American individualism and the broader black-boxing of “culture” (Roy 2004; Traweek 1988). This in turn had consequences for how the ACCBR was actualized as an apparatus and/as phenomenon. Particularly, it could not be realized and maintained in anything but a fragmentary manner, since there are no public and/or private funding sources in Canada comparable to, for example, the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom, which could offer an independent source of long-term funding that covers both equipment and ongoing research activity as a single package. So, what to do? In 2002 several participants in the open-concept group received a $2 million grant from the CFI (Canada Foundation for Innovation, a federally supported funding agency) to purchase equipment. Because the CFI only funds a portion of infrastructure projects, a further application of $2 million was directed to the Atlantic Innovation Fund (another federally supported funding agency) in 2003 for the purchase of equipment and operating expenses to keep the equipment in a state of “research readiness.” 40

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You might have noticed there are not any people yet. Because Canadian federal funding agencies cannot directly support the daily operations of research centers or institutes, such as the ACCBR, in 2004 three members of the open-concept group wrote individual research grant proposals to fund research projects in their areas of expertise. The idea was, in effect, to pool money from the three projects to hire personnel and purchase the necessary supplies. In this way diabetes, pharmacogenomics, and epilepsy platforms of research were planned to provide the people to run the dayto-day activities of the ACCBR. Research technicians would be hired to do much of the bench work for particular projects, but they would also be available to assist other users of the ACCBR with the wide range of equipment available, which requires the technicians, of course, to be fluent in their use (see below). It is important to note here that several individuating forces are at work here, especially the presumption by Canadian federal government funding bodies that individual researchers and their labs conform to individual projects and vice versa. Put another way, there is a structural bias in funding against collectivist projects, and there is an implicit assumption that cooperation is unlikely to lead to collaboration, despite frequent use of the two terms as synonymous by funders and scientists alike. One very important way this bias influences daily routine is through the short-term contracts through which technicians are hired. As if to underscore this point that collectivist forces are subordinated to individuating forces, the slideshow at the opening meeting relayed that the principal investigators for the diabetes and pharmacogenomics projects left for academic appointments at other universities in 2006, leaving Andy Tasker the options of looking for replacements or leaving the project unrealized. By 2007 researchers focused on cancer and neurodegenerative diseases had replaced those who left. The ground had been broken and the foundations laid for the North Annex when the lead scientist for the cancer research project unexpectedly died. Again Andy looked for, and found, other researchers—also in cancer as it turns out—who were willing to explore their projects through the ACCBR. At the onset of summer in 2007 I had my first meetings and discussions with Andy, who had by that time taken on the title of Director of the ACCBR. And certainly it is not hard to see, even with the lack of detail this brief historical outline provides, why it became his role. Lab Technicians, Training, and Research Readiness The collaborative choreography of which Rapp speaks, a local bioscientific dialect or “culture” if you like, does not arrive preformed. It is always in motion, in a process of becoming. Because the funding structures operated on the presumption of individual projects, and otherwise reinforced those individuating forces in the biosciences, the re-visioning scientific practice through the accbr

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lab technicians associated with the ACCBR found their positions to be liminal, which is to say “betwixt and between” ( Turner 1970) the individual projects to which they were attached and the more collectivist ideal of the ACCBR as a research facility. So, beyond competencies in techniques and equipment for the neuroscientific or cancer projects that would take up a portion of their time, they also had to have, or develop, skills in a wide range of techniques and equipment to assist and/or train users coming to the ACCBR. In other words, they themselves had to go through a shift from cooperation to collaboration to promote it more generally. They had to be as “open” and indeterminate as the rest of the facility and its users. They had to become, and keep becoming, part of the phenomenon they were building even as they had to participate in activities that worked against its actualization. It is not just the ACCBR that is a result of individuating and collectivizing forces as diffraction patterns or eddies, but also the entangled elements, including the people, intra-acting in the emergence of the ACCBR as a phenomenon. It should come as no surprise that lab technicians thought about and approached the ACCBR somewhat differently than the research scientists for whom they performed much of the bench work. If I may put it starkly, perhaps too starkly, the lead researchers were involved because they believed in the open-concept model, while the lab technicians, because of their short-term contracts, were interested in employment in the biosciences, regardless of their feelings toward the open-concept model. Consequently, it is equally unsurprising that they expressed a range of opinions regarding the vision and actuality of the ACCBR as an open-concept facility. This range of opinions can be considered within the terms of collaboration and cooperation, as mentioned above, and also the individuating and collectivizing forces shaping the practice of research. Hannah represents a position on this continuum very much in favor of the ACCBR’s vision. It was one reason, aside from missing being at the bench, that she left a position elsewhere at UPEI. On many occasions she was quite vocal in extolling the value and virtues of the open-concept model. She, like the project scientists, recognized time as the enemy. Would the Centre have enough time to “get the word out” and generate interest among potential users to demonstrate its viability? Lynne, for her part, was also supportive of the concept, but situated the forces historically. She implied that the two departments at the AVC that use molecular biology techniques—Biomedical Sciences, and Pathology and Microbiology—had a different stake and relationship to the ACCBR than researchers from the Faculty of Science, the National Research Council building next door, or local bioscience industries. She mentioned, for example, that several pieces of equipment arrived well in advance of construction being completed, and so were housed and used within the AVC. Lynne explained that over time people began to think of the equipment as an expansion of

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their labs rather than an extension of it, to use the terms mentioned earlier. She recounted one case: I found, in moving in upstairs, [that] the person that dropped it off was like “Oh, I’m going to miss it.” But they can still use it! It’s just not right beside you anymore. I think it will take them a little while to get over the fact that it’s different. . . . It’s just going to be a change. . . . But that’s mostly for the department because they’ve been used to [having the equipment right there]. Anyone from the outside . . . and I think people from other departments like biology and chemistry are really going to like it. Shelley, in contrast, indicated how individuating forces still permeate open-concept facilities, even when all involved share a more collectivist goal. She discussed her earliest work experiences as a lab technician: [It] was just in independent labs . . . You know, just a lab in itself. Any collaboration was to be very short term . . . borrowing someone’s equipment for a small period of time . . . or going to another lab and learning a kind of technique. [Author: This has been termed cooperation above.] . . . When I got to [working at a government lab] I could see how, budget-wise, it’s definitely more efficient to have an open-concept lab . . . but there are definitely personality issues that come into play, and just sharing issues, rules, [such as] people not cleaning things properly, or, signing up for time [on shared equipment]. It gets to be annoying sometimes when other people don’t have the same standards as you do. Once Shelley arrived at the ACCBR she, like Lynne, Mary, Abraham, and Brad, was exposed to the conflicting forces of working on an individual research project while encouraging users of the ACCBR to go beyond cooperation and collaborate in the sense mentioned earlier. To accomplish this, the lab technicians themselves had to move from cooperative relations to collaborative ones. That is one way in which diffraction patterns in the ACCBR settled into a distinctive subcultural style, an eddy in motion, an apparatus always already becoming. This in turn required lab technicians to expand their professional skills so that there was always someone available to assist with equipment and techniques if needed by a user. A good example of this, though certainly not the only case I observed, was the cross-training that Lynne and Abraham provided to each other. As we know from the previous chapter, Abraham was investigating the role of potassium ion channels in rat neurons. He came with skills in electrophysiology and cell culture but needed to learn electrophoresis and

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PCR techniques, with Lynne providing encouragement and guidance over a period of a few weeks. In turn, Abraham provided Lynne with the support to gain the tacit knowledge needed to make thin slices of fresh brain tissue on the vibratome, a machine with a vibrating razorblade, to augment her skills in preparing frozen brain tissue in the cryostat (a machine that allows the slicing of frozen tissue to the desired thicknesses). In other instances they were “in the dark” together, as when both were trying to navigate a brand new autoclave (sterilizer) much more digitized and automated than models either had previously used. (I must confess I wondered why the new model used a digitized female voice to issue instructions, guidance, or monitor progress, or why it [she?] even needed a voice at all? Is it because most lab technicians are, or are assumed to be, women? Is it because of a long-standing Euro-American stereotype that considers women’s voices “soothing”?) Other examples of cross-training occurred over my observation time, but this was especially the case in the early days or whenever a new lab technician arrived to replace one who had departed. Each technician took on the task of becoming familiar with several techniques and technologies, and was encouraged to become aware of as many as possible. The reason for this is to maintain the Centre in a state of “research readiness,” as demanded by the funding agencies. That is, it is not just a matter of simply having the equipment. Each piece needs to be serviced, regardless of how much use it does or does not get. Each piece of equipment, in addition to being available to a user, must also be accessible to the user. This is where lab technicians enter the picture, in that they must be aware of the agencies and peculiarities in relating to each piece of equipment. In other words, as Barad has suggested, it is ongoing intra-actions that create apparatuses, and it is ongoing intra-actions among these (and other) apparatuses that situate the ACCBR itself as an ever-changing apparatus. Lab technicians have to be lab technicians in practice, by doing and becoming. They are people—human eddies as varied and complex as any—but in the context of which I am speaking here, they are also phenomena and/as apparatuses which are themselves relationally intra-acting with/as parts of other phenomena and/as apparatuses. Why such a mouthful again here? Well, eddies, as mentioned before (simultaneously) can be moving with and against the current of which they are a part. From a Newtonian perspective, that often gets labeled as a paradox. But if you take into account that not all differences make a difference (based on what and how you are measuring), that the issue of scale is a difference that makes a difference, and that everything is in motion, we get closer to a quantum approximation. More directly, the individuating forces in the biosciences can be thought of as currents (even if in other ways they are eddies) of which collectivizing forces are eddies (and are superpositioned to be currents, potentially). 44

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The lab technicians in the ACCBR were already split between the demands on them in individual labs and projects and the demands on them to have the ACCBR in a state of research readiness, and the collectivist forces could not but ultimately reinforce the individualist forces because the latter were the predominant current. All the lab technicians expanded their skill and tacit knowledge bases. All the lab technicians were on limited-term contracts. In this case, the expansion of skills meant that those who could move on to permanent employment, did so. Yet at the same time the expansion of these skills occurred in pursuit of the collaboration, not just cooperation, between lab technicians to make the ACCBR a viable alternative phenomenon and apparatus to the more individualist mainstream/current. With this we come back to the issue of space. As Lynne implied above, in late 2007 the tensions between researchers favoring the promotion of collaboration and those favoring the retention of prior individualist norms was very intense within the AVC. She opined, “I think it will take them [AVC faculty] a little while to get over the fact that it [the ACCBR model] is different . . . but that’s mostly for the [AVC] departments.” The key issue in terms of space and equipment is how much time is needed or thought necessary to judge whether the model has shown it does or does not work. Certainly the demands were for a quick transition, if it was going to occur at all. But as anyone who has observed efforts to change any kinds of cultural attitudes and/ as practices will tell you, the process is slow and uneven. Just think of the decades of effort that have gone into encouraging people not to smoke or eat junk food or leave their seatbelt unbuckled, practices that we know are much more harmful to us than the social organization of most bioscience research. And, as in these more well known cases, it is easier to shift the attitudes of those early in their enculturation than those who are thoroughly habituated. In the context of the ACCBR this means junior faculty, graduate and postdoctoral students, and those on limited-term contracts (such as the lab technicians but also visiting researchers from outside the AVC) are more likely to shift practices. They are largely an academic generation or two behind more established faculty, and therefore their futures are, or at least seem to be, more open, variable, and superpositioned. This is not to say that all established faculty resisted or that younger researchers were inherently in favor. It is to say, however, that for the facility to really be “given a chance” requires time scales (5, 10, 15, 20 years or more) that many individual researchers, governments, the university, and private industry consider prohibitive, whether rightly or wrongly. Oddly enough, these latter groups are worried about the open “marketplace of ideas” being too slow and inefficient to generate the desired effects for the marketplace of commodities (see chapters 3, 4, and 5), and so policies are put in place to encourage a speedier transition from ideas to marketable product. What Kleinman (2003) suggested for industry seems more widely applicable: policy currents don’t dictate that a re-visioning scientific practice through the accbr

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bioscientist should research X, but not Y, or that research should be done this way, but not that way. These currents, however, do channel what should be researched and how in a broad sense rather than in direct and specific terms. Challenging those currents with other currents to actualize other possibilities is precisely what generates eddies.

the near future of the accbr It was one of those moments that had been anticipated, a superpositioned possibility, and yet, when it finally arrived, it was at the same time unexpected. The April 2010 email from the Office of the Dean for the AVC was sent to all users and staff of the ACCBR. It announced that the Dean’s Council, composed of several individuals and not just the Dean, had gone through its annual exercise of reviewing the activities of all research centers and institutes to assess and implement policies. The Centre was commended for both the quantity and the quality of the research performed and applauded for having largely fulfilled its original research mandate, with a particular nod to the staff and director for their efforts. Ominously, the email went on to say that the Atlantic Veterinary College had itself undergone large transformations since the original funding application in 2004. The Dean’s Council implied that the ACCBR was not fully aligned with the larger and changing research mission of the AVC, and consequently deliberated how best to reorganize relationships with the ACCBR so that it was more closely integrated with the AVC as a whole. Two concerns in particular were identified. One was how the ACCBR would finance itself after 2011, when the individual research projects paying for the staff would end, and the other was that the Centre contravened the AVC space allocation policy. As a result, the Dean’s Council recommended and immediately implemented five directives: (1) the director of the ACCBR was now to report to the Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies and Research; (2) the director was expected to contribute to the development of a plan for maintaining equipment past 2011, including the possibility of going “virtual”; (3) the director would contribute to the development and maintenance of a postdoctoral program; (4) the director was expected to establish and/or intensify connections with other biomedical institutions in the Atlantic provinces (New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island); and (5) all ACCBR space would be managed by the Associate Dean. While the third and fourth points were not considered problematic, the other three were taken quite hard by the ACCBR staff. There was a sense of a loss of autonomy for the Centre as a whole, a widespread feeling among many users and staff that the Centre was not being given the time needed to develop an alternative collaborative model and/as culture of doing bioscience, and also a justifiable sense of insecurity among the lab technicians. 46

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Although I will have more to say about the changing rivers and/as eddies of universities in the next chapter, the memo itself draws attention to this. Certainly universities are constantly changing, but by effect, if not design, this particular instance suggests that individuating forces in the biosciences would be institutionally privileged (not to be confused with taking an explicitly anti-collaborative stance). The entanglements and diffraction patterns leading to this result emerge from numerous intra-actions, not all of which can, or should, be confined to UPEI, or even the AVC. Strangely enough, some science policy researchers argue, as we will see, that as universities become more closely tied to governments and industry they become more classically bureaucratic, while the latter, for political and economic reasons, decentralize to an extent. Another eddy had formed. Or, better stated, what seems to be a current at one scale of magnification may itself be an eddy at another scale (and vice versa). This is one way to understand the closer ties the director is expected to have with the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research. The issue of space reallocation also supports the suggestion that individuating forces in the practice of research, as the prevailing status quo for bioscience on campus, would be promoted over collectivizing forces. Not long after the circulation of this email, one room of the main ACCBR suite was given to a faculty member as a standard “independent” lab space. All ACCBR staff either lost or were reassigned to share office spaces, as was the case for several users as well. Here, too, the entanglements and diffraction patterns, the conflicting currents of how to do science, shifted the shape, size, and direction of the ACCBR as an eddy, and not simply or only in a metaphoric sense. Finally, the lab technicians took particular note of the second point in the memo. Some expressed concern that their positions were not explicitly mentioned, and that serious consideration would be given to distributing the equipment to establish the ACCBR as a “virtual” phenomenon. What a virtual ACCBR would mean is that instead of concentrating most of the equipment in one place, as in the current openconcept arrangement, it would be distributed among already existent faculty labs, implying that current ACCBR space may also be distributed. Under the terms of the research grants that made the equipment available, the equipment would still be available to users of the ACCBR. They would, however, have to make arrangements for use, directly or indirectly, with the lab in which the equipment was located. Several of the users and staff worried that such an arrangement would create a logistical nightmare. These worries were often framed in the form of questions. At the time, users of the ACCBR reserved time for particular pieces of equipment through a centralized online booking system. How would it work in a virtual environment? Would users have to book time twice, once through the ACCBR and once through whichever individual lab housed the item? Regarding the time-sensitive nature of re-visioning scientific practice through the accbr

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some processes, someone wondered how it would work if two pieces of equipment were located in different labs? If an ACCBR user and a member of an individual lab both wanted access to the same piece of equipment, who would have precedence? Underlying these kinds of questions that staff and users raised was a perceived loss of control for encouraging collaboration. There was a fear that once a piece of equipment was located in someone’s individual lab, those in the lab would begin to think of it as “theirs.” Cooperation would be more or less freely given, but the possibility for collaboration in Shrum et al.’s (2007) sense would be significantly diminished. For many, but especially the lab technicians, the email was taken as the proverbial writing on the wall. The job insecurities of contract work, combined with an uncertain future for the ACCBR, led most of these technicians to look for greener pastures elsewhere. Some, as noted earlier, were planning to or did move on anyway, having grown tired of the insecurity of contract work, even as they enjoyed the cutting-edge work they were doing. Others, though, moved on more reluctantly, having invested something of themselves in trying to bring about another way of doing science. In retrospect, the timing of this email announcement should not have been a surprise, regardless of whether one accepts its rationale or not. The original funding agreements were nearing their expiration. The memo stated, “There was consensus [among the Dean’s Council] that the ACCBR needs time to evolve into a new sustainable model.” But as mentioned above, this “new sustainable model” was one that had to fit the ongoing transformations within the AVC, and the university at large. Here, as well, the email was quite direct: “The relevance of the ACCBR in the future will be directly measured by its impact on moving our college forward in its research mission” (emphasis added). That this research mission is not entirely of its own choosing, but is itself a product of entangled intra-actions has been implied throughout this chapter. What follows in the next chapter is a consideration of UPEI as a phenomenon, in Barad’s sense. It will be considered a phenomenon and/as eddy that is also simultaneously an apparatus in larger currents. It is also a phenomenon of which I am an entangled part, and this too brings us back to Barad’s notion of complementarity (and/ as reflexivity).

note  During the course of the Human Genome Project a portion of the research money was purposely distributed to human science researchers investigating the ethical, legal, and social implications (hence ELSI) of human genomics research. Whatever its past and present limitations, the implementation of ELSI was an important recognition that scientific effects might well go beyond the intentions that motivated the science. 48

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Chapter 3

What Can You Do in, to, and with a University?

The fact that I researched colleagues on my home campus leads to certain levels of what Rena Lederman (2006b) terms “informality.” She uses the term to describe “moments of ethnographic practice when ‘research’ and ‘daily life’ are inextricable” (Lederman 2006b, 477). The concept flows toward a questioning of how other the others I researched are. More than that, over the years some of these colleagues have become friends, and here standardized accounts of the ethics and assessment of fieldwork seem entirely misplaced (see Appendix 2). In his book “The Politics of Friendship” the philosopher Jacques Derrida posed a simple question: “Is the friend the same or the other?” (2005, 4). The distinction is both necessary and unnecessary at the same time, so answering the question is not at all as straightforward as one might believe. It is the eddies and/as currents surrounding friendship in the anthropology of science that Fortun and Fortun (2005) have considered (see also Fortun 2008). Although there is a lot more to be said, for the moment I want to think about what they have to say about friendship in relation to participant observation as an ethnographic research tool. What Fortun and Fortun suggest, simply put, is that friendship, as friendship, should be among the methodologies used by the ethnographer in the field. There is, as they point out, a longstanding history of friendship in classic ethnography, but studies of scientists quickly encounter these subjects’ individual and collective capacities to look after their interests in ways more socially marginal groups cannot. Why friendship as a method? In terms we’ve been using, it is a means to move away from the kinds of reflexivity appropriate to our Newtonian assumptions, toward a reflexivity that is diffractive, willing to engage with what is tacit, embodied, and open. It is not that there are not difficulties, as we will see, but that friendship “builds on important habits of rapport within anthropology while opening anthropology to people, topics, and institutional domains that, as a matter of habit, are often approached antagonistically”

(Fortun and Fortun 2005, 51). Obviously friendship and participant observation are not identical to one another, even though they can overlap considerably.

Kim Fortun and Mike Fortun (2005) on Friendship and/as Method In an article on the changing epistemological, ontological, and ethical horizons of US toxicologists, Kim and Mike Fortun raise the notion of friendship as an ethnographic methodology. As toxicology moves toward toxicogenomics, scientific researchers in this stream are altering their habits of thinking and/as doing. They encourage ethnographers, especially ethnographers of the natural sciences, to flow concurrently with these changes. Just as various tributaries of natural sciences, like toxicology, shift their course over time, so also, Fortun and Fortun argue, do the human sciences.

Drawing on Rheinberger’s concept of experimental system, Fortun and Fortun suggest that toxicologists and ethnographers need to strike a balance between stability and instability in their respective experimental systems. Since these systems flow through one another, “friendship—conceived as a way of relating to others that demands reciprocity yet tolerates times out of joint, the not-always-predictable circuit of gifts, and the way exchange can work even when not a simple, reciprocal transfer that returns an investment—offers a possible methodology” (2005, 51). This doesn’t, however, mean complete agreement. Friends can and do disagree with one another, sometimes vehemently. What seems to matter is the relationship continuing its movement based on qualities not easy to specify, such as respect, responsibility, trust, or obligation. In short, it is the relational tensions between stability and instability among friends that provides a means to flow into each other’s experimental systems. Perhaps some of this discussion is best explored through an event. During the course of my field work I continued reading on a variety of pertinent topics, as any researcher tends to do, and had taken to heart some of the lessons learned by previous ethnographers—or at least thought I had. Also, as most researchers tend to do, I worked some preliminary and tentative observations into a conference paper to get some feedback, different perspectives, and so on from the audience. Having read Lederman (2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2007), and Fortun and Fortun (2005) among others, I had resolved to minimize misunderstandings and miscommunications that can arise from informality and friendship. Having read Kleinman’s ethnography of 50

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a plant science lab, I wanted to be sure not to accidentally portray people as onedimensional caricatures (2003, 26–29). And after years of assigning to introductory classes an article by Benedict (2006) outlining the importance of investing in relationships to the point of vulnerability (to be interested, as Stengers [2000a, 2000b] might say), I thought that matters were well in hand. I was preparing a presentation for the American Anthropological Association annual meeting. By any common ethnographic standards, I was ethically obligated to share a draft of the presentation with the people I studied, and certainly felt it to be no burden. I was more than willing to share—it is, after all, the kind of thing friends do for one another. Late one Wednesday morning I handed a copy of the paper to Hannah. She returned to my carrel around 2:30 and the look on her face clearly indicated displeasure and disappointment. Completely caught off-guard, I asked what was it I wrote that was offensive. My field notes summarized the encounter this way: She explained there was nothing offensive in the paper in and of itself. What emerged [in the course of conversation] was [that] the quote from Fortun and Fortun on friendship as a methodology to get beyond some of the problematic aspects of [classic participant observation] was also what reminded her that I am not an “organic” part of the ACCBR. There was a moment of doubt as to whether the friendship I extended was genuine, or simply a means to collect information. In my mind it was not an either/or situation and it had not occurred to me that it could be construed that way. . . . I was confronted with the us/them divide of fieldwork. I couldn’t have guessed how I would feel, but now that it has happened I am distressed at creating distress, a distress which can only be generated among friends, rather than the more distant notions of “rapport” used by an older, objectifying anthropology. The final irony? The title of the paper she read was “Terms of Engagement: Fieldwork within the Academy and the Limits of Reflexivity.” While I did engage in participant observation and/as friendship to the best of my limited abilities, Gusterson (1997) was right to say it doesn’t travel up the social structure well. We saw in chapter 2 that the ACCBR, its personnel, and its users do not operate in that ideal world of Science. No scientific endeavor does. It is a current and/as eddy shaped by other currents and/as eddies both larger and smaller than itself as a phenomenon. It is what intra-action is all about. There is science only in practice, in the doing, and there is no doing science in a vacuum. It is always already entangled with multiple methods, objectivities, material-discursive entities, ontologies, emotions, knowledges, epistemologies, agencies, nonhumans, humans, and politics in its what can you do in, to, and with a university?

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emergence as a phenomenon. The discussion of something as seemingly ordinary and nonscientific as physical space allocation in the North Annex was part of the ongoing process of how, locally, bioscience could or should be done. It also raises the question of for whom science should be done. And as we saw, it is done, in part, as part of UPEI and the AVC. This chapter concerns itself with the further scaling up or magnification of our analysis. I hinted earlier that the university can also be considered a current and/as eddy that shapes the emergence of other phenomena even as it is shaped by them in its own becoming. These larger currents and/as phenomena will be the focus of this and the next two chapters. This chapter concerns itself with two related issues. One issue is the changing currents of the university in general, and the University of Prince Edward Island in particular, over the last three decades or so. Universities are no more immune to change than any other institution, all rhetoric surrounding the Ivory Tower frozen in time notwithstanding. In short, change the way one does a university and you change the way the biosciences within it are done. We have some sense of this already from the previous chapter. But it also changes the way anthropology is done, and that brings us to the second current I will consider in this chapter. I am part of the very institution that I study, which brings to the fore the complementarity principle outlined by Barad. Consequently I will spend some time discussing anthropological studies of the changing (Euro-American) university system and also some of what it means to do ethnographic fieldwork in the university at which one works. To do this requires working with a kind of objectivity suited to the task, what Haraway called “situated knowledge” (1991), and not, as some might contend, an absence of objectivity or an unattainable ideal of objectivity (Barad 2007, 346–48). Addressing these matters, which are also ethical matters, in this way compels us to pull out Wittgenstein’s ladder once again. Ethics cannot be determined in advance, nor ever completed.

Mike Fortun (2008) on Ethics and/as Expediency Mike Fortun, in a chapter of his book Promising Genomics, ponders the issue of ethics in a double sense. In one sense there is deCode Genetics’ relationships to the Icelandic population as circulated by the company in a 1999 pamphlet. This was their promise of how their research would be conducted. In the other sense, Fortun thinks retrospectively about the ethics of being asked to do a short-notice presentation on ethics during the course of his fieldwork on deCode Genetics, Inc. In both cases the discourse on ethics were partially facilitated by the University of Iceland’s Ethics Institute.

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He writes that “articulations of ‘ethics’ will always begin inappropriately and somewhat violently, and are never satisfactory, because the word ‘ethics’ is catachrestic—an inappropriate name for an unnameable that demands naming” (2008, 267). In other words, ethics is impossible because the “ethical moment,” if you can call it that, occurs before or after reflecting upon it. If you reflect upon it during the “moment,” then Barad’s complementarity principle tells us that you are thinking about the doing of ethics, and not the doing of ethics. In these terms ethics is indeed impossible because “it’” is always already elsewhere. And yet. . . . And yet it is necessary the way the absent doughnut hole is needed for the doughnut; the ethical moment’s absence is not an excuse to avoid responsibility because the relationship to this absence entails, even demands, responsibility. For Fortun, rushing too quickly to be ethical under Newtonian assumptions waters down responsibility to the point of expediency.

anthropology and the call to “study up” If we recall the brief mention of studying up from the Theoretical and Methodological Intralude that Nader (1972) suggested (see box, p. xxxviii), we know that the relatively powerful cannot be researched in the same way as the relatively powerless, largely because they can resist more and better if they choose. In Barad’s terms we can say that changing the tools of measurement (and privileged relations of power are such a tool) changes the phenomenon measured (privileged groups). This insight is important to understanding why I think this is the central chapter of this work. I don’t mean central as a core or essence, but as a fulcrum or balancing point in motion. When the concepts of complementarity and superposition were introduced in the Intralude, I quoted Barad (2007, 21): “either you think about something, in which case that something is the object of your thoughts, or you examine your process of thinking about something, in which case your thoughts about what you are thinking (about something), and not the something itself, are the object of your thoughts” (see also Guyer 2009, 358–59). Whereas chapters 1 and 2 were concerned with thinking about scientific practice at the ACCBR, this one includes thinking about the way I was thinking about scientific practice at the ACCBR. But, as if that wasn’t already confusing enough, I can only do this thinking about thinking after the fact. In other words, as I think back to what happened via my memory, notes, recorded interviews, and so on, I am already changed by my experiences and relationships over the four years there (and obviously not just the ACCBR). (And if you think about this carefully you will notice that the past, present, and future are not a simple linear progression.) The what can you do in, to, and with a university?

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issue of studying up is entangled with what is called reflexivity, a kind of methodological self-awareness, and Barad’s diffractive methodology. For the moment, though, I will focus on studying up. There has been some discussion in the literature regarding the similarities and differences between anthropological and science studies ethnographies of scientific practice (Biagioli 1999b; Gusterson 1997; Lynch 1993; Traweek 1988; Reid 2000). Despite the differences that are important but not my immediate concern, both fields of study recognize that ethnographies of the biosciences are not like the classic anthropological fieldwork monographs produced from 1920 to 1970, largely because the differences in power are considerably minimized, neutralized, or even reversed. As Hugh Gusterson put it, “participant observation is a research technique that does not travel well up the social structure” (1997, 115). Classic anthropology, as many have noted, had the support of powerful institutions like colonial governments, and classic anthropology displayed little interest in responses by the people studied to what was said about them and how. The same cannot be said of Euro-American middle classes and elites, nor of the institutions in which they predominate. These institutions, of course, are the phenomena of interest to the ethnographer. In her study of high energy physics researchers in Japan and the United States, Sharon Traweek plainly states, “[t]he anthropologist no longer has the last word in the dialogue of fieldwork” (1988, 6; see also Gusterson 1997). Some, like Reid (2000), also make a distinction between studying up and studying across, by using as a point of reference the ethnographer rather than marginalized groups (see also Helmreich 2007a). For academically trained anthropology or science studies middle-class professionals, it is certainly easier to study others who are more or less middle class than to study elites. But this raises the thorny issue of “what happens to conventional ethnographic assumptions and certainties when the other isn’t ‘other’ enough?” (Reid 2000, 121). As Reid recounts the challenges faced in doing an ethnographic study of tobacco control, it quickly becomes evident that minimizing power imbalances between researchers and those researched transforms not just research (such as participant observation) and not just capacities for intervention, but the entire epistemological and ontological currents within which research intra-acts. In other words, if I may oversimplify Barad’s thinking a little, studying up doesn’t just contribute to the emergence of different phenomena, relative to classic ethnographies of marginalized groups, it also contributes to the emergence of a different class or category of phenomena. Altered power relations are diffractive—they are a difference that makes a difference. Historically, ethnographers of the natural sciences have not engaged in as much participant observation as classic ethnographers (Barad 2007; Lynch 1993), whether it is due to reluctance or obstacles or some combination of both. There is no doubt that competence is part of this entangled state of affairs as well. Quite simply, there 54

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are few people with the interest, ability, time, and resources to pursue advanced study in both the physical and the human sciences. Despite my efforts, I have at best only a basic conversational ability in the neuroscientific dialects of biologese, and this in turn limits my capacity to do neuroscience (as my dismal efforts at patch-clamping demonstrated). Nonetheless, those who do either side of the Two Culture divide well, such as Karen Barad, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Debolena Roy, or Isabelle Stengers, are important not only because they are comfortable on either “side” of the human/natural science divide, but also because one doesn’t have to choose between being the classic native/other/researched or foreign/self/ethnographer. They are also important because they remind us the divide is not absolute (as in the Newtonian approximation), but intra-actively relative. As Barad put it, “I do not merely reflect on science, I engage in the practice of science while addressing entangled questions about the nature of scientific practice” (2007, 248). It is a matter of science and/as science studies, so that it is a question of emphasis as to what is measured and how. “Science” and “Science Studies” can be thought of as convenient shorthands in an agential realist account, but they should not be approached as entirely separate entities and/as practices. This distinction between science studies and science also offers a convenient place to think about reflexivity, or methodological self-awareness. It is related to both the condition where “you examine your process of thinking about something,” as Barad (2007, 21) puts it, and also the condition where “you think about something.” More precisely, it is that form of measuring that precipitates one of the complementary possibilities in a superpositioned state to be actualized. Several thinkers regard reflexivity as a specifically methodological series of currents and/as eddies (or phenomena and/ as apparatuses), such as Traweek (1988), Mol (2002), Franklin and Roberts (2006), Kalir (2006), and Lynch (2000). Despite the differences between them, they tend to imply or outright state that “[m]ethods are not a way of opening a window on the world, but a way of interfering with it” (Mol 2002, 155; see also Adams et al. 2009; Law and Urry 2004). Through intra-action the reflexive elements of research, whether bioscientific, ethnographic, or otherwise, are part of the phenomenon observed in its becoming. As Lynch points out (2000, 26–27), awareness of what you are doing and awareness of that awareness are unavoidable. Our thought processes and patterns could not change without it. However, Lynch also emphasizes that while reflexivity may be necessary to the practice of research, it is not sufficient by itself (see also Barad 2011a; Fabian 1991). Just as important, he emphasizes that reflexivity does not guarantee any particular theoretical, political, or ontological result. It is an ensemble that is part of a larger ensemble, a current within currents. Nonetheless, we should keep in mind that reflexivity is an action always already dependent on previous action. what can you do in, to, and with a university?

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In an agential realist reworking of the concept of reflexivity we also need to consider that reflexive practices are not confined to the agency of humans. How could we not if we assume agency is about relationships and/as phenomena in the doing (Barad 2003, 2007)? Agential realism also considers the agency of nonhuman elements in the emergence phenomena and/as apparatuses (though we should be careful not to confuse agency with human intention). In other words, as Lynch reminds us, there are many different kinds of reflexivity. One kind of nonhuman reflexivity already hinted at is the field site itself (Kalir 2006), approached as a set of intra-active, material-discursive relationships. It is an example of what Stone (1996) meant by those systems or structures that use people to bring themselves into being. I say more about my own experiences in Appendix 2, but for the moment the phenomenon ethnographers call the field generates a kind of reflexivity that helps shape the ethnographer’s self-reflexivity. We are always already more entangled than we think. But what an ethnographer terms “the field” is also for non-ethnographers an environment composed of multiple overlapping materialdiscursive relationships and/as institutions. We should not be surprised, then, that institutions as well as individuals practice reflexivities (Beck 1992; Fischer 2007, 2009). Institutional reflexivities can promote self-reflexivity among humans in their midst, such as among physical scientists in universities needing to be increasingly aware of the effects of their work beyond narrowly scientific definitions (Croissant and SmithDoerr 2008). These reflexivities, however, are also directed toward the institutions of which they are a part. And at this point much of what Lynch has to say about selfreflexivity can also be extended to institutional reflexivity. In particular, it is important to consider “what reflexivity does, what it threatens to expose, what it reveals and who it empowers depends upon who does it and how they go about it” (Lynch 2000, 36). Universities, of course, are institutions that are not exempt from reflexive practices, and without doubt there have been differences in time and place as well as the objectives of their institutional reflexivities over the decades and centuries of their existence. Nonetheless, since the early 1980s one of the most predominant currents and/ as eddies of Western universities as phenomena has been some manner of auditing and the spread of what Strathern (2000b) labels “audit culture.” Some of the reasons for the predominance of this current will be examined more below and in the next two chapters (and is implied in previous chapters), but for the moment suffice it to say it is related to the larger neoliberal currents flowing globally in recent years.

Marilyn Strathern (2000a, 2000b) on Audit Culture As Strathern (2000b) and Shore and Wright (2000) inform us, universities in the United Kingdom were among the first Western universities to have the

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auditing principles of financial accounting used in private, for-profit companies applied to public, not-for-profit universities in the early 1980s. In the process, the audit technology and/as apparatus became redefined, as well as the institutions and/as phenomena to which it was intra-actively applied. The phrase “value for money,” often associated with audit, along with others like “transparency” or “accountability” (conveniently pointing to a history in accounting) or “excellence,” were shifted from an environment in which economic rationalities were applied to the generation of profit in capitalist economy to one in which the generation of profit was not the primary aim. In short, procedures used in entities that existed for the bottom-line were applied to entities constrained by the bottom line. This kind of shift made sense to some people in governments, industry, and the academy, though by no means all. This is not to say that the academy is beyond scrutiny and assessment, nor that financial restraint wasn’t exercised before this period. What I am drawing attention to, though, is the principle of complementarity outlined by Barad. And as we already know, measuring and/ as intra-acting is a form of intravention that can’t pay attention to its own effects within the phenomenon of which it is a part.

As a kind of institutional reflexivity, audit culture is intended to provide a means for universities to assess particular kinds of performance among researchers and projects, and obviously not other kinds. In recent decades the preferred means for this kind of assessment has been primarily quantitative in nature (Mirowski 2005; Nader 1997; Nowotny 2007). There are numerous naturalcultural historical processes that have contributed to the preference for these kinds of assessments, but what I want to emphasize at this point is that their intention is to measure efficiency and productivity as economic indicators. What has been considered problematic is not the use of economic indicators in and of themselves in a university setting, but that they tend to be the most heavily relied upon of only very few kinds of measures used, and that they are too rigid and inflexible (Nowotny 2007; Shore and Wright 2000). This has resulted in many faculty, as well as universities as institutions, feeling somewhat unsure about the kinds of goals they set for themselves (Kleinman and Vallas 2001; Reid and Traweek 2000b; Shore 2008, 2010). To be clear, “audit culture” is a particular eddy of institutional reflexivity in rivers of universities that has received some formal attention from science studies and anthropologies of science, but is mostly discussed informally at universities through what is often called “corridor talk” (Downey et al. 1997).

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So what are the diffractive effects of eddies of audit cultures? I’ll just briefly mention three, some of which I expand on below and in the following two chapters, First, there is a shift from measuring a result, profit, through cost-saving initiatives, to measuring processes not initially intended to generate profit if sales drop through user rejection. In the former, a product consistently manufactured from inferior materials or too hastily constructed by a capitalist company will lower quality and, in the long run, profit. There has to be a balance between profit maximization and product quality (however that might be defined). In the latter, where profit is not the aim, the pressure becomes one of doing more with the same level of resources or doing the same with fewer resources. This is not a balancing act so much as a one-sided pressure. A second consequence in the case of postsecondary education is an increased pressure to shift toward revenue generation, if not outright profit. It is an example of how measuring is a form of intravening. The technology and/as apparatus—audit in this case—brings its history and diffractive effects with it. A thermometer at room temperature will slightly raise the temperature of a cold glass of water while measuring it. The effect of the measurement and/as intravention is built into the result. Why does this matter? The more often you measure, the more often you affect what is measured. That same glass of cold water, if measured by 500 room-temperature thermometers in 10 minutes, will quickly start to move nearer to room temperature, perhaps leading to questions of whether the thermometers work or if the water is actually cold. The third effect is that quality becomes registered as quantity. “Coldness” becomes °F or °C; “efficiency” or “value for money” is measured in monetary units ($), and so on. This is not to say quantification has no place, for clearly it does, and there are many instances when it is the most appropriate choice. There is a logical flaw, however, if you assume—because it is an assumption—that quantitative methods or analyses are inherently superior to qualitative ones. What quantification in university audit culture does is “allow the creation of a metric—a systematically constructed set of relationships between inputs and outputs, incomes and outcomes that purportedly measure efficiency and productivity” (Nowotny 2007, 481–82). In short, we are talking about a numerical representation of a kind consistent with our Newtonian assumptions. In such situations, where the process of measuring is assumed to have no effect, it becomes very easy to encourage or demand that practice coincides with the representation rather than letting the representation stand as an intra-actively generated, and inherently incomplete, snapshot of a moment in time. As Strathern (2000b) points out, this allows for a certain degree of control, if the assumptions are accepted, without having to coerce or compel the groups affected (see also Foucault 1979). Ok, I’ve been rather abstract again. Let’s see if I can be a little more concrete and bring some examples from elsewhere before saying more about UPEI and the ACCBR. In her study of atherosclerosis in a Dutch hospital, Mol (2002) concludes 58

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there are many ways to “do” atherosclerosis, and that each way of doing comes with standards for “doing well.” Rather than taking a position on which is ultimately better, a standard of standards if you like, she considers the consequences of efforts to develop a standard of standards through increasing rationalization (and/as audit). In particular she observed efforts to make the standards of laboratory practices “overrule the clinical tradition with ever more statistics, accounting systems, figures, and other carriers of scientificity” (Mol 2002, 184). Why not, she proposes, let clinical practitioners intra-actively sort out how and what doing well clinically might be? Doing so “is not a solution to a problem, but a way of changing a host of intellectual reflexes” (Mol 2002, 184). In short, she prefers that change is assumed and relative stability is what is investigated, rather than the other way around. A rather different example is Biagioli’s (1999a) examination of the changing practices of authorship in the natural sciences in recent years. Although the structures of scientific recognition and capitalist development have been intra-acting for several centuries, the eddies produced by the confluence of these two currents have gone through several changes. He discusses the most recent shift coinciding with the rise of neoliberal economic policies and/as practices, the tendency to ever larger research projects in more disciplines, and the increasing traffic between industries and academy, especially in regard to intellectual property and patents. One of the diffractive effects or patterns of these changes are the different norms emerging for scientific authorship. Publication, as you know, is one of the oldest forms of accounting in the academy, and historically is fairly independent of direct or immediate commercial concerns. For academic researchers the number of publications and the status of the publisher has always been an issue, and it continues today. What is changing, Biagioli suggests, is that the quantity of publications is coming to matter more than the quality. In other words, the metric is changing, and changing the practices of what it measures. He also notes that there is a trend in which the number of authors for a publication is steadily expanding. This is partly due to the increasing complexity and expense of conducting research (i.e., many kinds of people with particular talents are needed), but also due to “a growing entrepreneurial ethos” (Biagioli 1999a, 18). As we already have seen in the case of the ACCBR, these collectivizing forces “clash . . . with the requirement of individual responsibility” (Biagioli 1999a, 17). Put another way, the metric is not only changing, it is intravening as it changes, altering the very process it intended to measure. Since I began my research in late 2007 I have had several informal conversations with Andy Tasker on the changing nature of the academy and what this means for faculty and graduate students. Most graduate programs in the physical sciences encourage graduate students to publish their findings as part of their training, and this what can you do in, to, and with a university?

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is broadly the case in North America and Europe. Variations, of course, can be found by nation, by institution, and even by department or discipline, but the overall current over the last 30 or 40 years is clear: graduate students in the physical sciences are expected to publish more, and more often, than was the case in the past. In the human sciences the expectation for graduate students to publish is considerably less, though noticeably increasing in recent years. Andy ventured that Master’s students under his supervision averaged one or two publications before obtaining their degree, and PhD students an additional three or four. Furthermore, he insisted these publications be in “decent” journals, that is, those that have a moderate to high “impact factor” (a rating of a journal based on a mathematical formula considering circulation and the number of subscribers, frequency of citations in other journals, “big names” associated with the journal, etc.). Several journals in the human sciences are also shifting to the impact factor system, though not without debate and resistance (Andersen 2009). Andy also felt rather ambivalent about this trend, where on the one side he appreciated the benefits to students of journal peer review, and on the other side worried about how this pressure might cause specialization too early, leading to the development of “depth” at the expense of “breadth.” On more than one occasion he, and also his doctoral student Patty, mentioned the challenges of promoting depth and breadth within the time frames allowed for the degree. This trend also has its extension for those graduates who come to be hired in the academy. Increasingly, Andy told me, tenure applications in the physical sciences are accompanied by individualized impact factors for their research by statistical and graphic means, though he was also quick to point out that this is not the current practice at UPEI. In the terms we have been using, Andy is wary of replacing qualitative assessments for students or faculty (how does one quantify “depth” in a field of study?) with quantitative ones (conference presentations, number of publications and their respective impact factors, etc.). A third example, Lindsay McGoey’s (2010) consideration of Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) with antidepressant drugs in the pharmaceutical industry takes us outside postsecondary education again, simply to reinforce the message that audit culture is not confined to postsecondary settings. RCTs are demanded of drug companies by governments before granting permission to sell new drugs. They are intended to be a check on safety and effectiveness. Although McGoey outlines several concerns with RCTs as a method of testing drug effectiveness, I’ll confine myself to a couple. One difficulty is that mood-altering drugs are experienced “subjectively.” This concern tends to be addressed through various rating scales, which don’t neutralize the “subjective” elements so much as cover them. “[T]he ability to appear objective . . . compounds social and political belief in objectivity, regardless of how unattainable personal detachment is in practice” (McGoey 2010, 73). 60

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Another difficulty flows from the demand to make the size of the trials large enough to use statistical techniques with a certain range of error. The trial becomes a test of statistical significance rather than degree or extent of effectiveness. We can note again the devaluation of qualitative measures because of an assumed objectivity associated with quantitative ones, and that the kind of objectivity assumed is consistent with our Newtonian assumptions. For those and other reasons McGoey argues that drug companies are coaxed into dealing with the limitations of RCTs by—you guessed it— even more RCTs. Manufacturers find themselves trying to meet statistically defined standards. She explicitly compares this to “how failed audits tend to produce calls for more audits, rather than for reconsiderations of auditing systems in general” (2010, 72). With this, we are well on our way to inserting those 500 thermometers into the glass of cold water. With these examples in mind, let’s go back to considering the spread of audit culture in postsecondary settings. One of the reasons Barad, Fabian, and Lynch suggest doing reflexive work is not, by itself, enough to guarantee a useful result, is that what counts as useful and for whom is not at all self-evident. In fact, those kinds of elements are often the ones not given much consideration at all. The seeming “naturalness” of the present moment, with its many conflicting currents and/as eddies, is part of the intravention of measuring that is not noticed, that the auditing practices have a particular market-oriented bias which gets spread in the act of assessing (Strathern 2000a). Britain, as one of the earliest adopters of audit culture in postsecondary institutions, is in the process of mainstreaming this current, but other Western countries are not far behind. Here, government cutbacks to postsecondary funding combined with the pressure for more applied forms of research, under the banner of “value for money,” have led to a shift of emphasizing research over teaching (Mirowski and Sent 2008). The ranking of your university matters in research because government funding is based on your placement in the Research Excellence Framework (formerly the Research Assessment Exercise). As Mol’s example indicates, whether the research is “good” research ignores whose standard is used. The standard of standards is imposed. The pressure of currents for more applied forms of research at the same time also de-emphasizes basic forms of research. This in turn leads basic researchers in the natural and/as human sciences to become more defensive of the value, in economic and moral terms, of what they do (Amit 2000). Whether the rise of an audit culture was intentionally implemented, was an unconscious side effect of the confluence of several material-discursive currents, or, as I suspect, was some combination of the two, the important issue is that audit culture has become pervasive and widely adopted, even among those most resistant to it. In this sense it offers a parallel to the influence of industry in academic bioscience outlined by Kleinman (2003). The influence is pervasive what can you do in, to, and with a university?

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but indirect; any control that is exercised through audit tends to be in the form of ethico-onto-epistemological limits beyond which you should not go.

the university in transformation Very few people working in Euro-American academies deny that postsecondary institutions have changed substantially over the last four decades or so. Some even go so far as to suggest we don’t have a language adequate to talk about these changes (Reid and Traweek 2000b, 5). People may argue over whether the changes are superficial or thorough, or good or bad in political, moral, and ethical senses, but most agree these institutions no longer operate the way they did in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Change is, of course, in the natureculture of things—as everything I’ve talked about so far assumes—but the kinds and paces of change are where we must pay attention and, as best we can, be accountable and responsible. Although I don’t intend to present a detailed discussion of the changing university, some broad but careful discussion as it relates to the biosciences in general, and the ACCBR within UPEI in particular, is in order. Several thinkers agree something substantially shifted in the late 1970s in the way universities operate (Cooke 2007; Croissant and Smith-Doerr 2008; Kleinman 2003; Reid and Traweek 2000a, 2000b; Strathern 2000a, 2000b; Mirowski and Sent 2008). The confluence of educational, governmental, and industrial currents changed, as did their resulting diffraction patterns. It is not that one current changed, forcing the other two to follow along in a cause/effect kind of fashion, but that intra-actions among them altered phenomena among them at a variety of scales. In the United States, and to some extent other advanced capitalist countries, “Big Business” was restructuring itself as postsecondary student enrollments leveled off, the Department of Defense cut back on basic research funding, and governments from federal to municipal levels were feeling the pinch as inflation cut into tax revenues. In addition to those changes, Traweek (2000) also draws attention to the changing composition and attitudes of faculty in the late 1970s as “baby boomers” began to replace their teachers in postsecondary institutions (now we are beginning to see another shift as boomers retire). Each academic generation (pre-baby boom, baby boom, and post-baby boom) has or had its own ideas of how to do a university, and was/is a source of concern, negotiation, and friction. Les, a member of UPEI’s Senior Management Group (see below), mentioned that most of the post-baby boom faculty cohort on campus arrived in the late 1990s. This cohort is composed “of faculty that came out of different institutional cultures than the faculty whom they were replacing . . . faculty who are younger, who have been in research cultures . . . everything I understand about the institution [UPEI] from the times before I got here was that 62

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it always valued scholarship. It was less well equipped to do ‘techie’ kinds of research.” Other Western nations experienced similar pressures. An eddy, still swirling 30 years later, emerged at the confluence of these shifting currents and received a name in 1980: the Patents and Trademark Law Amendments Act, popularly referred to as the BayhDole Act. It is one piece of the broader phenomenon we have called neoliberalism. At a time when university revenues were dropping in the US due to falling enrollments, reductions in government grants, and a drop in research funding, the BayhDole Act offered a means to potentially make up at least some of the short fall through University-Industry Research Relationships (UIRRs) (Croissant and Smith-Doerr 2008; Kleinman 2003; Kleinman and Vallas 2001). Without going into great detail, the Act allowed for changes in who was allowed to file patents and under what circumstances. It became possible for businesses to partner with not-for-profit organizations in a way that allowed the latter to retain a degree of control over patentable discoveries in an effort to promote the speedier conversion of discoveries and inventions into marketable commodities. Though more will be said in the next chapters, the upshot is that the US government had cleared a legal space for UIRRs in a way that encouraged a greater emphasis on applied research, encouraged industries to fund university-based research, and encouraged universities and/or faculty members to establish start-up companies. Although the Bayh-Dole Act is still, after many years, much debated and contentious, we can detect here the currents of what has been broadly referred to as the “knowledge economy” and the “corporatization of the university.” Universities are restructuring, a business ethos is becoming more pervasive (Kleinman 2003), a variety of industries are cutting back their research and development programs if publicly funded universities can shoulder a portion of the expense, and of course universities are looking for a portion of the revenues in the case of a commercial success story. Universities themselves have shown growth in non-academic units and organizationally have become more Chandlerian (characterized by relatively distinct and unconnected units managed from a center) even as corporate restructuring was abandoning that model (Mirowski and Sent 2008, 656; see also Kleinman and Vallas 2001). Since the passage of this act, most Western governments have sought to establish a similar kind of intellectual property environment for universities through a variety of legal and policy actions (Amit 2000; Cooke 2007; Kleinman 2003). Here too we can note the influence of promoting “value for money” audits on this changing phenomenon of the university (Shore and Wright 2000). But we must be careful not to treat all universities as internally the same (Krautwurst 2013). The physical sciences have been dealing with issues of commercialization and research capacity building much longer than the human sciences, so what appears as an intensification to the former appears as something quite new to the latter what can you do in, to, and with a university?

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( Traweek 2000). Human science and physical science faculty have different interests at times (Balsamo 2000; Mirowski and Sent 2008). Students’ attitudes and expectations of universities have changed over the years as well. Increased scientific literacy has been demanded by students, parents, businesses, and legislators for many years now, but what it means, what it is expected to accomplish, and for whom is not at all obvious or agreed upon (Barad 2000). One gets the sense that most people are asking for students to have even more exposure to a singular, monolithic Scientific Method (Roy 2004) as it fits our Newtonian assumptions. As a consequence the Two Culture problem also gets reproduced, and over time has contributed to (but has not caused by itself ) an instrumentalist attitude to postsecondary education among students that Balsamo (2000, 270) describes as an “ontological and technological conservatism.” This broad summary should not be too easily accepted, though, because it can too easily be considered in Newtonian terms. As Mirowski and Sent point out, “monolithic abstractions of Science and Market” (2008, 636) miss too much: different currents of sciences and markets intra-act in ways that produce a variety of eddies, each of which has its own influences and effects. In other words, the broadly changing economic, political, cultural, and intellectual currents of recent years become realized differently depending on whether we are talking about developing economies, relatively underdeveloped parts of advanced economies, or the most advanced regions of developed economies. These flows in turn change the ways universities change (as well as governments and industry). Wellsprings of naturalcultural histories about place need consideration, too. Universities are increasingly thought of as engines of economic growth, and students increasingly think of universities as a means to an end (skilled employment) rather than an end in itself (well-rounded citizenship). Indeed, one of the architects of neoliberal economic thinking, Milton Friedman, advocated education as a commodity, and universities as sites of commodity production, half a century ago (Mirowski and Sent 2008, 670–71; see also Traweek 2000). The effect, however, seems to be that economic inequalities have increased within and between economies (Croissant and Smith-Doerr 2008). At the same time, it is this ongoing shift in thinking that both propels and justifies the use of audit procedures throughout the university (Amit 2000; Fischer 2007; Shore and Wright 2000). With the above cautions in mind, let’s turn to how the University of Prince Edward Island, and the ACCBR within it, fits the broad flows just mentioned. UPEI was formed in 1969 from the amalgamation of the Prince of Wales College and St. Dunstan’s University, two institutions operating on the Island from the latter half of the nineteenth century. St. Dunstan’s was founded by the Roman Catholic community, and largely funded by it, too. Prince of Wales College was a public institution open to all, but in a practical sense served the Protestant community and was perceived as 64

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such (Campbell 1994). “In an Island society where Protestants and Catholics had their own dentists, hospitals, and MLAs [Ministers of the Legislative Assembly], higher education was also defined by the two solitudes” (MacEachern 2005, 12). The merger of these two postsecondary schools was indicative of a growing secularization of life on the Island. Currents and/as eddies of religious difference, I am suggesting, were always already entangled with other naturalcultural currents and/as eddies at UPEI’s establishment. Another difference that made a difference was a change in funding policy for postsecondary education in 1967 by the Canadian government. From then on, the federal government no longer directly funded postsecondary institutions, but transferred lump sums to provincial governments that then redistributed funds (Campbell 1994; MacEachern 2005). A further difference that made a difference was changing flows of economic fortune among advanced capitalist nations. The post-World War II economic boom financed the expansion of universities and colleges to accommodate the baby boom generation and the unprecedented enrollment of women in university programs. In the words of Island historian Ed MacDonald (1994, 5), “by the 1960s postsecondary education had become big business—government business,” which is a very different movement from the privatization of the neoliberal era. Under those circumstances, and despite considerable resistance from several groups, the provincial government of the day felt one unified liberal arts institution and a technical college were more appropriate for a province of 110,000 people than two liberal arts schools. UPEI is now the only university in the province, and consequently is a focus of cultural, economic, and social interest among most of the province’s communities. It is an institution that elicits both pride and concern among Islanders, which is to say that what UPEI is and does is still contested. The Atlantic Veterinary College opened in 1986, serving not only the province of PEI, but also New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador through a cost-sharing and student placement agreement. Its establishment was no less contentious than the vortex of UPEI formed at the confluence of its two predecessor institutions. Calls for the establishment of the AVC went back to the early 1970s, with considerable conflict emerging within and across the four Atlantic provinces over which could or should claim the prestige and economic benefits, or not, of attaching this institution to an already existing campus. Debate within UPEI was equally intense (Bruce 2004). The timing of the AVC is not entirely accidental, as the mid-1980s is the period in which the Canadian federal and provincial governments began to change their expectations of what universities could and should be doing (Atkinson-Grosjean 2006; Salonius 2005). I should add that the four Atlantic provinces, in the period following World War II, had become among the most economically depressed provinces of the country, a point that is not insignificant. what can you do in, to, and with a university?

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When UPEI was founded in 1969, it was a classic small liberal arts institution designed to serve local needs for the most part. Bioscientific research capacity took a substantial leap with the addition of the AVC, which not only grants graduate degrees for practicing veterinarians, but also degrees in basic and applied bioscientific research. Since the late 1990s clinical, applied, and basic research have grown on campus with the addition of a School of Nursing, the granting of Master’s and later doctoral degrees in the Faculty of Science, the locating of the National Research Council’s Institute of Nutriscience and Health on campus, the development of a graduate-level biotech management program in the School of Business on campus, and more. Although UPEI remains a largely undergraduate institution, there has been significant growth in graduate programming and research capacity, and this growth has been primarily, but not exclusively, circulating around an eddy of the biosciences. As you might imagine, this growth has not been entirely random for UPEI or the provincial government. At the same time, it has not been part of a smoothly regulated and controlled transition either. It is part of a strategy of economic development that comes up against other currents of thought and practice regarding what the purpose of a university is or could be. To that end, as part of my research I conducted interviews and held informal conversations between 2008 and 2010 among several of UPEI’s Senior Management Group (SMG). The focus was always on what they thought of the changing role of universities over the last few decades, and how UPEI was meeting or resisting those changes. As the name implies, the SMG is made up of the university’s top administrators, including the President, Vice-Presidents, Deans, the University Librarian, and the Registrar, among others. Their remarks and responses, as well as a couple of recent policy documents, should help us understand UPEI’s specific changes within the broad changes outlined earlier. Members of the SMG were all quite clear that recent changes on campus over the last couple of decades were neither fully planned in advance nor haphazard but emerged in fluid and shifting circumstances. It was not purely a matter of bioscience and biotechnology emerging on the Island according to some master plan where everything fits together neatly, nor is it simply a random circumstance. It is, rather, somewhere within those extremes that material-discursive practices intra-act to produce a variety of phenomena I have been discussing in terms of currents and eddies (see also Lynch 1993, 131). Like other Canadian universities, and in keeping with similar processes in other Western universities, UPEI has tended to see its share of direct “no-questions-asked” government funding decrease, in relative terms, when compared to the 1970s. Since the late 1990s, indirect funding has been made available through a variety of UIRRs, some of which are national, such as the now defunct Networks of Centres of Excellence (Amit 2000; Atkinson-Grosjean 2006), or provincial, such as certain Innovation PEI programs. 66

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UPEI Strategic Research Plan (SRP) 2008–2018 In its functions as a policy drafting body of the UPEI Senate, the Research Advisory Committee, after investigation and consultation, produced a Strategic Research Plan (SRP) in 2008, still current at the time of writing. It is interesting to consider the SRP in terms of the previous discussion of the changing phenomenon of the university. The Plan’s opening statement recognizes UPEI “is an evolving research institution” (UPEI 2008, 2) that requires periodic reassessment because “the university’s role in society changes with society itself ” (2008, 2). The document adds that historically university research is in an intra-active tension between a Humboltian ideal of knowledge produced with ultimately pragmatic ends in mind, and Newman’s ideal of research done for its own sake. The latter ideal is sometimes referred to as Mode 1 knowledge (Gibbons et al. 1994) and dominated university research agendas from World War II until about 1980. The rise of Mode 2 knowledge coincided with the rise of neoconservative political thought, the implementation of neoliberal economic thinking, the molecular revolution in biology, and the rapid expansion of new information technologies. It was and is both cause and product of these currents intra-acting, creating eddies within eddies, complex diffraction patterns, emergent phenomena in motion. At UPEI the SRP aims to foster research “in a way that recognizes the importance of both university models” (2008, 3). The recent greater emphasis on Mode 2 is indicated, for example, by the goal of substantially increasing the presence of undergraduates in faculty research programs. We can note here a shift from the well-rounded individual proposed for citizenship in Mode 1 toward the well-skilled individual of Mode 2. UPEI Strategic Overview (Board of Governors 2009) As the highest body of oversight at the university, the Board of Governors, composed of a wide variety of people from campus and the wider community, provides direction for the university in its broadest and most general senses as defined by the provincial University Act. In 2009 it produced a document, the UPEI Strategic Overview, in which it assessed current challenges and what the aims for the near future would be to meet those challenges. It begins by noting, significantly, that UPEI has historically been closely integrated into “the social and economic development and capacity” (UPEI 2009, 1) of the Island, a factor no doubt related to PEI’s small demographic, geographic, and geopolitical size (Baldacchino 2006). Quite plainly, it states that “[a]s institutions, universities are more fragile in their fiscal make-up than is generally admitted” (2009, 1). The report even goes as far as to what can you do in, to, and with a university?

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suggest that postsecondary education in Canada is “chronically underfunded” (2009, 8). As a historically small institution it does not have large endowment funds or other assets from which to draw to supplement funding received from the public purse and student tuition. Because supplemental income is hard to come by in a “have-not” province, UPEI operates on yearly balanced budgets rather than borrowing money or running deficits. This helps to explain why the SRP called for an increase in research funding from nontraditional sources, such as corporations and private foundations, from 17.5 per cent of total research funding in 2008 to 35 per cent in 2018 (2009, 10). Put simply, desired equipment and facilities for growth must be at least partly funded from beyond historic sources, often referred to as “soft” funding because of its unpredictability. Nonetheless, because the share of federal government contributions has been falling, and the province is too poor to make up the shortfall, UPEI finds itself increasingly relying on, and planning for, sources of revenue that are unpredictable. Some of these sources are plainly market-driven in a direct sense, such as the expectations for the UPEI Bookstore or Residence and Conference Services to continue increasing their revenues, and in this sense we can speak of the corporatization of the university in a straightforward way. However, as Kleinman (2003) argued for the case of the University of Wisconsin, most of the time the current is indirect. Funding structures, with their recent emphasis on applied research, combined with a relative drop in government funding for universities do not demand outright that researchers enter into UIRRs, but since this is where most of the new or additional funds are, researchers are nudged in that direction of flow. This is not to say, though, that researchers must come up with research proposals that lead directly into business plans. They individually value and assert their autonomy and choices as much as possible. My point, as was Kleinman’s, is that this desired autonomy is within larger diffractive processes that researchers can only minimally influence as individuals. As long as the individuating forces model of science is prevalent and reinforced by industry and government, researchers can and will choose their own research programs to an extent, but only within the context of currents that tend to limit the realization of other superpositioned possibilities from the outset. And this is what I mean by the indirect influencing of research by neoliberal policies, a point that was difficult to convey to several people I talked to over the course of my research. This is where audit and value-for-money, as material-discursive practices, shape scientific practices, whether in terms of funding agencies, industry, government, university, or individual research grants. It is an ideology that permeates the context, shifting the flow away from emphasizing basic research and its serendipity (Mirowski 2005; Salonius 2005). The Strategic Overview notes that 16 per cent of UPEI revenue came from “soft” money in 2008–09, and that percentage is expected to grow significantly by 2018. Along 68

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with that is a corresponding pressure for faculty to apply for, and successfully obtain, grants. As the report put it, “it is critical that . . . work in this area be well managed to ensure that the external funding covers the actual costs . . . [which] includes an objective to secure adequate rates of overhead recovery and indirect costs, whether from public or private sources” (2009, 14). Members of the university SMG are quite aware of, and sometimes actively involved in, the changes in universities described above. Chris, for example, mentioned how universities in Canada began to change functions in the 1970s in response to the baby boomers’ graduating and leaving smaller cohorts of students in their wake. These demographic changes coincided with UPEI’s shift to “economic and community leadership in a more overt way,” or, in language we have used, from Mode 1 to Mode 2 models of university structure and function. The fear, provincially and nationally, was that Canada was going to lose out economically if universities were not more tightly integrated with governments and industry. Chris suggested the national effort to catch up to other countries began in earnest in the late 1990s, adding “one of the things that we see, rightly or wrongly, in the rhetoric around government support for research in universities is the desire—some would say disappointment—that there should be more results seen in terms of what people call commercialization. [Many countries now have] quite explicit programs of investing in universities as engines [of economic growth] for either a region or a nation. I don’t think Canada has really caught up to the leaders in that area.” Similarly, Les also spoke of the national and provincial shift in universities from the 1970s onward, where community connections shifted from public intellectual functions to more economical integration through research, especially beginning in the late 1990s. During that period “it really was the federal government becoming aware that there was a way that they could fund what was happening in universities, and in doing so achieve or work towards achieving certain goals that they had.” This shift in funding practice, according to Les, has had unintended consequences, notably “a downsizing in the research capacity in federal departments” combined with “industry . . . also offloading research . . . And so in some ways, in a societal sense, the universities remain essentially the sole place where research is being done.” Most basic research is now being done in universities, while the share of applied research has been increasing as well, leading to tensions at a variety of levels. This becomes especially evident when considered in terms of “value for money,” because everyone wants to represent themselves as accountable, responsible, and rational. As a result, Les suggests [T]here are a lot of lingering tensions because when the federal government began to invest in research they did so without consulting the provinces. And so CFI [the Canada Foundation for Innovation, a major funder of equipment in the what can you do in, to, and with a university?

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biosciences] was a classic example: they put the program in place, funded only 40 of each successful application and told the universities they had to find the other 60. They expected 20 to come from industry, and 40 to come from . . . [pause] it was never mentioned, so the universities clearly went to the provinces. On the issue of UPEI’s integration into larger communities, Les emphasizes that its embeddedness in this still primarily rural province is much stronger than is the case in larger urban centers, which in turn leads to a kind of ambivalence about its closer ties to industry. For many Islanders there is a disconnect between how people may talk about industry influencing the agenda of the universities and recognition that, with a couple of exceptions, we are not talking about large transnational corporations, but small local or regional enterprises, tiny streams flowing into larger channels. People tend to think about helping out a little company that just got started up. . . . This little company [is perceived as] “we know some people who work there, we know the people who founded it aren’t really from here but they are employing all these people we know, we want them to be a success”. . . . And in that way [Islanders] are willing to work with that industry in order to move the industry agenda forward. And so, if that means support and involvement with UPEI, Islanders tend to favor it. Much like Les and Chris, Nick also agreed that the mission and function of universities are going through a period of change, clearly stating, “one big change that we’ve seen in the last few years is that society, legislatures, politicians, etc. are asking more of universities and expecting more for their investment. I think they’re looking a lot at economic drivers for the economy, and . . . sometimes . . . there’s a potential to come into conflict with some traditional values.” These changes since the 1970s have affected how faculty do their university duties and also how they do their research. Junior faculty, according to Nick, are no longer as directed in what research they are to undertake as in the past. In exchange for greater flexibility in what and how to conduct research, there is in the United States, but also increasingly in Canada, an “expectation . . . to bring in [external] money, to bring programs, to bring people, graduate programs, postdocs, etc. So that has been a major change of which there are good things and there are bad things.” As universities are flowing to Mode 2 from Mode 1, taking on greater economic functions, “they [in turn] look at their faculty members as economic drivers.” And so the way one does research in a university is transforming from what faculty tended to do in the 1970s. Unlike the more directed and hands-on oversight of research in the past, the very expectation of, and upon, researchers has changed the 70

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notion of scholarship. To be sure, researchers all still spend time at the lab bench, but Nick cautions there are additional demands as well: [C]ertainly you do spend time doing things that you didn’t think you would be doing as a . . . beginning assistant professor, or postdoc, or whatever. . . . [P]eople don’t realize there is a promotional aspect to a good researcher. . . . And a good researcher feels that passion, and it goes beyond just writing a peer-review publication. You know, it’s out there and whether they do this on a grant application or whether they do this in a radio interview, or talking to some media, or whatever, they’re always there kind of plugging away because they’re passionate about what they do. I asked Nick what all these changes meant in the context of UPEI. The response was that even though UPEI’s bioscience research capacity has grown exponentially in recent years, UPEI is still a small institution compared to even medium-size research universities such as Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University or the Memorial University of Newfoundland. On the one hand, “it’s good being small because you’re much more mobile. You can respond to challenges, respond to issues, concerns, etc., whereas large institutions . . . take . . . a long time to get them steered in a different direction.” On the other hand, small scale promotes a focus only on certain niches, making connections among the whole less dense than is the case in larger research centers. Finally, we can ask how does the ACCBR flow into this larger current of the changing university? Although several directions could be taken, I’ll consider two for the moment: the place of audit culture and value for money as it relates to the ACCBR, and a continuation of the discussion of individuating and collectivizing forces in the actualization of the ACCBR as a phenomenon. Marilyn Strathern (2000a, 280) notes that “audit does not just impinge upon the academic’s conditions of work but also interpenetrates it.” In terms we’ve been using, the flow of neoliberal socio-economic forces associated with value for money is not an interaction with some preexisting outside phenomenon, but the ongoing intra-active actualization of superpositioned possibilities. The point is important because it helps us understand many ordinary everyday activities in the ACCBR. Just as Kleinman (2003, 6) suggested it would be easy to spend six months in the lab he studied and see no overt or blunt signs of the corporatization of the university—in fact the people in the lab were appalled by the very suggestion that their research activity was not largely under their direction—so also for Andy and the staff of the ACCBR. Kleinman’s point is that explicit and direct corporate control of an academic research program is going to be a rare exception. Most of the time material-discursive intra-actions, the diffraction effects of multiple currents and/as eddies, are present but diffuse. For what can you do in, to, and with a university?

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example, “relationships between university laboratories and research tools suppliers are often not thoroughly examined” (Kleinman 2003, 92). Though I am not going into detail here, it is one of those differences that make a difference that is almost too obvious to mention. Hannah, Shelly, and Lynne were always on the lookout for the best deal in terms of equipment, service, and suppliers. It was often presented in terms of a compromise between quantity and quality, given a limited amount of resources. When Andy was buying equipment for the ACCBR he took a lab technician with him to the Society for Neuroscience meetings. He would attend sessions while the tech would go to the trade show getting quotes, equipment specifications, and the background on service agreements. Andy argued that taking a technician to the meetings was cost effective because the grant money saved would more than cover the cost of travel and accommodation for the technician. Practices like this equipment purchase all seem imminently reasonable, rational, and full of common sense. It is value for money and audit in action. It’s what we do when we buy our groceries. And this is precisely the point. Because the logic is considered reasonable, rational, and commonsensical it seems additionally reasonable, rational, and commonsensical to spread that logic ever further. That the logic is derived from economic reason and rationality in business contexts is often lost in the course of its spreading. Put another way, a scientific instrument is also always a commodity enmeshed in commodity circuits. In its emergence as a phenomenon and/as apparatus, its relationships can’t be separated from its economic forms of measure. The peculiarities of brand/Model A vs. brand/Model B (say, of HPLC or electrophysiology equipment) exert themselves, as we saw in chapters 1 and 2, idiosyncratically, spatially, in terms of design, and so on. They also emerge as commodities in a predominantly capitalist economic context that supplies and/as demands certain forms of rationality often presented as a universal Rationality that has flowed from the logical positivism promoted by the human sciences, to the exclusion of others (Mirowski 2005). These various flows, currents and/as eddies, phenomena and/as apparatuses that are “at once a ‘context’ for the others and contains the others within” (Strathern 2000a, 280) are what I take Barad to mean by intra-action, but they are not applied only to “social” phenomena, but to material-discursive (or naturalcultural) phenomena in the fullest sense. The redefinition of the way university funding for research operates in Canada (Amit 2000; Salonius 2005) is both product and producer of the way the ACCBR operates, the way the bench work of an experimental system operates, all the way down to the very “objects” of research such as potassium ion channels in neurons or dopamine neurotransmitters. Nikolas Rose (2007b, 39) summarizes very well that the distinction between nonhuman and human, framed in Newtonian terms, no longer works. Rather, how to rethink that very distinction, how to actualize some of the many possibilities, is what the fuss is about. 72

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But there is the momentum of past and larger currents and/as eddies to consider as well, and this is where the local expressions of audit culture and value for money intrasect with the individuating and collectivizing forces of how to “do” biotech research, the ACCBR, UPEI, and twenty-first-century biocapitalism differently. There is an increasing consensus that scientific research no longer encourages disinterested curiosity because scientists have to increasingly rely on very interested funding agencies to conduct their research at all (Rose and Rose 2009, 8; see also Kleinman and Vallas 2001). Governments promote quickly commercializable research, as do corporate funders. The increasingly complex and expensive personnel and equipment are not simply a series of black boxes within black boxes (both historically and technically), but also commoditizations of commoditizations. “[O]nce the institutional structures of the globalized privatization regime have been put in place, the very character and nature of public science is irreversibly transformed” (Mirowski and Sent 2008, 661). In other words, the kinds of constraints within which universities operate in turn pass on constraints that encourage the individuating forces of which Knorr-Cetina spoke, and discourage collectivizing forces. Everything from tenure and promotion to funding (the language of “principal investigator,” for example, is telling) to patenting is slanted in favor of individuals. There is allowance for cooperation, in Shrum et al.’s terms, but not collaboration in the fullest sense. This has made the actualization of the ACCBR as a project, and not just the physical space, very difficult. The aim of collaboration, and the collectivizing necessary to achieve it, is drawn into individuating currents at a variety of scales. For Andy, the ACCBR is not and cannot be his primary academic focus. He made clear on numerous occasions that as an employee of UPEI he had to give precedence to “the Tasker lab” over the directorship of the ACCBR. From there it zooms out to focus on the university and its limited fiscal room for maneuver, to the small biotech start-ups seeking economic success (as individual companies), to federal and provincial governments seeking returns (in the form of taxes on commercial success) as soon as possible for the investment of taxpayers’ money. When I asked Les why the ACCBR was not operating as anticipated, I was told it was originally “conceptualized as a place to enable . . . call them disenfranchised groups, I’m not sure if that is exactly right . . . to be able to do research.” Indeed, the very assumptions Les made fit neatly into the individualist model: “It needs to be managed, it needs to be fostered, it needs people to identify with what it is that is going on.” When asked if the ACCBR could be considered successful, the response was “Not as successful as it was envisioned to be. And I don’t know why. I think retrospectively it would have something to do with not having someone who was the right enabler. It perhaps needed a more active enabler in order to have those groups who could most utilize it actually understand what it was and what it would be able to provide.” However, one what can you do in, to, and with a university?

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does have to wonder if the right enabler could ever be found under current conditions because the directorship is not a full-time position. Similarly, Nick noted the ACCBR is “conceptually kind of set up like [a] research park” where business and academia mix. For the scientists, whether in industry or academia, the research is the primary motivation. For an administrator, the primary concern is for the academic mission of the university. For Nick, business objectives and academic objectives are in competition: “We have to set up systems as administrators, set up systems that have complementary types of opportunities. . . . So I see in any entity, a research park, an ACCBR, etc., where the merit comes in providing opportunities for our faculty and staff to join in and further their academic mission. So when it comes into conflict with it, then we have problems.” The conflict Nick outlines is that “we only have so many resources and space, equipment, etc.” The individuating model of research that predominates in the biosciences, coupled with the recent emphasis on audit and value for money works against new ways of doing biosciences because no one feels they can wait long enough to see if a collectivist model will or will not take hold. “We can’t afford to hold space for future [occupants] that might want to rent it. Our academic mission comes first here. What’s hard for me to defend . . . [is that] we have equipment . . . that’s not being fully utilized,” Nick said. The admission that this is “instrumental in increasing good utilization of our resources, space, equipment, human resources, etc.” is certainly suggestive of how the predominant model of doing bioscience supports, and is supported by, the predominant economic thinking of the day. It is an excellent example of what Barad means by diffraction in that local bioscientific practices and local capitalist economic practices operate through one another. It is on this basis that the possibility was raised of dissolving the physical/spatial status of the ACCBR and turning it into a virtual facility with equipment and personnel distributed throughout already existing labs. But the ACCBR itself would never have come about, as Chris pointed out, if there had not been a concerted drive by various levels of government and industry to promote the bioscience sector as a means of economic development. And so the eddies swirl as these currents of government, industry, and academia come together, producing the ACCBR even as they undermine it. Considering the ACCBR within these larger currents is what takes us into the next chapter.

notes  Barad has consistently distanced herself from the concept of reflexivity because it tends to lead back to Newtonian assumptions. I rework the concept here in the sense that it should be used as a rung on Wittgenstein’s ladder to move toward quantum thinking and/as doing. 74

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 This has been termed “Campbell’s Law” by Waters () and was precisely the kind of thing quantum physicists of the early twentieth century spent a lot of time thinking about.  In that distinction is one way to think of what separates the streams of Keynesian economic policy (see chapter ) by national governments from the depths of neoliberal economic policy at the time of writing.

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Chapter 4

Science and/as Development

Partly reactive and partly proactive to unfolding events, toward the end of the 2000s the provincial government seconded Dr. Michael Mayne, a neuroscientist by training and the first director of the Institute for Nutrisciences and Health, to prepare a document known as the “Island Prosperity Strategy” (IPS), a five-year strategic plan for 2009–14 whose implementation would be overseen by a newly created Department of Innovation and Advanced Learning. The IPS neatly summarizes the concern: “We live in an increasingly globalized society which is changing rapidly—and we have not been keeping pace. Traditional approaches are only delivering moderate rates of growth, on a small and narrow base. Even though our social and economic indicators show improvement, we are falling further and further behind [relative to the rest of Canada]” (Government of Prince Edward Island 2008, 40). An important component of the new department was the transfer of the Island’s two largest postsecondary institutions, Holland College and UPEI, from the Department of Education. I had a couple of conversations with a senior provincial civil servant I’ll call Sam. Sam’s understanding of what the province was trying to achieve reinforces, almost to a T, the more theoretically based discussion to follow in the first part of this chapter on how government, industry, and the academy transform one another. For example, Sam noted the IPS was intended to augment the farming, fishing, and tourism industries. As an Islander Sam recounted how too many histories and identities are entangled with these activities to be ignored by the Island political parties, and so the growth of a knowledge economy had to be approached to easily mesh with the cultural values of longstanding Island families whose lives were and are dependent on those economic pursuits. Those cultural practices informed the IPS as a policy direction. Sam explained it was “designed so that we could break down barriers between communities. In particular, between academia and industry . . . [and] by

industry I mean small business.” Another way to think of this is that the small “startup” businesses so commonly associated with biotech and information technology in neoliberal times have been a longstanding feature of Island life. This is not to say that large multinational corporations don’t have a presence on the Island. It’s just that for most people, small—often family-operated—companies are a deeply ingrained part of the ethos, history, and cultural environment. In other words, there is no single way of relating academies, industries, and governments, though there are broadly common ways of representing these relationships to make the IPS recognizable as a phenomenon. Sam also advocates that each institutional complex is encouraged to intra-act in ways that promote, rather than restrict, flows between them, as in the past. It is interesting, too, that Sam is aware that the provincial government intravenes and yet is still portrayed as being at arm’s length, a case of ignoring the influence of bureaucratic cultural practices. The Department of Innovation and Advanced Learning, according to Sam, “is sometimes . . . very direct in tone, and drag[s] them [business and academia] into a boardroom and gets them talking. Other times it’s the indirect path of . . . encouraging people and sectors. It’s really time to take an academic style of excellence, which means peer review, thick skin, constructive feedback and apply it, gradually, to the macho world of business.” On the other hand, “universities need to be more nimble and flexible . . . they need to look internally, in a very serious and objective way, about how they do things, how their curriculum aligns with the local economy.” One way to facilitate the increased intra-actions among the cultural practices of each institutional complex is to “do a lot more swapping of senior managers in and out of organizations . . . [in order to understand] how other organizations tick, and then bring them into your senior management pool. You can’t pay for that kind of information.” In science policy practices, as in science practices, the importance of tacit knowledge should not be underestimated, though it tends to be ignored in formal contexts just as in formal scientific publications. One of our discussions led into the issue of the place of postsecondary institutions within this framework of the IPS and the new department. Sam was quite definite that they can be engines of growth. Oh absolutely! They are engines of growth. They are! And I think there is a little bit of denial at both the institutions [Holland College and UPEI] . . . how much they are engines of growth. . . . It’s really critical that the University and the College are front and centre on economic development. That doesn’t mean they are relieved of their responsibility of turning out (a) good citizens, [and] (b) really good students that are really well schooled in what they do.

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Evidently, then, a shift in the expectations of what an academic institution is expected to do, and thus what it “is,” is in process for UPEI. Because the shift in emphasis is ongoing, we should not be surprised to find that some faculty feel conflicting demands placed upon them, leading to perceptions of what Shore (2010) calls the “schizophrenic university.” Or, in Sam’s terms, “you need to know your boundaries of where basic science starts and stops, commercialization starts and stops. That doesn’t mean you can’t work together. So, the dogmatic principles of ‘arts and science and basic research do not mix with commercialization,’ those days are over.” The proportions of the mix, or where to draw the boundary lines, though, is an issue that is neither clear nor resolved. In Barad’s terms, the movement from one set of practices and metrics in an academic institution toward another set of practices and metrics creates a change in the phenomenon “university” because the measuring apparatus is changing, that is, there is a greater emphasis on economics over civics (but not to the exclusion of civics). At one point I asked Sam if the changes to postsecondary institutions in recent years are an extension or a redefinition of their role. The response is both telling and intriguing: “I think that of the two choices I wouldn’t choose either, I’d use the word ‘evolution.’” The nineteenth-century entanglements of biosciences and economic sciences continue into the present. When these changes were introduced in 2007 and 2008, Sam recalls that the provincial government’s “placing postsecondary education inside an economic development portfolio . . . wasn’t received well.” The reason for the shift, however, was so that the postsecondary institutions could more rapidly respond to local labor demands in the four streams of the IPS including, significantly, the establishment of a Master of Business Administration degree with a focus on bioscience at UPEI, and the establishment of a bioscience technician program at Holland College (see below). This was done in anticipation of major economic growth in the biosciences in PEI. Anticipation, in turn, has its own effects and affects (Adams et al. 2009). The relocation of the two institutions in the provincial political landscape has also, however, permitted new funding streams for research to become available. When they were part of the Department of Education they had different mandates, expectations, and practices that made funding provincial government projects from outside the department difficult and time-consuming. Now, “having everything under the same umbrella reduces a lot of barriers . . . we’ve got programs right now coming out of the Business School [at UPEI] where they’re doing active market research that we’ve never had before . . . they have access to funding they never had before.” And, finally, we should remember the province embarked on these changes in an effort to slow, and

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eventually reverse, the outward flow away from PEI of young, educated adults from the two institutions. Sam was concerned the province invested tens of thousands of dollars [through] taxpayers into those individuals and they’re gone. And we should be invoicing Alberta for that investment. . . . It’s our youth [who] go out there and are fully trained. . . . We say we want to add two thousand jobs [over the five years of the IPS] to the biotech community, IT, and aerospace . . . the easiest place to find the people is right out there [pointing in the direction of UPEI], and they got brains to burn and they are coming out from the university, and unfortunately we are just watching them drive off.

science and/as science policy: the triple helix, modes  and , and business clusters As we see nowadays in South-East Asia or the Caribbean, the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all. (Robinson 1962, 45) Let us begin by considering the three terms of our chapter title: science and/as development. Science-in-the-doing is always already science(s) in connection, sciences(s) in intra-activity with many other phenomena-in-the-doing. In our movement toward a quantum approach, “Science” is a shorthand that can never be an adequate, let alone full, means of approaching what it refers to. This is partly because the use of the word changes the meaning of the word, partly because science(s) do(es) not preexist its/ their doing, and partly because “You” and “I” are also continuously enacting and/as enacted through doing. The logic of the “and/as,” as we know from the Intraduction, is that “things” are never fully coincident with themselves. They are always already both more and less than one “thing,” separate yet joined through difference, at the same time, in a superpositioned state. This brings me, then, to “development,” the last of the three terms in the chapter title. Certainly modern science has been closely associated with the capitalist economic practices of the modern era. This has been quantitatively and qualitatively measured by historians, philosophers, economists, and many others, and as such they have also intravened by doing their measurements. In contrast, there is only a trickle of consideration as to how nonhumans may be measuring and/as intravening with human phenomena. Although many people use terms such as “development” or “market economies” synonymously with capitalism (in the abstract), they are not at all the same thing, as many economic historians, economic anthropologists, and others are at pains to point out (Gibson-Graham 1993, 2006; Latour 1993). 80

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In addition, bioscience currents and economics currents have a long history of influencing one another (Cooper 2008; Sahlins 1976), so much so that it is difficult to fully disentangle notions of biological and economic development, evolution, and competition. Although there has been much discussion as to whether Charles Darwin or Herbert Spencer expressed these ideas first, more important, I think, are the past and present shared assumptions of both streams of thought, assumptions that are consistent with a Newtonian approach. This has contributed to the widespread acceptance of those “monolithic abstractions of Science and The Market pushing each other around in Platonic hyperspace” (Mirowski and Sent 2008, 636; see also Rajan 2006). As you may have guessed, this chapter concerns itself with the diffraction patterns that emerge when thinking and/as doing economics and science through one another. The focus here will be on Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province in geographic size and population, and also the most rural in character. I noted previously that PEI is considered an economically depressed province relative to more industrialized provinces such as Quebec or Ontario, or resource-abundant provinces such as oil-rich Alberta or potash-rich Saskatchewan. Like many regions in similar circumstances throughout the world in recent years, a common local response to a relative resource scarcity and industrial base is to invest in what has come to be called the “knowledge economy.” It is within these local intra-actions that the ACCBR emerges as a phenomenon (and/as apparatus) within larger phenomena. Perhaps the place to begin, then, is to briefly mention the purpose of the quote at the beginning of the section. Joan Robinson was a prominent British economist of the Keynesian school. Her quip can be paraphrased as “the only thing worse than a minimum-wage job is not having a job at all.” (Writing this in the midst of a severe global recession, I’m sure many people can identify with the sentiment, even if they don’t completely agree with it.) Keynesian economists advocate, among other things, that governments regularly intervene in the economy of a nation and regions within a nation. Although the current desirability or necessity of capitalism is not questioned, there is recognition that regional inequalities exist, such as that between “First” and “Third” Worlds, or urban and rural areas, and that they need to be contained within limits (with all the measuring and/as intravention that entails). Keynesians, as Robinson makes clear, accept that capitalist economic logic is exploitative, in principle, of both people and regions. Some peoples/regions gain at the expense of others, rather than independently of others. The economically depressed Atlantic Canadian region, of which PEI is a part, is often considered in these terms by provincial governments. Needless to say, the neoliberal school of economics approaches capitalist economic relations differently. Despite variations, there is a broad agreement that Economics is a Science in a Newtonian sense, that capitalist logic is “objectively” positive, and that science and/as development

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government intervention distorts the free functioning of this logic. Moreover, institutions considered by adherents to be “non-economic” (such as governments and universities) should operate according to economic logic precisely because it is deemed Objective and Rational (Balsamo 2000). Inequalities are said to be not inherent in the logic of capitalism but come from distortions created by outside forces. In short, the world must be made to fit a particular economic representation. What has all of this to do with science and/as development on PEI? The outlines of an answer should be coming into focus. Classic economic liberalism and contemporary neoliberalism are practices—powerful currents and/as eddies emerging from positions of overprivilege that deny such privilege exists. Economically underprivileged actors and regions, human and nonhuman, literally cannot afford to engage in such denial. More immediately, however, we can pick up our discussion of the changing university from the last chapter, expanding especially on the Mode 1 and Mode 2 ideals of “doing” a university. Mode 2 practices of doing a university are in many respects a return to the practices enacted in the decades before World War II in terms of universityindustry relationships. A difference that makes a difference in recent years is the greater influence of governments in shaping those relationships, even as governments have been shaped by them. As I have emphasized throughout, these three currents are thoroughly entangled rather than the coming together of separate currents. Just as PCR was shown to be a “solution” for which problems were found, so too, on a different scale, is the “Triple Helix” (Etzkowitz 2003; Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1997), as it has come to be called, of the intra-actions of government-industry-university relations. In this regard it is important to distinguish actual variations within each of the three ideal components of the Triple Helix. Governments, for example, can be federal, provincial or state, or municipal; they can be economically, geographically, or demographically large or small; they can be powerful or relatively ineffectual on a global scale; they can be more or less responsive to their people and so on. Similarly, industrial enterprises can be large multinationals, medium-sized national or regional companies, or small startup companies with just a handful of people. They can be cooperatives, such as credit unions, or corporations managed by a board of directors, or family-owned businesses. Even if they all move toward producing similar products, say a therapeutic or diagnostic product for neurodegenerative diseases, they operate in very different ways with very different effects. The cultural practices of Big Pharma are not those of a small biotech start-up (Rajan 2006, 263). Universities, as we know, also come in different sizes, are public or private, are more or less research- or teaching-oriented and so on. Moreover, as Sharon Traweek (2000, 39) notes, “each country’s way of doing that is distinctive.” The term Triple Helix was coined by Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff in publications and presentations in the 1990s and was directed toward science policy audiences (see, e.g., Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1997). This was similarly the case for 82

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the Mode 1 and 2 distinction for universities (Gibbons et al. 1994) and the business clusters concept popularized by Michael Porter (1998a, 1998b, 2000). Although the term is intended to be descriptive, the assumption that these are three distinct entities that can come together and interact in different ways (a Newtonian assumption), rather than always already intra-acting, suggests that it is prescriptive or directive in its use. As Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff put it, “there is currently a need for a different kind of evaluation, one which takes into account the fact that both institutional arrangements and intellectual categories are changing in ways that break down the isolation of institutional spheres” (1997, 5; emphasis added). They suggest that “[t]he measurement of external impacts . . . indicates an increasing interest . . . in a more complex metric of research utilization” (1997, 5; emphasis added). Now, you may be thinking, “So what? Why does this matter?” Quite simply, the enactment of the concept matters; it is not so much a question of why it matters as how. Is it a difference that makes a difference? It’s not a question of does it get in the way of understanding, but in what ways does it intravene? This in turn takes us to the limits of the idea on the basis of our agential realist assumptions. For our purposes, we can consider three ways that concepts such as Triple Helix (3H), Mode 1 and 2 (M1/M2), and business clusters are used that “matter,” in all senses of the term. Beyond broad agreement that relationships between postsecondary institutions, industry, and government should be more intensive and extensive, there is a largely unarticulated assumption that these relationships are primarily economic in character and that the concepts are useful in describing and measuring “economic development” in the “knowledge economy.” Quite simply, even if we agree that connections among these three major institutions should be more frequent, why should the economic aspects necessarily be privileged? Second, “clusters,” M1/M2, 3H, and so on are favored by policy makers because the concepts are so general, that is, many different practices can be made to fit (Mirowski and Sent 2008, 669). The lack of particularity is then easily “black-boxed” (Croissant and Smith-Doerr 2008, 703) and promoted as a flexible and adaptable policy or development package, especially in areas that are considered, or consider themselves, in need of development. When Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff suggest “[o]lder economic development strategies . . . are being supplemented, if not replaced, by knowledge-based economic development strategies drawing on resources from the three spheres” (1997, 4), the assumption is this kind of development strategy will work anywhere. It is a “standardized development package” (Ferguson 1994) that presumes to be effective in all times and places, and, because it is considered Objective and Rational, can function as an “anti-politics machine” outside of the messiness of worldly goings-on (see also Kleinman 2003). Finally, each “sphere” or institutional complex is considered to be initially independent, and then brought into interaction science and/as development

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in ways that claim to promote each to be institutionally reflexive. That is to say, each element of the helix not only is presumed to promote economic development, it further assumes that the activities that promote this development can’t help but promote democratic principles as a by-product in these institutions as well (Atkinson-Grosjean 2006, 31–32). What, then, are some of the effects of these enacted assumptions, assumptions in keeping with that Newtonian assumption from which we are moving to distance ourselves? Let’s begin with the assumption of the primarily economic character of this series of concepts. One issue, as suggested earlier, is that in a knowledge economy, the knowledge in question has been made, or fictionalized, into a commodity (see Palsson 2007). Knowledge is part of humanity’s (and not necessarily only humanity’s) natureculture. With the rise of the modern era about three centuries ago, knowledge only rarely was bought and sold as a piece of property in markets until approximately 1980 or so, when the rise of neoliberal policies, the molecular biology revolution, the electronics revolution, and much more intra-acted in the emergence of the phenomena and/as apparatuses termed “biocapitalism” (Cooper 2008; Helmreich 2007b, 2008; Rajan 2006; Rose 2007b).

Karl Polanyi (1957) and David Graeber (2011) on Money and/as Commodity The “fictitious commodities” of which Karl Polanyi speaks in his major work, “The Great Transformation” (1957 [1944]), draws attention to two points pertinent to our discussion here. Put in the terms we’ve been using, he first describes a diffraction pattern of how naturecultures were rendered into “nature” and “culture” from a political economic position. Labor, land, and money are abstract ethico-ontological principles or concepts that have been made into commodities, that is, “things” for sale in markets that people can own as property. Despite the anthropocentrism, Polanyi makes clear that people’s potential to “do,” to act, is an ontologically inherent part of being and/as doing human. That this potential can be and has been made into a commodity is not inherent in humanity. It is simply the realization of a superpositioned possibility. What Polanyi calls “land” is an extension of this notion to the nonhuman realm. The beings and/as doings of the universe did not preexist as commodities but were intra-actively made so. This leads us into a related point. The “knowledge” in a “knowledge economy” is also a fictitious commodity. Whether knowledge is a type of labor or something else and whether it is exclusive to humans or not are not matters I will detail here, though they do, indeed, matter.

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Finally, both Polanyi and Graeber make some important observations regarding money. Both agree that money is something of value in its own right, as well as a materialized representation of equivalence (say, 4 apples as equivalent to 12 nails), that it is simultaneously a commodity and an IOU (Graeber 2011, 73). Money, as a representation of equivalence, only works as long as people uncritically accept the operation of a Newtonian universe. What matters for our purposes here is that this equivalence requires measurement. In the process, Graeber (2011) dispels what he calls “the myth of barter” as the “natural” state of human economic affairs. And, as we already know, measuring entails intravening. The apparatus and/as phenomenon that always already intravenes in the Capitalist Economy is some instance of state government.

One of the differences that make a difference in the enactment of biocapitalisms is the process of transforming information into knowledge, of which more will be said in the section that follows. Another, more directly connected to our discussion of the Triple Helix, is the forced separation of naturecultures into Nature and Culture. The intra-actions that produce Nature also produce Culture. Genes and gene sequences, for example, became different phenomena: the latter became cultural inventions available for patenting, ownership, and control; the former became the natural components inherent to biological species that cultural legal practices recognize as an inalienable resource or raw material. In this way knowledge is restructured into a commodity in Polanyi’s sense. This is an oversimplification, to be sure, but it does highlight the broader point I wish to make at the moment: bioscience in the twenty-first century is always already economic and political (Cooper 2008; Fortun 2008; Helmreich 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009; Kleinman 2003; Palsson 2007; Rajan 2006). It is an extension of Barad’s (2000) suggestion that one version of scientific literacy, presently presented and promoted as Scientific Literacy, is taken to guarantee democracy, economic growth, individual employment, how to take care of yourself, and more. Any failures in that list are thought to result from insufficient amounts of Scientific Literacy. This conversion of naturecultures into Nature and Culture by scientific and economic practices is not new. We must ask ourselves what is it about the Triple Helix (or M1/M2, or “clusters”) that is distinctive or different, or at least more noticeable, from relations in the past between academia, government, and the business world? One aspect that is relatively new is that the relationships among Triple Helix institutions are consciously pursued through much more control and direction than in the past. It is one of the ironies and paradoxes of neoliberal economic policies that laissez-faire— or, broadly, “leave things alone” to the invisible hand of the market—requires so much

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government intervention (Graeber 2011). Of the three helices, it is postsecondary institutions that have received the greatest pressure to change as a result. In turn, this has produced the “schizophrenic” university (Shore 2010), with its contradictory demands on faculty and students to address simultaneously both general knowledge and particular skills, basic science and applied science. From the vantage of industry and government this dual functioning of the academy is simply a matter of the academy being more responsive to “the Community”(GarrettJones and Turpin 2012), a rather vague term that leaves open who is and is not a member and to what extent. It is also what allows industry to shift much of the research, and its associated costs, away from itself (Cooke 2007, 2009; see also Franklin 2003). In this regard it is fairly evident that not all members of the Triple Helix are equal, a matter the term itself disguises. Finally, neoliberal policies, at least in relation to biocapital, aim for the financialization of “life,” though in the process it becomes commodified (Cooper 2008; Fortun 2008; Rose 2007b). Finance, by definition, is futureoriented risk-taking (or less generously, a form of gambling) in an effort to increase the original investment. As the aim is to minimize risk and maximize profit, any step to share or pass on risk makes a lot of sense (or loads the dice, to follow the gambling metaphor). The shift from emphasizing basic science toward applied science in postsecondary institutions is consistent with this way of doing or practicing “community” and community membership. This takes us further into issues of development. In broad terms, one can argue that with a substantial shift of bioscience research from privately owned industries to publicly funded universities, it makes a very particular kind of economic sense, especially to industry, and this has been facilitated from the start by science policies at various levels of government (Cooke 2007, 2009). In an earlier chapter we noted that the various inputs into a lab are already commodities (Kleinman 2003), which is one way capitalist practices always already indirectly influence scientific practices. Another influence is the implementation of science policies that encourage the patenting and ownership of knowledge, “discoveries” if you like. These two processes “bookend” lab research, where many people, including scientists, often argue that these are matters of inputs and outputs, but what goes on in between is “the Science” (Kleinman 2003). This ignores the funding currents researchers encounter, which can have a large impact on even the broad directions taken by researchers (Atkinson-Grosjean 2006; Harding 2008; Salonius 2005). Quite simply, when funders put limits or conditions on which proposals will be given consideration, no matter what they are, scientific research practice has already been shaped. In recent years this has been increasingly toward intellectual property, that is, knowledge as commodity. For this reason there has been a relative shift from basic research, common to Mode 1 ways of doing a university, to applied or Mode 2 86

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ways of doing a university. Although the distinction has always been rather muddy and simplistic (Harding 2008; Mirowski 2005), an ideal of basic research under Newtonian assumptions is that it is done purely out of curiosity. An ideal Newtonian form of applied research, in contrast, is that it is a clearly defined solution to a clearly defined problem. Indeed, universities under Mode 1 are thought of as leaning toward basic research, and those of Mode 2 toward applied, though there is always some mix of both. It is in this sense, then, that Mode 2 universities are thought more responsive to the larger Community. Notice, though, that this is a complementary dichotomy. Either you are seeking “solutions” for which there are not yet problems, such as the development of PCR technologies, an example of basic research, or you are seeking solutions for which the problem is to some extent (often large) already defined. Said another way, either you work toward maintaining the status quo (applied) or you work toward alternatives to the status quo (basic). You cannot do both at once. What it is that is “applied” is already existing knowledge (which is not to deny that sometimes new knowledge emerges by chance from efforts to apply existing knowledge). Furthermore, this issue intrasects with scientific literacy. Although the idea means many things to many people, it is consistently associated with economic development by global institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (Wright and Rabo 2010), by governments, and by most of the Euro-American middle class. It is considered to be a foundation of the knowledge economy, and as such is one way that scientific, educational, and economic currents create eddies where the boundaries and directions of bioscience and/as biocapital intra-act. But, in terms of particular content, “what does it mean to be scientifically literate?” (Barad 2000, 225). Whatever it is or does, she suggests, the trend has been to resist “critical examinations of the traditional construal of scientific literacy” (2000, 229). Individuals have not been encouraged to reflexively challenge notions of Science that fit our Newtonian assumptions. They are, however, encouraged to accept that institutions are being reflexive on their behalf. It is on this basis that 3H and M1/M2 formulations channel institutions such as the university toward being more open to community influences. So, we have come full circle: universities are presumed to be isolated, so they need to respond more to the community, but who and what a community is and does as a phenomenon is left vague, and all community members are presumed to be equal. We need to consider, too, how these changing relationships alter the internal relationships within each respective institution. As bioscience industries move toward more flexible forms of organization, universities have become more rigid (Mirowski and Sent 2008; Wright and Rabo 2010), a matter of some significance when considering the ACCBR. To make my position on the matter as plain as possible, it is not the case that I reject universities increasing and altering their connections to other phenomena and/ science and/as development

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as institutions. They are always already entangled in more ways than we are aware. It does, however, mean that we should be wary of accepting models such as 3H, M1/ M2, or “clusters” as inherently positive proposals for action precisely because they can be enacted in so many ways, and because these enactments presume the result will automatically reduce degrees of inequalities among humans and nonhumans alike. I am not so much interested in endorsing or refuting concepts such as the Triple Helix, Mode 1 and 2, business clusters, or applied vs. basic research as I am in bringing to focus and acknowledging that these are the measuring instruments favored by a wide variety of actors, and as such they shape what they measure.

culturing bioscience on prince edward island “The misery of being exploited by capitalists,” Robinson (1962, 45) wrote, “is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.” She argued that such a statement makes sense to economically disadvantaged groups and regions and, beyond that, also suggests that governments should direct economies in certain circumstances. This is advice followed often by governments in less prosperous areas, but it also encounters the dominant neoliberal ideologies and/as practices of resisting government intervention and commoditizing increasing amounts of naturecultures (Holland 2009; Mirowski and Sent 2008). The confluence of these two broad currents forms another eddy, with all its complex and contradictory movements and/as practices. PEI, in global terms, is a relative latecomer to the kinds of doings just discussed. As you can imagine, this has the advantage of learning from other people’s mistakes, and the limitation of having to play “catch-up” with the successes. Or does it? We need to be aware that the PEI biocluster is a phenomenon—and a fairly large one in terms of provincial scale—of intra-activity. All that has gone before has made this particular eddy possible. All the previous failures and all the previous successes are considered— or better, measured—from a particular situated knowledge (Haraway 1991) in a particular present. In short, although we may learn from the past, we cannot duplicate it in whole or in part. To many this seems almost too obvious to mention, so it is worth reminding you that mainstream Science and/as Economics regularly tries to do that very thing. As Barad (2007, 108) points out, every time you flip a light switch you rearrange the contents of the room (though on a human scale it is not usually a difference that makes a difference). Why point all this out? Because science policy in government and industry tends to use and do concepts such as Triple Helix, Mode 1 and 2, and clusters as models or formulae to replicate something that happened somewhere else. In this regard, it is interesting to note that these three concepts are often retroactively applied to the events surrounding, for example, the emergence of Silicon Valley as an information 88

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technology center in the late 1970s. At the time it was no such thing, but became so as efforts were made to copy it elsewhere, whether in terms of information technology or bioscience or something else. By 1988 the Canadian federal government established the Networks of Centres of Excellence based on this shift in science policy thinking (Atkinson-Grosjean 2006). This program was influenced in part by Michael Gibbons, one of the authors of the Mode 1 and 2 concept, and by Michel Callon, an early thinker and promoter of ActorNetwork Theory. Both had been involved in an advisory capacity through the Government of Canada (Atkinson-Grosjean 2006, 54). The Centres of Excellence were intended to be a series of “national research networks—research institutes without walls, anchored in academic settings—that in partnership with the private sector would target and develop practical and commercial applications” (2006, xiii). By the late 1990s Canada’s National Research Council had set in motion events to found the 11 “technology clusters” scattered across the country. The NRC adapted much of Porter’s approach in its own currents of thought, though always with an eye to “empirical issues such as the ability to measure the development of clusters in which it has invested to track results” (Cassidy et al. 2005, 32). This then, is the national context in which PEI bioscience and/as biocapital began to flow. In an interview with Rory Francis, Executive Director of the PEI BioAlliance, Inc., I learned that the first stirrings of the PEI bioscience cluster went back to the late 1990s. At the time he was Deputy Minister in the provincial Department of Agriculture, and it was widely recognized that farming and fishing (and tourism) would not be able to economically sustain the province in the long term. Together with several friends, associates, and colleagues, from inside government and out, “we came across the notion that we do have some assets in the science and research side of things that are disparate pieces that are supporting aspects of the economy, but they are not networked, they are not tied together, they don’t even know each other exists. We pulled some of these pieces, mostly government labs or government related facilities together and looked at ‘are there opportunities to work beyond the current mandate?’” The resulting working group came to be known as the Belvedere Life Science Research Group. During one of their sessions one of the members “came up with the name of the cluster. I think we even used [the] cluster word [as] it must have been about Michael Porter’s time . . . a good reader, he came up with that from his readings.” The ideas of clustering and (implicitly) the Triple Helix were circulating, entangled, intra-acting. They are always already currents through which other currents move, eventually coming together as the phenomenon and/as eddy named the PEI bioscience cluster. Over the next few years the Belvedere Research Group continued to discuss possibilities among members of government and interested citizens. By the new millennium science and/as development

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the President of UPEI had joined the discussion as had some of the local bioscience companies. Although the term Triple Helix is not used by anyone I’ve spoken to, the concept does convey quite well the processes described: people interested in economic policy issues began proposing closer ties between academia, industry, and government at the provincial level. With these intra-actions we can note the increasing confluence of science policy, education policy, and economic policy, and the stirrings of a shift in the role of UPEI from being more of a Mode 1 kind of institution to a Mode 2 (again, not a concept explicitly used by people I talked with). In 2000 the NRC considered a proposal to situate the Institute for Nutrisciences and Health (INH) on the UPEI campus for the Atlantic technology cluster, with approval granted in 2003 (National Research Council Canada 2012). The four-story structure was completed in 2006, with people moving into offices and labs by October. The new North Annex of the AVC, which housed the ACCBR, was literally just across the street one year later. The arrival of the NRC presence via the INH was considered by many of the actors in the local Triple Helix to provide the critical mass needed not just for the technology cluster, in the NRC’s sense, but for a Porter-like business cluster to emerge. The motivation for the province to pursue such a stream of economic development is not difficult to understand, regardless of whether one agrees with it. For most common economic indicators, such as GDP, unemployment rate, average family income, and so on, PEI tends to rank at or near the bottom among Canada’s 10 provinces (Casper et al. 2010; Government of Prince Edward Island 2008). Farming, fishing, and tourism are largely seasonal activities, and most of the jobs in these industries tend to be low-wage positions. Each of these industries is not expected to make large increases in growth into the foreseeable future. After all, arable land is at its limit, meaning gains in productivity must come from equipment or higher yielding varieties of crops. Even so, this rarely translates into large wage increases for agricultural workers. Similar pressures apply to the fishing industry, and tourism is precarious because the industry is so globally competitive and sensitive to changes in taste and global economic conditions. Beyond that, the Island is facing certain demographic challenges as well. As is the case for all of Atlantic Canada, its largest export for many decades has been people, some of whom eventually return, but most of whom do not. The export of labor as a commodity does not make it onto balance sheets the way Anne of Green Gables souvenirs, lobsters, or potatoes do. Add to this the imminent wave of baby boom retirees, a stagnant to slightly negative birth rate, and a low immigration and high emigration rate, and the financial and revenue burden facing the province is plain. Not only is there a shrinking middle class, in terms of income, there is a shrinking pool of people to become middle-class income earners. 90

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Another way to indicate that there is no single way of doing a Triple Helix is to consider Les’s comments on the Canadian situation since the 1990s. As a university administrator, Les was very aware of the greater emphasis placed on applied research in recent years and that universities were increasingly taking on greater proportions of research as industry and federal government departments sought to restrict their in-house efforts. At the same time, though, Canadian universities have been expected to carry on with basic research activities as well, contributing to the perception of the “schizophrenic university” among faculty. The peculiarity of the Canadian situation is that beginning with the Centres of Excellence in Research program (see AtkinsonGrosjean 2006), the federal government wanted to pass some of the responsibilities of research out of its own departments while retaining some measure of control over the kinds and directions of research. As Les explains, “in Canada we’re in an odd situation . . . with research being a federal responsibility and university learning being a provincial responsibility. I don’t think you’ll find that in other jurisdictions.” In Canada federal research funding was significantly reduced in the mid-1990s, but has been slowly increasing since, largely through a suite of programs that provide that measure of control federal departments are seeking over university-based researchers. “And so CFI [Canada Foundation for Innovation] was a classic example,” Les adds. “They put the program in place, funded only 40, and told the universities they had to find the other 60. They expected 20 to come from industry, and 40 to come from . . . [well], it was never mentioned, so the universities clearly went to the provinces.” So, in a political climate where “value for money” in particular, and audit culture broadly, is portrayed as among the highest virtues, the federal government puts parameters on research competitions that shape what goes on at the laboratory bench (Salonius 2005). For example, many federally funded competitions for research grants stipulate time frames for what are referred to as “deliverables.” These kinds of Triple Helix currents and/as eddies, then, shape the manner in which Mode 1 becomes Mode 2. Just as there is no single way of doing Triple Helix, there is no River of Mode 1 and 2. Like Sam, Chris, and Rory, Les has to consider the specific place UPEI holds in “Island culture.” Les opined, “UPEI is an interesting place and it started in an interesting place because it’s so deeply connected to its communities.” Since its inception in 1969 “it always has been the province’s university and a repository for knowledge of the Island as well as other kinds of knowledge. . . . I think there’s a divide between the way people may think of the issue of industry driving the university agenda, and the way they think about helping out a little company that just started up.” What Les seems to be implying is a caution to avoiding what AtkinsonGrosjean calls “cartoon capitalism” (2006, 163). It also brings us back to the Robinson quote and the desire, at least among some segments of the local population, to invest materially, intellectually, and emotionally in these kinds of economic development science and/as development

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initiatives because the current alternatives are considered worse. This is not to say critiques of capitalism should not or cannot be done, or that they don’t already happen, but rather that they must consider entangled doings, many eddies and/as currents, rather than an essentialized representation. As if to emphasize the point, another Senior Management Group member, Chris, echoed similar sentiments to Les. “Coming out of the cuts that were made in the mid1990s [the federal government] made some substantial new commitments starting in 1997 to research and development. . . . I would identify that as the clearest take-off point that marks at least where we are today.” While this may point to a rather marked shift from a Mode 1 to Mode 2 university, the movement to a Triple Helix approach, according to Chris, has been both more gradual and, at least initially, due to luck and chance. Historically, Chris pointed out, “this campus on which we’re sitting probably would never have been created . . . were it not for the recognized need in the community for clergy. So that was in the middle of the 19th century [and] seemed to be a need to fill, and the role in which the [institutions] got going for a purpose.” At that time they had to turn to various Island communities for support and funding. And indeed this does lend support to the notion that Mode 1 styles of doing university were departures from a much longer trend of something more Mode 2-like in practice (Mirowski 2005). Of course, there is no Triple Helix to speak of until government funding and regulations are added as one of the helices, an intra-active emergence. A variety of industrial currents was necessary, too. In the 1980s the Dean of the Science Faculty, Regis Duffy, established a small company producing diagnostic kits. Aside from showing his entrepreneurial spirit, he “wanted to have work for his students,” according to Chris, many of whom were leaving the Island or leaving their skills unused. The founding of the AVC and its research facilities on campus in the 1980s made it possible for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis to establish its fish health research facility in PEI. Shortly thereafter the potential for realizing a bioscience business cluster magnified. With the bid to have the NRC’s INH located on campus, Chris argued a critical mass (or perhaps an eddy with a relatively defined center) for planning and consciously directing the development of a bioscience cluster in terms of a Triple Helix became possible through the IPS. As Chris framed it, “it is a neat story, how you go from pulling on your bootstraps to seeing how you can have . . . a nicely put together and mutually supportive cluster.” Jay also agrees that universities are undergoing a process of reorganization and redefinition: “One big change we’ve seen in the last few years is that society, legislatures, politicians, etc. are asking more of universities and expecting more for their investment. I think they’re looking at economic drivers for the economy, and I think that sometimes . . . there’s a potential to come into conflict with some traditional values.” 92

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Nevertheless there is recognition that the phenomenon that emerges has local characteristics and peculiarities. This conflict with “traditional values” is, once again, an indicator of the schizophrenic university. Managing that conflict is, not surprisingly, what senior managers are expected to do. The philosophy and strategy Jay offered is the following: How do you get faculty members interested in the knowledge economy? . . . getting involved with industries or companies that might put . . . restrictions to publications, etc? And the conclusion was you don’t do it with young professors . . . you have to do it with older people that don’t . . . feel this pressure to publish or perish. . . . Well then, how do you convince older, established faculty . . . to do something different? or something riskier? or get involved? or whatever? And the conclusion to that was you don’t do it to every faculty member, you have to look around and you have to figure out the ones that might have interest, then you try to incentivize it. Growing and expanding the Triple Helix is likely to be a slow process in Jay’s estimation, because of the different tensions, conflicts, and visions within and across helices. As a senior administrator on campus, Jay is concerned, understandably, with how the university integrates into the bioscience cluster. Although he is quite clear in saying, “I think it is the role of universities to help grow the knowledge economy,” it also needs to be understood that “if a hopeful situation does not come about, which oftentimes it doesn’t, that everybody can leave learning something without any harm, so to speak, coming to any of the entities involved.” Beyond that, there is also a concern regarding the extent to which each helix does or does not blend into the others. In Barad’s terms we could say the extent to which entanglements and intra-actions shape one another is at issue, where the agential cuts are made. Certainly there is an abstract side to this, but Jay is equally clear that the kinds of intra-activity and entanglements matter in direct ways as well. The relationship between industry and the academy in research can become a problem area, for example, if the boundaries separating them become too blurred, especially where issues of intellectual property are concerned. From Jay’s perspective, maintaining the boundaries allows for more efficient management on either side of the dividing line. It also has the effect, though this may not be the intention, of doing business and doing academic research according to principles of the status quo. In other words, it works against new ways of doing science and/as capitalism and the possibilities and potentialities that could be explored to go beyond them. Having mentioned the chance and somewhat haphazard beginnings of bioscience and/as biocapitalism on the Island, we can return to Rory Francis and some of the science and/as development

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doings that led to the PEI BioAlliance as the entity that has more consciously directed the intra-actions of the three currents of the Triple Helix on the Island. As such it is the “center” of an ever-changing eddy. Still under the banner of the Belvedere Research Group, the participants were confronted with the decision of which possibilities to pursue or foreclose, which intraventions were to be performed. Rory recalls, “We could’ve picked ideas as the bottom line and focussed on building a research cluster, but we felt [that], really, economic development has to be the outcome.” Evidently this was an important decision, a difference that made and continues to make a difference. Shortly after the successful lobbying to have the NRC-INH located on the UPEI campus, the group was reconstituted as the PEI BioAlliance, Inc. in March of 2005. Influenced by Michael Porter’s notion of a business cluster, the BioAlliance “incorporated as a private, not-for-profit, industry-led organization, but unique in the sense that more [participation] has been included in research and academic partners as well as government policy partners.” Certainly the composition of the Board of Directors indicates a broad mix of personnel, including local and international companies both large and small, the presidents of Holland College and UPEI, and the Deputy Minister for the provincial Department of Innovation and Advanced Learning, among others. By the goals it set itself and the metrics it uses to measure success, the bioscience cluster is achieving some of its targets. For example, cluster businesses have grown in number from 16 in 2004 to 39 in 2011, and employment figures in the cluster have grown from about 400 in 2005 to about 1,000 in 2011 (PEI BioAlliance Inc. n.d.). Right from the outset, then, the conscious design of the business cluster has been integrative, and to practice integration of the three helices as tightly as possible. You, the reader, have likely noticed that comments by Sam, Pat, Chris, Les, and Jay to greater or lesser extents gestured toward how each helix seeks to maintain its boundaries to some extents. The contradictory yet entangled movements of an eddy, the diffractive process and manifested patterns, is not merely metaphoric representation (though it is that), but also agentially realist. Many of the people I spoke with echoed two sentiments. One is that each of the three helices has distinct cultures that must be understood, at least to an extent, and respected. Implicit in this approach—Pat’s earlier comments being an exception—is that each helix is expected to make some accommodations for the others and yet also somehow retain its essence. Using terms introduced in earlier chapters, we could say there is a desire to establish trading zones (Galison 1999) at the edges, but not in the centers. Note, too, that each culture-as-helix is presumed to arrive preformed and bounded, much in keeping with our Newtonian assumptions. Expectations to change only emerge after contact. The second sentiment voiced repeatedly concerned trust, particularly trust that changes to one’s own institutional helix would not go beyond surface reorganizations 94

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and that their essential features would remain intact. Indeed, it is the role of the BioAlliance to promote trust and manage it. Needless to say, this differs from the very different assumptions I am making in climbing Wittgenstein’s ladder toward quantum assumptions. The formation of the BioAlliance, the decision to pursue a business cluster rather than a research cluster, and the many material-discursive events leading up to these decisions and formations always already altered the way each helix was performed and the intra-actions among them, including those that maintain each as a relatively distinct phenomenon. Not only has this affected the way science is done, it has changed the possibilities of what is possible in terms of how science could be done. From all that has been said so far, it should be evident that to consider the issues of the PEI bioscience cluster in terms of a singular, unchanging Science or Capitalism is too simplistic, because the frame is “what it is” rather than “how it is done.” In all but the most abstract senses, there is little point in asking whether you are for or against Science or Capitalism. What matters—the differences that make a difference—are the kinds of phenomena that are being practiced into becoming or not. Therein, I think, is the kind of responsibility advocated for agential realism. Take, for example, the case of Alex. The route Alex traveled to teaching in the Business School at UPEI was not at all straightforward. Having achieved graduate biology degrees in Europe, Alex began working for large multinational pharmaceutical companies, moving up the corporate ladder and relocating frequently as a result. Having been working in the Boston area, personal events brought Alex to the Island, and ultimately, to be a contributor to the MBA program that had recently begun offering a specialized stream for bioscience. This bioscience-stream MBA is an important element of how the local Triple Helix plan, in the form of the Island Prosperity Strategy, emerges as a phenomenon. One of the points Alex stressed over the course of formal interviews and informal conversations was the importance of high quality basic research to cluster growth, regardless of whether this happened in company labs, in academic labs, or in tandem. From a business perspective we encounter similar themes to those mentioned already for the academy and government. For example, the different “cultures” of industry and postsecondary education can simultaneously be supportive and at crosscurrents with one another, and negotiating those movements easily and quickly is a major challenge. Grossly simplified, they can be mutually supportive by going from basic to increasingly applied research to finally putting a product on the market. The shift can be from academy to industry in a series of stages, each of which increased what Alex called the “value step up.” In short, the closer a company is to bringing a new product to market the more valuable it becomes in economic terms, even though an actual product may be years away or never even come to market at all. This is what doing risk, intellectual property, and financial capitalism, as Cooper (2008) and others have expressed it, is about. science and/as development

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On the other hand, science is done differently in the two contexts. There is the fairly plain sense of more basic research being done in the academy, though it is increasingly taking on applied research too, as we have seen. But science is also done differently in the sense that academic and business “cultures” have different aims and motivations. In Alex’s words, “in academia I think what happens a lot is that people do their research through academic rewards, which is reputation [and] funding, whereas in industry one of my first bosses said, ‘We don’t want no prize winners, we want team players here’” (see also Garrett-Jones and Turpin 2012; Morgan et al. 2011). These comments resonate with Les’s observation that academic researchers are more committed to their disciplines than the particular institution that employs them, as well as with Pat’s and Rory’s comments on the same issue. If the aim is the emergence of a Triple Helix business cluster as an engine of economic growth, then it is not surprising to also see the emergence of hybrid phenomena through their intra-actions, such as the “scientist-entrepreneur” (Kleinman 2003). Similarly, Alex suggests that as bioscience companies grow in size, bioscientists divide into those who primarily do research and those who increasingly move away from the bench to take on managerial functions and strategies. It is these intra-activities that promote the “schizophrenic university” that Shore (2010) studied or the conflicted types of “knowledge workers” examined by Kleinman and Vallas (2001). Had the decision been made to pursue a research cluster, we would expect different “hybrid” phenomena to emerge. Before moving on to the place of the ACCBR in the PEI bioscience cluster, it is also worthwhile to momentarily consider how Holland College and its bioscience lab technician training program is entangled in the Island Prosperity Strategy and/as local Triple Helix. The program itself was conceived and implemented in the early 2000s, as part of the larger strategy by the provincial government to grow the business cluster. A survey at the time looked into what local bioscience firms’ needs were and would be into the foreseeable future in terms of the skills needed in the workplace and projected growth in PEI’s bioscience sector. Based on that assessment, Holland College was given additional funding by the province to purchase equipment and infrastructure that would be most common among the four areas of emphasis in the developing bioscience business cluster. Students in the two-year program learn to work with a variety of techniques and technologies related to cell culturing, protein identification and separation, bioinformatics, and so on, but with a particular focus on how these are used in industrial settings rather than academic ones. Dr. Mike Gibson, coordinator of the Holland College Bioscience Technology program, explained, “[T]here are very specific industry needs for what the graduates have to be capable of.” Many firms, I was told, have neither the time nor the resources to train individual hires, some of whom may not stay in the firm after their training period. By providing graduates every year that have the majority of skills required, the 96

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time and cost of training is considerably reduced for companies, and the ability to more easily hire replacements from a local labor pool increases. Noteworthy, too, is that while the program was initially funded from provincial coffers, local bioscience industry advisory committees helped shape the curriculum to provide as close a fit as possible to local conditions. To date, the graduates have been absorbed into the growing bioscience industry on the Island, but a time may come when competition for term contract work and moving from employer to employer becomes more common, as can be found among larger, more established, bioscience clusters. Unlike universities, which maintained a much more Mode 1 style independence in the twentieth century, Canada’s community colleges have offered their many vocational programs with employment programs and local or regional industry labor needs in mind. Historically, it would seem, something of a Triple Helix approach has existed right from the beginning of the community college system. Mike suggested, “the [community] colleges have a clear identity and a process that fits that model better than universities. So I think universities have some soul searching to do. I can see why there’s a lot of time spent on that debate at universities, because . . . it is a bigger change for them, whereas that’s what colleges have always been about.” For Mike, the issue “comes down to the distinction between training and education, if you are going to make that kind of a distinction, so they [his students] are coming here for training. I try to give them some education along with it.” We can see in this statement the reverse of many recent demands to have universities graduate students with more tangible, rather than abstract, skill sets. As such, Shore’s notion of the “schizophrenic university” may more usefully be extended to postsecondary education as a whole. From this discussion we can ask “how does the ACCBR fit in”? Let’s move back upstream and consider some of the history already mentioned. The PEI bioscience business cluster, as an emergent phenomenon produced by countless intra-actions, carried and carries within it numerous superpositioned possibilities. The principle of complementarity Barad proposes suggests that the actualized phenomenon also excludes the other possibilities. In these instances the act of measuring is integral to which possibilities become actualized. She also provides the example of the scientist doing science or reflexively thinking about doing science, but not doing both at once. This particular example is pertinent here insofar as clusters are also superpositioned possibilities, which in this instance came down to choosing research or business clusters. Just as the physicist uses different evaluative criteria (i.e., apparatuses) to measure light as wave or particle, or to measure an experiment or the implications of an experiment, different measures are used to evaluate research in business or research clusters. In each case the superpositioned possibilities don’t disappear, but the principle of complementarity tells us that how and what gets measured is part of the phenomenon that emerges. science and/as development

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Throughout this chapter I have suggested that success is largely measured through economic criteria. The Island Prosperity Strategy makes very clear that success is measured in terms of growth in bioscience employment and businesses, which does not mean that research is unimportant. In a business cluster the research currents must support the economic currents rather than the other way around. The conception of “community” in each case implied an economic or business community. In saying this, my point is not to advocate that UPEI return to doing Mode 1 practices, but to point out that there are other newly consequent superpositioned possibilities for “community” beyond the economic, and other superpositioned possibilities for doing bioscience beyond its individuating forces (Knorr-Cetina 1999) and sometimes its cooperative practices (Shrum et al. 2007). Nonetheless, as suggested at the beginning of the chapter through the Joan Robinson quote, PEI is geographically and economically marginal in Canada and globally. For most people who call PEI home, this is a prominent concern, so we need not register great surprise when the focus is economic. One of the consequences of this, however, is support of the economic status quo, broadly conceived in terms of Capitalist conceptions of development, and the bioscientific status quo, also broadly conceived. This said, the variations within each current do matter, since they are differences that make a difference even as they limit other possibilities. Keynesian interventionism in the economy is still preferred over neoliberalism. Small- and medium-sized local businesses gain local support (beyond political and/as economic elites) more easily than large multinationals headquartered elsewhere, but being abandoned is the worst option and greatest fear of all. This is the sentiment that Robinson captured so well. Phrased in less abstract terms for PEI, former UPEI President Wade MacLauchlan was asked in a newspaper interview how PEI’s economy was doing after the economic downturn of 2008. He responded: When people outside PEI ask me how things are, I say “it is still pre-recession.” The economy in Atlantic Canada chugs along. We didn’t see the peaks and valleys, and the makeup of our economy is different from places that got hit hard. Part of it is that public spending is a big factor here, and governments now are in a stimulus mode. (Pitts 2010, emphasis added) One consequence of this is what Callon and Rabeharisoa (2008) term sociotechnical lock-in. Given that the measuring instrument of success for (intravening in) the cluster is economic, there is a preference to invest, in all senses of the term, in technologies already available rather than considering other possibilities. Financially speaking, the risk is too large, or at least considered so. In many ways this parallels for 98

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biocapital what Rheinberger described for experimental systems in bioscience. It is a diffraction pattern. We need to remember as well that technologies need not only be physical, but can be ethico-epistemo-ontological as well. In this respect Canada’s National Centres of Excellence (NCE) program shaped what was possible on PEI as well as being a similar application of the same process. Atkinson-Grosjean (2006) describes how the NCE was intended by the federal government to change Canada’s natural science “research culture” from a Mode 1-like structure to something more Mode 2-like and thus easily integrated into a Triple Helix approach. She outlines how the priority of research over economics was reversed as part of the adoption of neoliberal economic policies by federal Conservative and Liberal governments alike. Success is measured by performance according to economic indicators in an audit culture, and this in turn requires demonstrating cost effectiveness. Because basic research rarely leads to the production of specific goods or services, it is notoriously difficult to quantify results in terms of dollars although the costs are readily quantified. The NCE program did encourage scientific cooperation, but “little evidence exists of bench-level collaborations between academy and industry researchers, working together to advance technologies along the pipe . . . what was needed was something between basic research and commercial development” (2006, 144, 161). On a much smaller scale the ACCBR was intended to be a bench-level collaborative space where basic research was privileged, though commercial development need not be automatically excluded. Indeed, during my time there some small companies and start-ups had begun making regular use of the facility. “Open” lines of communication tend to promote success more often than “closed” for both research and commercialization (Cooke 2007), and, as Rory reminded me, intellectual property secrecy is often a red herring in industry-academy partnerships. What is at issue is the timing of publishing results, and that brings us back to the issue of socio-technical lock-in. The ACCBR aimed to reorganize the individuating practices of current bioscience (Knorr-Cetina 1999) into a more collective model. Such practices, considered as apparatuses, were a challenge to the assumption and presumption of the standard individualistic bioscience model that is found at all scales, from within the AVC, through the university, to the scale of the bioscience cluster on PEI. Operating from these principles, I would expand Kleinman’s suggestion that “any alternative inventions must compete with existing products” (2003, 89) to include the socio-technical as well as the technological. In more straightforward terms, the measuring instruments were always already configured to promote results favoring a certain bioscientific and/as biocapitalist status quo. This helps, then, to explain some of the attitudes and actions directed toward the ACCBR, suggesting that it wasn’t a good “fit” for the current circumstances and directions of the university and the business cluster. science and/as development

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Alex, Chris, Jay, Les, Rory, and Sam all mentioned that the relatively small size of the university, the cluster, and the Island offered a variety of advantages and challenges. First and foremost, all of them agreed the possibilities for networking is a major strength. As I started attending a variety of functions sponsored by the university, the BioAlliance, or the province, it did not take long to start recognizing the same three or four dozen faces at each event. The closely knit nature of the group has impressed a variety of visitors and potential investors, with most of them surprised at the level of cooperation within the business cluster. This kind of success in terms of economic development presumes a stability and “black-boxing” of bioscientific practices. Different forms of bioscientific cooperation were encouraged, and often termed collaboration, but a shift in epistemic culture (Knorr-Cetina 1999) or bioscientific intra-activity was not given much consideration. Framed in terms of the measures of success outlined in this chapter, the ACCBR was considered by some to be an experiment that had been given an opportunity to fit local events and had not lived up to its promise. Proposals to make the facility “virtual” began circulating (see chapter 2). Needless to say, Andy and others, myself included, felt it needed a longer time span and different criteria of success to be applied. As an eddy in the local business cluster, it had in some respects promoted the larger current of which it was a part, while resisting it in others. It was on the verge of dissipating at the time. Les mentioned that the pressure from federal funding agencies to create “value for money” measured through quantitative auditing techniques could not and did not fit all circumstances at UPEI. Moreover, these pressures were unevenly experienced within and across the faculties and schools on campus. For example: Les: Within the vet college [there were] some faculty who were, for various reasons, unable to access the kinds of resources needed. It could be that there were clinicians [that] on their own time didn’t allow them to set up and run a lab in the way that they needed it. . . . It could be that there were colleagues, new colleagues coming in, people to visit who wouldn’t have a place to work, but the work was probably the most valuable contribution. . . . So it [the ACCBR] was really, I think, conceptualized as a place to enable those various, call them disenfranchised groups—I’m not sure if that’s exactly right—to be able to do research in a way that might not take those other [paths]. Udo: Do you think it was successful in that? Is it successful in that? Les: Not as successful as it was envisioned to be. The understanding that Les expresses is certainly cooperative within individuated bioscientific practice rather than collaborative in a more collective practice. Ultimately 100

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Les conjectures that “people undervalue or underestimate the amount of time and effort it takes to keep a group together.” Les’s suggestion that the ACCBR might require more time and oversight can be contrasted with Andy’s point, mentioned to me more than once, that the ACCBR was a side project to his primary institutional role as a research scientist in the Department of Biomedical Sciences. What emerges here is the tension Shore expressed in terms of the schizophrenic university, as academia struggles to balance its research mission with new demands to generate economic growth. That UPEI is increasingly shifting toward a Mode 2-like institution within a Triple Helix-like conceptualization is fairly evident, even if not expressed in those terms by most of the people I talked with. That said, there is still considerable ambivalence. Jay, as another senior university administrator, indirectly expressed this shift in attitude and/as measuring, while also aiming to strike a balance between past practices and future demands. Here, however, the ACCBR in its original form was considered to get in the way of Mode 1-like activities. In discussing successful research parks in the northeastern United States and North Carolina, Jay noted that “there is a delineation from the academic arm and this entrepreneurial-discovery-business related arm,” implying each strand of a Triple Helix must be a fairly distinct phenomenon. Difficulties are said to arise “when you mix those two in close proximities.” As the discussion came to the ACCBR, Jay added it was “conceptually kind of set up like the research park, but it’s internally [to UPEI].” That was not considered problematic as much as the blurring of what was supposed to be distinct, a blurring that leads to a competition of the two aims of commerce and science. From an administrator’s position, Jay said, we have to set up entities that are not in competition, because if it’s viewed that way, then at the heart of it, it just cuts it down. For instance, a faculty member, and that’s where it really gets down to it, that what it’s really all about is our intellectual ability and intellectual capacity. . . . So we have to set up systems as administrators, set up systems [so] that we have complementary types of opportunities, not stark choices, “you know, well I’ll do this, but it’s going to be at the expense of this.” So I see in any entity, a research park, an ACCBR, etc., where the merit comes is providing opportunities for our faculty and staff to join in and further their academic mission. So when it comes in direct conflict with it, then we have problems. Jay is very clear that as an administrator for the university, the academic “arm” takes precedence. “We have to make sure that there are no entities restricting us in that regard. . . . So we need to look at the ACCBR. [It is] one of the concerns that I have had, and we will be changing it.” Jay went on to elaborate that too much equipment and space was held in limbo while waiting for users, on campus and off, to become science and/as development

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regular. The space allocation issue, which Andy was concerned with from the outset, was space considered or measured in terms of individual researcher labs of standard bioscience practice. For equipment as well, the notion of making the ACCBR a virtual facility was based on standardized academic bioscience practices. In fact, the space and equipment issue are two sides of the same coin. Space can be used to establish more individual labs. As the ACCBR equipment, as a kind of commons, was being relocated “in various people’s labs, it’s being utilized [more] now.” The possibility that a piece of equipment relocated to an individual researcher’s lab may over time come to be thought of as “mine” was not discussed. It was, however, a concern several ACCBR staff voiced when they heard the facility might “go virtual.” The point I’ve been trying to make, however, is that at a variety of scales there were several currents and/as eddies that the ACCBR was moving against, even as it was supportive in other ways. A more collectivist bioscience practice may yet emerge, but PEI’s and Canada’s economic policies and/as practices work against it, as do their educational and/as science policies. UPEI, like most universities worldwide, is under pressure to transform, and relatively quickly at that, although what it should transform into, and how, is rather murky and, as we have seen, contested. The next chapter builds on the political economic theories discussed here, but zooms out analysis to take in global flows.

notes  These values are so strongly rooted that even though first-generation immigrants to the Island, whether from elsewhere in Canada or the rest of the world, make up a substantial portion of the population—perhaps a third as an estimate—they (myself included) continue to be referred to as “from away” by native Islanders.  This was understood by dependency theorists, those early critics of development economics such as Andre Gunder Frank () or Rodolfo Stavenhagen (), nearly half a century ago.  Like the terminology of H and M/M, the “business cluster” concept promoted by Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School has been adopted by a variety of governments and industries as a policy-oriented apparatus for economic development. The notion refers to the close physical and geographic location of closely related firms within an industry. The presumption is that physical closeness of related firms enhances possibilities for creating innovative products and/ as commodities. This echoes a slightly different way of speaking about the tacit knowledges, knowing bodies, and epistemic cultures we encountered in chapter  but emphasizing economic measures rather than natural scientific. An important 102

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difference that makes a difference is that clusters are treated as pre-existing their doing (Cooke ; Martin and Sunley ), rather than intra-actively. Like H and M/M, the concept’s theoretical vagueness means its meanings can be used in very different ways, but rarely with any kind of precision (Martin and Sunley ). Historically, clustering has affinities with evolutionary economics (Cooke , ) and shares with contemporary development economics the idea that successes can be duplicated provided that the conditions or context of growth can be duplicated. This is precisely the problem of a Newtonian representation. Currently thriving clusters, like our earlier thermometer example, have already changed the terms and conditions of intra-action, and so there can be no duplication. Nonetheless the appeal of the concept for policy makers is that it offers a promise of economic growth to jurisdictions that are considered or consider themselves relatively underdeveloped. Moreover, the concept seems especially suited to industries that tend to rely substantially on tacit and body knowledges, such as biocapital and/as bioscience (Martin and Sunley ). Because research-intensive industries such as bioscience and/as biocapital have been outsourcing research and development projects to universities, businesses in the field tend to do their clustering around campuses, and therefore, to an extent, create a self-fulfilling prophecy (Cooke ).  As an interesting confluence, consider also Rheinberger’s discussion on “standardized kits” in biological research as applicable: “They lose their function as machines for making the future” (, ).  How, at present, does knowledge become a commodity to fuel a knowledge economy? A very important move in that direction has already been made by separating Nature from Culture at the beginning of the modern era (Latour ). Another important element is that Science is broadly accepted to merely represent and/as study Nature and not interfere or change it. Patent law, as it emerged in the West, stated that Nature—as substances, creatures, and nonhuman processes— could not be patented, though they could be owned or sold as commodities. Patents have to be “cultural,” and not “natural,” innovations. The Bayh-Dole Act in the US was passed in , and in many respects is a model for variations in other countries. The mechanics of the legislation includes the stipulation that university research funded by government whose discoveries are patentable can either be patented and licensed by the university or, if the university declines, by the government (Biagioli a; Cooper ; Fischer ; Novas ). There is no choice between patenting or not, only who does the patenting. In effect, the government insists that publicly funded research will be privatized, which is very much in keeping with a neoliberal flow of thought. science and/as development

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In many cases it is not only the biological product, but the knowledge to isolate and/as produce it that is patentable, made private property, and therefore commodifiable. For example, in  Florida Governor Rick Scott made international headlines with his demand that his state needed more university graduates from the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) and fewer from the human sciences, singling out anthropology in particular as giving graduates poor job prospects. In Canada the federal government provides transfer payments to “have-not” provinces so they can provide services such as health care and education on a par with more prosperous provinces. The economic climate of neoliberalism and austerity at the time of writing has meant relative reductions in these transfers. For PEI, farming, fishing, and tourism have become even more precarious in this climate of reduced transfer payments. This company, Diagnostic Chemicals Limited (DCL), became quite successful and eventually grew to the point where it split in two. DCL was eventually bought by Genzyme, and the spinoff company, BioVectra, continues today. The original DCL facility changed hands again and now continues to produce diagnostics for the Japanese multinational corporation Sekisui. Holland () cautions that hybridization may not proceed smoothly or to great extents. Insofar as there is still a division of labor between programs emphasizing applied skills versus “basic” or more theoretically oriented skills, we can detect the diffracted outlines of two rather distinct groups of lab technicians and/as phenomena. There are those who will primarily work in industry, well-versed in a variety of techniques and technologies where they don’t require a detailed understanding of how to do the science. The other group of lab technicians require more advanced university degrees, often graduate degrees, and are found most often in academic settings. This is because experiments and experimental systems, as discussed in chapter , do not know outcomes in advance. These lab technicians need to be able to distinguish signal from noise, and machine malfunction from novel result in much more subtle and complex ways than the first group, though I should add that this divide is not solid or rigid. Nevertheless, as fuzzy as that line is between the two categories of technicians, they are separate enough to follow somewhat different currents in the PEI Biocluster. Since the decision was made to establish a business cluster rather than a research cluster, one could speculate most of the students with graduate degrees from UPEI’s biology program and the AVC’s biomedical science and pathology/ microbiology departments will eventually have to look off-Island in the manner culturing bioscience

Pat mentioned earlier. Although there will be some growth in positions for people with advanced degrees, the Island Prosperity Strategy is biased by design in favor of industry and the people who have learned the specific skills required by industry.  Within physics Barad (, ) mentions Schrödinger’s cat and the wave/ particle nature of light as examples of this principle (see also Barad , a, b).

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Chapter 5

Globalizing Bioscience and/as Biocapital

Since the year 2008, I have had the opportunity to attend several panels and presentations hosted either jointly or separately by the PEI BioAlliance, UPEI, and the Province of PEI, all focusing in one way or another on the business cluster’s growth and cohesion that develops through shared tacit knowledge of the Island’s bioscience and/as biocapital networks. These presentations, and others, have the dual task of network building and also allowing comparisons to various “elsewheres” on a variety of themes ranging from overviews of cluster development to intellectual property issues to the development of an appropriate lab technician labor force, and so on. Not surprisingly, these themes emerge as goals and targets in the most recent cluster development strategy (2012–15) as published by the BioAlliance (n.d.). The desire for standardization, if not outright replication, and the difficulty of achieving it, as will be mentioned later in the chapter, is entangled with the apparatuses of measurement and the apparatuses of time diffracted through one another. As we have seen in previous chapters, economic criteria are explicitly the standards of measurement used in the PEI case, which in turn forecloses certain possibilities for doing bioscience while simultaneously opening other possibilities (which I have condensed into the phrase biocapitalism and/as bioscience). It is in terms of those possibilities, those currents and/as eddies that flow faster and stronger in some directions than others, that I can consider the ACCBR. Toward the end of September 2008 UPEI hosted a panel entitled “Cluster Success: People, Place, and Positioning.” The depths of the financial crisis that was spreading outward from the United States was not yet known. Rather, there was an air of confidence and optimism in the room, peopled by members of the NRC-INH, the PEI BioAlliance, representatives of the provincial government’s newly created Department of Innovation and Advanced Learning, scientists and managers from the Island’s

bioscience companies, several members of UPEI’s Senior Management Group, as well as several faculty. The upbeat mood was buoyed by an announcement: the Fulbright program in the United States had made possible UPEI’s first Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, awarded to Dr. Steven Casper of the Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, California. As an economic sociologist specializing in business cluster emergence, growth, and sustainability, Casper’s presentation gave an overview of cluster successes and failures around the world, and discussed some of the organizational features common to clusters. He distinguished “organic” (using the common biological metaphor) clusters, that is, emerged without formal planning, from “big bang” clusters, generated through formal planning and substantial state involvement, adding that most clusters of either type tended to fail. The most successful ones, in biocapitalist terms, were the earliest to emerge and organic, such as the San Diego or Boston area clusters. Structurally they were characterized by dense networks linking bioscientists and/as managers who often circulated among firms, leading Casper to suggest innovation in management (and not bioscience) is diffused through job hopping. During the course of the question-and-answer period he added that studies of success and failure used what he called “the big examples,” but studies of smaller to medium-sized clusters were not sufficiently studied (hence one reason for his coming to PEI). Why raise these points? This brief sketch of his presentation suggests, first of all, that the early, organic bioclusters did and do continue to influence “the future,” and second, that these very clusters are the standard by which others are measured. In the terms of our quantum assumptions we can see the outlines of Barad’s spacetimemattering in the doing. Nearly a year later, in August 2009, many of the same faces in this fairly tight-knit network gathered again to hear Casper’s farewell presentation: “The PEI Bioscience Cluster: On the Road to Sustainability?” During the course of his stay he was introduced to almost all the prominent and active people in the Island biocluster and Triple Helix, and consequently was able to interview and administer questionnaires to most of them. In a very agential realist sense, then, this presentation was a report on how the Island cluster was doing global biocapitalism based on economic measures of success. My intention here is not to summarize the tables and statistics presented, but to think diffractively through the doing of Island bioscience and/as biocapitalism as characterized in this and the previous chapters. To begin, I think it is significant that neither Casper nor others who actively measure success in terms of increasing the number, size, patent and licensing incomes, revenues, and profits of firms reflexively ask(ed) to what extent the metrics used intravene(d) in what is being measured. This is to suggest, again, that Newtonian assumptions are primarily at work. Noteworthy, too, is that in the context of a large 108

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current of worldwide neoliberal economic policy (though I recognize many eddies are moving in different directions and speeds, hence altering this current) UPEI’s VicePresident of Research, while introducing Casper, remarked how the Island’s Triple Helix sought to reinvigorate the province’s economy. Casper’s task as a Fulbright scholar was to assess the future of the business cluster, not the process of what was presently happening, and in that regard he was asked to assess the promissory character of the business cluster. This is not far removed from the previous portrayal of the valuation of bioscience firms or the risk associated with various forms of finance capital. Here the future as a concept is reliant on a concept of time that is linear, standardized, and pre-given. The cluster is assumed to operate in time, rather than cluster and/as time, as phenomena, mutually differentiating each other, according to our quantum assumptions. Recall that in Casper’s September 2008 address the big and economically successful early clusters were to be the gauge of success. In an odd sense he was being asked whether the future was The Future, or some other future. By 2009 he concluded that the ratio of scientists to technicians was low relative to older clusters, that labor force turnover was lower than in older clusters, and that labor earnings are higher than the Island average but lower than the industry average. This should not be surprising given cluster size, PEI’s geopolitical and economic location, and PEI’s status as an “underdeveloped” province within Canada. In all of this we can begin to appreciate how other clusters are not simply a basis of comparison as if they were unconnected. Instead, their very activity changes the possibilities of which differences can make a difference. It is in this way we can speak of spacetimemattering in Barad’s terms. For example, Casper emphasized in his departing presentation that small and medium-sized companies were not asking to go “public” on a stock exchange, preferring instead to offer themselves for acquisition on the market, making use of federal and provincial program supports until that happened. He went on to say that because of size and location, the PEI biocluster should avoid a Silicon Valley strategy in the short term because of a lack of venture capital, but that in the medium term needed to wean itself off government supports and find ways to expand. It is this particular tension that led me, in the previous chapter, to note how the province is an eddy circulating both Keynesian and neoliberal economic policy directions. At the time of the 2009 lecture, as well as the time of my writing (and quite possibly during the time you are reading), most of the bioscience companies on the Island are small, with fewer than 20 employees, and in several cases fewer than 10. The lecture also asserted that the small size of the cluster is what facilitated the density of the network and a lot of cooperation (in Shrum et al.’s sense), which Casper lauded as positive while also cautioning against the too-parochial character of the cluster relative to other clusters. These issues are some of the currents in which the ACCBR was globalizing bioscience and/as biocapital

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trying to promote a different model of doing science. As we will see and have seen, the subordination of basic to applied bioscientific research in the business cluster combined with a continued prevalence of individuating rather than collectivizing forces in bioscience practices has worked against it. Its superpositioned possibilities for success, by its criteria of measurement, set it against the larger current. As I’ve mentioned earlier, efforts to establish a “knowledge economy,” as a means to capitalist economic growth via forms of biocapitalism, are not confined to PEI. Indeed, the Island’s “cluster” is a relative latecomer, with some geographic regions having a 15–20 year head start, others just a few years, and still others in the early stages of “cluster” development. It would seem that in the short to medium term, the entanglements of bioscience and/as biocapital will be with us for a while yet. It is a globalizing phenomenon. Globalization, however, is not a more unified process than any other we have considered. There is no River Global, and consequently there is no River Local to contrast and counterpose to it under the agential realist assumptions I am working under. Rather than the more familiar “local” versus “global,” with its Newtonian assumptions, let us consider local and/as global. Rather than homogenizing global processes that local processes disrupt or resist, let us consider the emergence of differences, and differences that make a difference, based on the apparatus(es) by which we measure difference(es). These are currents and/as eddies of various speeds, sizes, and intensities in intra-action. This chapter continues to address several of the concepts and themes of the previous chapter, but in its first section zooms out beyond the provincial and Canadian scales of magnification. It considers in broad terms some of the efforts put in place elsewhere in the world, such as Iceland, India, and Singapore. This is another way to suggest there is no doing globalization in general, though there can be more or less broad representations of it after the fact. This is followed, in the second section of this chapter, with a discussion of the logic of the “and/as” diffracted among two phenomena on PEI: bioscience and/as biocapital diffracted with/in local and/as global. The PEI bioscience cluster, the companies, the governments, the postsecondary institutions, the ACCBR, and so on all do and are done by “the global and/as local.”

global biocapital and/as community One of the points mentioned in passing in the previous chapter is that the various manifestations of doing science policies usually considers “Community” as an entity independent of the policies or other activities directed toward it, and furthermore, that the usage is vague and flexible. If “communities” are considered in the plural, there is rarely a consideration of how they interact, in all but the most simple terms, let alone intra-act. Whether this vagueness is intentional or not is not nearly as important for 110

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our purposes as the effects, the differences, this makes. Within the Triple Helix formulations, for example, the assumed homogeneity of each helix is hard to miss, as is the presumed homogeneity of the “Community” it claims to serve. That this “Community” is thought of largely in economic, especially neoliberal capitalist, terms has also been noted. But here also, biocapital, especially in neoliberal forms, manifests as a variety of “species” (Helmreich 2007b, 2008).

Stefan Helmreich (2008) on Species of Biocapital The concept of biocapital, as it has been used in this book, is a current of thought with multiple inflections creating a variety of eddies that moves both with and against the overall flow in the study of political economy. Some of this diversity has been usefully summarized by Stefan Helmreich in an article considering how the concept has been used or practiced in the last several years (2008, see also 2007b). Differences in use, even when the term itself isn’t used, are matters of differences in emphasis among bioscience researchers, bioscience business managers, bioscience policy makers, but especially among those who research those three groups, Helmreich suggests. What they all share is a sense of how much more intensively and extensively capitalism and biology have become in their intra-active doings than in comparison to, say, Sahlins’s (1976) historical investigation of capital-biology relationships from roughly the 1870s to the 1970s. Contemporary usage implies that “[i]t should be no surprise that discussions of biocapital mark a social moment” (Helmreich 2008, 471). The multiple flows of difference in a biocapitalist current that Helmreich outlines have been mentioned in several paces and places throughout this ethnography of the ACCBR. Amidst naturecultures sometimes the emphasis is on natures, other times cultures; in spacetimes it can be spaces or times that are stressed; in value sometimes the mainstream has been economic, other times ethical and moral; in material-discursive streams somewhere the flow has been more material, elsewhere the flow is more discursive. Sometimes capitalism uses biology to be productive, other times capitalism uses biology to be speculative; in some places biology is a problem looking for a capitalist solution, in other places biology is a solution looking for a capitalist problem.

What I would like to address here initially is some of the diffractive intra-actions of doing biocapital and/as doing community, especially in terms of practices and effects globalizing bioscience and/as biocapital

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that unreflexively promote generalization, homogenization, or universalization rather than reflexively resisting those practices, to the extent this is possible. In other words, I continue moving toward quantum assumptions from Newtonian ones. At a large scale it is tempting to approach the matter in terms of global vs. local, and to say that globalization is synonymous with universalism or homogenization. Doing so, however, implies a particular approach to time that I would also like to put into question with Barad’s notion of spacetimemattering (2007). When you are trying to “replicate” or “imitate” an individual experiment, or a business biocluster, or any other phenomenon in terms of our Newtonian assumptions, time is done as Time. It is an effect of trying to separate the representation from the phenomenon so that the representation can mimic it. One of the features of biocapital that anthropologists and STS scholars have been aware of is its promissory and speculative character (Cooper 2008; Fortun 2008; Helmreich 2007b, 2008; Palsson 2007). There is a promise of a return, particularly in the form of returns on economic investments. Having emerged as part of the larger shift to neoliberal economic practices in the 1970s and 1980s, biocapital shares their future orientations. Rather than trying to recreate (control) the past, more effort is put into trying to anticipate (control) the future (Adams et al. 2009). As we noted in the previous chapter, this financialization is a form of gambling that tries to spread around the probability of failure while resisting sharing the probability of success. Patent and copyright laws have been an integral part of this procession in regards to the latter, while industry partnerships with university and government research facilities and public funds have broadly been integral to the former. As was discussed in chapter 4, the PEI business biocluster is an effort to imitate clusters that have been developed elsewhere: past successes elsewhere have been fashioned into a model that informs a plan of action. Here, then, we have a tension between the past and the future played out in the “present.” As such, it is tempting to situate these events in a linear, progressive, and cumulative sense of time, such as “history” or “evolution” in its straightforward everyday sense, and thus relate to Newtonian approaches. If we follow the logic given the quantum assumptions I am trying to enact here, however, an act of imitation alters the phenomenon to be imitated (Maurer 2005; Barad 2007; Rajan 2006). It also changes the futures of the phenomena that are imitated as well as the futures of the emergent phenomenon that does the imitating. Some possibilities are excluded as new ones come forward. In a sense, entanglement and superpositioning are themselves dynamic rather than stable. Copying the function and structure of successful bioclusters alters the existing ones by forcing consideration of another player. That is very much in keeping with climbing up Wittgenstein’s ladder toward a quantum approach. What I am also suggesting is that pasts, presents, and futures—all in the plural—have also been altered. 112

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If time is also a singular multiplicity (Mol 2002), a series of currents of different speeds and intensities intra-acting, then those intra-actions will generate eddies. In an odd way, then, bioclusters and/as economic development are an effort to realize a future by ignoring its openness, based on measuring (and/as intravening in) a past also denied an openness. As efforts to do this on PEI and elsewhere occur at different speeds and intensities, resulting in a multiplicity of futures and pasts, effort gets put into making these different temporalities comparable. This is one reason why a Newtonian approach is tempting, especially in regard to time. In short, a standardization of time is an important (though not the only) means of performing or doing standardization of other apparatuses and/as phenomena in an effort to fit them into something like a Newtonian universe. We have encountered efforts at standardization in previous chapters, as well as considering some of the limits of those efforts. Whether we are talking about whole cell patch–clamping techniques in electrophysiology, or HPLC runs in a lab, or the networked familiarity among managers expected in business clusters, or the individuated practices common in academic biosciences, there is an element of what we have referred to as tacit and embodied knowledges that undermines efforts toward ever achieving a full or complete standardization. This is not to say we should never attempt it, even knowing it will ultimately fail. Rather, the point is we should be more aware of its limits and desired fields of applicability than we currently are, especially the manner in which it reduces rather than expands possibilities for a phenomenon in some moment of time. In chapter 4 we borrowed the phrase socio-technical lock-in from Callon and Rabeharisoa (2008) in reference to the limitations to diversity that result from various technoscientific practices of standardization. Efforts to measure, compare, and establish a business cluster then fall into similar constraints. Efforts to be and/as do globalization, then, encourage and assume uniformity, that is, currents will simply scale increasingly larger without encountering other currents that will effect and affect numerous eddies. The kinds of differences that make a difference by acting or not acting on this assumption have been the focus of the previous chapters. Again, what I am trying to emphasize here is that we should not always differentiate, nor always standardize. Such a distinction is “itself ” an intra-active phenomenon where human (and nonhuman) agential relations are always already a responsibility of doing. Having said this, we can return to the issue of “community.” Efforts to standardize communities, human or nonhuman, are efforts to fix spacetime as well as sharply and rigidly demarcate one group or unit from another through some means of measurement or evaluation. Conversely, it is not enough to simply state that communities are fluid phenomena whose size and contours are always in motion. A “community” may very well be a superpositioned series of possibilities whose entanglements cannot globalizing bioscience and/as biocapital

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always be known in advance. How you measure and/as intravene matters, too. Ethnographers and other researchers shape and are shaped by the phenomena they study and/as bring into being, as I’ve suggested before. In contrast to a notion of community that is rigid, unchanging, and predetermined, as in our Newtonian approximation popular among scientific research and/as policy practitioners, I prefer Fischer’s term “ennunciatory communities” (2005), with its implication of the material-discursive that Barad promotes. Here the “community” forms in the process of doing or performing community. Fischer suggests, for example, that “[t]he ventures of companies like Genomic Health and patient advocacy groups like PXE International signal the possibilities that ‘ennunciatory communities’ . . . can, in fact, shape research directions and markets for the benefit of patients and individuals— instead of leaving them to the aggregating political economies of the search for ‘billion dollar molecules’” (2005, 58). In this kind of circumstance business firms are not only business firms, and patient advocacy groups are not only patient advocacy groups. They become policy makers and scientists and several other things as well (Novas 2008). As you might expect, how such ennunciatory communities think of, and act upon, their conception of community also has a bearing on the kind of “community” that is enacted. Here Traweek’s (1988) ethnography of particle physicists in the United States and Japan is good to think with. In contrast to the Japanese physicists she observed, among American physicists there is an ethos that assumes Western rational individualism, if properly conducted, also leads to successful community. In other words, community is a collection of individuals the way 52 cards make a deck, which in turn allows for “a laissez-faire economic model for the growth of knowledge: each contributes as one chooses, and the unfettered marketplace of ideas selects the best” ( Traweek 1988, 146). We are now in a better position to appreciate how efforts to “standardize” bioclusters in a global knowledge economy, as presented in chapter 4, are likely to have limited success without resorting to a “cartoon capitalism” or an all-powerful Capitalism. Cassidy et al. (2005) argue that in Canada clusters are increasingly adopted in an uncritical fashion, particularly in regions with a history of relative economic underdevelopment and with a limited resource base, in an effort to benefit from the perceived bounty of the knowledge economy. Because such regions fear further economic underdevelopment, there is a tendency to develop and/as create markets, sometimes via clusters, that exclude a variety of marginalized groups or “communities.” These marginalized groups, however, have an interest (in all senses of the term) in being taken seriously and given resources (Callon and Rabeharisoa 2008). This fear of being “left behind” in the efforts to be a “leader” in the knowledge economy is intensified by the speculative future orientation of bioscience and/as biocapital. In this version of 114

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neoliberalism the biggest “risk” of all is thought to be the risk of avoiding risk rather than managing it. The strategies of when to file or not-file for patents or other forms of intellectual property cannot be separated from the (“local”) diffractive processes and/ as eddies of bioscience and biocapital in historical currents and/as eddies (Cooper 2008; Cooke 2009; Rajan 2006). Some of the points I have been addressing in the last few pages, in admittedly a rather broad fashion, have been investigated by Rajan (2006) in his comparative study of bioscience and/as biocapital cluster-like formations in the US and India. His study of cluster formation (my imposed term, not his) in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh indicate some important similarities and differences in relation to circumstances on PEI. Both Andhra Pradesh and PEI are more or less explicitly trying to copy what Rajan calls US “start-up culture” (2006, 84) in reference to small, capitalpoor research companies, largely funded by venture capitalists (who are, in simple terms, speculative funders willing to accept higher levels of financial risk in return for higher levels of returns on their investment should an innovation like a new drug make it to market over the long periods and testing that are required). For reasons that Rajan discusses, the Indian case differed from the American one in that the state of Andhra Pradesh is the largest venture capitalist for the cluster he examined. This suggests on the one hand the importance that differences in time and place make, while on the other hand suggests that this state has been influenced by neoliberal economic doctrine to the point where it is willing to take on the role of financial capitalist (rather than, say, the role of an industrial capitalist during the era when other economic doctrines predominated). In addition to that, the government of Andhra Pradesh must, in effect, reduce subsidies in one or more “low-tech” economic sectors to subsidize the “high-tech” bioscience sector (Rajan 2006, 88–89). The case of Andhra Pradesh is also an example of what Ong (2006) termed “neoliberalism as exception,” the idea that no static River of Neoliberalism is possible. This similarity to events in PEI will be explored further in the next section, but for the moment I will also draw attention to two major differences. One of these differences is time itself. It is not just that Indian histories are differently organized in a cultural sense, but also that this Indian state, by virtue of its spacetimemattering also intraacts with the possibilities for what could be realized in PEI, in however subtle or small a manner. In other words, the emergence of the Andhra Pradesh cluster as a phenomenon also made it an apparatus in the formation of the PEI cluster and vice versa. This is the case even though there may be no immediate or direct link between them. Second, there is also the difference in a variety of scales, or the strength and size of the currents and eddies in motion, if you like. This is not simply a matter of force (though to some extent it is that), but also direction and influence. globalizing bioscience and/as biocapital

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Also worth considering is the need to explore how publicly funded science becomes privatized, and here too the Indian case of bioscience and/as biocapital is a useful point of departure. Rajan describes how differences in economic scale are differences that make a difference—that increasing the scale of a company does not translate into standardization of biocapitalist firms. A small start-up company made up of a handful of scientist-entrepreneurs (Kleinman 2003) and one or two administrative staff is not simply a small-scale replica of a large multinational pharmaceutical company. They have come to influence each other in different ways not only because of differences in scale, but also differences in time. Larger biocapitalist companies, especially pharmaceuticals, have increasingly shed their research labs as the costs of research began to increase. The most straightforward genetic and disease conditions had been researched, techniques for curing or controlling had been patented, and products brought to market around the 1980s. These patents are now running out at a time when it is increasingly accepted that human genetic diseases and illnesses are much more complex than was thought just a generation ago. Nonetheless, these companies have amassed billions of dollars over the years. Rather than investing in research, with its decreasing likelihood of finding a single molecule to treat some condition as the understanding of biological complexity at all scales increases, multinational pharmaceutical companies are on the lookout for small companies that have researched promising prospects but lack the capital and other resources to see if they are medically and economically viable to bring to market. Basically, their large cash reserves allow them to load the market dice to an extent. At the same time, though, large pharmaceutical companies also support “open” or public information databases, such as the thousands of freely available genetic sequences deposited in the SNP Consortium, for example. The reason for this seeming paradox is that if smaller companies doing the early steps of research do the patenting, larger firms in the drug development process must pay for it. Being “open,” then, keeps the larger firms’ costs down while weakening the bargaining power of smaller-sized competitors (Rajan 2006, 41–61; see also Cooke 2007, 2009). “Indeed, it is hard to take an excessively comfortable position on intellectual property issues in biotech and drug development writ large when major proponents of DNA sequence patents are some genetic disease patient advocacy groups, and major opponents are big multinational pharmaceutical companies” (Rajan 2006, 73). As we have also seen, many of these small companies cluster around research universities or universities with a strong but focused research component, like UPEI, in large measure through Mode 1 and 2 or Triple Helix kinds of science policy. In this way we get a sense of how publicly funded research in the biosciences is privatized and biocapitalized. It is rarely in explicit and specific terms, but more a series of processes or currents putting probabilities or the management of risk in favor of large 116

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multinational companies. According to Cooke (2007, 2009), one reason such large firms like to have a presence in bioscience clusters and be part of the networking and local tacit knowledge in business affairs, even when the research conducted in the cluster does not fit existing product lines, is to be aware of opportunities for partnerships or buy-outs. It also gives us a sense of not only why, but how, universities and their research centers and personnel are integral to bioclusters as a strategy for a knowledge economy. The demands for standardized practices in scientific research cannot be separated from intra-actions of standardization broadly conceived (Kleinman 2003; Rajan 2006; Cooper 2008; Cooke 2007). The Biopolis project in Singapore is another example of bioscience and/as biocapital intra-acting as a means of comparing and contrasting with the processes occurring on PEI. Like the Indian case Rajan studied, Singapore began its planning of Biopolis in the 1980s, opening the biomedically oriented research park in 2003 (Clancey 2012; Coopmans et al. 2012; Waldby 2009). Also like the Indian case, the scale of Biopolis relative to PEI is many times more intensive and extensive. This island city-state, even in very crude naturalcultural terms, differs in climate, histories, population size and density, and geographic size. The largely rural character of PEI, somewhat off the beaten paths of commerce in northeastern North America, stands in sharp contrast to the urban and cosmopolitan character of Singapore, centrally situated in the commercial hub of Southeast Asia with strong connections to the rest of Australasia. The Singapore government has also explicitly promoted a transition to a knowledge economy, but its historical point of departure is an economy based on industrial manufacturing rather than a resource economy based in agriculture and fisheries. In other words, one is trying to do “postindustrialism” while the other experienced industrial manufacturing largely as an absence. From this sketch it should be evident that doing “clustering” on each island is quite different, with similarities being more apparent than substantial, and that the currents and/as eddies in motion are certainly connected, even entangled, but by no means the same. This point can be taken further when considering how the two clusters function and to what ends. To put the matter in simple—perhaps simplistic—terms, Biopolis is explicitly a research cluster first and a business cluster second, while the PEI Biocluster is explicitly a business cluster first and a research cluster second. In the phrase “bioscience and/as biocapital” is a question of emphasis in the course of actualizing superpositioned possibilities. Certainly the cluster characteristics in Porter’s sense hold for Biopolis, as does the M1/M2 distinction and the Triple Helix of academia, government, and industry: the research park is located beside the National University of Singapore and the National University Hospital. And yet, from a conceptual and policy point of view, Biopolis was intended to attract “world-class” researchers as a priority, followed by world-class globalizing bioscience and/as biocapital

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education and basic research, which in turn was then expected to lead to successful public-private business partnerships based on a large volume of potential marketable products emerging from the large scale of basic research. At least, this is how it was expressed by the Deputy Prime Minister in his speech when opening Biopolis (Waldby 2009). On PEI, as we saw in chapter 4, the larger current was to promote business, adding research capacity as needed, in terms of both scale and focus. Biopolis resisted a specialized research focus or foci (Coopmans et al. 2012; Clancey 2012), while on PEI a small number of research foci were given prominence. Because the government of PEI, in its role as state venture capitalist (at least partially), has limited capital at its disposal, we get a sense that scale of cluster can be a difference that makes a difference, as does the placement of the emphasis in bioscience and/as biocapital. Similar to the situation in PEI, Singapore’s Biopolis cluster was never intended to be a narrowly scientific or economic project, even though largely represented in those terms. It was always intended to be transformative of the many naturalcultural communities within which it engaged (Clancey 2012; Hua 2012; Waldby 2009). These communities, whether human-centered or not, were to be agentially limited in their intra-actions in rather particular ways, such that new forms of “graduated citizenship” (Ong 2006), new forms of social control, and new subjectivities or identities emerged. Which communities were included, the manner of their inclusion, and the spatial and/as temporal scope can also be expressed as eddies in motion. Relative to PEI, though, Biopolis is an expression of a more comprehensive scale of what Barad termed spacetimemattering. The effort to be a local and/as global phenomenon is both more intensive and extensive, as is the effort to achieve a particular kind of (linear, future) time under the banner of “progress.” As we have seen, this orientation to/in time fits well with the neoliberal orientation of bioscience and/as biocapital. Here, too, the space and/as time differences between Singapore and PEI matter. They can be summarized in this way: PEI’s lack of “clustering,” as a phenomenon, in the 1980s shaped Singapore’s clustering, and leading up to the present, Singapore’s clustering shaped PEI’s. Time is part of what emerges in diffraction patterns of intrasecting phenomena. In contrast to the cluster-like properties of the Indian and Singaporean examples, recent bioscientific and/as biocapitalist events in Iceland mark a useful contrast. A great deal of academic interest and media attention have been paid in recent years to the efforts of deCode Genetics, Inc. to access a publicly funded database (“biobank”) constructed from the historical, genealogical, and medical records of Icelanders on the assumption that centuries of relative isolation has produced a relatively homogeneous genetic pool or population (Fortun 2008; Palsson 2007; Palsson and Rabinow 1999, 2001). The expectation, somewhat fulfilled but mostly too optimistic, was that genes 118

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and gene sequences in such a population could be identified in ways that would yield patents that in turn may be converted into new diagnostic or therapeutic tools. Here, again, we encounter the issue of transforming public resources into private gain via the transformation of knowledge into a “fictitious” commodity (Palsson 2007; Palsson and Rabinow 2001). In this context, I would like to emphasize not the privatization of knowledge per se but the appearance here of a Triple Helix type of relationship with no effort, as far as I can tell, to develop a Porter-like business or research cluster. It was primarily a relationship between the government of Iceland and deCode Genetics, with some involvement of the University of Iceland. Insofar as economic development was supposed to happen, from the perspective of the Icelandic state, it was through a variety of agreements, contracts, and taxes. But this has presented its own difficulties, not least of which is time. The many genomics companies that emerged in the wake of the Human Genome Project—a research project that itself came to generate several eddies at the confluence of public and private funding currents—are inseparable from neoliberal economic streams, as I’ve been emphasizing throughout. Fortun (2008, 3) encourages us to “[t]hink of them as bio-dot-coms, since they too traded on the promise of information” (emphasis mine). He adds that in the year 2000, the year deCode began offering shares for sale on the stock market, over 60 other genomics companies also did likewise, raising nearly $40 billion of biocapital, an amount nearly four times larger than in the previous three years combined (2008, 191). And yet, company executives and scientist-entrepreneurs cannot make well-informed estimations of value, economic or otherwise, in advance. These kinds of biocapitalist firms, and the future-oriented value(s) attached to them, began to falter just a few years later partly in relation to the 2008 global financial collapse, and partly because there was (and still is) a coming-to-terms with the bioscientific complexity of the cellular, genetic, and various “omic” processes for diagnosing and treating diseases. Certainly in terms of a biocapitalist transition to a “knowledge economy,” Iceland’s efforts have been very different from PEI’s. This is despite the fact that there are otherwise some strong similarities between the two islands. Both, for example, identify strongly with the resource sectors of the economy (fishing and agriculture for PEI, fishing for Iceland; Palsson and Rabinow 1999, 2001), both have a substantial proportion of rural population, both are relatively small in terms of human population (about 300,000 for Iceland, 140,000 for PEI), and both are geopolitically and economically marginal relative to the larger political-economic entities they are associated with (the rest of Canada for PEI, the rest of Europe for Iceland). In this series of comparisons I have tried to indicate that the local and/as global is neither “local” nor “global,” if the words are understood in Newtonian terms. Furthermore, I have also tried to suggest that questions of time and timing are not uniform globalizing bioscience and/as biocapital

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either. There are many such initiatives, each a relatively distinct phenomenon, yet diffractively connected (i.e., entangled). The many naturalcultural apparatuses (and/as phenomena) that “do” clustering may bear a similarity to one another, but we should be cautious not to reduce them to one another, nor to assert there is an ideal representation they should approximate. This is another way of suggesting that “globality” and “locality” are always already in motion through each other, currents whose diffractions cause eddies to come and go, even as the currents are themselves eddies.

bioscience, biocapital, and business clusters: intellectual property on pei There is a widespread assumption that “globalization” is a uniform process that acts upon somewhere local (Ong 2006). Conversely, there is also a commonly held assumption that someplace “local” wants to go global. In either case these assumptions posit a preformed entity, and in both cases transformations are assumed to occur through inter-actions in (linear) time (our Newtonian assumptions). For the remainder of this chapter I will consider how the supposed global/local interactions (rather than the intra-action I’ve been promoting) have been expressed on PEI in terms of how some of the biocapitalist world has been invited to the Island. I will conclude with a brief discussion of how the enactment of those invitations (and their Newtonian assumptions) affected the ACCBR, removing several superpositioned possibilities. Alex, during the course of one of our conversations, relayed that representatives of clusters, governments or companies historically went on trade missions, seeking out contacts with other companies or clusters in an effort to find a “fit” between the products, people, and processes between the two locales. In these circumstances the timing and pace of intra-action (perceived as interactions) worked against achieving an understanding of the tacit and embodied knowledges and networks in the economic realm. Instead, Alex offered: I am a firm believer in reverse prospecting. . . . Reverse prospecting means you have to bring these people here where they have to spend a day or two. They can then experience the energy here, they can experience the people here, they can experience the environment here, and you have their undivided attention. . . . [Y]ou couldn’t try and inspire them if you go there for half an hour. The other thing would also be their environment, so their routine problems are still lingering somewhere. If you bring them here they’re exposed to a different environment, it’s a different experience. Before considering the ACCBR further, however, I would like to consider some other cases of what Alex called reverse prospecting as part of the “local” strategy for doing 120

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“global.” In mid-May 2009 Dr. Michael Mayne, then Deputy Minister of the Department of Innovation and Advanced Learning in the provincial government, was telling the audience on the UPEI campus about the importance of bringing experienced and well-connected people in the bioscience industry to the Island. The remarks were made in the course of introducing Dr. Michael Entzeroth, who was Deputy Director of Singapore’s Biopolis. The presentation itself was an overview of the project and covered many of the items already mentioned in the previous section. Biopolis’s strategy for bioscience and/as biocapital, as already stated, is to promote and fund basic research to generate findings for applied research, also well supported, all the way through clinical trials. This occurs at scales not possible for PEI. More important than the presentation was the fact that he was on PEI at all, networking with members of the Island cluster. Alex relayed to me at a later date that Biopolis was weak in doing toxicology studies at the time, leading to some discussions with the AVC. A similar situation was the case for the April 2009 visit of Dr. Randolf Sandler, Head of Corporate Department Research and Development at Boehringer-Ingelheim Vetmedica Inc. (the United States animal health division of the German multinational pharmaceutical conglomerate). The title of his presentation was “Animal Health: Innovation as Key Driver for Success.” Again, the fact of his presence and the opportunities for networking made the presentation itself rather secondary. As Latour (2005) and others have suggested, such simple introductory visits ought to undermine overly rigid conceptions of “global” and “local.” Two years later Bob Steininger, Senior Vice President of Manufacturing at Acceleron Pharma, headquartered in the greater Boston area, spoke on “Preparing Students for Biotechnology: An Industry Perspective.” The link here to the desire to establish a stable and suitably educated Island workforce as outlined by Mike, Pat, Rory, Sam, and others in chapter 4 should be easy to make. Beyond the importance of networking via reverse prospecting, which I have already emphasized, this presentation stressed the importance of keeping a fair degree of control over applied research within businesses through what might be called modular design in the workplace. It is an example of what Ong (2006), Sennett (2006), and others have referred to as the “flexible workplace,” in terms of not only labor, but also the facility, which can reorganize a production line in the course of a day. To the extent possible, disposable (rather than fixed) equipment and supplies are used to keep down costs to the company. It is not clear what the “costs” might be at other scales and through other metrics, such as the environmental naturalcultural consequences. The audience was told the main facility cost only US $6 million instead of the US $25 million for comparable facilities with the more common model of fixed means of production. As Steininger put it, employees are used as an integral part of globalizing bioscience and/as biocapital

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the production process instead of as supports to fixed process. For these reasons he argued the Acceleron model was important to the PEI business cluster. The second half of his lecture turned, significantly, toward the relationship between education and the bioscience industry. We have already indicated the importance of labor force training for biocapitalist economic development on the Island. Bob Steininger’s presentation proposed going further, arguing that flexible technicians and research scientists need to be cultivated beginning in high school. Like PEI, Massachusetts offers a variety of postsecondary programs providing conceptual and practical forms of instruction in bioscience and/as biocapital. There are numerous co-op and internship opportunities for students to acquire skills needed by industry as well as certificate and degree programs providing bioscience students with knowledge in business and management affairs. By introducing such training and summer work opportunities in high school, the presumption is that students will develop the flexibility needed to be part of the (flexible) production process instead of supports to a fixed process. In turn, the industry will be able to lower its costs. To this end, Acceleron and other companies in the Boston area have helped promote special biotech course options in high school, allowing students to perform transfections, multiply genes and other proteins in PCR machines, and so on. If I may put all this in simpler terms, the advice given in the course of the presentation was to expand the Triple Helix and Mode 2 package of policies into students’ teen years. In that way students will have sufficient industry “savvy” by the time they enter the full-time workforce. Although most of the Island’s bioscience companies are small to medium-sized enterprises, there is some large corporate presence on the Island as well, such as Novartis and Sekisui. Moreover, as Steven Casper sugggested, many of these small companies are seeking to be bought by large corporate firms. Dr. Peter Smith, Senior VicePresident of Non-Clinical Development Sciences at Millenium Pharmaceuticals in the Boston area (now part of the Takeda group), gave an overview of “Modern Approaches to Discovery and Development in the Biopharmaceutical Industry” on the UPEI campus in June 2010. Throughout the course of his presentation he made it evident that Millenium was thoroughly entangled in the Boston cluster and/as Triple Helix. What struck me was the frankness with which he, as a representative of “Big Pharma,” stated the overriding concern in all of Big Pharma these days is the lack of productivity in the short to medium term. Another way to think of this is that the spacetime continuum for “blockbuster” drugs is collapsing. As patents run out, biocapitalism does not eddy back into bioscience. Now that the “low-hanging fruit” has been picked, the development of new drugs requires more money and other resources, and offers less likelihood of success in coming to market than ever before. At the time 122

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Smith forecast that Takeda Pharmaceuticals would lose US $3 billion in revenues once three of its major drugs came off patent protection in 2011. He was also very clear that due to the way therapeutics were done, that is, the way pharmaceutical bioscience was diffracted through biocapital, blockbuster drugs are likely a thing of the past. As notions of a universal biological body begin to give way to “local biologies” (see Lock and Nguyen 2010) and “biosocialities” (Rabinow 1992), we are seeing the emergence of personalized medicine as a phenomenon. Using cancer treatment as an example, Smith suggested the disease would increasingly be treated with a combination of drugs rather than following the single-drug model. He shared with the audience that the mantra in his department is “The Three ‘R’s: The Right Target, the Right Molecule, and the Right Patient.” In this current the movement from research into development is a fraught exercise. As Smith put it in his presentation, “we might be publishing interesting papers, but that doesn’t necessarily help the company.” The time required for development, the lower proportion of people for whom new drugs work effectively, and the increase in market competition for producing similar drugs have all put a squeeze on corporate profits and the development of new molecules that are effective. Implicit in his presentation was the observation made by Hughes (1999) that economic competitors in an industry follow each other’s patents and publications to gain insight into competing companies’ areas of interest. “This helps explain why patents tend over a period of several years to cluster around problem sites” (1999, 208). Beyond that, it again gestures to the extent to which bioscience and biocapital are entangled; business clusters and scientific “problem clusters” propel each other. I came away from Smith’s presentation with a better appreciation of the corporate strategy, mentioned in the previous section and chapter 4, of buying small start-up companies on one hand while promoting open access to biobanks on the other. Because of economic competition and the lively resistance of molecules to universalized human bodies, time is being reshaped—compressed—as part of intra-active spacetimemattering. Or, put another way, the time for in-house developing and testing has effectively shrunk the period of new drugs’ market exclusivity through patent protection from 10 years to 5 months, according to him. The difficulty for Big Pharma research and development, in Smith’s estimation, is that “you have to patent as early as possible, but it works for you and against you because the clock is ticking.” Interesting, too, was that during the question-and-answer period a man who identified himself as an employee of the People’s Republic of China asked when Big Pharma would start producing cancer drugs for the “other” 5 billion people on the planet. In response Smith asked how much people would or could pay to extend life two to four months, which are the present limits of some of the new drugs. All concerned recognized the moral dilemma, which is simultaneously a bioscientific and/as economic globalizing bioscience and/as biocapital

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and/as ethical dilemma. Unprofitable companies cannot produce anything at all for very long; profitable ones are selective by definition (because what they select for, what they “measure,” is profitability). This has always been an issue when capitalist currents intra-act with, through, and in other currents, but is especially intense under the present dominance of neoliberal economic doctrine. It is for this reason that I made the brief contrast to a Keynesian policy of state involvement in the previous chapter. Quite simply, other possibilities are doable, and could go much further than Keynesianism with cooperative or state-controlled enterprises. In the process of this intra-active doing, we alter what it means to be responsible/do responsibility, as Barad suggested, but we also redefine “life” (Barad 2008, 2010, 2011b; Cooper 2008; Rose 2007a, 2007b). The following month saw an on-campus presentation by two legal experts in intellectual property, providing further insight for members of the Island business cluster and campus bioscience researcher community considering a scientist-entrepreneur status. “Licensing University Technology: A Perspective from a Large Biotechnology Corporation” was jointly presented by Jonathan O’Brien, Chair of the Intellectual Property Practice Group at the Honigman, Miller, Schwartz, and Cohn legal firm, and Dan Darnley, Vice-President and Chief Intellectual Property Officer at Millennium Pharmaceuticals. The changing dynamics of “Big Pharma” coupled with a desire to “be global” in a knowledge economy made this an interesting—and spacetimely— visit. Building on Peter Smith’s presentation from the previous month, the pair of panelists reiterated that large corporations had an interest in the success of small start-up companies. Darnley encouraged the scientist-entrepreneurs in start-ups on PEI by saying “We need you to be successful . . . all of us have pipelines to fill.” I’ve already mentioned that large pharmaceutical corporations are going through a massive loss of revenue as patents on several lucrative drugs reach their expiry dates and their times begin to flow more rapidly again. Helmreich (2003) remarks that patenting is an attempt to freeze time, in a sense making its movement glacial, if only for the duration of the patent. The presentation by O’Brien and Darnley was more concerned about the process of buying intellectual property, or start-ups who owned intellectual property, than about openness and the free flow of information, though this also was touched upon obliquely. Both lawyers noted the importance of the BayhDole Act in the commoditization of knowledge in United States universities, in effect privatizing publicly funded research (see chapter 3). They were also aware that this law promoted more applied forms of science over the previously more prevalent basic research. Ever since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, there has been a tension in university settings between the sharing of bioscientific knowledge with little to no time lag (an unconditional openness if you like) and withholding knowledge until it can be commoditized through intellectual property. Both O’Brien and Darnley made plain (echoing Rory Francis of the BioAlliance) that this was an issue of time and timing. 124

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For academic bioscientists more inclined to favor a Mode 1 approach to academic research, the pair warned that they were not likely to do as well financially as individuals. The reason, they suggested, is that if some of the data, techniques, or processes are made public too early, then the knowledge could not be privately appropriated or given patent protection. They went on to say that after Bayh-Dole in the US, the rapid rise of technology transfer offices such as WARF at the University of Wisconsin, which was one of the first (Kleinman 2003), or Three Oaks Innovations at UPEI has created tension between the sharing of information in the academic community and the increasing expectation among university administrations that intellectual property concerns be addressed. Younger researchers, however, were said to be more comfortable with the more business-oriented model of the scientist-entrepreneur than those who are in mid-to-late career, a point not largely different from Nick’s in chapter 3. In this regard it is important to remember that with the rise of Mode 2 kinds of educational policy, Mode 1 forms also had significant successes built on very different assumptions and principles. Perhaps the most remarkable instance, in terms of our present discussion, is the Drosophila (fruit fly) bioscience “community.” Over several decades it has fostered not only cooperative projects but collaborative ones that have, for the most part, resisted the effects of those individuating forces operating in the biosciences. The many advances in understanding genetic phenomena that the Drosophilists have generated over the years are largely on the basis of an open flow of information, in stark contrast to the more property-oriented activity of the present (Kohler 1999). The difficulty from the perspective of present practice is that there is no way of measuring, in economic terms, what Drosophilists have or have not accomplished because they have been operating by a different measure of success (Kohler 1999). There are different “understandings of what it means to include people well” (Hayden 2007, 733). Both O’Brien and Darnley stated in the course of their talk that the early practice of “file (patents) early and often” common in the 1980s and 1990s is being rethought, an issue also commented upon by Rory Francis of the PEI BioAlliance. Rory was quite clear that the issue of intellectual property in academia was a “red herring,” a source of misinformation. He suggested that “there is nothing [about] patenting that prevents a publication, there is a timing issue.” Like O’Brien and Darnley, Francis suggested much of the tension at present was a generational one, where “younger researchers coming in seem to have more exposure to this,” and that “the best way of [research] having impact, in some cases, depending of the nature of the research, is for it to be part of the market economy.” Rory went on to talk about the importance of investment in realizing ideas, but they have to be ideas that make commercial sense. In that regard the technology transfer office at UPEI, Three Oaks Innovations, has to build trust with researchers on globalizing bioscience and/as biocapital

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campus in a way that takes account of the differing reward systems within universities and bioscience companies. In his words, “there is a critical interface there that I think is important to . . . get beyond, to help universities’ research to get beyond the fear of the unknown, which is what it is when it comes to patents and patent protection.” Implicit in Rory’s reasoning are many of the concerns expressed in the previous chapter. Given PEI’s marginal economic and geopolitical position within Canada, let alone the world, it is not altogether surprising that the business cluster desires more scientistentrepreneurs. When the concern is that the only thing worse than being exploited by biocapital is not being exploited by biocapital, other ways of doing science seem, rightly or wrongly (by whatever measure you prefer) like a luxury the Island cannot afford. One of the reasons patenting practices have changed, say O’Brien and Darnley, is that it is an expensive process. Many patents never make it to market as products for a variety of reasons, from technical to cultural (Bauchspies et al. 2006, 80). According to Jon, the intellectual property world is changing rapidly, such that researchers and technology transfer offices are more strategic in pursuing patents. The technology transfer office at the University of Wisconsin, for example, which was one of the first university intellectual property offices to be established in the wake of the BayhDole Act, has come to be quite selective in terms of which faculty “discoveries” will be converted into patent applications (Kleinman 2003, 133). It is now more important to “pick and choose your battles.” Another way to think of this is that while there must be some openness, this “openness” must be (self ) regulated by academic researchers in consultation with their universities. Insofar as there should be some degree of “openness,” the catch is when (the matter of timing) and by what measure (the matter of doing and/as meaning). After all, people talk, and scientists are no exception. If they are restricted in what they can formally disclose, they nonetheless informally gossip within local scientific communities (Cooke 2007). Another reason the “file early and often” approach is falling into disfavor seems to be industry-related. Although they did not make the point explicitly, these two lawyers well acquainted with the corporate world of Big Pharma hinted—or at least I took it as a hint—that the early approach to intellectual property made worse an already existing problem beyond the expense of patenting or buying start-up companies with promising intellectual property. As the concentration and centralization of capital in the pharmaceutical industry proceeds, there are fewer and fewer companies because the remaining companies buy their competitors when they can. The more this current in the industry flows, in Dan’s estimation, the more restricted the flows and currents of scientific creativity become in research and development. The shrinking number of players in Big Pharma is creating, to paraphrase the environmentalist activist Vandana Shiva (1993), an intellectual monoculture of the mind 126

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where naturalcultural diversity is being reduced. With fewer differences there are fewer differences that can make a difference. In this respect we get a sense of why Dan and Jon stressed that a balance between “openness” and intellectual property is possible (and desirable), and why they suggested Big Pharma wants start-up companies and small clusters to succeed. The big companies need diversity to maintain their viability even as their activities in other ways undermines that diversity. The matter of timing for a patent application is a matter of risk management, of managing the future (as discussed earlier), and therefore a matter of timing times and actualizing one time from superpositioned possibilities. What these brief vignettes of reverse prospecting on PEI have in common is that the global and local “levels” do not preexist under our agential realist assumptions, even if others do operate on that assumption. Rather, reverse prospecting is something practiced or done; it is one way to do globalization and enact the global-local divide. By now you might begin to wonder how the ACCBR fits into this and the spacetimemattering I’ve alluded to. Revisiting what has been said about eddies and/as currents is a good place to start. Although this is certainly a metaphor, it is also always already more than a metaphor; it is material-discursivity in the doing. Eddies and/ as currents are never more, but also never less, than relatively or relationally distinct. They are entangled phenomena emerging through intra-action; they come into being through doing rather than preexisting beforehand, including acts of measuring, identifying, and observing. I suggested in chapter 1 that while an eddy in a current is moving with a current, in its motion of circulating it can be both with or against, faster or slower than, the current of which it is a part. Currents and/as eddies are singular multiplicities (Mol 2002) that are problematic if approached using Newtonian assumptions. As we continue to climb Wittgenstein’s ladder toward quantum assumptions, though, we can also consider the element of time. Most of the time we assume time is linear and standardized (Mirmalek 2008), but if we take spacetimemattering seriously, time is also a singular multiplicity where what it “is” is entangled with what it “does” and how it is “done.” Paul Rabinow’s (1996a) account of how PCR technology for duplicating strands of DNA developed around 1980 mentions that, at that time, what Shrum et al. (2007) have referred to as collaboration was infrequent in both the academy and industry. The individuating forces of Euro-American biosciences of which Knorr-Cetina (1999) speaks were more or less synchronized with one another. As neoliberal economic policy, the molecular biology “revolution,” Triple Helix science policy, and Mode 2 educational policy, among other things, began to intra-act, their diffraction patterns indicated emergent temporal circulation rather than synchronicity. In the process of circulation some elements moved faster than the current, and others slower. That is globalizing bioscience and/as biocapital

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to say, the whirl of the eddy creates a “time lag” (Bhabha 1994), where time does not coincide with itself, but like in Shakespeare’s Hamlet time can be out of joint (Derrida 1994). Another way to think of this is that bioscience and/as biocapital is always flowing, that the logic of the “and/as” indicates that phenomena, including their spacetimes, are motions, and that motions entail currents and eddies. Time lags, then, are measured (with everything that entails) to be detected: they both create and are created within the act and through measuring. When the choices were made between emphasizing business clusters over research clusters, or applied research over basic research, time lags began to swirl and times began to go out of joint. For example, basic research is now so far “behind the times” that applied research has correspondingly less to work with, which in business clusters leads to the seemingly contradictory practices of Big Pharma wanting to buy intellectual property and thus restricting the flow of (some) information while also advocating a free flow of (some) information. Openness, then, is not only a spatial matter, but a temporal one. Moreover, what openness means is connected to what it does and how it is measured. This resonates well with Palsson’s (2007) proposal that we study not what intellectual property “is,” but what intellectual property “does.” When the predominant measures are largely biocapitalist, as I have been outlining them for PEI (it is a business cluster, not a research cluster that is desired), then the bioscience with which it is entangled is deemphasized in much the same way that light, when measured as a wave, de-emphasizes its particle natureculture. “Openness,” although related, is not the same. Recall that a connection does not mean that the phenomena connected are equally connected; the portion of an eddy moving against a larger current is still taken by the current even as it influences it. There is an openness to appropriation, in the patenting sense, which swirls against and/as with an openness to communication, in the sense of sharing scientific information. One does not “cause” the other, but they emerge through diffractive intra-action. The presentations I attended as well as my interview with Rory of the PEI BioAlliance made clear that attitudes to intellectual property were moving in the direction of becoming more flexible with regard to time and/as timing. When the measure of success is economic, the exponential growth of patent applications leads to a situation where research can’t as easily generate the innovation that is desired. This is a point recognized by many supporters of the Triple Helix and Mode 2 university. As Jonathan O’Brien put it, it is better to “pick and choose your battles.” Implicit within this way of doing intellectual property is doing bioscience in a manner that largely conforms to the individuating forces mentioned earlier. The presumption is still the individual laboratory, headed by a single researcher who sometimes cooperates but rarely collaborates with other labs and researchers that are structurally 128

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similar in organization. In the intellectual property realm the shift away from “file early and often” encourages somewhat greater bioscientific cooperation, but still resists greater collaboration. It is likely not a coincidence that biocapitalist business firms also tend to operate mostly individually, sometimes cooperatively, but very rarely collaboratively. Doing otherwise would challenge the (too often overrated and oversimplified) principle of “competition” in capitalist markets. All this is to say that Andy’s worry, in his role as director of the ACCBR, about space right from the opening of the facility was also simultaneously a worry about time. The facility’s spacetime, as an open-concept laboratory, was a different spacetime than those of individual colleagues (or even that of his own lab) or other bioscience research centers on campus. An individuated lab’s or center’s manner of doing “openness” tends to stop at some degree of cooperation, and in this regard more easily relates with the somewhat greater flexibility for sharing information about whether and when to apply for patent protection. On the other hand, as we know from chapter 2, the ACCBR’s manner of doing openness begins with some degree of cooperation, with the intention of working toward collaboration. It is not just that the time scales in the case of each bioscientific and/as biocapitalist phenomenon are (relatively) different, but that the times enacted in each case are (relatively) different. Different ways of doing bioscience, time, openness, and intellectual property are involved. They are different phenomena and/as apparatuses whose intra-actions are measured by neoliberal economic criteria. As we have seen, in those terms Andy’s worries about the ACCBR are justified. It was never a question of whether it was a good idea, but whether it was producing sufficiently quickly based on the metrics employed, metrics that emphasized biocapital over bioscience. We should be careful here to reiterate that this does not mean that biocapital (or any other form of capital) directly and causally manipulates bioscience (Kleinman 2003). Neither the Government of PEI, the PEI BioAlliance, UPEI, nor individual firms “control” the ACCBR like a puppet. They are part of a milieu whose intraactions more easily facilitates the persistence of some phenomena at the expense of others. They enable it and/as limit it within and through various agencies (human and nonhuman) of measurement (i.e., intra-actions). The bioscientific and/as biocapitalist spacetime flowing on PEI largely made the ACCBR the part of an eddy that moves against a current. This does not mean it did not have relative autonomy nor that it had no effects on the “whole” of which it was a “part.” By going against the flow it expressed a difference, though to what extent it was a difference that makes a difference is too difficult to say at the present moment. It also indicates that there are other possibilities. Staff and research personnel that have moved through the facility took some of those possibilities with them when they left, even as they intra-actively transformed those possibilities. globalizing bioscience and/as biocapital

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Sam once asked me how I might wish to do science curriculum differently in PEI’s primary and secondary schools. At the time I fumbled for words. I cannot have that moment back, but that fumbling set in motion a stream of thought I will summarize here and now (which is to say temporarily): primary and secondary school students are taught that Science, capital S, is separate from Nature and Society, just as Nature and Society are separate from one another. In this way the assumptions and doings of our Newtonian conception of Science are put in motion and perpetuated. Moreover, they are not taught collaborative models of doing science, though they are sometimes encouraged to be cooperative. Certainly some of the equipment, but especially the means of testing, measuring, and evaluating students, reinforces forms of individualism that encourage ideas of selfhood and identity also corresponding to Newtonian assumptions. By the time they enter the academy, government, or industry as people who use and/or offer their services, their sense of possibility is often much diminished. They cannot consider the complementarity of that which they exclude. We need a Third Culture that is more than, and does not rely on, the interaction between the Two Cultures discussed by C.P. Snow (Rabinow 1996b), just as we need a Mode 3 university that is more than the intersection of Mode 1 and Mode 2 in the “schizophrenic university” (Shore 2010). Now may be the time to embrace the agential possibility of what the French anthropologist Joël Candau called “slow science,” taking inspiration from the Slow Food movement in Europe (McCabe 2012). By these criteria the ACCBR gestured to a superpositioned possibility, a realistic (in all senses of the term) potential. Through its ups and downs, in terms of (working toward) becoming realized, it was never intended to be a thing, or a person, or a place, in that Newtonian sense. It was intended to “be” a doing, a spacetimemattering of relationships within and between and across humans and nonhumans, even if the members of the ACCBR might not have chosen quite those terms. What I would say about education curriculum, if Sam were to ask me again today, is that such a possibility ought not to seem so out of the ordinary. Such is responsibility.

notes  I remind the reader again that Prince Edward Island, as an Island, is itself an important and lively apparatus and/as phenomenon intra-acting with other apparatuses and/as phenomena (Baldacchino ). That I have not emphasized its contributions in no way diminishes them. Comparisons to Iceland and Singapore help emphasize the message. It would be interesting to diffractively read Helmreich’s (a) research in Hawaii in these terms as well.  In contrast to the monolithic representation of “Globalization,” Haraway () proposes we offer not a denial of globalization, but a performance of 130

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





 

 



alter-globalizations, which I take to be the actualization of other superpositioned possibilities. Tsing () argues that universalizing discourses and desires may not be avoidable. However, as these desires and discourses intra-act they create “friction,” preventing universals from emerging. Although universalizing and generalizing may be ethico-epistemo-ontologically unavoidable, how friction is thought of (if at all) or otherwise done matters a great deal. Similarly, Aihwa Ong () proposes that neoliberalism in intra-active practice always generates “exceptions” that run counter to the homogeneity it is expected to enact. Mary Morgan, a historian of science, has considered the changing role of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game in contemporary (neo-)classical economics. She suggests that “in [economic] theoretical analysis, the outcome of individually rational and strategic behaviour in the PD game leads to an outcome that is jointly irrational. That is, by following the economists’ injunction to maximize their individual gain, both prisoners end up with a worse outcome than if they had both collaborated” (Morgan , ). I mention this point because it speaks to issues of responsibility, in Barad’s terms, and also that Morgan’s insight may be scalable in a variety of ways, for example in bioscience labs or even bioscience business clusters. Callon and Rabeharisoa () speak specifically of patient groups advocating for research in orphan diseases. I am extrapolating from their argument to include a wider variety of socially, environmentally, politically, and economically marginalized communities. The many small information technology companies in s’ Silicon Valley that were funded this way are taken as a model. Naming Singapore’s Biopolis as a cluster is partly my doing as a means of comparison, even as I recognize the point of my comparison is to undermine the effectiveness of comparison when considering clusters. Coopmans et al. () also refer to Biopolis as a research cluster, and it is particularly significant and interesting, I think, that science and technology studies is a significant part of the research cluster. See, for example, the quote from the Celera scientist Hamilton Smith in Fortun (, ). Similar to the discussions in chapter  and Appendix , Palsson (, ) reminds us that ethnographic research, especially when “studying up,” takes on its own character when all the participants know each other fairly well, as I found out in the course of my research on PEI. Despite the reliance on Newtonian assumptions, Alex indicates, perhaps unconsciously, that in practice there is no universal Capitalism or Globalization, globalizing bioscience and/as biocapital

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but rather the kind of individual networks of firms, people, and institutions discussed by Latour (, -; see also Gibson-Graham , ).  I could not confirm this after the presentation.  Homi Bhabha offers this concept in the realm of postcolonial discourse studies. Nonetheless, it seems apt here.  Appropriate to its aims, the Slow Science movement is, slowly, gaining some acceptance as another alternative means of doing science. The Slow Science manifesto is available at http://slow-science.org/. Numerous thoughts on the matter are posted on the Internet by bloggers, and academic journals occasionally consider the topic, such as Lutz ().

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Concluding: Lessons from an Open Concept Lab

By the time I first drafted this sentence, the ACCBR had been compelled to go “virtual,” as discussed in chapter 2. When I first began writing this book, the ACCBR’s continued existence in the form I knew it as a participant observer was in question, but still holding. Much of the writing process has been ambiguous for me. Should I write in the present tense or the past? This tells us the matter of spacetime, or spacetimemattering, as discussed in the previous chapter, is both pervasive and an everyday phenomenon. Having become “virtual” in space it has also become “virtual” in time, with its human and nonhuman components alike having been dispersed and distributed. It has become visibly out of joint with itself. Some pieces of equipment have been moved to individual labs, some personnel have moved to other labs or departments or even left the university altogether, some of the collective space has been converted to individual labs and offices. A large portion of the former space has been redesignated for toxicology services in the AVC. The eddy that it is and/as was is dissipating, being drawn and reassembled in other vortices large and small. It was never a thing or a person or a place in that Newtonian sense anyway. As I have gone to great lengths to emphasize, the ACCBR, insofar as it “is” at all, is the doings, intra-actively, of nonhumans and humans. These are lively doings, and not just for the humans, of, in, and through space, time, and relationships. Entanglements are active and, insofar as this occurs in a “whole” whose connections are likely (to remain) beyond our full comprehension, intra-active. The re-arrangement of the ACCBR is a re-arrangement of relationships. That is, after all, what intra-action does. Its design and intention was premised on doing bioscience differently than usual for this part of the world. It promoted conceptions of openness and the exchange of information that took cooperation, in Shrum et al.’s (2007) sense, as a point of departure for moving toward some kind(s) of collaborative

practice. Previous chapters have suggested that other conceptions and/as doings of openness, exchange, and collaboration worked against the ACCBR. The eddy of the ACCBR swirled both with and against larger currents (and/as eddies), but these too encounter other currents (and/as eddies). As the chapters progressed, you may have been left with a sense that nonhuman phenomena were less and less of a focus, and that this implies a move away from thinking in terms of naturecultures. I do not deny that the nonhuman elements were gradually de-emphasized, but this by no means suggests they are unimportant. Provisional limits do need to be enacted. That is why phenomena emerge rather than preexist. As was hinted at in chapter 3, the naturalcultural fact of “islandness” (Baldacchino 2006) is an entangled geophysical, political-economic, and socio-cultural (and much more besides) phenomenon. Prince Edward Island, as an island, does things both as apparatus and phenomenon. That it too is an eddy and/as current can be quickly recognized simply by considering some of the projections in terms of changing size and shape as a result of climate change and rising sea levels. There is no separating of nature from culture in this regard. Similarly, I have also gestured to the naturecultures of space as a phenomenon and/ as apparatus. You might be tempted to see more than a touch of irony in the fact that five years after the ACCBR was launched, Moira Farr (2012) published an article in Canada’s University Affairs magazine outlining the rise of “open-concept” laboratories and research spaces at several Canadian universities. Interestingly, given the discussions on the economic metrics prevalent in science and education policy in the previous three chapters, there is an emerging recognition among some, at least, that open-concept spaces are cost-efficient, minimizing “wasted” space and maximizing opportunities for information exchange within and across various fields of knowledge (Farr 2012). Whether economic efficiency or the free flow of information is the intended consequence or an unintended side effect, the two do seem to go together. All that said, however, irony would suggest, at least implicitly, that the ACCBR was a “failure.” Such a term would be misleading. Although I do not think anyone would deny that in its “virtual” state it cannot function as intended, this is not the same as saying it failed. Because I work on the UPEI campus, the formal end of the research grant and research ethics clearance to study the ACCBR is not the end of my contact with the people who were there. The informality, in Lederman’s (2006b) sense of blending ethnographic research with everyday routine, persists in and through relationships. Patty, Shelley, Hannah, and Lynne have all told me, at different times, that the ACCBR was never given the time it needed to establish and prove itself. Failure would suggest it cannot work. More than that, for those who would insist it was a “failure” (and I do not count myself among them), it may be worth noting, as many researchers in many fields informally do, that formal publications of experiments that 134

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did not perform as expected or anticipated is rare. It is knowledge, too, despite formal exclusion. Either way, it remains a possibility. And possibilities, because they can be and/as do things, in fact, do things. To say that possibilities, as present absences and absent presences, do things is one of the most positive contributions an agential realist approach to phenomena can provide. For that reason it is worth saying a bit more about it and its relationship to responsibility as this book draws to its (relative) end. Possibility in particular draws our attention to three of Barad’s concepts, and the relationships between them, which have been used extensively: superposition, complementarity, and entanglement. Two points I have tried to emphasize concern possibilities and complementarity. First, superpositioned possibilities are not stable, but change with the possibilities actualized relative to those not realized. Relative stability of any phenomenon, whether actual or potential, is a (fleeting) result (Mol 2002; Barad 2007). For the ACCBR this mattered in terms of the prevalence of “individuating forces” (Knorr-Cetina 1999) in the biosciences broadly, and on PEI in particular, making the issue of doing science more collaboratively difficult. I have tried to indicate that the actualization of other possibilities, through various measurement apparatuses, also has affects and effects, from the changing organization of universities to changes in intellectual property policies and practices to the shift to specifically neoliberal practices of capitalism to much more that I have only hinted at. Everything is connected, but that does not mean that everything is connected the same way or that everything is equally connected. This is what I understand entanglement to be all about. Possibility does not mean anything goes (Hacking 1999). We are as much our changing possibilities as we are our changing actualities. There is no hard and fast line separating them. One consequence of this is that we are always in the middle of things and/as possibilities, including our narratives and representations (Rose 2007b). Change in the biosciences, whether conceived broadly or narrowly, tends to occur incrementally rather than through large discrete events. In other words, possibility is distributed differently at different scales. The Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution, for example, emerged over centuries and is still ongoing more than ten millennia later, still transforming planetary natureculture. The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions also operate on a scale of decades and centuries and continue. The Molecular Biology and “omics” Revolutions operate on a scale of years and decades and persist. Yet even so, recently past and/as passed possibilities are quickly forgotten (Landecker 2007). Throughout, there are always possibilities that are never infinite, but always more than we can ever be aware of, a matter I will return to momentarily. The other point I have tried to emphasize is that complementarity, a process of intra-active exclusions, is also entangled with possibility through apparatuses of measurement. This is likely the most difficult issue to accept if you accept the assumption, concluding

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which I have characterized throughout as our Newtonian assumption, that the proper doing of Science results in objective, unmediated, and unchanging fact of phenomena that are already there ahead of our investigations. This circumstance can be grieved or celebrated (Fortun 2008; Haraway 2008). I prefer approaching it via the latter. Again, following Barad, I have accepted the assumption that the act of measuring something and what you measure it with are part of the phenomenon being considered. (And yes, that means I have changed “Barad” as she has changed “me.”) Just as different apparatuses are entangled with light, such that one apparatus measures and/as creates waves and another apparatus measures and/as creates a particle (meaning there are two “light” phenomena), so too for other phenomena. Similarly, just as light can’t be measured as a particle and a wave simultaneously, the doing of science (not to be confused with the ideal of Science) can be assessed in different ways, all of which are entangled with the way science is done. One of the two ways that I have considered in the previous pages is that the doing of science is often measured in and through economic criteria, particularly neoliberal variants of capitalism rather than, say, Keynesian forms of capitalism (or even noncapitalist forms of economics altogether!). Neoliberalism promotes “applied” forms of science over “basic,” and they tend to exclude each other. The other complementary way I have mentioned frequently is the doing of science as measured through individuating forces or collectivizing forces. In both currents, I’ve suggested these measuring practices matter— from the scales of ordering lab equipment to global science and education policy. Another current I have followed in regard to complementarity throughout the book is the mutual exclusion of bounded and relational conceptions of phenomena, or our Newtonian assumptions in contrast to quantum approximations that move up Wittgenstein’s ladder from the Newtonian conception. In philosophical terms this is the tension between idealism and materialism (see Laclau and Mouffe 1987). These are also measures that matter, differences that make a difference. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger reminds us: During the last 50 years our view of the world has been profoundly altered. We have witnessed economies that are no longer centered around a [discrete and bounded] ego: a Darwinian economy of nature, a Marxian economy of production, a Nietzschean economy of the moral, a Freudian economy of the unconscious, an Einsteinian economy of relativity, a Saussurean economy of the sign, a Foucauldian economy of discourse. (1997, 224) It is not beside the point to suggest that these “other” economies and their openness could be measures of the doing of science but they come up against currents that try to limit, to place bounds on them. I’ve proposed that this is how eddies form. Neoliberal 136

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currents, as I’ve implied, contribute toward trying to reinstate this bounded ego where possible, hence the efforts to discredit the economies Rheinberger mentions. These other economies can also open us to other ways of doing risk and risk management (Stengers 2000a, 2000b). Even “letting myself become interested is a risk” (Stengers 2000b, 92), and challenging the certainties that come with our Newtonian assumptions is a risk. In place of (the impossible demand for) certainty we could risk the pleasures of doubt (Mol 2002; Fortun 2008). We tend to think of risk as a biomedical probability of some condition, forgetting that it has histories. We are so accustomed to thinking of risk as an economic or statistical gamble that we forget risk need not be economic and need not be a gamble. We have made a habit of thinking biomedical and economic risk through one another. The pleasures of doubt might encourage us to learn to laugh again, opening other possibilities of risk. It is relearning a laugh which would not be the irony and derision which always avoids risk-taking, going beyond the differences to recognize the same. It is, instead, the laughter of humor. It is comprehending and appreciative without expecting to find a secure position. (Stengers 2000a, 52) I like to think that, as the years have passed, this is how Andy and I have enjoyed each other’s intellect. We both enjoy a good laugh. All this is to say that we need to ask different questions than is it “right” or “wrong” because of the way that question excludes possibilities. There are, as Annemarie Mol (2002, 184) tells us, other ways of being partial or interested beyond the passing of judgment that comes with a claim of certainty. Multiple rationalities and/as multiple possibilities and/as multiple realities is one way to think about entanglement. There may be some who argue this is not “practical,” that it is impossible to put into practice. But what if we’ve already been doing this in spite of ourselves? Possibilities do matter, and so do assumptions. Some of you might have wondered what the simplified pairing of terms, the purposely created dichotomy of Newtonian and quantum assumptions is supposed to approximate, or what it is supposed to do. They all flow toward what Barad (2000) termed agential literacy, or what I have meant by the idea of a Third Culture. There are many approximations and possibilities to be considered beyond what I have discussed here. To be clear, we need a Third Culture that doesn’t just mix the Two Cultures of the human and natural sciences, as if they already preexisted, but that recognizes and explores and shapes the ways they are always already entangled. “We” are part of what is reworked in our research practices and doings (Barad 2007, 383), whatever they may be and whether done “formally” or “informally.” That is why how the research is done matters and why we need ACCBR-like experiments that are “social” as much as they are “scientific” or “natural.” concluding

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But how the research is communicated matters, too. This is where the currents of science and education, science policy and education policy, generate eddies at present, at least in the global North. In Canada and the United States there are increasing calls for relevance-based approaches to education, which implies that whatever went before was not (sufficiently) relevant (Barad 2000). Barad adds, moreover, that these policies are often intended to serve economic rationales. Primary, secondary, and postsecondary courses are presumed repaired or improved through the addition of “relevance” rather than questioning the current intra-actions that divide the human and natural sciences with the hope that politics is thereby separated from the Scientific Method or that disinterestedness can be distanced from engagement (Fortun and Fortun 2005; Latour 2005; Rheinberger 1997). Agential literacy offers one possibility, among others, to move toward a Third Culture that is other than a combination of the Two Cultures and their divide(s). Agential literacy is the phenomenon that our quantum approximations have been flowing toward; it is a superpositioned possibility entangled within agential realism. In agential literacy, science is not “in context” but in intra-action (Barad 2000, 238). Recent years have seen increased calls for expanding instruction and resources in the curricula of the so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) at the expense of other fields of knowledge or modes of inquiry. The assumption motivating this, as Barad (2000) argues, is the idea that scientific literacy in the Newtonian sense automatically generates responsible social behavior, that politics (in its broadest sense) should be separated from science, that disinterestedness should be separated from engagement. Instead, an agential literacy approach proposes to teach science in a way that promotes an understanding of the nature of scientific practices. This will make for better, more creative, more responsible participation in the various technoscientific enterprises in which we are all implicated at this historic moment. If science students do not learn that doing responsible science entails thinking about the connection of scientific practices to other social practices, then what is the justification for our current confidence as a society in the ability of scientists to make socially responsible decisions? (Barad 2000, 223) To this I would add only the converse, that those who usually think about other social practices also think about scientific practices, since these are among the most potent relationships in making and remaking the naturalcultural world and/as ourselves. Science and scientists certainly add much to the ethnographic record, whether ethnographic practitioners are aware of it or not (Fortun and Fortun 2005). Efforts to be aware, though flowing with currents of doubt and/as possibility throughout, take 138

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us again to Barad’s agential realist framework in which ethics, epistemology, and ontology mingle intimately. Doing responsibility and accountability is a relational matter that is pervasive, not some “thing” you do before, during, or after. It is intra-active with, in, and through humans and nonhumans alike. Being and/as doing openness to new forms of openness is a good place to start. It was that openness to openness that had Andy introduce me to the staff of the ACCBR at its inaugural meeting in 2007 as the ACCBR’s first user and project. I was met with the good humor and curiosity of which Stengers speaks. It was not lost on any of us in that room that day that this project was “social,” and that something akin to a Third Culture was desirable and achievable, though through what or how that might happen was and still remains, well, open. One responsibility for all of us, then, remains to keep open possibilities for other possibilities. This is not only an abstract notion. It is something you do.

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Appendix 1

A Parable on Changing Assumptions, or, How to Approximate Agential Realism I have included this little parable as a way to assist you in thinking about some of the logical consequences that follow if you assume a universe—and everything in it—is always in motion rather than implicitly or explicitly stable. In other words, it is a way to help you shift thought from “Newtonian” assumptions to “quantum” assumptions, particularly the notion of agential realism that Karen Barad has been developing since the 1990s. As I mention in chapter 1, if you assume stability then change has to be explained, but if you assume constant change then (relative) stability has to be explained. This little story, then, is a way to consider how far a change in our assumptions affects our ways of thinking and/as doing. Assumptions, which are by definition neither true nor false, are the tools we use to build truths and falsehoods. Reconsidering and changing our assumptions, and the truths they can generate, is what anthropologists and other ethnographers have been grappling with for 150 years, even though they haven’t been as responsible as they could be or should be (Derrida 1978). Many of you will have come across some instance of the following story. A student and mentor walk to the riverbank to observe the river. The mentor asks the student to describe the river as thoroughly as possible, leading to the production of lists, descriptions, and maps. The name? It could be the River of Science. Or Self. Or Anthropology. Or Development. And so on. Regardless of what the river is called, it is a representation made as accurately as the student can with the means at hand. Perhaps more, or better, or different technologies would lead to better lists, descriptions, and maps. Perhaps not. In any case, we should be able to recognize the similarity to the widely accepted Newtonian version of science mentioned above. We Euro-Americans are often in the habit of treating representations, like words or images, as if they were outside the reality they refer to.

As the story goes, the student and mentor return to the same place on the river bank several days later, and they go through the same process again. Just before they are about to leave the mentor asks, “Is this the same river?” The student quickly catches on to the mentor’s ruse, explaining that indeed the river was not the same: banks had eroded, silt deposited, eddies swirled as currents and huge volumes of water had passed. The river had changed. And the representations of the two visits? Well, they must also be different. Rather than a River of Science, or Self, or whatever, there were rivers of sciences and selves that representations cannot fully capture. Does this mean representations have no place when trying to understand things that are in motion? Not at all. In fact, we can’t do without them. It does suggest that the process by which we “know” something and what that something “really is”— epistemology and ontology in philosophical language—may be more complex than we usually consider. More has been said about this in the rest of the volume, yet already we have a hint of why the study of science and scientists appeals to some researchers like myself: science is multiple not only in what it studies, like neurons or quartz or electricity, but also how it studies neurons and quartz and electricity, and raises the possibility that the “same” neuron, quartz molecule, or electron “is” not just one thing, but many at the same time. They, too, continuously change. The student became aware that representations were inherently incomplete, so therefore the kinds of knowledge available through representations were also incomplete and would likely always be that way. Incompleteness, though, is not falseness, which suggests that representations offer something worthwhile, even if they can’t offer things “as they really are.” What happened to the student and mentor when they returned to the riverbank a third time? On the second visit the River of Science had given way to rivers of sciences. To this point the student had only represented science, but now the mentor asked the student to experience science. In short, the student was told, “Get in the river.” A bit apprehensive—and who wouldn’t be!—the student cautiously descended a few paces into the river. Facing away from the mentor, the student heard, “Close your eyes and feel the river.” Tentatively at first, but then with greater concentration, the student could soon confidently feel the current moving faster at the waist than at the feet. Where does a current begin and end if all “parts” of it are moving at different speeds? Is it a matter of uncertainty or indeterminacy? With eyes open again, the student watches water flow over and around rocks in the channel, noting turbulences and the formation of eddies, those “whirlpools” or vortices of different sizes. Eddies, as currents within currents, move at different speeds and directions to the larger flow of the river—sometimes even directly against the overall flow. Carefully placing a hand in an eddy, the student could experience the crosscurrents that it contained. Although a center was observable, and therefore representable, the student 142

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couldn’t escape the questions: “Where does an eddy and the current of the river begin?” “Where do they begin to differentiate?” Looking downstream, the student also realized that one’s own body also produced turbulences and eddies. To experience the river, the student also altered the flow of the river in however large or small a manner. The student realized that change itself is not stable, that change changes. The student’s fourth visit to this river in motion, a river that is neither completely the same one nor completely different from previous visits, was conceptually more challenging. In the previous visit, when the student was coaxed into the flow the mentor had conveyed that experiencing rivers in their becomings also altered those becomings. Being in the river transformed the way it was transforming, however large or small the effects are. Just as the student was beginning to adjust to this way of thinking and feeling, coming to terms with being surrounded by currents and eddies that were somehow and paradoxically multiple and singular at the same time, but without being a complete and self-contained whole either, the voice of the mentor was heard again. “Oh, what now?” the student muttered, turning to face the mentor again. “You’re not as solid as you think,” yelled the mentor. “What!?” is all the perplexed student could muster by way of response. By this point the mentor had also waded into the river and walked over to the student. “What I mean,” the mentor continued, “is ‘you’ are not a riverbank. You too are a river, and so am ‘I.’” It took a few moments, but understanding the implications came to the student. “I’m not outside what I observe, I’m part of what I observe. I don’t just see change, I am change!” The mentor smiles: “Melodramatic, but yes, you’ve got it.” The student could feel that solid Self of Newtonian assumptions dissolve and liquefy into the river, thinking, “I’ve gone from ‘I am who I am because I’m not you’ to ‘I am who I am because of you!’” The student had come to a relational awareness that a sense of Self is a series of currents and eddies in motion, always changing, because of relations to other currents and eddies, not despite them. Lastly, we return again to the liquefied student and mentor we left in the fourth visit. The student had come to appreciate there were currents and/as eddies in motion within larger currents and/as eddies in motion. In effect they were rivers within rivers, which is perhaps a useful way to think about currents and/as their relationship(s) to/with/in other currents. In doing so we can dispense with the illusion of solidity offered by riverbanks. They too are currents and/as eddies, but operate at different speeds, directions, and intensities to the water they supposedly “contain.” Something similar can be said for air currents in relation to “ground” currents and “water” currents. Under these “quantum” assumptions there are only currents and/as eddies. On their fifth visit the liquified mentor asked the liquefied student, “What if any ‘container’ or ‘constant’ you can think of is just another current among currents?” After mulling over the question, the student came to understand that space, time, and appendix 1

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matter were not independent of one another, but emerged in and through one another. The seemingly figurative abstractness of time and the seemingly literal solidity of matter were intimately related. This is a story without end. There are always other visits or approximations to consider, there are always additional rungs on Wittgenstein’s ladder. What matters—the difference that makes a difference—is the movement away from the Newtonian model of the universe that assumes there are unchanging “laws,” that assumes that words or any representations are separate from the things they refer to, and that assumes things have a single, static essence that merely requires getting the representation right.

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Appendix 2

Fieldwork in the Academy, and the Ethics of Ethics

Although it’s a mouthful, Barad’s notion of the ethico-onto-epistemological reminds us that “doing the right thing” is inseparable from knowing and/as becoming. As Strathern puts it: “Ethics is a social actor frequently enrolled to justify auditing practices, yet is frequently seen as betrayed by or in resistance to them” (2000b, 5). This brings us to an issue at the confluence of several currents as confronted by ethnographers in anthropology, science studies, sociology, and more. Participant observation is a methodology about as qualitative as you can get in the world of research practices. It privileges experience, intra-action, and immersion: in recent years ethnographers have been encouraged not to remove the traces of their presence, but to account for them. At this intra-section of currents an eddy emerges from the different meaningeffects (diffraction patterns) of value and accounting. It is why Strathern argues audit culture and ethics are thoroughly entangled, and that entanglement has come to influence how participant observation is performed and/as structured (Strathern 2000a, 279–80; see also Maurer 2005). Yes, I know I’m being wordy again, but the upshot is this: participant observation is a research method that has to be done well, that is, ethically. How do we know it has been done well and/as ethically? Well, it has to be measured against a standard, and in the case of academic ethnographers it has to be measured before any other research intra-actions take place. There are very good historical reasons for this. All kinds of cruelties and abuses against humans and nonhumans alike by researchers of various disciplines have been documented. Some kind of mechanism to maximize the safety of those researched is widely agreed to be necessary, but this kind of measuring, as a form of audit, also generates several effects. It is some of these effects that I will follow downstream a distance.

A place to begin is with the method of participant observation itself. Students taking an introductory socio-cultural anthropology course are well aware of the importance ethnographers place on it as the research tool of choice. It is at the far end of a quantitative–qualitative continuum in research methods, and it is also at the far end of a direct–indirect experience continuum in research methods. This makes participant observation rather unique among the physical and/as human sciences, and also, as you may imagine, a source of difficulty and misunderstanding for people with limited exposure to it. It is an “open” methodology in the sense that researchers do not try to limit or predetermine the research field as much as possible, but to consciously adapt to and make use of its indeterminacy as much as possible. This is in contrast to techniques that try to control and limit at least some, if not most, of the research environment (Lederman 2007; Franklin and Roberts 2006). One consequence of this openness (a difficult concept to pin down, as we already know) is that the participant observer has to conform, as much as circumstances and awareness permit, to the material-discursive environment much more than the other way around. As we already know from the Intraduction, the intra-actions of researchers and that which is researched modifies both in their phenomenal becoming, even if unequally. This also relates to our discussion of audit culture in chapter 3. Any academic researcher in the physical sciences, social sciences, or to some (increasingly greater) extents in the humanities (to use the common North American distinction) wishing to investigate people must be granted some form of formal ethics approval. In Canada each university has a Research Ethics Board (REB), which is similar in structure and function to an Institutional Review Board (IRB) in the US. There has been concern over the last two decades or so about what has been called “ethics creep,” the ever-growing current of circumstances for which ethics approval must be obtained (Swiffen 2007; Bosk 2007). There has also been concern expressed by academic researchers over an increasing loss of flexibility as to what constitutes “ethics” in this formal institutional sense as it becomes bureaucratized (Amit 2000; Jacob and Riles 2007; Swiffen 2007). In the Canadian case, the three major government-sponsored funding agencies for academic research—the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)—all share the same document outlining ethics oversight, the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS). (It is the approximate counterpart to the Common Rule in the United States.) This is another standard of standards. To consider how it intravenes in, rather than simply measures, research practices, we need to very briefly consider what this apparatus, this ethics “thermometer,” is composed of and intended to measure. 146

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Some of the guiding assumptions for ethics review are a good place to start. One is that ethics review is an assessment of a research design, not of the researcher or even of the relationship between researcher and research design (Lederman 2006c). In other words, the separation of researcher from research design operates according to our Newtonian assumptions, with their bounded forms of representation, and the artificial separation of “subject” and “object” to suit a particular understanding of objectivity. There is also an unspoken assumption that when it comes to the researching of humans there is only one way to be ethical: all humans, as “research subjects,” are presumed to be equally powerless over what the researcher says or does; it is presumed that the research is necessarily on people rather than about people (i.e., human “subjects” are “objects”). This presumption is widely regarded as following a biomedical or behaviorist model, such as randomized control trials (Lederman 2006c). Finally, this is all done before the researcher of humans is allowed to proceed, which entails that formal institutional ethics is a representation to which researchers of humans have to adjust their research designs. What we are left with is a monolithic River of Ethics rather than rivers of multiple and shifting ethics; this is ethics as being fixed and stable, rather than becoming. We need to move from the special case of Newtonian ethics to quantum ethics. This brings us back to what is distinctive about participant observation, and also the ethics of (formal institutional) ethics (as muddled as that might seem). Researchers going through the ethics review process are implicitly expected to be somewhat familiar with quantitative methods, but not necessarily qualitative ones. When C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures essay was published in 1959, he was concerned with the lack of natural scientific understanding compared to the understanding and authority of the human sciences. Half a century on, it seems the poles have been reversed, but the split and ranking between the Two Cultures persists. For many of the faculty sitting on the ethics boards, participant observation has the appearance of a “method of no method” (Lederman 2007, 307) because it aims to be flexible, open to chance events, and to a large extent guided by what those researched say and do. In other words, a major portion of fairly consistent control and authority exercised by an ethnographer is in what they write after the formal research period is over (Clifford and Marcus 1984; see also Franklin and Roberts 2006, chap. 2). Fieldwork itself is a negotiated process worked out by the ethnographer and those researched on an ongoing basis (Lederman 2007, 11; Kalir 2006), where sometimes the observer and sometimes the observed has the upper hand in relations of power relative to each other. In Barad’s terms, fieldwork is always already intra-active, emergent, and entangled, where participant observation can be thought of as a method of tacit and embodied knowledge about tacit and embodied knowledge, an “exploration of the relationships by means of relationships” (Lederman 2006a, 547; see also Strathern appendix 2

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2005). Barad’s epistemo-onto-ethic of agential realism demands that investigators take responsibility for their actions and the phenomena they help to create, but not in a way that always suits IRBs and REBs because these boards work on assumptions consistent with our Newtonian approximation, whereas our move toward quantum assumptions may better flow into Barad’s efforts. Now, as if all this talk about ethnographic methods and ethics processes wasn’t complicated enough, we need to take it back to our earlier discussion of studying up and across. In particular, we need to consider what differences flow from ethnographically studying friends and colleagues from your own academic institution, and whether those are differences that make a difference. Biagioli (1999b) notes that what is usually thought of as the institution of science is more influential than the science studies (or anthropologies of science) that examine it. For the most part, it informs science studies more than being informed by them, even as people seek ways to move beyond the Two Culture divide. If this is the case, then one of the assumptions of the ethics review process, the automatically presumed weakness of those researched, is put in some doubt. It gets even messier when we consider the “informality” of ethnographic research and daily routine overlapping, as mentioned at the beginning of chapter 3 (Lederman 2006b; see also Reid 2000). When those you research are your colleagues, co-workers, and friends at your home institution, the entire us/them distinction is blurred, again leaving the formal ethics review process uncertain (see also Palsson 2007). Leafing through my field notes I came across numerous instances of this informality beyond the incident mentioned at the beginning of chapter 3. They occurred in the course of everyday conversations during coffee or lunch breaks and even a couple of baby showers for lab technicians, where “shop talk” among members of the ACCBR easily flowed into personal life and back again. They occurred in moments of gossip, or frustration with a co-worker. And they occurred in moments of delight or disgust (and occasionally both simultaneously) in reaction to some action or policy on the part of the university administration or any of the several unions on campus. Taking just one example, let’s consider the events of early one Monday afternoon in March 2008. I had just had a very pleasant interview with Anil. The mood was open and relaxed and we both seemed to be at ease. Once the recorder was turned off we continued to chat, as happened frequently following interviews. Before long the conversation turned to how the growing pains of settling into the new North Annex— things like equipment delays, ongoing construction, and so on—had him concerned about resulting delays in research productivity and what that might mean for his tenure application further downstream. During that conversation I offered what advice I could, given that I was just in the process of applying for tenure myself and had also encountered obstacles early in my probationary period leading up to my tenure application. 148

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Well, where in the course of the post-interview conversation did my practice as ethnographer stop and that of faculty colleague begin? Is it possible to disentangle the two material-discursive practices beyond the ideals of logical abstraction (where it is always possible to separate them)? Or is it a matter, as I strongly suspect, of a thoroughgoing intra-active entanglement? More to the point, because the ethics review process happens before the conduct of fieldwork in its actual messiness, it has come to depend on the nice, neat distinctions offered by logical abstractions (Biagioli 1999b), that is, representations in a Newtonian universe. In that circumstance one is either more or less ethical as a researcher or colleague. There is, in the current structure of ethics review, only one way to be ethical and that is to fit into what was agreed to in the ethics review process. But if we accept ethics as multiple and in motion, as being what one becomes by doing in some circumstance rather than what one “is” in advance, what comes to matter is what was actually said or done and how. What we are encountering here is what Michael Fischer names “ethical plateaus,” circumstances “where ethics and politics cannot be reduced to two person, zero-sum games [such as more or less ethical]; and where often incommensurable frames of reference come into play” (2005, 56; see also Fischer 2003, 2009). In other words, it is because of these entanglements that Lederman writes “[g]eniune IRB compliance is impossible for ethnography . . . so long as the regulations recategorize all research participants as human subjects necessarily in need of human protection” (2006c, 489). Similarly, Mike Fortun, writing of ethics and/as becoming in his ethnographic study of deCode Genetics, Inc. in Iceland, suggests “[e]thics is impossible” (2008, 267) (see box, p. 52). From all that I’ve said so far it would be easy to conclude that these concerns around audit and ethics and research methods are peculiar to the human sciences, which is not the case (Lederman 2007; Barad 2007). The issues involved, however, do emerge differently and they are differences that make a difference. I am not thinking here so much of animal ethics as a parallel in the natural sciences to human ethics for human sciences, though such a comparison might be fruitful in its own way (and would have to consider fields such as biomedicine that also deal with human subjects in their animalness). What I have in mind is how currents of ethics and audits in academic institutions recreate the Two Culture divide and everything associated with it. As Stengers (2000b, 93) points out, the eddy separating yet joining currents of “scholastic practice” and “scientific practice” is not that large. Nonetheless, we do need to consider two related points. One way the Two Culture divide is maintained is that the human ethics standards that are asked of researchers in the human sciences toward researchers in the physical sciences are not asked of natural science researchers among themselves. For example, I am expected to destroy the recordings, and eventually the transcripts, of the appendix 2

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interviews I conducted for this research (while paradoxically encouraged by the TriCouncil to make portions or summaries available to others over whom I have no control). Conversations between Andy and any of the lab technicians are under no such limitations. To be clear, it is not the case that there are no ethical expectations among ACCBR staff. It is that they come from elsewhere (national laws, university policies, social norms, etc.) and are assumed not to intrude in the research itself (such as the neuroscience I observed). A great deal of contrary evidence that everyday ethics does matter has been provided by feminist scientists (such as Evelyn Fox Keller or Sandra Harding or Debolena Roy) or political economy based thinkers (such as Daniel Lee Kleinman or Kaushik Sunder Rajan). What persists—and this is the second point— is the assumption (consistent with our Newtonian assumptions) that laboratory and clinical research operates under a “culture of no culture” ( Traweek 1988), not only for the scientists involved but also for policy makers, politicians, entrepreneurs, and others (Webster 2007). Because the “culture of no culture” presumes the kind of objectivity in a Newtonian universe, the assumption is made that the intra-actions among researchers and the things being researched remain unaffected. What I and other observers of scientists propose, however, is that they are affected by the phenomena and apparatuses through which they are involved and about which they are passionate. The language I am using here is quite intentional. Good science entails passion, affection, emotion: Donna Haraway uses the psychoanalytic term “cathexis” (2008, 38); Isabelle Stengers (2000b, 92) speaks of the aesthetic and affective elements of experiment, Natasha Myers (2008, 169) offers the phrase “affective entanglement,” and so on. We’ve encountered it before through Abraham’s relationships with and through patch-clamping neurons, Shelley’s relationships with and through cell cultures in cancer research, Hannah’s relationships with and through dopamine in the HPLC system, Andy’s broad research program in neurodegenerative diseases, and so on. They are not disinterested observers, but interested observers (Stengers 2000a, 2000b) and this is why finding/using forms of objectivity that take into consideration the entangled investments of all concerned (human and nonhuman) is not only important, but responsible. The assumption associated with our Newtonian approach “is doubly unfortunate, both because it obscures all the ‘non-subjective’ components of the experimental methods that make it so exciting and emotional for scientists, and also because it assumes that ‘good science’ cannot, by definition, include the human sciences within ‘science proper’” (Franklin and Roberts 2006, 82). This is not a call for the physical sciences to be even more like the human sciences or vice versa. It is the very distinction between them, and its effects, that matter at the moment. We need to further investigate the entanglements of the Two Cultures, neither ignoring them nor simply affirming the distinction in our efforts to “be” ethical. 150

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There has always been traffic between them, various “interliteracies” (Franklin and Roberts 2006), such that each “side” has something to offer the other, and this already takes us some distance from our Newtonian assumptions. Barad, as I read her, proposes flowing even further down this current, by requesting an ethics “taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are a part” (2007, 384). In this way an ethics emerges not reliant on the Two Culture distinction, not an ethics appropriate to physical scientists in one way and human scientists in another, and certainly not an ethics deemed “ethical” in advance of the research. It is an ethics where the “accounting” is in taking responsibility for what one contributes to intra-actions in the actualization of phenomena (see also Nader 1997). It is also an ethics where we “account” for how our intra-actions with (other) humans and nonhumans change us as we learn. As Barad goes to great lengths to insist, ethics, ontology, and epistemology are what emerge in and through phenomena: they do not preexist before a phenomenon or vice versa, and they can never be fully separated from one another. To this point I have mentioned some of the effects of ethics and audit culture on myself and other ethnographers, but a few words on this confluence among bioscientists are also needed. Much of the literature written in this regard concerns itself with bioethics among humans in clinical settings, but there is no reason not to extend these issues to all forms of life as a responsible reaction to human exceptionalism. Nikolas Rose (2007b) has spoken about how bioethics has become compartmentalized over time, and this does seem to parallel processes in the human sciences. Ethics creep is widespread within the academy. We can argue along with Rose (2007b, 256–59), though, that this is entangled rather than parallel: a superpositioning whereby the measuring instruments participate in the creation of, say, human or animal ethics. This compartmentalization, according to Rose, also tends to operate on the principle of ethics-in-advance which has several material effects that extend well beyond the lab, tying them in flows of complicity and responsibility. In this compartmentalized approach, well suited to our Newtonian assumptions, “[b]ioethics, . . . like accountancy, legal regulation, audit and the like, has indeed become an essential part of the machinery for governing the bio-economy” (Rose 2007b, 256). In contrast, one way an agential realist account can begin to do responsibility is to indicate the always already entangled histories of the Two Cultures. It is not by chance that Rose concludes his work on the shifts taking place in the biosciences over the last few decades by reminding us that modern sociology (and anthropology) and biology emerged from the same currents in time and space (see also Sahlins 1976) and continue to flow back into each other, creating eddies that continue to transform even as they are part of what gets transformed. It is not a question of biology (e.g., evolution, development) as a metaphor for society (e.g., politics, economics) or vice versa. It is a matter of biology and/as society. appendix 2

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Any university ethics review process, whether it involves humans or nonhumans, gets caught in this current of having to “be” ethical in one way in advance rather than becoming multiply ethical. Isabelle Stengers, chemical feminist and/as philosopher of science, put it rather nicely: I don’t want to sit on an “ethics committee” alongside a theologian, a psychoanalyst, a philosopher of technology and science, and a medical mandarin or moralising scientist. I’d like to make an intervention, and provoke others to do the same, without resuscitating a past in which other moral majorities dominated, and for which we women [and other minority groups] have no reason to be in the least nostalgic. . . . The risk is that one might accept the terms of the problem as they have been defined. It so happens, for my part, that the trap would be to accept that science has an identity, an epistemological identity. (2000a, 42) In other words, if rivers of sciences are multiple and moving, why would we expect a stable one-size-fits-all ethics or audit regime? If an accounting (in all senses of the term) of research is necessary or desirable, it will usually benefit from asking about the ethics of ethics, too. The Intraduction and chapter 3 note that participant observation changes as you study up or across, in part because of the difference of power relations between people and how other otherness has to be in order to be a difference that makes a difference. It also, as we have just seen, changes the ethics-in-the-doing despite efforts to put in place a universal and timeless ethical standard of standards. That standard becomes more problematic the less “other” the other is. If nothing else, it suggests that otherness or difference has no single, stable essence. What do we mean by Self and Other materially and/as discursively? The assumptions attached to our Newtonian and quantum approximations of Self and Other are quite different in conception and effect. It would seem to be an issue of complementarity, of self and/as other. But this is the very issue that current academic audit and ethics regimes seem unable to embrace. Moreover, the ACCBR, despite being physically located in the North Annex during my fieldwork, could at any time become virtual, as we saw in chapter 2, which in turn means it always could have been virtual. I mention this here because my study of the ACCBR always had elements of what George Marcus (1995) calls multi-sited ethnography where the aim is to follow the phenomenon (see also Franklin and Roberts 2006). In fact, as we move away from Newtonian assumptions and into agential realist entanglements, it is hard to think of any ethnography as not being always already multi-sited. Even at its most virtual, however, it would still be quite material, caught with/in agencies and powers often thought of as belonging to people alone. The reflexivities involved are not reflective, but diffractive. This kind of reflexivity 152

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encourages studying “up,” “down,” and “across” simultaneously within an emerging phenomenon and/as current moving at different speeds and directions (Barad 2007, 2011a; Hine 2007). The concept of multi-sited ethnography also assumes, as we move toward quantum assumptions, that the ethnographer both intravenes and is intravened upon by “activism” (Marcus 1995, 2007; Hine 2007), complicity (Fortun 2008), interest (Stengers 2000b), and responsibility (Barad 2007). We make differences (that matter) in what we observe, changing ourselves, our object of attention, and our natural cultural matrix at the same time.

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Index

Abi-Rached, Joelle, 3–4 academy. See universities ACCBR, xi, 1, 13, 15, 51, 90, 120 audit culture and value for money, 71–73 development of cooperation (See cooperation and collaboration) establishment of, 29, 40, 64 as ever-changing apparatus, 44 fit into globalization, spacetimemattering, 127 funding, 41, 48 HPLC system at, 21–25 individuation and collectivization, 31, 37, 42, 59, 71, 73, 99, 135 loss of autonomy, 46, 48 multi-sited ethnography of, 152 needed more time, 46, 100, 134 not operating as anticipated, 73 open concept multi-user facility, xv, 14, 30, 33–34, 38, 42, 129 open-ended relationships, 28 as phenomenon (and/as apparatus) within larger phenomena, 81 place in the PEI bioscience cluster, 96–97 promoting a different model of doing science, 33, 36, 99, 109–10 (See also collaboration) reorganization, 46–48, 133 space (organization of ), 30–31, 39, 45–47, 101–2, 129

study of, xiii, xxxviii, xli, 29 as “virtual” phenomenon, 46–47, 74, 100, 102, 133–34 ACCBR-like experiments, 137 accountability, xvii, 38, 57, 139 acting body, 26–27 aesthetics in scientific practice, 23, 27 affective entanglement, 27, 150 agential realism, xiv, xxii, xxvii, xxxi, xxxv, xxxvii, 7–8, 11–13, 17, 56, 95, 137–39, 148 relational assumptions of, 25 American Anthropological Association, 51 “and/as” logic, 8 Andhra Pradesh, 115 “Animal Health: Innovation as Key Driver for Success” (Sandler), 121 anthropocentrism, xxxvi, xl anthropology, xxii, xxxviii, xli, 54 apparatus, 9, 12 Karen Barad’s concept of, 2, 8, 11, 35 applied science, 68, 86, 88, 96, 99, 136 applied science over basic research, 10, 63, 91, 110, 128. See also Mode 1 and 2 Bayh-Dole Act promotion of, 124 artisanry in scientific practices, 15, 18, 21, 25 Atlantic Centre for Comparative Biomedical Research. See ACCBR Atlantic Innovation Fund, 40

Atlantic technology cluster, 90 Atlantic Veterinary College (AVC), xi, xiii, 30, 33, 39–40, 42, 46, 52, 90, 92, 99 establishment of, 65–66 individualist norms, 45 audit culture, 56, 64, 68, 73, 91, 99, 146, 151 ACCBR and, 71–73 and ethics, 145 in pharmaceutical industry, 60–61 in postsecondary settings, 58, 61 quality becomes registered as quantity, 58 Barad, Karen, xviii, xx–xxi, xxxviii, xliii, 3, 12, 20, 31, 33, 55, 61, 72, 79, 85, 88, 93 agential realism theory, xxxi, xxxvii, 137, 139, 148 apparatus, concept of, 2, 8, 11, 35 complementarity principle, 10, 16, 29, 48, 52–53, 57, 97, 125 concept of phenomenon, 29 diffractive methodology, xxii, 54, 74 entanglement, 6, 93, 135 as “feminist (theoretical) physicist,” xix on fieldwork, 147, 151 material-discursive phenomena, 114 Meeting the Universe Halfway, xiv notion of the ethnico-ontoepistemological, 145 quantum assumptions, xxv spacetimemattering, 108–9, 112, 118 superposition, 125 basic research, 86–88, 91, 96, 128. See also applied science over basic research; Mode 1 and 2 Bayh-Dole Act, 63, 124–26 Belvedere Life Science Research Group, 89, 94 Big Pharma, 116–17, 122–24, 126–28 biocapital, 111–12, 114, 117, 128–29 promissory and speculative character of, 112 biocapitalism, xvi, 84–85, 108, 110, 112, 119 biocapitalism and/as bioscience, 107 BioCommons, xiii, 38–39 biology and medicine, xix

170

biology as a discipline, xxiii biomedical research, 40 US research and development funds, xxiv Biopolis project in Singapore, 121 comparison with PEI biocluster, 117–18 bioscience, xii, xxii, xxiv, 61, 66, 85, 107 as means of economic development, 74 bioscience and/as biocapital, 114, 117, 128 bioscience technician program, 79, 96–97 bioscientific cooperation, 129 bioscientific entanglements, phenomena, and intra-actions, 33 bioscientific research capacity, 66 biotechnologies, rise of, xxiii–xxiv biotechnoscience, xvi, xxv black-boxed body, 25–26 black-boxes, 8, 11–12, 24, 33 black-boxing, 18, 21, 83, 100 Bruno Latour on, 10–11 as form of stability, 17 body multiple, 25–26 Bohr, Neils, xxxii brain, 3–7 business clusters, 83, 90, 95 Casper’s presentation on, 108 preferred over research clusters, 128 promissory character, 109 research currents must support economic currents, 98 shape what they measure, 88 subordination of basic to applied research, 110 Callon, Michel, 89, 98, 113 Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), 40, 69, 91 Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), 146 Candau, Joël, 130 capitalism, 80–81, 85, 92, 95. See also biocapitalism Cartesian mind-body split, 25 “cartoon capitalism,” 91, 114 Casper, Steven, 38, 122 Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, 108–9

index

“cathexis” (term), 150 Celera Corporation, xxv–xxvi cell biology, 5 cell culture, 16, 43 cells, xxvii, 3, 7, 15 change, xvii, 2, 143 cluster development, 107, 115. See also names of individual clusters “Cluster Success” (UPEI panel), 107 collaboration, 37–38, 40–41, 45, 48, 73, 127, 129, 133 ACCBR intended as collaborative space, 99 across research teams, 35 from cooperation to, 30, 32–35, 42–43 objectivity and, 35 collaboration and cooperation distinction, 35 collaboration or cooperation, 36, 129 collectivism, 37 collectivist style in Japanese society, 36–37 commercialization, 63, 73, 79 commoditization of knowledge, 124 community, 86–87, 110, 113–14 complementarity, xxviii, xxxii, 16, 48, 135–36 Barad’s concept of, 10, 29, 52–53, 57, 97 entangled with possibility, 135 cooperation and collaboration, 32–38, 40–41 Darnley, Dan, 124–27 Darwin, Charles, 81 Daston, Lorraine, xxi, 26 Decade of the Brain, 5 Decade of the Gene, 5 deCode Genetics, 52, 118–19, 149 Department of Innovation and Advanced Learning, xiii, 77–78, 107 Derrida, Jacques, “The Politics of Friendship,” 49 Descartes, Rene, 12, 26 differences that makes a difference, 54, 72, 82, 85, 110, 136, 148–49 differences in scale, 116, 118 diffraction, xxxiii, 74 diffraction patterns, xxiii, 6, 33, 39, 47, 81, 84, 99 emerge through intra-action, 18

diffractive methodology, xxii, 54 DNA, xxiii–xxv, xxvii, 127 double helix, xxiii Drosophila fruit fly community, 37, 125 Duffy, Regis, 92 economic development, xvi, 66, 80, 86, 96, 100, 119 bioscience sector as means of, 74 in the knowledge economy, 83 universities’ and colleges’ role in, 78 eddies, 6, 12, 16, 34, 136, 142 eddies and/as currents, 23 effects and/as practices, 23 electronics revolution, 84 electrophoresis, 43 electrophysiology, 2, 14–15, 18–19, 26, 43 ELSI (ethical, legal, and social implications), xxvi, 13, 37 embodied knowledge, 15–16, 19, 21. See also knowing-as-doing excluded from formal presentation of results, 17, 21 and stability within an experimental system, 17 undermines achieving complete standardization, 113 embodiment, 4 ennunciatory communities, 114 entangled knowledge, 26 entanglement, xxxii, xxxiv, 6, 47, 135, 137 “and/as” logic, 8 entanglements of the Two Cultures, 150–51 Entzeroth, Michael, 121 epilepsy, 14–15, 41 epileptogenesis, 14–15 epistemology, xvii, xxv, xxxv, 4, 139 equipment, 30, 40, 47 funding, 68–69 value for money and, 72 equivalence, 24, 27, 85 ethical plateau, 37, 149 ethics, xxxix, 52–53, 139, 145, 150–51 ethics as multiple and in motion, 149 ethics review process, 147–49, 151–52

index

171

ethnography, xxxi, xxxv, 54, 152 academic ethnographers, 145 doing ethnographic fieldwork in the university in which one works, xxxvi, 52 ethnographers shape and are shaped by the phenomena they study, 13, 114 fieldwork as negotiated process, 147 laboratory ethnographers, 13–14 multi-sited (See multi-sited ethnography) relationship between investigator and technologies used, xv, 26 relationship of researcher and researched, 20 us/them divide of fieldwork, 51 “Ethnography in/of the World System” (Marcus), xl Etzkowitz, Henry, 82–83 Euro-American middle classes and elites, 54, 87 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., xxxvi experienced body, 11, 26 experimental system, 8, 11–12, 50 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger on, 9–10 relationship between research object and, 9 reproducibility (or stability), 9 Faculty of Science, 33, 40, 66 falsifiability, xvii–xviii Farr, Moira, 134 federal and provincial program supports small and medium-sized companies use of, 109 federal government, xiii, 65. See also government cutbacks to postsecondary funding changing Canada’s natural science “research culture” from Mode 1 to 2, 99 established Networks of Centres of Excellence, 89 measure of control over university-based researchers, 91 passing responsibilities of research to universities, 91 A Feeling for the Organism (Fox Keller), 20 financial capitalism, 95

172

Fischer, Michael, 149 ennunciatory communities, 114 “flexible workplace,” 121 “flies on the wall,” xxxvi, 13 fluids in motion metaphor, xv. See also eddies Fortun, Kim, 49–50 Fortun, Mike, 49–50, 119, 149 on ethics and/as expediency, 52–53 Promising Genomics, 52 Foucault, Michel, xxxvii, xxxix, 4 Fox Keller, Evelyn, A Feeling for the Organism, 20 Francis, Rory, 89, 93–94, 99, 124–26, 128 Friedman, Milton, 64 friendship and participant observation, 49–50 friendship as methodology, 49, 51 funding, 29–30, 37–38, 46, 48, 65, 79, 86. See also government cutbacks to postsecondary funding; names of funding organizations assumes individual labs, 40 bias against collective projects, 41 federal and provincial program supports, 109 indirect funding through UIRRs, 66 promoting commercializable research, 73 “soft” funding, 68 Galison, Peter, xxi Geertz, Clifford, xxxix–xli “gene or genes for,” xxv–xxvi genes, xxiii–xxiv, xxvi–xxvii patenting, xxvi, 85 genetic agency, xxvi genetics, 5 Genomic Health, 114 genomics, 5, 13 Genomics and its Ethical, Environmental, Economic, Legal and Social Aspects (GELS), 13, 37 Gibbons, Michael, 89 Gibson, Mike, 96 global biocapitalism, 108 global currents of biotechnoscience, xvi globalization, 110, 113, 120

index

government cutbacks to postsecondary funding, 61, 66, 68. See also federal government government-industry-university relations, xii, xvi, xxvi, 47, 69, 77–78, 82–83, 90 government intervention, 81–82, 85–86. See also Keynesian economic policies; neoliberal economic policies Graeber, David, 84–85 “The Great Transformation” (Polanyi), 84 Gusterson, Hugh, 51, 54 gut feeling or “hunch,” 27 Haraway, Donna, xxi, xxii, 5, 12, 20, 52 “cathexis” (term), 150 health care, xxiv–xxv Heath, Deborah, 19 Heisenberg, Werner, xxxii Helmreich, Stefan, 111, 124 High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), 1–2, 21–26, 35 high schools expansion of labor force training into, 122 science curriculum for, 130 Holland College, 77 bioscience technician program, 79, 96–97 Hood, Leroy, xxv Human Genome, 37 Human Genome Project (HGP), xxv–xxvi, 5, 119 human/nonhuman divide, xl human sciences, xvi, xviii–xxi, xxiv, xlii, 14, 55, 60 Iceland bioscientific and/as biocapitalist events in, 118 Triple Helix relationship, 119 identity, 4 identity and equivalence, 8, 24 imitation, 112 impact factor in scientific authorship, 59–60 individualism, 30, 36–37 individuating and collectivizing currents, 31, 38, 73, 99, 136

individuating forces, 37, 40, 45, 47, 71, 110, 128 in biosciences, 39, 44, 127 conventions for authorship, 37 individual research grant proposals, 41 industry, xi. See also Big Pharma; governmentindustry-university relations shifting of research away from itself, 86 small and medium-sized companies bought by larger firms, 109, 122 inequalities, 81–82 informality, 49–50, 134 information technologies, xxiv, 38 Institute for Nutrisciences and Health (INH), 33, 66, 77, 90, 92, 94, 107 institutional reflexivities, 56–57, 84, 87 Institutional Review Board (IRB), 146, 148 intellectual property, 86, 93, 95, 107, 124–25, 127–29 intellectual property issues, 63, 99, 116 interdisciplinarity, 37 interlude and intralude, xxxi interviews with UPEI’s Senior Management Group (SMG), xxxix intra-action, xxvii, xxxiv, 2–3, 12, 16, 18, 31, 51, 72 intra-active diffraction, 23 intra-active practice, 38 intralude, xxxi Island Prosperity Strategy (IPS), xiii, 77–79, 92, 95–96, 98 “islandness,” naturalcultural fact of, 134 Japanese and American particle physics communities, 54, 114 differences, 35–37 Keynesian economic policies, 81, 98, 109, 124, 136 Kleinman, Daniel Lee, 30, 34, 45, 61, 71, 96, 99 Knorr-Cetina, Karin, 11, 16, 27, 36–37, 73, 127 on bodies of research, 25–26 knowing-as-doing, xxii. See also embodied knowledge knowledge as commodity, 86. See also intellectual property

index

173

knowledge economy, xvii, 6, 63, 77, 81, 83–84, 93, 114, 117 biocapitalist transition to, 119 desire to “be global” in, 124 as means to capitalist economic growth, 110 knowledge production, xiv, xxi Kuhn, Thomas, 33 lab technician labor force, 107, 121 lab technician training, 79, 121–22 lab technicians (ACCBR), 44, 72 shift from cooperation to collaboration, 42–43, 45 short-term contracts, 41, 45 technician and technology adapting to each other, 18 uncertain future, 46, 48 views on ACCBR’s vision, 42–43 Laboratory Life (Latour), xliii Lacan, Jacques, 4 language, xix, 55 Latour, Bruno, 5, 121 on black-boxing, 10–11 Laboratory Life, xliii Lederman, Rena, 49–50, 134 Leydesdorff, Loet, 82–83 “Licensing University Technology” (O’Brien), 124 local and/as global, 110, 119 local vs. global distinction, xli Lynch, Michael, 12–14, 55–56, 61 MacDonald, Ed, 65 MacLauchlan, Wade, 98 Malinowski, Bronislaw, xxxv Marcus, George, xxxix, xli, 152 “Ethnography in/of the World System,” xl Martin, Emily on egg and sperm, xix–xx, 36 Master of Business Administration (with focus on bioscience at UPEI), 79 material-discursive phenomena, 12, 31, 114 material-discursive practices, 8 Mayne, Michael, 77, 121 McClintock, Barbara, 20

174

McGoey, Lindsay, 60–61 measuring, 61, 136 medical anthropology, xxii Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad), xiv methodological self-awareness, xxxvi, 19, 29, 54–55 methods, xxxv–xxxviii, 2, 17 Millenium Pharmaceuticals, 122, 124 “mind,” 6 Mode 1 and 2, 83, 116, 125. See also applied science; basic research move from 1 to 2, 91, 99 Mode 1 ideal of “doing” a university, 82, 86–87 Mode 2 ideal of “doing” a university, 82, 86–87 Mode 1 knowledge, 67, 69–70 Mode 2 knowledge, 67, 69–70 models, 7–8 Mol, Annemarie, xxviii, 5, 10, 25, 55, 61, 137 body multiple, 26 complementarity, xxviii multiple singularity, xxviii study of atherosclerosis in a Dutch hospital, 58–59 molecular biology, xxiii–xxiv, 3–5, 42 molecular biology revolution, xxvii, 4, 32, 34, 67, 84, 135 multi-sited ethnography, xxxix, xl–xli, 152–53 multinational pharmaceutical companies. See Big Pharma multiple singularity, 6 Myers, Natasha, 27, 150 Nader, Laura, xxxviii–xxxix, 53 National Centres of Excellence (NCE), 89, 91, 99 National Research Council, 89–90 National Research Council Institute for Nutrisciences and Health (NRCINH), xiii, 33, 66, 77, 90, 92, 94, 107 natural/human science divide, xviii–xxi, xlii, 14, 55 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), 146

index

naturalcultural communities, 118 naturalcultural currents, 65 naturalcultural diversity, 127 naturalcultural historical processes, 57, 64 naturalcultural phenomena, xxvii, 72, 120–21, 134 naturalcultural terms, 117 naturalcultural world, 138 nature vs. culture, xxi, xxix natureculture, xxi, xxxii, 8, 84–85, 88 neoconservatism, xxiii, 82 neoliberal economic policies, 34, 81, 86, 99, 109, 124 indirect influence on research, 68 neoliberalism, xxiii, 63–64, 67, 71, 84, 88, 115 government intervention required for, 85–86 PEI’s economy and, 98 promotes applied forms of science, 68, 99, 136 Networks of Centres of Excellence, 67 neuromolecular gaze, 3–4 neurosciences, xv, xix, 2–5, 7 Newton, Sir Isaac, xiii, 12, 26 Newtonian approach, 81 Newtonian assumptions, xxv, 16, 20, 35, 64, 84, 108, 137 audit culture is consistent with, 58 on basic research, 87 black-boxing and, 11 consistent with Randomized Control Trials (RCTs), 61 Newtonian conception of knowledge production, xxi Newtonian ideal of objectivity. See objectivity Newtonian methods, xxii Newtonian Science, xiii, xiv–xv, xvii, xix, xxvi, xlii shift from, xxiv Newtonian scientific and/as social practices, 24 Newtonian world, 40 North Annex, 30, 39–41, 52, 90 Novartis, 122 fish health research facility in PEI, 92 Nussbaum, Martha, xx

objective vs. subjective, xxxix–xl objectivity, xviii, xx–xxi, xxxii, xxxvi, xlii, 26, 35, 52 Newtonian standards of, xxxvi, 17, 150 a process, not a result, 7 “situated knowledge,” 12 O’Brien, Jonathan, 125–28 “Licensing University Technology,” 124 ontology, xvii–xviii, xxv, xxxv, 4 open concept facilities, 14, 34, 36, 38, 40, 43. See also ACCBR Farr’s article on, 134 funding structures and, 40 to promote scientific collaboration, 35 open-endedness, xli open source information technology, 38 openness, 9, 38, 127, 129, 139, 146 moral sense of, 38 sharing of bioscientific knowledge, 124–26 temporal, 128 participant observation, xxxv, 19, 51, 54, 145–47 ethics approval involved, 145–46 “open” methodology, 146 patch-clamping technique, 15–16, 18–19, 21, 26 patents, 85–86, 116, 122–26. See also intellectual property expiry dates, 124 “file (patents) early and often,” 123, 125–26 risk management and, 127 when to file or not, 115, 128 Patents and Trademark Law Amendments Act. See Bayh-Dole Act PEI, 77 both Keynesian and neoliberal economic policy directions, 109 demographic challenges, 80, 90 diversification of economy, xii, xvi economically depressed, 81, 90, 98, 126 global/local interactions on, 120 pursuit of economic development, xii, 79, 90 underdeveloped status, 109

index

175

PEI BioAlliance Inc., xiii, 89, 94–95, 107 PEI biocluster, 31, 88–89, 97, 99, 109–10. See also business clusters attempt to copy US “start-up” culture, 115 comparison with Biopolis project in Singapore, 117–18 comparison with Iceland, 119 desire for more scientist-entrepreneurs, 126 effort to imitate clusters that have been developed elsewhere, 112–13 “The PEI Bioscience Cluster” (Casper), 108 pharmacogenomics, 41 phenomenon, xxxiv, 9 Barad’s use of term, xxxiii, 8, 29 Polanyi, Karl, xvii, 85 “The Great Transformation,” 84 Polanyi, Michael, 25 “The Politics of Friendship” (Derrida), 49 polymerase chain reaction (PCR), xxiii–xxv, 44, 82, 127 Popper, Karl, xvii Porter, Michael, 83, 89–90, 94 possibilities and complementarity, 134 “post-industrialism,” 6 postsecondary institutions. See also universities audit culture in, 61 distinction between training and education, 97 economic development role, 78 funding policy for, 65 need to address general knowledge and particular skills, 86 postwar expansion of universities and colleges, 65 pressure to shift toward revenue generation, 58 responding to local labor demands, 79 responsiveness to the community, 86–87 student expectations, 64 power, 54 power, recognition of in fieldwork, xxxvi–xxxvii, xxxix, 147–49 power and truth relationship, xlii power to knowledge relationships, xxxviii

176

“Preparing Students for Biotechnology” (Steininger), 121 Prince Edward Island. See PEI Prince of Wales College, 64 privilege, study of, xxxviii–xxxix Promising Genomics (Fortun), 52 “psy” fields of study, 4, 7 public resources into private gain, 116, 119, 124 “pure science,” xxvi. See also basic research PXE International, 114 qualitative measures, devaluation of, 61 quantification in university audit culture, 58, 100 quantity vs. quality, 59–61 quantum approach, 6, 80 equivalence and, 24 quantum approximations, xxxiii, 2, 136 quantum assumptions, xxv, xxxii, 11–12, 108, 137 climbing Wittgenstein’s ladder toward, 112, 127 shift to (from Newtonian), 35, 80, 139, 143–44, 148 quantum ethics, 147 quantum methods, xxii, xxiv, xxvi quantum physics, xxi–xxii, xxxii quantum science, xiv–xv, xxi, 5 Rabeharisoa, Vololona, 98, 113 Rabinow, Paul, xxiv, xxvi, 30, 127 Rajan, Kaushik Sunder, 115–16 Randomized Control Trials (RCTs), 60–61 Rapp, Rayna, 32, 35, 41 reflexive analysis, xxxv–xxxvi, 19 reflexivity, xxxvi, xlii–xliii, 29, 48, 54–56, 152 relational agency, 16 relational assumptions of agential realism, 25 relational connectedness of all things, 12 relational entanglements, xxiii relationality, xiv–xv, xvii–xviii, xxxii relative stability, 8–10, 12, 22, 134

index

relevance-based approaches to education, 138 representation, xvii, xix, xxvi, 7–8, 142, 144 scientific responsibility and, xxxvii Research Ethics Board (REB), 146, 148 Research Excellence Framework, 61 research readiness, 1, 32, 40, 44 research technicians (ACCBR). See lab technicians (ACCBR) responsibility, xxxix, 139 responsible science, 20 reverse prospecting as part of “local” strategy for doing “global,” 120–21, 127 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 8, 32, 55, 99, 136–37 experimental system concept, 50 on experimental systems, 9–10 risk, 109, 115–16 risk and risk management, 127, 137 River of Objectivity, xxi River of Science, xvii, 142. See also Newtonian Science River of X vs. rivers of multiple x’s, 2 rivers of objectivities, xxi rivers of sciences, 142, 152 Robinson, Joan, 81, 88, 91, 98 Rose, Nikolas, xxiii, 3–4, 7, 72, 151 Roy, Dobolena, 55 Salk Institute in California study, xliii Sandler, Randolf, “Animal Health: Innovation as Key Driver for Success,” 121 Schaffer, Simon, xii, xlii schizophrenic university, 79, 86, 91, 93, 96–97, 101 scholarship, change in notion of, 71 School of Business, 66 School of Nursing, 66 Schrödinger’s cat, xxxii science, xi–xii, xvii, 55, 80–84, 95. See also bioscience; neurosciences always already entangled, 51 “doing science,” 21 “real science,” 13 slow science, 20, 130

science and ideology distinction, xix, xxix Science and Technology Studies (STS), xli, xlii science curriculum for primary and secondary schools, 130 science policy, 80–84, 88–90, 116 science studies, xii, xxii, xlii, 55, 148 Newtonian and quantum versions, xvii–xix science wars (1980s and 1990s), xx sciences-in-the-doing, xiii, xv–xvi, xviii, 80 scientific adequacy, xxxix scientific authorship, 37, 59–60 scientific knowledge, xxxviii, xlii, 20 scientific literacy, 85, 87, 138 Scientific Method, xii, xvii, 24, 28, 64, 138 scientific practice, cultures of, 35–36 scientist-entrepreneurs, 96, 116, 124, 126 Self, sense of, xvi, 7, 27, 152 Shapin, Steve, xlii Shiva, Vandana, 126 Silicon Valley, 88, 109 singular multiplicity, 7, 113 situated knowledge, 12, 52, 88 slow science, 20, 130 Smith, Peter, 122–23 Snow, C.P., 37, 130 “The Third Culture,” xx “The Two Cultures,” xx, 147 social constructivism, xx Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), 146 social sciences and humanities. See human sciences Society for Neuroscience, 5 socio-technical lock-in, 98–99, 113 space allocation (politics of space), 30, 39, 45–46, 52, 101–2, 129 spacetimemattering, 108–9, 112, 118, 127 St. Dunstan’s University, 64 standardization, efforts at, 113–14, 117 Steininger, Bob, 122 “Preparing Students for Biotechnology,” 121 STEM fields, 138

index

177

PEI bioscience cluster and, 89–90, 94 UPEI and, 92–93 truth, xvii, xxxviii, xlii, 7 truth and power relationship, xxxvii, xxxix turbulences, 6 Two Culture divide, xxi, xliii, 37, 64, 130, 147–49 “interliteracies,” 151 intra-actively relative, 55 “The Two Cultures” (Snow), xx, 147

Stengers, Isabelle, 51, 55, 150, 152 Stone, Alluquere, 23, 56 Strategic Research Plan (SRP), 67 Strathern, Marilyn, 71, 145 on audit culture, 56–57 studying across, xvi, 54, 153 studying up, xvi, xxxviii–xxxix, 53–54 studying up, down, and across, 153 studying up and across, 148 superposition, xxxii–xxxiii, 6, 46, 53, 134–35 tacit knowledge, 25–26 Takeda Pharmaceuticals, 123 Tasker, Andy, 14, 32–33, 40–41, 59, 71–73, 101, 129, 137 technology, 3, 5, 10–11, 16, 89. See also information technologies ethico-epistemo ontological, 99 polymerase chain reaction (PCR), 127 relationship between investigator and technologies used, xv, 18, 26 technology and/as apparatus, 35, 58 technoscience, xxiv, 5, 23 technoscienctific language, 13–14 theory, xxxi Third Culture, xxi, xliii, 13, 37, 130, 137–39 “The Third Culture” (Snow), xx Three Oaks Innovations at UPEI, 125 time, 9, 112–13, 118–19, 123, 125, 128. See also spacetimemattering Tractatus (Wittgenstein), xii Traweek, Sharon, 37–38, 54–55, 62, 82, 114 on cultures of scientific practice, 35–36 Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS), 146 Triple Helix, xvi, 82–83, 85, 87–89, 96, 99, 116, 122. See also government-industryuniversity relations assumed homogeneity of each helix, 111 Biopolis and, 117 community colleges, 97 members are not equal, 86 no single way of doing, 91

178

United States National Institutes of Health, 5 universities, 82, 87 audit culture, 56, 64 basic research (expected to carry on with as well as applied), 91, 96 changing expectations, 62–67, 70, 79 distinction between training and education issue, 64, 67, 97 as engines of economic growth, 64, 69, 92 greater emphasis on applied research, 91 integral to bioclusters as a strategy for a knowledge economy, 117 integration with government and industry (See government-industry-university relations) Mode 1 and 2 distinction for, 70, 83 redefined funding for research, 72 (See also funding) reflexive practices, 56 reorganization and redefinition, 92 research offloaded from federal government and industry, 69, 91 research over teaching, 61 schizophrenic university, 79, 86, 91, 93, 96–97, 101 small companies cluster around, 116 University-Industry Research Relationships (UIRRs), 63, 66, 68 University of Iceland’s Ethics Institute, 52 University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI), xi–xiii, xvi, xxxvi, 33

index

UPEI, xvi, 52, 60, 116 ambivalence about its closer ties to industry, 70 changing role of, 67, 90, 92, 101–2 corporatization, 68, 71 founding of, 64–66 graduate programs, 66, 79 place in Island culture, 91 research capacity, 66–67, 71 research funding, 68 Three Oaks Innovations at, 125 transfered to Department of Innovation and Advanced Learning, 77, 79 what it is and does is still contested, xxxix, 65, 79 UPEI Strategic Overview, 67–74

UPEI’s Senior Management Group, 62, 66 US National Institutes of Health, xxv value for money, 63, 68–69, 71–72, 91, 100. See also audit culture “value step up,” 95 WARF at the University of Wisconsin, 125–26 Wellcome Trust in the UK, 40 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus, xii Wittgenstein’s ladder, xii, xiv, xxxi, xxxv, xxxvii, 13, 25–26, 52, 95, 136, 144 toward a quantum approach, 112, 127 Woolgar, Steve, xliii

index

179