STS: Where the Marxist Critique of Capitalist Science Goes to Die?

摘要

Gary Werskey writes insightfully and sympathetically of people and events he knows well—the giants of the visible college, the heroic cadres of British radical science. Many science studies scholars engage as deeply with the subjects they study—human or disciplinary—but we rarely do so on the vicissitudes of our own enterprise, notwithstanding the widespread demand for reflexivity confessions. Yet there are costs. Intimacy brings narrowness; reflection can dissolve into elegy. There is grandeur in Werskey's first movement and brightness in his second, but it is less clear how we are to hear (or view) the third. Looking down from the heights of the 1930s, when public intellectuals, with genius far beyond their disciplines, sought to remake society, or even from the foothills of the 1970s and 1980s, when noble revolutionaries would create change by living it, he sees in the present only variations on a great theme. The marginalized mandarins of modern STS scurry about, busy, but too inept theoretically to be helpful. Through its preoccupation with epistemology at the expense of political economy, this STS bears (at least partial) responsibility for the polarizing science wars. The position ascribed to modern STS, more relativist than constructivist, is seen to be at odds with the far-reaching 'scientific rationality' championed by the visible collegians of the 1930s. Overall I find the mood tragic, with a tristesse common to British intellectuals exhausted by a quarter century of Thatcherism and its Blairite version.