Raise the World with a Laboratory? Give Me Instead a Despised People’s Cultural Image

• In Event: 067 - Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Metaphors in Science and Society

Abstract

Bruno Latour (1983) has argued that laboratories serve today as the unique Archimedean levers by which scientists “raise the world”—that is, alter our collective representations of it. This paper examines a curious case wherein the world was raised with no laboratory in sight. The case is that of the termination of references to God in scientific discourse that occurred in mid nineteenth century Britain. The paper argues that Thomas Henry Huxley was in part able to displace God from science because he blocked God’s viability with a maneuver in the symbolic realm. Specifically, Huxley “Judaized” (cf. Nirenberg 2013) references to God by painting theology and theologians as Jewish and by co-opting a configuration of cultural codes (cf. Alexander 2006) for use against the theologians that had originally been ascribed to the Jews by French Enlightenment thinkers. On the basis of these data, the paper concludes by theorizing the concept of a “symbolic laboratory”: it is argued that the cultural image of Judaism was able to serve as the functional equivalent of a (material) Latourian laboratory because it shares the Latourian laboratory’s two primary properties: 1) lack of an inside/outside boundary, and 2) the capacity to transform scale.

Author

• Jordan Colosi, University of Wisconsin-Madison