Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

When someone talks to me about a universal, I always ask what size it is, and who is projecting it onto what screen. I also ask how many people maintain it and how much it costs to pay them. I know this is in bad taste, but the king is naked and seems to be clothed only because we believe in the universal.(Bruno Latour 1988: 4.4.5.1)We tend to believe in the universal; we believe in the universality of scientific facts and technological artifacts, of surveys and overviews and of scholarly practices. Universals furnish our cultural space.In this chapter I introduce the academic field of science and technology studies (STS), which has made it its business to learn about the social, material, and cultural conditions that make and maintain the universal. While the object of the scientific enterprise is to produce universals — and it is notorious for its success in generating quite a few of them — STS, the field that engages in the (social) study of science and technology, can be cast as tracing how, exactly, particulars become universals in this arena of scientific and technical knowledge. Put another way: STS is — among other things — interested to trace the strategies of representation that form the trajectory from local theory or vision to universal (arti)fact.This is an unorthodox way to frame STS. As the name of the field implies, STS has science and technology as its objects of ... log in or subscribe to read full text