Over the last forty years, scholars in science and technology studies have produced many so-called “ethnographies” of scientific practice, which most of the time are in fact simple interviews with different actors and not months or years of imbedding in the chosen “tribe.” As is often the case in books produced in this field, authors pretend to debunk or “deconstruct” what they present as a myth or an ideology generally accepted by an unspecified group of people. Hélène Mialet’s book is no exception and can even be read as an exemplar of this style of rhetorical fighting against straw persons (or, better, “persona”…).
The physicist Stephen Hawking is well known among physicists for having predicted the evaporation of black holes. For the general public he is the incarnation of the popular view of the genius. The reason is obvious: being considered a “genius” is generally associated with uncommon “thinking” and this “thinking” is generally supposed to be done with “the brain”, not the whole “body” or with other people or “objects.” It is of course taken for granted, and thus passed over in silence, that the body is necessary to walk and talk but the basis of it all is in the brain. Another reason Hawking has acquired the status of a living genius is that he studies “the origin of the universe,” a scientific topic that looms large among the media and the general public with its religious overtones. Add to this the unexpected sales of millions of copies of his book, A Brief History of Time, and you could predict that sooner or later a Hollywood movie would emerge. And it did in 2014 with “The Theory of Everything.”
Despite this popularity, most physicists would agree that Hawking’s scientific contributions to physics cannot be compared to those of Albert Einstein, which were numerous and revolutionary, and that the chances he is ever awarded the coveted Nobel Prize in Physics are slim. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that Hawking is the new “Einstein” of science in the public mind. Like the latter, he contributed to the public image of himself created by the media, by giving them what they expect from him, that is stereotyped sentences like: “I was born on January 8, 1942, three hundred years to the day after the death of Galileo.”
The book is not a biography of Hawking but a description of his day to day activities as a researcher who, given his strong handicap, cannot work alone and needs a computer to talk, research assistants to help him write papers or repair his wheelchair, and also a nurse to take care of him when needed. Chapter one brings us in contact with his assistants who take charge of his computer without which Hawking could not communicate with his environment. We learn how the assistants try to complete his sentences and thus sometimes get it right and sometimes wrong, as one could expect from having interacted with someone with speech problems. All these mundane interactions are reformulated in the language of “extended body”, and “distributed competencies.” Chapters two and three focus on the role of his doctoral students and how they interact with Hawking to write papers and discuss difficult problems in physics using diagrams and graphical representations of space-time. Here, the strong focus on Hawking gives the wrong impression that Hawking is usually the sole author of his papers, an impression that is reinforced by the photo [60] of his 2005 solo paper in Physical Review D. But that impression is misleading as a simple inspection of his list of papers shows. It is in fact instructive to note that whereas he is the sole author of about 60% of his papers between 1966 and 1990, that proportion drops to only 25% during the period 1990-2014 according to the Scopus database. So, most of his papers are in fact signed with two and often three collaborators.
The descriptions of Hawking’s work with students and collaborators are supposed to show that “the scientist is by no means the disembodied mind that he is described to be” [61, my emphasis]. We are not told who exactly think this way: The general public? Journalists? Scientists? Sociologists? Even though more than fifty years of sociology of science have long shown that science is a collective activity, Mialet thinks that the singular case of Stephen Hawking “reveals what is normally hidden or overlooked, like the role of instruments and the students as loci of mobilization of information and collaboration” [62]. But—again—“hidden” from, or “overlooked” by, whom? Certainly not scientists or sociologists. And even the general public interested in science knows that particles like the Higgs boson cannot be seen without cern’s huge instruments, billions of euros and thousands of engineers.
Chapter four describes in detail the various steps in the preparation of the BBC documentary on Hawking and how it reinforces the myth of the genius. Chapter five describes the interviews conducted with Hawking, recalling what conversation analysis had long shown—that turn-taking in oral exchanges is disturbed and made difficult when the body language of the person is absent. Also we are presented with another obvious fact that without his computer and the software for writing and transforming his words into voice, Hawking “would have been cut off and unable to carry on as a physicist” as he himself wrote to a journalist of the Los Angeles Times [132]. Chapter six describes the creation of the Hawking archives including the most trivial aspects of the manipulation of the documents such as “in the first stage, the material will be left in the boxes” for, according to the librarian, “it’s a safe environment.” Only “in the second stage” will the documents be put “in the hands of the archivists at the University Library.” Also, one has to “make an inventory” so that these documents are “usable for the archivists” [142]. The last chapter, seven, is devoted to the creation of Hawking’s statue and Mialet tells us that this is “the most improbable scene: Hawking meeting hawking,” the latter being the statue [8]. In fact, there is nothing improbable in such a scene and one can point to Margaret Thatcher looking at her own statue in 2007.
The French version of the book is not a complete translation but an adaptation for a popular audience. It is quite a bit shorter and does not include the many photos included in the English edition. This is ironic since these photos (Hawking floating in the space station, Hawking sitting next to Bill Clinton, even the photos of the cover pages of his books!) play no analytical role and are thus superfluous in a scholarly book. One would thus expect more of them in the French popular edition, which is aimed at the general public than in the English edition with its intended audience of sociologists of science. Except if Chicago Press, surfing on the name “Hawking” also tried to attract the general reader who, browsing the photos, might think the book is a biography.
The whole approach of the book is the now usual “thick description”; but it is worth recalling that a description, be it “thick’” or “thin”, remains a description. Moreover, whereas ethnography is a method developed to describe foreign cultures for the benefit of people who knew nothing about them, too many “ethnographies of science” seem to forget that they write for an audience that lives in what is basically the same social and cognitive environment as the one described, thus creating a sense not of surprise but of triviality. The chapter on the Hawking archives is full of such trivial descriptions that bring no real intelligibility for the intended audience which is, for the English version, made up of academics. As for the French version, my guess is that the reader interested in learning about Hawking in the short 143-page version, will be puzzled in reading the details concerned with the inventory of his personal archives. For one could imagine that much work must be done to compile such an archive and that “le directeur de la bibliothèque triera ce qui doit être archivé à la bibliothèque de l’université, c’est-à-dire catalogué puis stocké dans des conditions particulières” [115, French version]. But it is true that these trivia provide an opportunity for some name dropping and recall in passing that having access to these archives is “entering a sacred place, where what Derrida calls ‘archontic’ power—the control over authorship, accessibility and interpretation—is exercised” [142].
In fact, it is hard escaping the conclusion that, from the point of view of a sociology of contemporary science, the whole book exists essentially because it offers the voyeur a window through which to observe the life of a popular figure, incarnating the “pure genius.” For no one can really doubt for a minute that the physicist Stephen Hawking would have become such a grandiose public icon if he was walking and talking like anyone else. It is indeed his total immobility that shifts the focus on his “brain” and thus offers to the general public—with the complicity of scientists and journalists—a new incarnation of the “pure scientist”. For real geniuses like John von Neumann or Wolfgang Pauli, who always dressed like bankers in three-piece suits, could never become the imago of the mad or disincarnated genius.
The style of the book is typically postmodern with its recurrent affirmations (one never encounters any detailed argumentations) of the usual mantra of the “science studies” over the last forty years: the “blurring” of boundaries and dichotomies, the discussion of pseudo-paradox, the use of contrasting sentences (“absence-presence”), the Orwellian inversions (“the closer we get to him, the further away we seem”), the creation of straw positions easy to demolish like “the myth of the individual, disembodied, rational actor.” Finally, the use of terms proclaiming things to be “strange,” “improbable,” or “enigmatic” creates an aura of mystery suggesting new and surprising results for situations that are in fact quite obvious if one does not get hypnotized by the strategy of playing with the various meanings of words.
In their back cover blurbs promoting the book in advance, Bruno Latour writes that Mialet has taken “a terribly risky topic” while Judith Butler adds that this is a “provocative book.” They may be referring to the fact that the author pretends to use that limited case-study of an individual to raise “larger questions” about nothing less than: “genius, singularity, identity, subjectivity, corporeality (or the mind/body problem), distributed agency, socio-technical networks, scientific practice, formalism, language, cognition, creativity, expertise, and the frontiers of humanity” [6]. For it is certainly “risky” and “provocative” to try to do all of this in less than 200 pages of text, including 14 figures. Put another way, each one of these major questions is discussed, on average, in less than 14 pages, and without referring to any serious literature in philosophy or psychology. Mialet affirms, for example, that Hawking “cannot think without the machine—his computer—to which he is connected” [80]. Though the author has italicized “without”, it is obvious that the sentence plays on the meaning of “think”. One could easily admit Hawking would not do the kind of physics he does without his computer or his assistants, but can one really mean he cannot think without these? It would have been interesting to see how Hawking would have responded to this question had Mialet had the courtesy to ask him during her interviews. But more on that below.
As a disciple of Bruno Latour, Mialet repeats the usual affirmations about “distributed” competences and “agencies,” the supposed false “dichotomy between humans and nonhumans, men and machines.” But what these scholars seem to forget or, worse, be blind to, is the fact that all these nice “non human” computers, wheelchairs, microphones, pens, ink, books and the like have in fact been invented and thus “constructed” by… humans! In the verbal universe of “actor-network,” humans are in fact lost in relations. The fundamental reason why Mialet seems unable to locate Hawking even in his wheelchair is that the conceptual lenses through which she tries to see him are in fact dissolving him in a network, much as looking at the moon through a kaleidoscope instead of a telescope would make it invisible, dissolved in a myriad of coloured crystals.
That there is no place for real human subjects in Latour’ scheme—though gods and djinns seem to fare better as individuals with a clear ontology—explains why Mialet cannot really find Hawking and thus asks: “Where is Hawking?”, a question probably generated after having perused the well-known cartoon, “Where’s Waldo?”. The French title of the book is even “À la recherche de Stephen Hawking” where the English title preferred “Hawking Incorporated,” playing on the meaning of “incorporated” as referring to a body but also to a corporation. Desperately searching for him, she asks (seriously I guess): “Is he a text stored in a computer? Is he a voice speaking to his assistant’s office? Or an actor playing on a stage?” and so on [43]. In the usual oxymoronic postmodern style, Mialet defines him as a “distributed-centered” subject, insisting that “this is not a contradiction” and that this is different from his being a “totally distributed postmodern subject” [192]. This feigned uncertainty about “where” is Hawking may explain sentences like: “One never knows whether one is dealing with a Hawking who is suffering, or bored, or thinking” [87] and “Hawking seems to feel pain in his human body” [134]. The words I underlined suggest an uncertainty about Hawking’s possible sufferings or thinking. But how could we know if he thinks or suffer? Again, one could have asked him and taken the answer seriously even if it appears as a text on a computer screen or comes out from a loudspeaker.
This brings us to what makes me the most uneasy (in fact, irritated) in reading this kind of book. For Stephen Hawking is certainly thinking with his own brain, even when he talks to nobody. But seeing everything as a network in which relations are supposed to define all the properties of the nodes, as if these were not also individuals with internal properties, the author remains blind to any question concerning Hawking as an individual human subjectFootnote 1. She can thus affirm—without seeming to care about Hawking’s own opinion on that matter—that he cannot think without his computer, an affirmation that is, of course, patently false, not to say simply crazy. And “irony” being a typical postmodern topic, we should note in passing that it is certainly ironic that with all the discourse on “reflexivity,” only a total lack of it and of a modicum of introspection can make one write (seriously it seems) such sentences aimed at teaching us something about the “anthropology of the knowing subject,” to use the grandiloquent subtitle of the English version of the book.
Though the book is supposed to focus on Hawking and his interactions with other people and objects, we do not learn anything serious about him; about, for instance, what it may mean to be locked-in a wheelchair, able to communicate with others only through a computer. But in order to ask those kinds of questions, one should first escape from the autistic world of “science studies” and come back to some common sense about what it is to be human. Finding nothing in this book about the kind of personal experience that Hawking is living, one can turn elsewhere to learn from first-hand experience of how one feels about his/her “identity” and “location” when living essentially cut off from one’s environment. Though Hawking has been suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, this has degenerated into a form of locked-in syndrome. And this is precisely the experience of Jean-Dominique Bauby, then editor of the French fashion magazine Elle. In December 1995, following a cardiovascular accident, he woke-up after twenty days of deep coma to find himself totally paralysed except for the movement of his left eyelid. In a book he dictated letter by letter he explains that one is thus “paralysed from head to toe” but that “the patient, his mind intact, is imprisoned inside his own body, but unable to speak or move.” In his case, “blinking [his] left eyelid [was his] only means of communication”.Footnote 2 Bauby learned to communicate through a system known as the esa code, which lists the letters of the alphabet in decreasing order of their frequency of use in French words, the first three being E, S and A. Bauby explains how slow and basic the system is: “You read off the alphabet (esa version, not abc) until a blink of my eye stops you at the letter to be noted. The manoeuvre is repeated for the letters that follow so that fairly soon you have a whole word, and then fragments of more or less intelligible sentences.” In practice though “some visitors fare better than others […] Crossword fans and Scrabble players have a head start. Girls manage better than boys. By dint of practice some of them know the code by heart and no longer even turn to our special notebook” [28]. Interestingly, Bauby notes that this code is a “method for transcribing [his] thoughts”. So we know he is thinking, as probably Hawking is when he prepares his sentences before dictating them to his computer. Unlike the latter, Bauby did not use a computer but could we seriously say he “could not think without” his code and his left eyelid?
Bauby’s story—which became a movie with the same title in 2007—clearly shows that one cannot seriously doubt that he and Hawking can think not only without a computer but also when they are alone in their respective wheelchairs. Bauby tells us that “in [his] head [he] churns every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn [his] text by heart, paragraph by paragraph” before dictating it letter by letter through his rudimentary system of communication [13]. Why recall these obvious facts? Because I think there is something ethically problematic in the postmodern-cultural-science-studies manner of talking about people as if they were only elements in a network without any internal autonomy. For instead of theorizing childishly about “where is Hawking” and whether or not he can think without his computer, the author could have tried to be more sensitive to his reality, in the way Bauby has done in his book. On the question of “identity,” for instance, Bauby can teach us something useful. His eight-year old daughter, visiting him on Father’s day, “cradles [his] head in her bare arms, covers [his] forehead with noisy kisses and says, over and over, ‘You’re my dad, you’re my dad,’ as if an incantation” [77]. This event, Bauby observes, showed him “that even a rough sketch, a shadow, a tiny fragment of a dad is still a dad” [78]. Reading his book, we also learn where he thinks he is, for at the very end of his book he writes: “I have indeed begun a new life, and that life is here, in this bed, that wheelchair and those corridors. Nowhere else” [137].
These poignant reflections by Bauby should suffice to suggest that it may be time to ask about the ethical consequences of the kind of discourse generated by the use of actor-network language (anl) and its supposedly blurred distinction between humans and “non humans,” to use again Latour’s jargon—as if, by the way, animals and wheelchairs were in the same category. For those who seem convinced that hawking (the sculpture) and Hawking (the person) are difficult to distinguish, let them wait until the death of the latter and then let them talk to the former. Maybe they well then start to “think” more seriously and ethically about what it means to be human.
