veridiction:s

A long quote that frames my starting point connecting Science Studies and Dramaturgy. It is a story of Archimedes proposing an experiment to King Hiero, told by Plutarch in Parallel Lives and dissected by Bruno Latour–a story in experimentation, experiment as a performance, as an experience, and how in the story, the narrative connects the experiment to science, politics and society. In the end what concerns me is the insight into the conditions that enable us to act and speak truthfully in the setting of science and in the setting of theatre–and to valuate the truth of the actions. Let’s get to the quote, of the very beginning of Latour’s text, and then I make some comments.

Latour, B. The Force and Reason of Experiment. In: Experimental Inquiries, edited by H.E. Le Grand et al. 1990, Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

“Archimedes, who was a kinsman and friend of King Hiero, wrote to him that with any given force it was possible to move any given weight; and emboldened, as we are told, by the strength of his demonstration he declared that, if there were another Earth, and he could go to it, he could move this one. Hiero was astonished and begged him to put his proposition into execution, and show him some great weight moved by a slight force. Archimedes therefore fixed upon a three masted merchantman of the royal fleet, which had been dragged ashore by the great labours of many men, and after putting on board many passengers and the customary freight, he seated himself at a distance from her, and without any great effort, but quietly setting in motion with his hand a system of compound pulleys, drew her towards him smoothly and evenly, as though she were gliding through the water. Amazed at this, then, and comprehending the power of his art (sunnoesas tes tecnes ten dunamin), the King persuaded Archimedes to prepare for him offensive and defensive engines to be used in every kind of siege warfare.” (Plutarch, 1961x: iv,78-9)

In this famous report of what may be the oldest public scientific experiment, several features are remarkable. The performance has almost certainly never been staged (at least with a fully loaded ship); it is thus a tale of a staged thought experiment, but a story which for hundreds of years played a continuous role in shaping the relations between Kings, mathematics,war and mechanics. It is a public show before all the assembled ‘media’. It is a direct application of a theoretical demonstration that Archimedes had just completed following a Platonist research program that Plutarch sketches in the paragraph before. It is Archimedes himself who takes the initiative of boasting to the King that he can move the Earth; the King, quite reasonably, challenges him to a ‘show down’ by way of a smaller scale public experiment before believing in the demonstration, as if he was unable to be convinced by the strength of mathematics alone; but it is the King who, in an instant, makes the connection of this striking but futile experiment with a technical and military research program headed by Archimedes (o demiurgos) to protect Syracuse against the Romans.

This is the end of the quote. Latour spends pages to deepen the study of this story. (The whole chapter is available here.) I am concerned here with his attempt to distill a lesson from a Hellenic periode text. Plutarch’s text is partly history, partly story, and anyway it is a narrative with recognizable dramatic elements and style (even more than its concern for historical accuracy or substantiating evidence): a dynamic in time, cumulation of events and chain of actions explicated with connectives, excitement, changing relationships, and of course characters and a setting (war coming to Syracuse). These elements are far from irrelevant to Latour’s study in ‘sociology of science’–in fact they are home in it. There is much thrill in the fact that Archimedes is an old man moving the merchantman single-handedly–it helps Hiero being amazed and convinced to even a greater degree.

Another example is Archimedes’ initial bold claim that he can move the earth, which in any solemn and academic philosophy of science could be ignored or criticized for being an exaggeration, or being unscientific. But in Latour’s reconstruction, Archimedes’ proposal is a metaphor for his (and Plutarch’s) Platonism–that there is another world (that of certain knowledge) from which Archimedes can manipulate a population, or move an army. Obviously, Platonism of those days was not merely a category of weird abstract philosophy but embedded in communicative and political practices.

I want to move beyond the point of scientific activity being imbued with elements interesting for humanities scholars and also beyond the point that peoples of the hard sciences need to recognize the significance of dramatic and narrative elements in the work of their old teachers and their own’s. My proposal is to carefully craft a tool repository with tools from both dramaturgy and science studies that extends the power of the theatre maker and the writer in creating more truthful work and makes the scholar sensitive to the subleties of human action, what they say, how they say it, when and to whom they say it, and ultimate the correspondence that actions and utterances have to what we call reality. Ultimately, we should become able to know why Julia did not take teenage Romeo for a smooth playboy when he approached her with his flamboyant speech. That being much studied, we should become conscious of the conditions of true speech in live situations instead in texts, thus in theatre for a beginning, when making or viewing theatre. (Continued later.)