The existence of the objects

I remember an advice from Umberto Eco when I read “How to Write a Thesis”: do not mind whether a book is small or looks like a book to dummies, give it attention, put aside your prejudices and them maybe you can find something useful. So, exactly this happened with me when I was reading “Science, the very idea”, by Steve Woolgar.



I have loaned the book because its title, and at home started having a look, which made me put it in the corner. After a week I started reading more carefully and I discovered a really good book, discussing the approach of Actor Network Theory in the social analyse of science. A sequence of small chapters discusses how the social network brings the world to exist, nothing but this. First, the author discusses the representation on science, taking a good attention to the methodological horrors that normally happen in a misuse of terminologies and methods. To him, the creation of representation permits indexicality, inconcludability, and reflexibility, as any discourse with pretension to be scientific is organized to reinforce the ideology of representation. Reviewing the process of generation of representation, Woolgar dogs a inversion on nature: facts and discoveries are, according to him, first achieved in a social dealing with representations. He summarizes an scientific finding as having the following stages:



(1) document

(2) document → object

(3) document object

(4) document← object

(5) deny (or forget about) stages 1-3



To exemplify those stages, Woolgar explain how the Pulsars were discovered. First, the scientists created hypothesis of such phenomenon, and all the representations, in terms of documents, papers, thesis, experiments reports, were able to generate an object. In the course of the social movement around that representation, the object started being detached from the documents, to after being influent as to generate documents. The last stage, and this is why we normally think there are real objects to be discovered, the social milieu denies the stages in which the representational assumptions were used to create the object.



In terms of architecture, this approach is very interesting to consider the design process. As a matter of fact, drawings could be regarded as a strong representational stage, and ever since the object is generated, it returns its influence over the documents (drawings or written objections about). The main point is conceiving the objects as part of a social network in which they got their permanency through the movements, social and scientific.