writing about something

Taking umbrage at Latour and Woolgar’s assertion that the laboratory is a system of literary inscription, laboratory members suggest that what is important is that they are “writing about something, and that this something [is] ‘neuroendocrinology’” (p. 53). The papers, participants argue, have “no interest or significance in themselves: they [are] only a means of communicating ‘important findings’” (p. 75) The participants advise Latour and Woolgar to give up their “obsessive interest in literature” in order to grasp “the ‘true meaning’ of the ‘facts’” papers contain (p. 75). Taking these proclamations with a grain of salt, Latour and Woolgar noted how participants immediately resume their discussion of drafts, proofs, figures, and diagrams after their interviews.

In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Jacques Derrida (1972) explained the impetus for this devaluing of writing and the need to make it disappear. Referencing Plato’s Protagoras and Philebus, Derrida argued that “writing is essentially bad ...producing not of science but of belief, not of truth but of appearances...” (p. 103). Writing is lowly and deceptive. To ensure the “internal purity” of dominant knowledges such as science, writing must “return to being what it should never have ceased to be: an accessory, an accident, an excess” (p. 128). Science is decontaminated by casting writing as outside its boundaries, as a mere “accessory.” This inclination makes me particularly wary about the wholesale adoption of the laboratory metaphor for wireless environments dedicated to writing instruction.