Some 20 years ago, I was based at Lancaster University and engaged in fieldwork into the public understanding of science. Specifically, I was conducting interviews with respondents to derive the ‘mental models’ that underpinned their understanding of ionizing radiation. In one particular piece of fieldwork, I was in Cambridge interviewing people who had undergone whole-body radiation monitoring at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. I was attempting to trace public understanding of ionizing radiation on the back of a whole-body monitoring programme that had been set up in the wake of the Chernobyl fallout. I too underwent the monitoring procedure, which involved lying on a hard bed in a tunnel chamber, watching a metal bar – a radiation detector – move up then down the length of my body. In recompense for volunteering, a read-out was made available – a graph with the x-axis showing different types of isotopes, and the y- axis showing level of radiation. The most prominent features of the graph were the two peaks, the larger on the left for Carbon 14, the smaller on the right for Caesium 137.
As part of the interviews with whole-body monitoring volunteers, and informed by a commitment to a mental-models approach to public
Anecdote 31
understanding of science, I asked respondents to describe what they under - stood by these graphs. One particular interview involved a participant who insisted, in a rather arrogant and dismissive way, that he understood perfectly the meaning of the graph. Nevertheless, I pressed him, arguing that, for the purposes of my research, it would be very helpful if he would still describe the graph. Unfurling the read-out, he said (and I paraphrase from memory): ‘Well, it’s all very obvious. Except, while I can see why your head is so radioactive, I can’t understand why your knees are’. He had misinterpreted the peaks: rather than seeing the peaks as markers of especially prominent isotopes, he read them as indicative of particular parts of the body.
For a long time, I found it hugely difficult to ‘accommodate’ this bit of data. The respondent seemed to be clearly wrong, though it was an understandable mistake given the nature of the whole-body monitoring procedure. But what particularly struck me was his sheer self-confidence, indeed bravado. Here was someone who was wrong and arrogant and, crucially, a member of the lay public. This was problematic in the context of the political battles being fought at the time, not least against the Royal Society and the deficit model (see Wynne, 1995), in which the public was primarily represented in terms of the deficiencies in its scientific literacy. It was hard to know what to make of this lay arrogance/ignorance: how could it be accounted in a way that did not simply reproduce the deficit model? As before, on one level we have an anecdote about failure: failure of nerve, failure of paradigm, failure of the public to be the public that was politically ‘needed’ at that time. It is an anecdote about the complex politics of research in which differences in data are situated in relation to ongoing political battles. But this is a politics that seems fixed, with established positions and oppositions (e.g. scientific institutions versus the public).
In retrospect, this anecdote did something rather more interesting. Certainly, it acted as an irritant against what I would later call a ‘romantic’ view of the ‘lay local public’ (Michael, 1998). But also, it niggled at a deeper level. Questions that came into focus included: What might be valuable about the participant who does not do what one (politically) expects of them? What does this say about one’s politics? How does it disrupt not only one’s particular politics around the specific issues associated with the research, but one’s very conception of politics more generally?
Let me put it this way. The respondent in this anecdote was an idiot, and the anecdote itself was a medium for reiterating such idiocy, or rather a mediator of such idiocy (see Latour, 2005). In saying this, I draw in part on Isabelle Stengers’ technical sense of ‘idiot’ – an ever-present metaphysical spectre who, by refusing the invitation to the event, and not bothering to explain that refusal (i.e. operating with incommensurable criteria of what is sensible/ meaningful) discomfits us. Here, the anecdote and its idiot serve as a way of enabling us critically to reflect on ‘what we are busy doing’. Even if it 32 Mike Michael
does not quite suspend ‘the habits that make us believe that we know what we know and who we are, that we hold the meaning of what makes us exist’ (Stengers, 2005: 1003), it does resource a querying of the ‘events’ into which respondents are brought, or better still, prehended (Whitehead, 1929) along with the social scientist. This anecdotalization enacts the idiot in terms of the exclusion of the then anomalous figure of the arrogant/ignorant member of the public from a range of interdigitating events (e.g. the ‘data gathering’ event, the analytic event, the ‘relevance’ events in which data and analysis circulate to various audiences). But the very the effort exercised in the process of exclusion ironically renders this figure present. This ‘excluded presence’2
can prompt a rethinking of such events. This rethinking goes beyond regarding the event of the difficult interview as a methodological problem in need of a solution; for example, the means with which better to accommodate this analytically and politically bothersome respondent. Rather, it enables, as Fraser (2010) puts it, ‘inventive problem-making’: how fruitfully to remain sensitive to – i.e. capable of anecdotalizing – those and that which is excluded in the process of research. Indeed, there is a querying of the very field of ‘public understanding of science’: the excluded idiot resources the questioning of what ‘we are busy doing’ (Stengers, 2005: 1003) in indexing people’s complex relations to science.