Scientific Oversights


 

Images and other visualized scientific data like the postdoc's histograms have publicly come to signify scientific knowledge and even “science” more broadly, where the identifying paradigm of the discipline – to see and, thereby, to know – has dominated scholarly discussions for decades. The marshaling of images and texts within scientific research is part of managing the representational artifacts of science and the power they have been given to speak: to evoke verisimilitude, to act as proof, to expose that which was previously invisible (Poleykett 2017: 191-193). Of course, bioscientific imaging, where the mysteries of the human body are experimentally visualized or modeled and made available for interpretation, has had a profound impact on the way we imagine, and indeed image, ourselves and our relationships to disease. The production of such a vision has a clear corollary in colonial history, where texts, maps, photographs, and other records were used in systems of imperial representation for persuasive social control, rooted in administrative effects and forms of biopower. For example, Branwyn Poleykett discusses the ways colonial era medical photography and “scientific visuality” among Pasteurian scientists played a role in “depict[ing] North Africa as an unhygienic territory that could be modernised through access to French bacteriological knowledge” (Poleykett 2017: 196). 

 

Scientific images displace attention from the equally aural and tactile experiences of everyday scientific practice. As a corrective to this oversight, more recent research has focused on sound as part of the “material practice” of science (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2004: 637; see also Bijsterveld 2019; Helmreich 2007; Kursell 2008; Mody 2005; Witten 1996). Many of these studies consider sound as an experimental means, at work explicitly in the laboratory: for example, as components of the instruments and tools used by scientists to visualize data and experimentally perceive physical realities such as the ocean floor or the earth’s crust (Helmreich 2007; Bijsterveld 2019), through “sonification” (Witten 1996). In medicine, this has been similarly extended to an examination of sound as a tool for diagnostic purposes, such as with stethoscopes and the “tones” of heart monitoring machines in cardiology wards (Rice 2013: 3).[3] Other attention to sound in the scientific laboratory has considered it as environmental noise or “pollution,” feedback from technical materials and the buildings and infrastructures that house them, such as electronic and air conditioning systems. These two sonic forms are described by Cyrus C.M. Mody as “wanted and unwanted” sounds (Mody 2005: 176), in other words, sounds intentional to and unintentional for the mechanical production of science. The plaintive crow, in this case, could be considered a passive ambient sound, an unavoidable artifact of online meetings inside offices with thin walls in cities such as Tokyo. If not elevated to dominance by monaural digital audio tracks, crows and other similar disruptions might otherwise be easily ignored by scientists and filtered out as background noise, similar to the way “motorway noise” is described by proximal homeowners: “It was just ‘there’, something that people did not think about a lot, but nevertheless part of the environments they inhabited and were already sensorially attuned to” (Lacey et al. 2019: 61). 

 

Yet, scientists do more than manipulate sound experimentally or encounter it as an unavoidable residue in the ambience around them. Sound, as we know, is structured in and by the built environment, regardless of whether that space is a laboratory of four walls and a window with a crow perched nearby (hopefully outside), or a neighboring motorway, or an online interface connecting distantly (or not so distantly) situated individuals. Sound is not merely an element of space but is actively constitutive of place, the physical world experienced as both “a thing given” and “a thing fashioned” (Richardson 1982: 421): in other words, space inscribed with cultural meaning. In a summary of his research with oceanographers, Stefan Helmreich details the way these scientists use sound to transform the dark space of the ocean into a knowable, locatable place through sonic pings, a conversation between transponders and the submarine craft. In summarizing other research, Helmreich also describes the way sound is used to “define [the] auditory circumference of village communities” or “demarcate local maritime territories” (Helmreich 2007: 623-4). In this way, sound helps delimit towns, domains, and even the seabed, defining, in turn, the communities of people, animals, and things who inhabit them. 

 

At the same time, however, sound is a modulator, used by individuals to move through (transferring from one to another) and even across places (existing in multiple places simultaneously) – for example, public and private spheres – through the regulation of sonic presence. Jo Tacchi describes this in relation to the use of radio in the home: 

 

To look at radio sound as texture in the domestic sphere, requires an understanding of the ways in which a soundscape can operate to link the social and the private. Within the texture of a domestic soundscape, listeners can work on their sociality, keeping the outside world firmly in the background, or bringing it closer and surrounding oneself with it. (Tacchi 1998: 36)

 

Like the radio, modern computing technologies such as video chat are essential to the weaving of our presences into and out of places, regardless of where we are actually located geographically. In fact, places (near and far) are always sonically penetrating each other and are, thus, in continual negotiation and co-constitution. Describing the properties and technologies of sound, in general, Steven Feld writes: “All ‘sound worlds’ are simultaneously local and translocal, specific yet blurred, particular but general, in place and in motion [...] all sound worlds are actually or potentially transportable and hearable in all others” (Feld 2000: 174). While the term telepresence has been used to describe an equivalent or smooth collapsing of the near and far – a “'transhorizon optics' which puts what was previously out of sight on display” (Virilio 1999: 13) – following Tacchi I argue that, rather, telepresence reflects more of an oscillation – a potential for mobility back and forth across places. But as Tacchi also emphasizes, this potential is not a mere accidental outgrowth of sound itself and certainly not smooth. Sound is also a tool, a means to socialize, create, project, and negotiate our social selves. We use sound to craft and manipulate, to settle social norms, circumscribe acceptable interactions, and, thereby, negotiate social relationships within places. Sound is therefore also implicated in constructs of power, just as Poleykett describes in the case of colonial era “scientific visuality.” While telework has been promoted as liberating, affording the maintenance of healthy work-life balance (reduced commute time; increased “presence” in family life), I argue instead that the home itself can become reorganized, and ultimately de-prioritized, under (tele)work demands. Receding the soundscape of the home reflects continued normalization of the neoliberal imperative to find self-realization in workplace forms of sociality (Donzelot 1991) and to self-govern through capitalistic incentives (Foucault 2008, Rose 2007). Such structuring logics play a role in the way individuals adapt technologies to solve everyday problems.