Read the previous post by Leah Falk
Read the next post by L. Shapley Bassen
Yes, of course, use metaphor, craft, all the tools at our disposal, to tell scientific stories in ways that are accessible, beautiful, open, meaningful. Write to a variety of audiences. Yes, of course. But even this feels like too false a binary. As a working scientist and a writer, I understand that science is a narrative both because it is done by people, and we are deeply narrative beings, and because it occurs inside of people and the world we inhabit.
This notion—that science is narrative and is deeply social and constructed—is backed up by basically the entire field of science studies, starting probably with Latour, which is a field that scientists need to read in and engage with more often and deeply. And, importantly, considering science as narrative, instead of viewing narrative as a tool we use to talk about science to a broad audience, allows us space to talk about power and how it’s used. If science is narrative and is socially and interpersonally constructed, you can’t talk about this construction of knowledge without talking about race and gender and sexuality and capital and “western thought” and colonialism and geography and class, even if you’re only interested in how molecular motors cause muscles to contract. Who did that research? What’s their story? Why that research and not some other? How did we think it worked before, and how was that paradigm deconstructed? In other words: what’s the old story, and what’s the new one? Who did the research, where, and why there?
It’s important to remember that post-modernism and quantum mechanics—too seemingly disparate fields of thought—came about around the same time. And they informed one another. The notion that observing the state of a particle will affect the state of that particle deeply troubles the boundaries between the observer and the observed, and that this happened in the hardest and seemingly most objective of the sciences profoundly cracked the edifice of truth that was built around the scientific method for centuries.
But even in the humble biological sciences, those of us who actually do work at the bench usually understand that there is something deeply unknowable about many many things. Our projects that make sense, the ones that work, that turn into publications to be shared with our field, are usually the exception. Science is messy, and messy is the stuff of fiction.
Finally, the notion that science writing may require metaphor still feels somewhat patronizing. Well, of course it does. Teaching and doing science requires metaphor. Much scientific research, by definition, deals in the realm of the invisible. Microbiology is micro; seeing requires tools. Metaphor doesn’t mean untrue in fiction or nonfiction or research. Proteins act as machines. Movement is done by motors. The immune system has Natural Killer (NK) cells. Indeed, the best metaphors approach truth in ways that other language can’t. This is why they’re required. But, as Susan Sontag argued, not all metaphors are benign. Shit ain’t simple. Some metaphors kill. Some are a salve. That is the question: which stories do justice, and which perpetuate death? That is the choice What a world we find ourselves in. How little we know, how many stories we have left to tell. For our sake, let us choose wisely.
Comments from other contributors to the Poetics of Science online discussion:
L. Shapley Bassen: Another wonderful expression/response! “Science is messy, and messy is the stuff of fiction . . . as Susan Sontag argued, not all metaphors are benign. Shit ain’t simple. Some metaphors kill. Some are a salve. That is the question: which stories do justice, and which perpetuate death?” Is there some way KR can invite Frederick Turner into this conversation? He was my first editor/publisher at KR [1984], and his career of writing/teaching is an aria about this topic. His latest epic poem is being published in installments at http://www.baen.com/apocalypse-book1.
Helen Betya Rubinstein: YES. Thank you for this fantastic articulation of how science is narrative. And it’s not only the invisibility of scientific research that requires metaphor. Language is metaphor. The attempt to communicate anything requires a translation of what we don’t yet understand into words and images we do.
L. Shapley Bassen: Yes yes, Helen. Said as economically/succinctly as possible!