Case 2: incommensurate knowledge

I turn now to an arena that is all about ethics, indeed explicitly about the determination of ethical principles. But while we can recognise similar processes of internalisation and externalisation, it throws up another kind of externality altogether.

Let me start with Gallon’s observations on what he calls hot entanglements. These are conditions of extreme overflowing as one might find in crises or dilemmas that seem to have many ramifications. And the usual remedy, making more and more elements of the situation explicit, often makes hot things hotter.¹⁰

Not only are ‘hot’ situations becoming more commonplace, it is becoming exceedingly difficult to cool them down, i.e. arrive as a consensus on how the situation should be described... Externalities are at the centre of public debates [i.e. the focus of them] with no obvious conclusions.

(Gallon 1998: 262-3)

The desirability of putting information into the public domain, the ethical principle we have already encountered, is doubled in the further desirability of stimulating open debate on ‘ethical issues’ as such. In relation to controversies over science, Nowotny et al. (2001: 202-3) call this risk feeding off risk: ‘The creation of ethics committees, the development of ethical guidelines and an apparently endless stream of regulations, procedures and protocols’ is at once a symptom of unease about the application of science, a signal of social conscience and a proliferation of the perspectives that clamour to be taken into account.¹¹ Add to Gallon’s description of the ‘hybrid forums’ which result from such hot entanglements of diverse facts, interests and knowledge bases¹² Siegler’s (1999) description of multidisciplinary approaches to ethics committed to bringing together a spectrum of views,¹³ and we have attempts to frame heterogeneity through creating heterogeneity.

I point to a type of enterprise, a Commission of Enquiry, generally framed off from the market that measures, frames and disentangles the values of products.¹⁴ It belongs to the type of forum which seeks to measure, frame and disentangle flows and counterflows in the values generated by public concern. As it turned out, a field of potential, anticipated action was laboriously created out of diverse domains of information only to be pre-empted by a set of ‘externalities’ that had all the time lain within at the heart, at the core, of the enterprise itself. This is what I call an internal externality.

I intend the idiom not as a psycho-dynamic but as a spatial or structural one. The inspiration here, the externality at the heart of my own exposition, are the Mekeo people of Papua New Guinea (Mosko 1985) who imagine insides and outsides as each having their outside and inside. Thus the relationship between a village, an ‘outside’ place to which visitors come, and the clan territory it lies within, which is an ‘inside place’, is repeated within the village, between the village street where the houses are (‘inside’) and its centre, a plaza, an ‘outside’ place into which, for example, rubbish is swept and from which it is evacuated over the village fence. The plaza can be thought of as the outside’s inside or an inverted outside; the area over the fence as an inside’s outside or everted inside. I have thus taken Gallon’s ‘externalities at the centre of public debate’ not in the sense of contingent issues that suddenly require focusing upon but in the sense of an unexpected discontinuity in the decision-making process. It is a locale for the voices, which speak with authority, which is what the whole enquiry was about.

Externalities in comparative guise 71

Background

A public inquiry, which unfolded over four years between 1989 and 1993, deliberately tackled heterogeneity and the multiplicity of interests that ethical issues call up.¹⁵ At stake was appropriate legislation for the ‘social, legal and ethical’ effects of technoscience applied to human reproduction. ‘Society’ needed to find out what its ‘members’ thought.

As Canada becomes more heterogeneous, it will become increasingly important to make core values transparent and to ensure that consensus on technologies takes into account the diverse nature of the country.

(1993: 29-30)

This Canada was the nation that would recognise core values, the government that would reach a consensus, and (their hope) the federal state which would give backing to provincial legislatures.

The Commission interpreted its mandate as being asked to speak on behalf of ‘Canadian society as a whole’ (1993: 20). It wished to be equipped with information drawn from a wide range of social sources within the population, and thus indeed intended a ‘total society’ approach (Massey 1993). Now when Callon argues that any framing produces overflowing, and any disentanglement produces new attachments (1998: 38), he describes a condition familiar to anthropologists. Above all, they have pointed out how, as overarching abstractions, Euro-American notions of ‘society’ and ‘culture’ precipitate a world full of incidental and intransigent particulars (e.g Wagner 1976). This is especially true of the way information about society is marshalled. Notably, the more you describe ‘society’ the more you create the counter problem of ‘the individual’.

From the Commission’s point of view, the ‘Canadians’ whom they wish to consult are not others in the way competitors can be (in part at least a reflex of one’s own

agency) but agents whose calculations may be as yet unknown. The Commissioners could not act without information, and they wanted to find out what Canadians thought in order to report the answers to the Canadians themselves. No blocking here: the information they collected was (in suitable form) to be relayed back to the public. In what follows I imagine some of the processes that might have lain behind the massive Report, and the information it marshalled, and thus how the Commissioners in turn might have imagined their task, that is, the character of the calculating agency they had to acquire. Evidence is drawn almost entirely from the text of the Report.