10.6092/issn.2038-3460/16993
In this paper, I will be treating the technoscientific body in terms of the emergence of emotion and emotion conventions, mainly by considering the role of affect. In this I want to pay attention to technoscience not only as a key site for the emergence of epistemic and ethical novelty, but also emotional novelty. In particular I want to focus on the role of the peculiar objects of technoscience whose affect upon bodies enables the emergence of peculiar, new emotions, and their conventionalization, that is the way in which such new emotions become warrantable. In all this I address the technoscientific body in two versions: on the one hand, there are the bodies of practicing stem cell scientists, and on the other there are the bodies of members of the public in the transport system non-places like airports and train stations.
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Mike Michael
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Affecting the Technoscientific Body: Stem Cells, Wheeled-luggage and Emotions
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2011-06-27
2023-05-22
2011-06-27
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Mike Michael
2011/06/27
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/16993
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Affecting the Technoscientific Body: Stem Cells, Wheeled-luggage and Emotions
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/16993/15894
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                                                                             Lecture
Affecting the Technoscientific Body:
Stem Cells, Wheeled-luggage and Emotions


Mike Michael



      Abstract In this paper, I will be treating the technoscientific body in terms of the
      emergence of emotion and emotion conventions, mainly by considering the role
      of affect. In this I want to pay attention to technoscience not only as a key site for
      the emergence of epistemic and ethical novelty, but also emotional novelty. In
      particular I want to focus on the role of the peculiar objects of technoscience
      whose affect upon bodies enables the emergence of peculiar, new emotions, and
      their conventionalization, that is the way in which such new emotions become
      warrantable. In all this I address the technoscientific body in two versions: on the
      one hand, there are the bodies of practicing stem cell scientists, and on the other,
      there are the bodies of members of the public in the transport system non-places
      like airports and train stations.

      Keywords technoscience; body; affect; emotions; stem cells.




Introduction
    In this paper, I will be treating the technoscientific body in terms of the emer-
gence of emotion and emotion conventions, mainly by considering the role of af-
fect. In this I want to pay attention to technoscience not only as a key site for the
emergence of epistemic and ethical novelty, but also emotional novelty. In par-
ticular, I want to focus on the role of the peculiar objects of technoscience whose
affect upon bodies enables the emergence of peculiar, new emotions, and their
conventionalization, that is the way in which such new emotions become war-
rantable. In all this I address the technoscientific body in two versions: on the
one hand, there are the bodies of practicing stem cell scientists, and on the other,
there are the bodies of members of the public in the transport system non-places
like airports and train stations.




TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Volume 2(1) pp. 53-64 - ISSN 2038-3460
http://www.tecnoscienza.net                       © 2011 TECNOSCIENZA
54   MICHAEL



         By way of clarification, I treat technoscience not only in terms of the more or
     less sequestrated spatialization of heterogeneous knowledge-production and as-
     semblage-making (the hub of which is often the laboratory), but also more ex-
     pansive spatializations traced by the artifacts of technoscience as they circulate
     and serve in the construction of hubs, like hospitals or airports. Put simply, I
     want to think about technoscience in relation to both centers of calculation and
     the calculation of centers. Or to put it in yet another way, I am interested in how
     technoscientific bodies are affected both by the process of making technoscien-
     tific object, and the way that more or less stable technoscientific objects have af-
     fects. Of course, in both cases I see the “object” as an actual entity that emerges
     from and contributes to a complex heterogeneous assemblage (Whitehead,
     1978).


     1. Emotions and Technoscience
         Now, despite the commonsensical division between rationality and emotion,
     and by extension, mind and body, and the way these shake out institutionally as
     the parallel contrast between science and religion or anti-science say, this division
     is, needless to say, highly problematic. So, we can see hints of emotion in, for ex-
     ample, the reported trauma of paradigm change, or in the practices that go into
     the purging of core sets. As Jack Barbalet (2001) has noted, one can be highly
     passionate about what one sees as rationality or truth, as well as be highly rational
     about the experience and performance of emotions. In this respect, emotions are
     routinely accompanied by their rationalising discursive accounts that serve to
     warrant them.
         Of course for social constructionist accounts of emotion this should come as
     no surprise. This is because constructionist accounts “view emotions as primarily
     dependent upon the definitions of situations, emotions vocabularies, and emo-
     tional beliefs, which vary across time and location” (Thoits 1989, p. 319). Thus,
     subjective experiences:

     are influenced not only by a society’s emotion vocabulary, but by cultural beliefs about emo-
     tions (...) rules regarding what one should or should not feel or express; ideologies about emo-
     tions such as romantic love; shared understandings of the typical onsets, sequences and out-
     comes of emotional experiences and interactions (...) and beliefs about which emotions can
     and cannot be successfully controlled (Thoits 1989, p. 322).

         These are “ethnopsychologies” or “emotion cultures”. As various authors
     have noted, this background of shared assumptions serve as the medium by
     which displays of emotion, and emotional talk and behaviour, are warranted in
     situated interaction.
         I have certainly witnessed this in a number of areas I have studied. For in-
     stance, in relation to ethical judgement of animal experiments, in work with
     Lynda Birke, we found that our scientist participants had particular versions of
                                                              TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)        55



what counted as appropriate emotionality. Too much emotionality – too much
empathy with animals – and ethical calculation would be disrupted. What we see
here are particular conventions for emotion acts being enacted. This is a version
of the argumentational processes that make up core set controversy. A typical ac-
cusation is that one’s opponents cannot see the “truth” because they are too
committed – irrationally committed, emotionally over-invested – in their own
theories, or technologies, or experimental system, or data sets. In this animal ex-
perimentation case we have a sort of ethics core set (Michael and Birke 1994a;
1994b).
    Now, arguably, constructionist accounts of emotion are somewhat static and
even functionalist in practice if not principle. It is rare that we see how emotions
and the conventions that warrant them change. In what follows I will explore a
couple of examples where there might be – and I stress “might be” – novel emo-
tions and their conventions emerging from the ways in which technoscientific ob-
jects affect bodies – leading to the novel emotion performances of novel techno-
scientific bodies. I am aware that the emergent, hybrid emotions I derive in what
follows can be regarded as having precedents in other areas of social life: the
main point however is not so much the content of these emotions as the form of
the empirical study and analysis by which we attempt to trace the specificities of
their emergence.
    By way of further clarification, I should note that I see affect as a broader cat-
egory than emotion that reflects the machinic aspect of assemblages, in Deleuze
and Guattari’s terms (1980; I also draw inspiration from authors such as Mas-
sumi 2002; Bennett 2010). Thus, affect concerns the ways that bodies are impact-
ed upon by particular circumstances – in this case how bodies as physical entities
with particular corporeal, perceptual and reactive capacities are affected by tech-
noscience, its objects and processes.


2. Technoscience-in-action and Specific Emergent Emotions
    So, in this analysis I want to say something about the way that emotional bod-
ies and their related emotion conventions change in relation to the specificities of
technoscience. In work on the ethics of human embryonic stem cell research with
Stephen Wainwright and Clare Williams at Kings College London, we began to
see hints of the emergence of some new configurations of emotion that reflect the
peculiarities of the scientific object – embryonic stem cells (see Michael, et al.
2007).
    To reiterate, by “object” I minimally mean an actual entity that emerged from
and contributes to an assemblage that in the case of stem cells includes heteroge-
neous relations ranging from the policy imperative towards translational research
through to the situated recalcitrance of stem cells themselves (Michael, Wain-
wright and Williams 2005).
    Let us consider the Lumelsky protocol – a system in which as stated in a head-
line from Science “stem cells are coaxed to produce insulin” (Lumelsky, et al.
56   MICHAEL



     2001). The seminal nature of the Lumelsky paper is reinforced in the editorial
     comment in Science:

     In a boost for scientists who hope to turn the potential of undifferentiated stem cells into med-
     ical miracles, researchers have found a way to produce insulin-producing cells from mouse
     embryonic stem (ES) cells. There is a ready-made demand for anyone who can achieve such
     alchemy in human cells: millions of patients with diabetes… An unlimited source of cells that
     can produce insulin in response to the bodies cues would…be a hot commodity (Vogel 2001,
     p. 615, my italics).

         It is not difficult for those of us reared on the sociology of expectations to see
     the particular emotions coursing through this text. However, the key point is that
     the protocol, after generating frantic activity to replicate and extend it, turned
     out to be – that is, could be constituted as – an artifact. What was interesting was
     that the artifactuality should have been self-evident from the original paper –
     even a cursory reading of one of the key graphs would have shown that there was
     insulin already in the medium in which the stem cells were supposedly differenti-
     ating into beta-cells, and that there was statistically insignificant difference be-
     tween the concentrations of insulin before and after the supposed differentiation.
         Now, it was certainly evident from the interviews that dynamics typical of the
     core set seemed to operate. Some scientists accused others of getting over-excited
     and jumping on the bandwagon (that is, they applied conventions in which such
     over-excitement was illegitimate). The upshot is that bandwagon jumpers’ epis-
     temic judgment could not be trusted (i.e. they need to be excluded from the core
     set). However, the point I want to make is that something else was also going on.
     After all, the scientists who jumped on the Lumelsky bandwagon have not been
     abandoned – they are still working in the field (at least at the time of our re-
     search, around 5 years ago). How does this “rehabilitation” take place?
         Crucial here is that chronic uncertainties characterize the field – epistemic,
     ethical, institutional, translational. This suggests that running alongside the dra-
     matic narrative of seeming success and evident failure is a morass of experimental
     work whose success and failure is profoundly and chronically uncertain. In the
     core set analysis in which scientists compete for the epistemic – and, we might
     add, emotional – high ground, certain scientists were “discredited” partly be-
     cause they were successfully accused of jumping onto the Lumelsky protocol.
     However, regarding this controversy in relation to the more diffuse technoscien-
     tific assemblage of chronic uncertainties, to jump onto the Lumelsky bandwagon
     is socially “understandable” where “understandable” connotes empathy, or sym-
     pathy. In other words, parallel to assessments of epistemic and emotional cor-
     rectness or incorrectness – that is about the propositional or substantive content
     of knowledge – mapped by core set analysis, are feelings of “social understanda-
     bility” under conditions of chronic uncertainty. Alongside the “punishment” of
     those who have failed in a controversy, there are ways in which they may be
     “pardoned”, “excused” or “forgiven”.
                                                            TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)        57



    In one way this reflects the complex technoscientific object that is the human
embryonic stem cell, not least in relation to the enormous uncertainty constitu-
tive of the assemblage out of which it emerges. While our respondents did not
jump onto the Lumelsky bandwagon, they might have done if circumstances had
been slightly different. Indeed, they might be on a bandwagon at the present
moment, but will only know it in retrospect, though they can certainly
acknowledge the possibility – there is a “but for the grace of god” presumption –
“it could have been me (or my lab) on that (the Lumelsky protocol) bandwagon”.
In a sense then, there might be an emotion convention emerging, partly struc-
tured by the (complexly defined) object of their attention, which cuts across
blame and forgiveness for bandwagon-jumping, that both discredits and warrants
over-excitability and over-enthusiasm.
    What seems to me to be particularly interesting in this story I have told is the
prospect that we are witnessing an emerging hybrid convention that warrants a
complex emotion that reflects and mediates the technoscientific complexity of
the stem cell object. We have something combining blame and forgiveness, and a
convention that warrants contrary emotions that encompass extreme enthusiasm
and caution. In other words, we have the possibility of new hybrid emotional
forms and their conventions emerging in relation to this technoscientific assem-
blage.
    Obviously, I would not want to limit the possible emergence of new emotional
forms and their conventions to this particular fraction of biosciences, or to lab-
based technoscience per se. The simple point is that we can perhaps look at how
recent technoscientific objects – through their complexity and uncertainty – cor-
poreally affect scientists by generating immediate problems of pinning them
down physically, ethically and institutionally and thus lead to the reconfiguration
of emotion and emotion conventions.
    However, perhaps we can also find the affects of everyday technoscience also
generating new emotions. Let me now turn to the possible affective role of a
mundane technology.


3. Products of Technoscience and Emergent Emotions
   Many of us will have made our way here to the conference through a series of,
what the anthropologist Marc Augé (1995) calls, non-places. These are transport
hubs such as airports, train and bus stations largely devoid of those qualities said
to be characteristic of place – familiarity, rootedness, a sense of history and
memory, ‘organic-ness’. These non-places are spaces of consumption, of travel-
ling-through, of solitariness where communication tends to take place through
screens/ICTs. The notion of non-places has been critiqued in various ways (e.g. it
neglects how it is a place for various workers and business travellers), most perti-
nently in relation Augé’s the under-estimation of the heterogeneity, histories and
imaginaries of the associated assemblages (Merriman 2004). Non-places are high-
ly designed – structured by the products of technoscience: not least in the ways
58   MICHAEL



     that bodies are marshaled, directed, pacified, surveilled through the design of
     distribution, security and media systems. Within this context, I want to look at
     one particular technological artifact and its possible affective role in the emer-
     gence of novel emotion and their conventions: wheeled or rolling luggage.
         Invented by Northwest Airlines pilot Bob Plath in 1987 to transport his bags
     more easily through busy airports, the Rollaboard® as it was initially called, was
     innovatory because in addition to the wheels, it added an extendable handle and
     turned the suitcase vertically onto its end (there had been other forms of wheeled
     luggage, in particular, a horizontal model featuring four small wheels and a strap
     for pulling but this was not very efficient or controllable – obviously I would take
     these terms to be contingent). He started making and selling these to colleagues,
     and by 1989 due to pressure of public demand he moved from his garage to a
     factory proper founding the company Travelpro in the process. By 1991 he had
     retired from Northwest Airlines1.
         I think many of us are familiar with this luggage technology – it is now pretty
     much ubiquitous. It is routinely represented as a vast improvement on previous
     forms of luggage. The corporeo-cultural scripts implied in its typical representa-
     tion suggest a single traveller, moving through empty, or uncluttered space (Fig.
     1a) smiling or meditating at the sheer convenience of it all (Fig. 1b).




           Fig. 1a                                        Fig. 1b



     1
         See http://www.travelproluggageblog.com/tag/bob-plath.
                                                              TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)        59



   Anecdotally, we know different, of course (Fig. 2). Moving through the con-
courses of busy transport hubs where crowds of travellers collect at certain points
– such as around departures boards, or information points – has, arguably, be-
come the occasion for a set of new body techniques, and emergent emotions and
their conventions. The design of rolling luggage means that it usually trails be-
hind the body rather than at its side. This means that we cannot see it directly. As
such, we can monitor the immediate risks it poses (how it might potentially get
entangled with others’ legs and luggage) only by constantly looking over our
shoulder, which means we don’t look consistently where we’re going. And we
need to look carefully where we’re going because we might get entangled in other
travellers’ rolling luggage. But if we do that, we increase the dangers we pose to
other travelers… and so on and so forth.




   Fig. 2


   I am tentatively suggesting that signified in this, albeit caricatured, representa-
tion of “doing” rolling luggage within the sociotechnoscientific setting of a
transport hub, are possibly emerging body techniques entailing a particular pat-
terning of attention-and-attribution that is physico-moral-emotional. Atten-
tion/attribution is directed and distributed toward, simultaneously, the vicitim-
ized self/guilty other (when you are banged into) and the guilty self and vicitim-
ized other (when you bang into). My sense is that this rolling mixture of anger
and apology is the stage we are at the moment.
   Contrary again to the idea of a non-place, such chronic encounters might cu-
mulatively, maybe cosmopolitically, occasion a different sort of heterogeneous
patterning: a common recognition of a common condition that might serve as the
60   MICHAEL



     organic basis of a highly situated and contingent sense of community, and, ironi-
     cally, a belonging in which conventions for these complex hybrid emotions might
     emerge. Of course, this scenario has flattened a range of cultural and political dif-
     ferences that militate against such communitas: some cultures take apology to a
     fine art; the status signified by self and other is not unimportant in the patterning
     of anger and apology. Nevertheless, the complex object of rolling luggage does
     open up certain possibilities for the emergence of these novel hybrid emotions.


     Conclusion: Anecdote and Affect
         Ironically, we seem to have, at least superficially, a similar emergent emotional
     form in relation to both Lumelsky and rolling luggage cases: hybrids emotions of,
     respectively, forgiveness and blame, and apology and anger. But how do we ac-
     cess their difference or similarity?
         To be sure my accounts of the affective emergence of particular technoscien-
     tifc bodies and their emotions have been highly speculative. So, I want to finish
     with a possible methodological strategy for better accessing these: the anecdote.
     The issue is how can we access affected technoscientific bodies when our data are
     so often linguistic or discursive or narrative. On this score, I’m trying to work
     with anecdotes as a heuristic tool for accessing these processes.
         Anecdotes can be formally characterized in the following way (see Michael in
     press, for more detail):
             1. The anecdote is at once literary (obviously a constructed story) and
                 exceeds this literary status (manifestly, it is supposed to report or
                 document real events). Thus, it is an openly ambiguous textual form,
                 combining the real and the constructed, holding them in tension.
             2. The anecdote, as a part of an historical record, not only reports events
                 but also acts upon them. An anecdote reports an episode from social
                 life, but by virtue of being a particular interpretation of that episode,
                 and by virtue of its circulation as a story and reportage, it can go on to
                 influence subsequent events. It is performative.
             3. The anecdote is a narrative about difference and sameness. As noted
                 above, it documents an “incident”, that is, something out of the ordi-
                 nary. It relates an instance of difference which allows us to interrogate
                 the sameness of the taken-for-granted.
             4. The anecdote can enable us to draw broader lessons. We move from
                 the individual to the general: from this incident to this phenomenon.
             5. Anecdotes, insofar as they refer to incidents that have befallen or im-
                 pacted upon their author are a means to enacting self. More crucially,
                 such anecdotes can connote how the anecdotalised events themselves
                 contribute to the making of their author. That is to say, the author can
                 emerge from the “event” that renders the incident “anecdotable” as it
                 were.
                                                             TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)        61



    Taking all this into account, the anecdotes told of particular past events are
not simply a construction of those events, but are a partial effect of those particu-
lar pasts. Prior events that become anecdotes serve in their own anecdotalization,
even as the telling of those anecdotes makes those pasts recoverable or narratable
or constructable. This is because those events impact, often corporeally or affec-
tively, upon the persons involved – the events are partially constitutive of those
persons. This is a complex view of the anecdote has a number of potential ad-
vantages.
    Most importantly, we can see how emerging emotion performances might be
grounded in particular past events. When stem cell scientists or rolling luggage
users do emotion and its accounting, we can ask for anecdotes. Is there a specifi-
able event that triggered emotions – say in relation to a scientist friend seduced
by a dubious experimental system or scientific bandwagon that goes nowhere? Is
there a particular incident where a traveller felt a peculiar mixture of embarrass-
ment and anger during the simultaneous banging into and being banged by other
travellers with rolling luggage? In this way, we can partially ground these emo-
tion acts in specific events while of course noting how these events themselves
have been constituted in the present moment as anecdotalizable events that can
be used in the accounting of particular enactments of affect or emotion. This
does not of course deny the importance of other sorts of relations and events – it
simply aims to concretize these affected technoscientific bodies in specifiable
events.
    But anecdotes might also work in relation to what is unclear or incomprehen-
sible in them. They might be a way of grasping affects upon the body in the past
that could not be grasped – affects mediated by the complex objects of techno-
science. If such affects trigger new configurations of emotion, then perhaps the
anecdote becomes an initial means to their conventionalization. So telling the
personal story of the complexity of affects and the heterogeneity or hybridity of
emergent emotions is also an initial way of finding their warrants. This is another
instanciation of the performativity of the method, which partly constitutes that
which is studied.
    Another possible advantage of the anecdote is that it offers an always already
mediated, voice to the nonhuman and norepresentational. The situated recalci-
trance and vitality of embryonic stem cells, the contingent limits and capacities of
human bodies within certain technoscientific assemblages, the local simultane-
ously tricksterish and standardized behaviors of mundane technologies – the an-
ecdote is an oblique means to touching upon their role in the emergence of novel
emotions and emotion conventions.
    So, such anecdotal accounting is always partial and ambiguous, real and con-
structed – but able to hint at the affects that enable emergent emotions. But, fur-
ther, our own analytic use of such anecdotes is itself no less anecdotal. The doing
of social scientific research abounds with events that affect us by being physically
and corporeally, as well as socially and culturally, surprising, upsetting, non-
sensical, idiotic. Often such troublesome events (for example, where a partici-
pant does something that fails to make any sense within the frame of the re-
62   MICHAEL



     search; when a research engagement falls apart because of some technical or bod-
     ily mishap) are sanitized out of our more formal written work or presentations.
     Yet sometimes these events “linger” in us, sometimes they become anecdotaliza-
     ble by affecting us in ways which make them subject to anecdote. And along the
     way, perhaps, our emotional (and epistemic) relation to our own subject matter
     shifts.

        Thank you.




     References
     Augé, M. (1995) Non Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermoder-
        nity, London, Verso.
     Barbalet, J.M. (2001) Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure, Cambridge,
        Cambridge University Press.
     Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter, Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
     Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1980) Mille Plateaux, Paris, Minuit, (Eng. transl. A
        Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London, Athlone Press,
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     Lumelsky, N., Blondel, O., Laeng, P., Valeslo, I., Ravin, R. and McKay, R. (2001)
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        to Pancreatic Islets, “Science” 292, pp. 1389-1394.
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        Set, “Social Studies of Science” 24(1), pp. 81-95.
     Michael, M. and Birke, L. (1994b) Accounting for Animal Experiments: Credibil-
        ity and Disreputable “Others”, in “Science, Technology and Human Values”,
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     Michael, M., Wainwright, S. Williams, C. (2005) Temporality and Prudence: On
        Stem Cells as “Phronesic Things”, in “Configurations”, 13(3), pp. 373-394.
     Michael, M., Wainwright, S. Williams, C., Farsides, B. and Cribb, A. (2007)
        From Core Set to Assemblage: On the Dynamics of Exclusion and Inclusion in
        the Failure to Derive Beta Cells from Embryonic Stem Cells, in “Science Stud-
        ies”, 20(1), pp. 5-25.
     Thoits, P.A. (1989) The Sociology of Emotions, in “Annual Review of Sociology”,
        15, pp. 317-342.
                                                           TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)   63



Vogel, G. (2001) Developmental Biology: Stem Cells Are Coaxed to Produce Insu-
  lin, in “Science”, 292, pp. 615-617.
Whitehead, A. (1978) [1929], Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, New
  York, The Free Press.




    Mike Michael Goldsmith College, University of London
    Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process
    Department of Sociology
    New Cross, London SE14 6NW - United Kingdom
    Email: m.michael@gold.ac.uk
64   MICHAEL
