THE BLACK BOXES
From spontaneous generation to global warming, from cold fusion to the memory of water or the age of the Earth, numerous controversies have punctuated the history of modern science. Similarly, major debates have regularly swept through the humanities, sometimes spilling over to the public sphere, such as those recently focused on migration history and the integrity of elective democracy. In musicology, experts have argued over the provenance of the Codex Medici (Staehelin 1980), the practice of vibrato (Neumann 1991), and the authorship of Giacinto Scelsi’s oeuvre (Drott 2006). They have debated the place that one composer or another should be given in the history of music (recall the opposition between the defenders of John Cage and those of Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1970s; see Nyman 2013), one music or another (as in the fight for academic recognition of “popular music studies”), and even one genre or another—if indeed they could agree on what differentiated those genres (Moore 2001).
How are such controversies settled? The standard response is to recognize the most objective and rigorous works, peer-reviewed and endorsed by prestigious editorial boards. But if we look behind the controversies to reconstruct the lineage of those theses and theories that established the present facts, we uncover an array of truths that, however solid they may seem, fail to converge in a single direction. During the second half of the twentieth century, relativist and postmodern thinkers in the humanities and social sciences rightly rejected the positivist rationality that science attempted to don, as would the so-called New Musicologists who followed them in the 1980s and after.
Thus, in 2002 Daniel Leech-Wilkinson demonstrated, drawing on Thomas Kuhn (1962), the inherent subjectivity of the facts produced by musicologists. In The Modern Invention of Medieval Music, he argued that the interpretation of medieval music evolved, from the concept of polyphony with instrumental accompaniment to that of an a cappella polyphony, less in response to tangible new “proof” than to the efforts of prominent academics and performers seeking to validate modes of thought that supported their own ideologies and musical tastes. A musicological theory was thus largely determined by the predilections of the researchers who elaborated it. Promoted via networks of influence, this theory gained credibility thanks to the institutional power behind the researchers, just as it gained cogency through their rhetorical manipulations (Leech-Wilkinson 2002, 215–46). This process opened the discipline to the dangers of ideological manipulation for personal or institutional ends. Leech-Wilkinson cites the incursion of Nazi ideology into medieval music research and its academic framework during the Third Reich (246–52). He reveals, as the extreme opposite of the positivist tradition, a musicology reduced to the social forces at play, to a belief or a set of beliefs. For Leech-Wilkinson, the notion of neutral objectivity is a delusion. Research is, and indeed must claim to be, a fundamentally subjective endeavor. From this perspective, one can only conclude, sadly, that “musicology is whatever musicologists do as musicologists” (216).
Nonetheless, various propositions have been made between the extremes of an objectivist science that recognizes little human interference in its normal operations and a relativism that sees in scientific facts only their aspect of social construction. One school of thought in particular puts forth another way to consider the question of scientific truth. This school has received different labels over the years and has undergone numerous, widely varied developments. Most often it is associated with “actor-network theory” and Bruno Latour. Among Latour’s many works, Science in Action (1987) presents the most complete and detailed program of research in this protean field (see also Latour 2005). There Latour takes up Norbert Wiener’s concept of “black boxes” to metaphorically designate scientific facts and techniques—from cosmological theory to the microprocessor or an economic model—that run “by themselves,” without their users needing to question how they work. Latour tries to open these “black boxes” and describe them in action in the course of their construction.
In the world that Latour describes to his readers, new facts and theories do not appear from thin air as the result of a simple discovery, any more than they spontaneously gain recognition. Once elaborated by scholars, findings must then be backed by peers. To that end, these new facts usually need to be based on preexisting ones that have already won peer support. Recourse to theories already accepted as true and to facts already established is one of the techniques used to buttress a theory and ward off controversy. This reference to previously confirmed theories, however, provokes subtle changes in them; indeed, it is rare for a theory to be applied in exactly the same way as before. By relying on an established fact to develop a new one, the researcher steers the first fact in a slightly different direction. Latour calls these refashioned scientific arguments “modalities.” He gives an example of these modalities in his book:
(1) New Soviet missiles aimed against Minutemen silos are accurate to 100 metres.
(2) Since [new Soviet missiles are accurate within 100 metres] this means that Minutemen are not safe any more, and this is the main reason why the MX weapon system is necessary.
(3) Advocates of the MX in the Pentagon cleverly leak information contending that [new Soviet missiles are accurate within 100 metres].
In statements (2) and (3) we find the same sentence (1) but inserted. We call these sentences modalities because they modify (or qualify) another one. The effects of the modalities in (2) and (3) are completely different. In (2) the sentence (1) is supposed to be solid enough to make the building of the MX necessary, whereas in (3) the very same statement is weakened since its validity is in question. (22; brackets and bold type in the original)
Thus the status of a statement depends on the subsequent statements that establish, transform, or abandon it. A theory can be categorized as “fact” or “fiction” based on how it fits with another theory. A fact, if ignored, will never become accepted as fact. For that reason a scholar needs to “recruit” other scholars to bolster it, at the risk of these latter transforming the fact in the process. This is the Latourian concept of “translation of interests”: for a theory to be adopted by others and achieve posterity, it must arouse, and “translate,” their interests. “We need others to help us transform a claim into a matter of fact. The first and easiest way to find people who will immediately believe the statement, invest in the project, or buy the prototype is to tailor the object in such a way that it caters to these people’s explicit interests,” Latour writes (108). Actor-network theory thus reveals the performative value of the arguments that constitute theories. For Latour, each scientific argument becomes a proposition whose fate depends on the authors who come later, who may adopt, transform, or reject it. Their works, in turn, are adopted, transformed, or rejected. In this perspective, scientific fact becomes a collective object that undergoes continual mutation at the hands of various authors, as well as a process of layering or stratification. Once any fact or theory is established in this way, contesting it can mean opposing such an entanglement of alliances, conciliations, and writings, each implicated in another, that the task proves almost impossible. The new theories have become things; the scholars seem to have discovered what had always been there. We witness this reification, itself based on a series of other reifications and soon, potentially, the basis for further ones. Layer upon layer, ideas have solidified into things. They have become real—at least as long as no one is there to contest them. Ultimately the great lesson to be learned from Science in Action is that if facts are made, then it is possible to escape the circular logic of “objectively demonstrated” and “socially constructed,” whereby all is determined either by objects or by subjects. The facts are no less solid. Indeed, they are more solid, but it is up to us to decide their fate.
As mentioned above, the school of thought that Latour founded in the early 1980s—alongside Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich, and John Law—underwent a number of developments, some of which addressed the question of music. Antoine Hennion—a member, like Latour, of the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation in Paris—was one of the first to confront the theory with music.
Actor-network theorists had learned an important lesson while examining science in action:
