ALKA MENON: I'm going to call
us back to order after lunch.
So get your snacks
and come have a seat.
My name is Alka Menon.
I'm in the sociology
department at Yale University.
I'm another interloper for
the conference for the day
and substituting in as chair
and moderator for this session.
Our speakers for this
session are Alex Csiszar,
who is an Associate Professor
of History of Science
at Harvard University.
He just finished a book
titled The Scientific Journal
Authorship and the Politics
Knowledge of the 19th Century,
outlook used Chicago Press.
And our next presenter
is Kaushik Sunder Rajan,
who's a professor of
anthropology and social
sciences at the
University of Chicago.
He's also co-director
of the Chicago
Center for Contemporary Theory.
Kaushik Sunder Rajan recently
published the book farm
Pharmocracy: Trials
of Global Biomedicine
with Duke University Press.
Please, Alex.
ALEX CSISZAR: Thank you so much.
I also would like to
thank [INAUDIBLE]..
I need a microphone, don't I?
All right, I will start
by thanking you again.
Thanks to Lucas [INAUDIBLE]
for this invitation.
I, like, Stephanie and some
others, I'm an historian.
And so while historians make
normative claims sometimes--
still?
As a historian,
I think of myself
as not making normative claims.
Of course, that's not true.
We make normative
claims all the time.
But nevertheless, I
have to consciously make
normative claims,
which I don't often do.
And so I'm going to try my
best, and we'll see how it goes.
I've chosen this
word peer review,
which when I told people
I was doing peer review
said, oh, well, you
know lots about that.
But I actually know very little
about this term it turns out.
At least that's what I've
learned in the last week
or so as I've gotten into it.
I'm mostly a historian
of the 19th century.
As a concept, certainly
as linguistic-- as a term,
peer review just does not
exist in the 19th century.
It's a relatively
certainly in the sciences
it, kind of, comes into
being basically in the 60s.
But what it means
is really messy.
It continues to be messy now.
It's certainly messy back
then, and historically it
changes its meaning quite a bit.
And I'm going to be tracking
some of those meaning changes,
and what that means for how we
should think about this term
today and whether we should
keep it around at all.
I should say that,
yes, it's messy.
I'm not going to deal with
all the different sorts
of meetings.
The center of gravity of what
I'm going to be talking about
is really going to
be on peer review
as it relates to publication
practices in the sciences,
in particular, but also
academia more generally.
And much of what I'm
going to be talking about
is going to focus especially
on the United States context.
And I think that
seems reasonable.
As a term, I think it shows
up mostly in the United States
and, perhaps, in England first.
But then it's exported
I think to other places,
and ideas about what peer review
is for and how it should work
have had it seems
to me a very, sort
of, important effect on the way
in which research is practiced
throughout the globe.
And trying to understand how
that story, sort of, plays out
is something that I'm kind of
in the middle of working on
but haven't completely
figured out yet.
OK, so peer review is
talked about a these days.
And there's a set of
concepts that connected to it
that are usually what people
talk about when they bring up
the problem of peer review.
These are concepts such as bias,
fairness, efficiency, cost,
cost of labor,
corruptability, and indeed
whether or not it's presence
or not in various places
and scenes.
All of these concepts have some
have something political kind
of embedded in them.
Nevertheless, the
discourse about peer review
is not usually explicitly
these days political.
And indeed, I think
that's because it's often
imagined that peer
review is exactly
that one of those
sorts of things
that makes the practice
of science not political.
So a, sort of, great, good
example of that is a relatively
recent editorial by John Rennie
who's one of the main figures
who's let's say theorized-- but
he hasn't really theorized it--
but talked a lot
about peer review
over the last 30 or so years.
And his idea is that
we need more and more
empirical research
to figure out how
we can make peer review
better, et cetera, et cetera.
Although in this, sort
of, discourse there
isn't a lot of talk about
just what peer review is,
why it exists in
the first place,
what its scope is,
et cetera, et cetera.
That kind of thing
tends to be missing.
All right, so these days these
are just a few different sorts
of papers in the last year or
so talking about peer review.
There;s various sorts of genres.
One is just the state of the
art of peer review, the review
genre.
There are many, many
articles that just tell you--
that, sort of, summarize
research on peer review.
This is a topic that
as Barbara pointed out
research on research is big.
It's an industry.
This is one from
The Economist is
a question of just is peer
review actually being used.
And if it's not, what does
that mean for the places which
it's not being used?
And then another big discourse
is is period going to end?
Is it going to be replaced
by something else?
These are all sorts
of-- the sorts
of places, the sorts of
ways in which peer review is
talked about these days.
And I should say that when
people use the term peer
review in these sciencey
sorts of contexts,
they might need a lot
of different things.
They might be talking
about grants review.
They might be talking
about tenure cases.
They might be time but all sorts
of different sorts of places
in which peers--
whatever those are--
review and pass
judgement on others.
But it seems to me when you see
the term most often unmarked,
it tends to refer these days
to these scenes of publishing
in some way and these
scenes of deciding
whether something ought to
be out in the public domain
or not.
And that's significant,
because that's very much a sort
of new sort of development.
All right, the sort of
moment that I'm going to--
the question I'm going
to focus especially on
is a question that's been very
big in the last year or two,
and this is a question about
whether peer review might
be replaced or altared
through automation.
So peer review shouldn't be
that the robots take over.
That refers to various things.
More sort of
approximately is a set
of questions
associated especially
with this moving
called altmetrics,
which talks about,
perhaps, replacing
what it calls
traditional peer review
with various sorts of
algorithmic judgment
and aggregation.
So this is a manifesto
for altmetrics.
One of the key
people for altmetrics
is a fellow named Jason
Preim in a paper of his
a few years ago called
Beyond the Paper, he writes--
he wrote, the web opens the
workshop windows to disseminate
scholarship as it happens.
Over the next 10 years, the
view through these open windows
will inform powerful
online filters.
These will distill
communities impact judgments
algorithmically replacing
the peer review and journal
systems.
So there's a lot going
on here, and there's
a lot of figuring what
kind of thing peer review
is, sort of, implicitly
here, and it's
done by opposing it to some
other sort of mode of judgment.
We might call it
algorithmic judgment.
And so peer review
it seems to me
is figured as traditional,
as slow as opposed to,
sort of, being fast
and instant, as being
subjective or
qualitative rather than
objective and quantitative.
Those are two separate things.
It's artisanal rather
than algorithmic.
It tends to be something
that's really best on paper,
whereas the web allows you
to do other sorts of things.
It's closed rather than open.
It's secret rather
than accountable,
and it's corruptible rather
than hard to corrupt.
Not all of that is in this
little quote, but in the stuff
that Preim and others
write about it,
those are the sort--
that's the sort
of set of oppositions
through which peer review is
being figured.
All right, so that's
all very interesting.
I find it interesting, because
it's so even just a few years--
even just 10 years ago,
this particular way
of thinking of
peer review I think
wouldn't have made
a lot of sense.
The other thing to be said about
this is a lot of these binaries
are, sort of,
inherently political.
But the kind of
discourse and the kind
of conversation about why
we might replace peer review
doesn't really get too much
into the details, at least
explicitly of politics.
Rather it tends to be a
question of whether the sets--
whether something can be
replaced by something else
to do the same job.
So we have ways of judging work
that create quality science.
That question about
what constitutes quality
and what constitutes
science tends
to be kept relatively
fixed in this discourse.
And instead what's
being discussed
is how can we come
up with a better way
to do this more
efficiently, sort of,
improve something that's
sort of doing a job
but not doing it very well.
Whereas, it seems to
me that-- and this
is where eventually the
kind of intervention
I would want to make in this
goes what we ought to do
is sort step back and ask
more specifically what
do we mean by open, what do
you mean by objective, what
do we mean by quality
science, and then
let us think about what
sorts of judgment procedures
might be relevant in
those sorts of context.
All right, now, as I say,
this is a very specific way
of thinking about or talking
about peer review that
wouldn't have made sense a
whole lot earlier in this.
And certainly wouldn't
have made sense
when the term sort of
enters American discourse
about science.
So now I'm going to, kind of, do
my little historical genealogy
that will get us back to here.
It's going to take me
a few minutes to do it.
I'm not going to go back
to-- we could go back
a little earlier
than this, but I'm
going to go back only to
1972 to Alvin Weinberg,
American physicist, kind
of a public intellectual,
very much a science
administrator during the Cold
War in the United States.
Most famous probably for
big science, that term,
less famous for trans-science.
This was another
one of his, sort of,
key concepts at a moment
that he was trying
to get people to take up.
People didn't quite take up.
But his essays on
science and trans-science
are really interesting from
the point-of-view and the way
in which the term and
potentially the concept of peer
review was being mobilized in
the early 70s and the late 60s.
So this is a bit
of a long quote.
I apologize, but it's useful.
"Scientific truth is established
by the traditional methods
of peer review.
Only what has value in the
intellectual marketplace
survives.
By contrast, where
trans-science is involved,
wisdom rather than
truth must be arrived
at by some other mechanism.
Our society is experimenting
with procedures,
either adjudicative or
political for making
the delicate judgments
of value that
underlie the resolution of
trans-scientific questions.
We scientists value
a republic of science
with its rigorous
peer group review.
The uninformed public is
excluded from participation
in the affairs of science
rather as a matter of course.
But when what we do transcends
science and impinges
on the public, we have no choice
but to welcome participation."
So very clearly peer review
is being invoked here
as a means of separating
different sorts of judgment
practices and different
sorts of communities.
Peer review is something
that happens among this thing
being--
coming to be called by this
point the scientific community.
If it involves experts, it
doesn't involve the public.
The moment matters of public
concern come in, trans-science
might eventually--
I think maybe
regulatory science would
be, sort of, what he was
talking about here, which
is a term that maybe, sort
of, took on what trans-science
might have been.
When its regulatory science,
of course, that's political.
Of course, we have
to think carefully
about the politics of judgment.
But peer review is
this other thing,
and it's what allows
scientists to not worry
about that political stuff.
So this is-- so
this is relatively,
I think, comparable, even to
current uses of peer review.
But what's very different
is that here it's
not connected to a
particular set of practices.
There's no assumption
about what specifically
peer review entails.
It's a very general sort of idea
about the scientific community
coming up with
truth in what often
is called a self-correcting,
sort of, manner.
And the other thing
to be noticed here
is that the language he's using
is actually very political.
So republic of science,
intellectual marketplace,
those are terms
that are coming--
that have already come
into play, especially
through the writing
of Michael Polanyi who
makes no bones about making
a political claim about how
science works
starting in the 1940s.
Very famous essay in the
first issue of Minerva,
which is also where science
and trans-science the longer
version comes out.
Very famous essay by
Polanyi called the Republic
of Science, which begins
my title is intended
to suggest that the
community of scientists
is organized in a
way which resemble
certain features of
politic and works
according to economic
principles similar to those
by which the production of
material goods is regulated
and so on and so on.
So Polanyi wants to
make strong claims
about the way in which science
works, and he wants to--
he's very keen to insist
that it should be separated
from certain kinds of--
certain kinds of
politics, but it in itself
is a sort of political theory.
And he is very, very
upfront about that.
And indeed peer and peer
review don't come up in this--
don't come up for
him too, too much.
But what does come up
interestingly often
for him and in a
way that turns out
to be significant
is the, sort of,
other term we haven't talked--
I haven't talked about
yet, which is the referee.
So these days,
again, it seems to me
that when one says peer
review, one tends--
most of my actors that I'm
talking about here associated
with a set of practices
connected to an individual
called the referee.
That isn't the case in
this earlier moment.
When people talk about
scientific referees or referees
of scholarly publications,
they tend not
to use the term peer review.
Nevertheless, it's sort
of floating around.
And Polanyi is really one
of the key early people
who starts talking
about the referee
as an important
scientific personage who
matters in all sorts of ways
in a universal sort of way.
And when he talks about
the referee though,
it's not so much to say that
of course the referees are
everywhere but rather that we
can understand a lot about how
science works by
following the exploits
of this particular
kind of individual.
So to talk about consensus
in science, he writes--
and this is in 1946.
This is very early
Polanyi text with regard--
in terms of his
writing on science,
and it gets picked up a
lot by people interested
in the subject later on--
he writes the harmony between
the views independently held
by individual
scientists shows itself
also in the way they conduct
the affairs of science.
We've seen that there's no
central authority exercising
power over [INAUDIBLE] of life.
It's all done at a multitude
of dispersed points
and at the recommendation
of a few scientists who
happen to be officially
involved or drawn in as referees
for the occasion.
And yet in general,
such decisions
do not clash but on the contrary
can rely on wide approval.
Two scientists acting unknown
to each other as referees
for the publication
of one paper usually
agree about its
approximate value.
So the referee is
an example here.
And it's not something he's
too worried about, you know,
there's no research saying
that this is actually true
that there's consensus
among referees.
He's pretty sure it is the
case, and he's quite willing
to invoke it to discuss
the way in which consensus
happens in this relatively
smooth sort of manner.
So let's get back to Weinberg.
So Weinberg himself
is not so much talking
about those
particular procedures,
but they're sort of
in the background
of all sorts of
things that might
be understood as peer review.
Not simply what goes
on with refereeing,
but all the sorts of
informal processes
by which science kind
of self-corrects itself.
And this is part
of a lot of writing
that happens in the '60s and
'70s connected to this idea
that there is a
scientific community.
Much of this is in
the United States,
most obviously Hagstrom's
book, The Scientific Community,
a bunch of others.
John Ziman is actually British,
but very much in dialogue with
others talking about this notion
that there's this community
that is separate--
works in ways that--
judgment happens in ways
that are not political.
The other key person
in all of this
is Robert K. Merton
and then his students.
Merton, most famously,
has basically
a kind of political conception
of what makes science--
at least a conception of
what makes science work,
that's very connected to matters
of politics that he develops
in the '30s and '40s connected
to a kind of normative
structure--
universalism, communism,
disinterestedness
is this organized skepticism.
Interestingly, he then,
sort of, steps back
from this kind of work.
But when he reemerges
doing sociology of science
in the late 50s and 60s, the
story has a little bit changed.
You can actually see it
through the changing titles
of a particular famous paper.
The normative structure
paper was initially
called, "A Note on
Science and Democracy,"
then it becomes "Science and
Democratic Social Structure,"
and by 1976 another publication,
it's "The Normative Structure
and Science."
So there's a kind
of Merton Stage Two
that gets going,
basically in the 1960s.
And again, it's about
the internal dynamics
of the scientific
community more or less,
rather than the question
about the relationship
between science and politics.
This is pretty well-known stuff
that Hollinger and others have
talked a fair amount about.
And what happens
in this new work
is it's all of a sudden going
to be a lot more empirical.
And that's his hope.
He's got students, and
he's got collaborators,
so he needs to take these
sort of namby-pamby norms
and make them operational.
He needs to do
things with them that
can locate actual examples
of the normative structure
at work.
So now he's got a new
language of reward system,
peer evaluation
which sort of stands
in many cases for organized
skepticism, property
rights and things like that.
The first big paper
in this is "Priorities
in Scientific Discovery,"
and various papers follow.
Most importantly, here,
the biggest publication
still probably ever on
referee systems is 1971.
That's written in very close
collaboration with Harriet
Zuckerman, and it's really
kind of the first major study
of referee systems.
Again, the word peer
review is missing here.
Peer review is being
used by these people
but in this very general way.
When they talk about
specific practices,
they don't tend to use it.
They use this term
referee system.
This paper had three parts.
It sort of presented
a kind of history
of the referee system which was
very interesting but ambiguous.
They used surveyed
acceptance rates
at various journals within
the natural sciences,
the social sciences,
and the humanities.
And they got access
to an archive
of referee reports and things
like that from Physical Review.
And they did various sorts
of statistics on that
and tried to sort of fault
authorship practices and things
like that.
One of their fun facts
that they learned
is that actually rejection
rates in the natural sciences
are extremely low, as
compared to humanities
and social sciences, where
rejection rates tended
to be very much higher.
The way in which
they interpreted
this was very much along
Polanyi's lines, which is--
well sure because there's
generally consensus
already happening in the
natural sciences so, you know,
things just tend
to work out better
when everybody kind of agrees.
Whereas where there's
no consensus in fields
like history and
[INAUDIBLE] literature,
everybody rejects
everything all the time.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
So the point
is they're interested
in this, but they
don't take it to be the
key way in which judgment
happens in science.
It's more-- they're
interested in status judges
as part of the idea that
science is a profession,
but there's no
sense in which this
is sort of where judgment
happens exclusively
in the sciences.
One other place
this is coming up
that's a key context for
what's going to happen,
is at the same time
that people are
talking more and more
about referee systems
and studying them, citation
analysis gets going,
and metrics get going.
ALEX CSISZAR: This is
important because right now,
the discourse about
peer review is often
as this traditional thing
that's been replaced by metrics.
But what one finds
when one looks
at what's going
on in this period
is that these two ways
of talking about science,
measuring it, judging
it, studying it, kind of
happen together.
So people become interested
in referee systems
at the same time that they
begin becoming interested
in citation analysis.
And these two things are
very much mutually supported.
The person who invents, or sort
of promulgates citation data,
is Eugene Garfield.
He gets Derek de Solla Price to
write various editorials trying
to convince authors and
editors, and referees to behave
in particular ways.
If you're going to
use metrics, the idea
is you need standardized
publication practices,
and referees have a key role
to play in standardizing
scientific communication.
So the peer review system, or I
should say the referee system,
is crucial to the way
people are thinking about
whether scientific citation
metrics are going to be usable.
This more general notion of
peer review sort of floats--
continues on in the '70s,
except for in the case of grants
review.
So if there's a specific meaning
for a peer review in the 1970s,
it's not to do with refereeing,
although that occasionally
gets used that way, it's to
do with grants peer review
in the United States connected
especially to the NSF and NIH.
So when you see peer
review in a specific way,
it tends to be about
grants, but it's often
also used in this
very general way
to talk about these various
self-correcting mechanisms
of the scientific
community through 1970s.
All right.
That changes completely
in the 1980s very quickly.
And it happens at--
what I've come to
see is a really key--
that in the history
of peer review,
the concept, 1981,
the hearings on Fraud
in Biomedical Research.
These are chaired by
Senator Albert Gore.
Why do they happen?
They happen because there's
a few very, very-- well one
reason they happen
is a few very, very
publicized controversies over
fraud in biomedical research.
And if the state is
going to fund this,
well then we should figure
out what's going on.
So Gore, who's the head of the
Subcommittee on investigations
and oversight for the committee
of science and technology,
helps organize these hearings.
He leads it often.
He has a bunch of
leading questions
for his various witnesses who
are going to come and testify.
Here they are.
I'll just focus on a
few, and these are great.
This is really important.
Is science really
self-correcting?
Is the peer review process
working adequately?
What responsibility do
referees and journal editors
have to ensure the
integrity of data?
So the key here is that there's
a little ambiguity as to what
peer-review means here.
It might be this
very general thing,
or it might be this more
specific thing connected
in particular to the
ways in which editors
decide what to publish.
My sense is it seems
the context suggests
he means that more specific
meaning, which is interesting
again because it's not used
that often in that way.
And indeed, it creates
lots of confusion
during the testimony itself.
In particular, the first
person to give evidence
into misstatements was
Philip Handler, President
of National Academy of Sciences.
And his statement, which
is-- the first statement
is really quite
interesting in this regard,
"The matter of falsification
of data, I contend,
need not be a matter of
general societal concern.
It is, rather, given the size
of the total research effort,
or relatively small
matter generated within
and is normally
effectively managed
by the scientific
community itself.
It occurs in a system that
operates in an effective,
democratic,
self-correcting mode,
the very peer-review system
of which your letter makes
mention--" and then
various other things about
the falsification of data--
but "in the hot cauldron
of the operation the peer
in the scientific world,
false data cannot long
survive undetected."
So the point here is that--
well, the thing I'm most in--
I should say, this turns out
to be an infamous statement
now because it didn't go
over well with Gore at all.
But key here, people don't
talk about this so much.
He seems to have--
if I'm right about
what Gore thought
he meant by peer review,
he's completely misunderstood
what Gore was talking about.
He's talking here about
these general modes
of self-correction, very much
the sort of 1960s, 1970s way
of using the term peer-review.
There's nothing here about
any sort of formal procedure,
and that's very much the way
he's thinking about this.
And this really annoys Gore
and various other people
on the committee.
The next day he says,
"We heard from some
of the most
distinguished members
of the American
scientific community--
that the problem of fraud is
essentially a private one that
should be dealt with
by informal codes
of the scientific
community-- in one
short hour of the subcommittee
went from the Olympian heights
of a nonproblem to the depths
of a potential perjury--"
once they heard about all
the terrible things going on.
So this is a complete
failure, a complete failure.
It works out very, very badly
for the people testifying,
in terms of making
their claim that science
ought to be left alone.
You immediately
have lots and lots
of published stuff
on fraud and science.
Scientific misconduct
fraud becomes
a sort of general
category of public debate.
Most famously this
book by Broad and Wade
in 1982, who interestingly
also use peer review
in this general way.
Whereas referee, they use
in a more specific way--
but that changes very quickly.
I'll skip this.
This book is a
book, I should say,
that Merton did
not like very much.
And I thought this
was terrible and I
urge to buy the book
because that would support
the author's [INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE]
All right.
But a million things
happened very quickly.
Things changed very quickly.
All of a sudden we have lots and
lots of studies of peer-review,
by which is meant
referee practices.
One of the first big ones after
this is 1982 Peters and Ceci.
They do what is probably
the first hoax study.
There's lots of hoax studies
to do with peer-review now,
which we can talk about,
but I won't too much.
It this is the
first one I found.
It's kind of a reverse
hoax because what they do
is they take a published
paper, and they resubmit it
in various places and find out
that almost everybody rejects
it, interestingly.
Again there wasn't so
much worry about stuff
getting through
the referee system,
until a little later on.
So this is sort of a hybrid
moment after this hearing
but still, playing
with a set of concerns
that were more active in
the '70s than the '80s.
Lots of more stuff--
There's a book in 1985, a
set of conferences get going
in the mid-'80s on
studying peer-review--
that's where Drummond Rennie
comes in from the beginning.
And then there's more
hearings about misconduct.
The next one is in 1986.
This one is about publishing.
And now if you read
this, peer-review always
means prepublication referee.
There's no ambiguity anymore.
Its meaning has
very, very quickly
shifted over among the
witnesses testifying
to prepublication refereeing and
there's a lot of focus on it.
There's also focus on what
happens when it fails.
And so there's lots of
interest here in retraction.
So the rise of
retraction is very
tied up with these
sorts of hearings,
and indeed with the coming
into being of peer-review
as this key process
of science, and this
is where it's happening.
What else-- ethics
guides start to talk
about peer-review essential
to the practice of science.
So this is our 1989 National
Academy of Sciences,
"While publication in
a peer-reviewed journal
remains the standard
means of disseminating
scientific results, other
methods of communication
are subtly altering how
scientists divulge also
receive information," et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is fascinating for
a couple of reasons.
One is that by 1989,
peer-review is already
being replaced by other things,
which is crazy because it just
came into existence as a concept
more or less it seems to me.
And it's already something
that seems like it
might be being pushed out.
It's sort of a
traditional thing that's
being replaced by other things.
That's kind of crazy.
And indeed a whole
sort of historiography
of the origins of peer-review
gets created around this time.
Sort of based on the
Merton-Zuckerman paper,
but you're doing
crazy things with it.
The idea is basically
that peer-review was there
at the beginning of
modern science, which
happened in Europe, and it
happened in the 17th century.
And one of the reasons is they
had the right social structure
and techniques--
lots and lots of stuff on that.
And this is still very much the
narrative you hear about it.
The other thing that
happens, and you
can see it in this phrase,
the peer-reviewed journal,
peer-review becomes a
means of classification.
There are things that
are peer-reviewed and is
things that are not.
Again, this is not something
that existed earlier.
And in publishing properly
as you can see here,
means publishing in
peer-reviewed journals
and publishing improperly
will be your publishing places
that are not peer-reviewed.
So it becomes a principle
of classification.
Another way that comes up
is in discussing science
across the globe.
So people who become in--
scientists or metricists
in particular, who become
interested in tracking
the growth of science and
different sorts of places,
use it by tracking the growth of
the reputable literature, which
is essentially understood
as something like the well
peer-reviewed literature.
So a key person for
this is Eugene Garfield,
who invents the Science Citation
Index, talks about science
in the third world,
and basically explains
that good science is the sort
of stuff that is both refereed
and gets lots of citations.
But you get lots
of citations, you
have to be cited by people
who are in good journals,
and all those good journals
are in Western countries.
And so all the good science is
happening in the Western world,
more or less.
There's pushback on
that that comes starting
in the 1990s for good reasons.
[LAUGHTER] This stuff
is quite fascinating.
There's pushback on this that
happens probably earlier--
but a really very public
push back in the 1990s
stating that most of
this is against metrics,
but it's also ultimately
against the whole idea
that there's a sort of
standardized way of publishing.
And Garfield pushes
back on the pushback.
And instead of saying
it's all about citation,
he points out that it's also
about just good publication
practice, and good
publishing practice
is all about peer-review.
All right, so these
sorts of phenomena
in which a particular
standardized way of thinking
about peer-review is
exported into lots of places
comes up a lot.
So this John
Bohannon piece, Who's
Afraid of Peer-Review?,
if you know it,
is this big [INAUDIBLE]
focal sort of quintupled
which he ran a few years ago.
But it's very interesting
from the point of view
of the geopolitics of science.
And peer-review is-- the other
sort of thing that happens
finally--
I know I'm out of time.
The other big thing
that happens is
that discussions of
peer-review become
central to the legitimacy
of science more generally.
So lots and lots of
climate-science science talk.
Climate-science
deniers, in particular,
are very keen on
talking about the way
in which science is dependant
on its refereed scientific
literature on peer-review
and if that process can
be seen to be faulty
in any way, that's just
that science itself is faulty.
Of course, if you're
defending climate-science,
as my colleague, Oreskes and
her co-author, Conway are doing,
you have a choice whether you
want to invoke peer-review
or not.
And they tend to, but
they tend to do it
in exactly this ambiguous
way, which hearkens back
to those earlier
definitions of peer review.
And yet, they're of
course read in ways
that are more complicated
in this regard,
especially because they do
talk about the specific notion
of peer-review in other places.
So back to the beginning,
it seems to me,
that what's going on in
this moment in talking about
automating peer-review--
is taking it into
even newer territory.
And I'm not going to
get too much into it.
But the way it's
doing it is actually
kind of a holdover to these
other ways of simply thinking
about issues surrounding
bias, fairness--
without really talking
too much about why
we care about fairness,
why we care about bias,
and what kind of
system of judgment
we want for the sciences
or humanities in general.
Who ought to be involved
in deciding this?
These are questions of the
geopolitics of knowledge
that is almost completely
separate-- is completely
not taken into account
in these debates.
It remains a kind of
question about efficiency,
and what is scientifically
most feasible for producing
a system that will simply
produce the best science.
But we need to question--
that's a conversation that's
a political conversation about
what constitutes best science,
and whether that's a
useful term at all.
[INAUDIBLE]
[APPLAUSE]
KAUSHIK SUNDER
RAJAN: So now, you
know [INAUDIBLE] to
my PowerPoint skills.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
KAUSHIK SUNDER RAJAN: Thank
you so much to the organizers
for inviting me.
It's a real
privilege to be here,
and geopolitics of knowledge
is a nice hand-off Alex.
Thank you.
This is going to be
a slightly odd paper,
and fairly
self-indulgent as well,
in that it's not going
to be terribly empirical,
but it's kind of a
personal genealogy of how
I'm thinking about value,
who I'm thinking it
with, both in my own
work and collaboratively.
And I'm interested in
this question of value,
not as a thing in itself,
but methodologically,
as in how do we deal with
this question of value?
And for me personally, I
can't answer that question
without talking
a lot about Marx.
So forewarning is that there's
a lot of Marx in this paper.
OK.
So the question of value has
been at the core of my work
more or less from the beginning.
So when I received
this invitation,
I had an opportunity
to go back and look
at how I've been thinking
about the question of value
throughout my work.
In my first book, "Biocapital,"
the question of value
was omnipresent but
somewhat implicit
in its characterization.
My second book, "Pharmocracy,"
on the other hand,
was explicitly concerned
with the question of value.
In between the two,
I had organized
a long series of
collaborative conversations,
the edited volume,
"Lively Capital,"
and a series of workshops
on team knowledge/value
that explored the
question of value
alongside other anthropologists
of science and STS scholars,
whom I've been working closely
with over the past few years.
Many of them do not adopt
the same Marxian approach
to the question of value that
I do, so what emerged, in fact,
were different methodological
and conceptual trajectories,
and genealogies
to this question.
So what I'm about
to offer up today
is my own conceptual trajectory.
And this is thinking
about how I've
used in "Biocapital,"
"Pharmocracy," how
it emerged in knowledge value.
And I'm going to work through
it in the following three
registers.
First, value as a
polyvalent category
that has within capitalist modes
and relations of production,
the question of
surplus at its core.
And this is a question that
I explore fundamentally
through a reading of Marx
and concerns the dynamics
of capital in "Biocapital."
Second, but that also
articulate to regimes
of norms and knowledge that
are potentially external to,
yet appropriable
by capitalist modes
and relations of production.
So this is a question of
the co-production of value
and it's polyvalents with the
ethical and the epistemic,
the problem, broadly
speaking, of knowledge/value.
And third, that
materializes politically
in ways that put questions of
life and/or health at stake
in historically, geographically,
and institutionally situated
ways, a question that
requires attention
to the global political
economy of biomedicine
and speaks to the problem
space of "Pharmocracy."
So value is one of those words
that imply different things.
On the one hand, it
implies the market value
that is realized through
processes of exchange.
On the other, it implies
the non-market values,
what might be
called in shorthand
that has led to the term's
own blackboxing, ethics.
This is particularly
salient for industries
such as the biotech
and pharmaceutical,
which generate significant
symbolic capital from being,
as they're never
averse to pointing out,
in the business of making
health and saving lives.
Market valuation depends
upon notions of value
that are deemed somehow
external to the market,
while at the same time the
ethical gets increasingly
encroached upon, co-opted by,
and made answerable to systems
of market valuation.
This has consequences for value
in both senses of the word.
On the one hand, this
implosion makes technoscience
more driven by market value,
on the other it troubles,
displaces, and puts at stake the
Mertonian normative structure
of science based on
values of universality,
disinterestedness, communism
and organized skepticism.
After this idea of
epistemic value--
what counts as good
knowledge, but also
when something becomes valuable
because it is factual--
then one is confronted with a
complex and politically salient
conceptual category.
Further, value operates
at multiple scales,
from the local to the
global, and perhaps
the planetary as well.
Attending to the historical
and geographic context
out of which value
materializes is
essential to resist a
positivist rendering of value.
The economy of bioeconomy,
which is what I'm interested in,
therefore refers not just
quantitative measures
of productivity or profit,
but to the regimes of value
both material and symbolic
that form the theater
of political articulation.
So as I said, I'm going
spent much of my time
today thinking about value
through a reading of Marx.
But to do so in ways that are
faithful to Marx's own method
involves situating
the question of value
within the conjunctional
specificities
that one is elucidating.
This involves
attending to the ways
in which the nature of
the market, its value
systems, and epistemologies,
are themselves
shifting under the sign of
increasingly financialized
and monopolizing
corporate capital.
The relationship between
the technoscientific
and the political-economic is
not one of cause-and-effect.
It's not that the life
sciences in biomedicine
change because of capitalism
or financialization,
nor that capitalism and
financialization are
consequence of the
biotech revolution
or changes sectoral industrial
logics of drug development.
Rather we confront mutually
implicated and emergent
epistemologies and systems
concerning life and health
on the one hand, and
value on the other,
an example of what Sheila
Jasanoff has dubbed
"co-production."
This co-production occurs under
the sign of certain values
systems that are themselves
historically specific.
So the problem is twofold.
On the one hand, elucidating
the historical and sector
to the specificities of a
technoscientific capitalism
operating within financializing
global capitalism,
on the other hand,
doing so well remaining
attentive to the dynamics
of capital under which
financialization operates.
So that's the kind of
overarching problem space.
So a little bit of Marx
there, actually a lot of Marx.
So in order to elaborate
on how I think about value,
I find it particularly useful
to turn to the way in which Marx
analytically conceptualized
it in relation to labor
and capital.
Marx insisted that any proper
understanding of capital
has to come from
beginning the analysis
with the question of value.
And he says as much
in The Grundrisse.
To develop the
concept of capital,
we have to begin not with
labor, but with value.
This does not mean that
labor is unimportant,
just that one can
only understand
how it comes to be at stake,
alienated, and exploited,
if one begins one's
analysis with value.
And for capital,
value had no meaning
unless its surplus value.
For money to be capital,
it must have the potential
for generating surplus within
it as it circulates in processes
of commodity exchange.
Marx locates the
generation of surplus value
not in the labor that the
worker exchanges for wage
from the capitalist, but in
the potential of the worker
to perform work in
excess of that wage.
Marx terms this
potential labor power.
The potential for the worker to
generate more labor than that
adequated by wage.
The methodological
insight here it
is that capital generates
value through an exploitation
of bodily potential, even
as the generation of value
becomes an end in itself.
As creative
potential, labor power
is not predetermined value.
Therefore an apparent
active equivalent exchange,
workers labor for
capitalists wages,
has hidden within it
element of nonequivalence
because wages are
fixed remuneration,
but labor, which is
actually labor power,
is the potential
for the creation
of value over and above the
money expected in wages.
Surplus value, Marx
says, is in general value
in excess of the equivalent.
Further, value is that which
allows the commodity, which
is always the product
of specific and concrete
human labor defigured
as abstract labor.
At the core of Marx's account
of the dynamics of capital,
is his insistence that value
is an abstraction device.
The key here is that labor
power is an entirely abstract
concept, and yet it is
in this abstract concept
that the fundamental
dynamics of capital rests.
This abstraction stems entirely
from the structural material
relations of
production because it
is an abstraction that can
only be enabled by the fact
that the capitalist controls the
material means of production.
Therefore, the very heart of
Marx's analysis of capital
is a dielectric between
materiality and abstraction.
Therefore, on the one hand,
value is simply an attribute.
Something that the commodity
has-- its utility its beauty,
its ability to be won or eaten,
something that money has,
its ability to circulate itself,
to mediate and measure various
kinds of circulations--
but on the other hand,
value itself performs
the various materialization and
abstractions of those things
that it is simply
supposed to represent.
And this is a long Marx
quote from "Capital"
that I'm going to
leave up for a while.
This is my PowerPoint
basically [INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE] Someone
read it all [INAUDIBLE]..
Basically, both
money and commodity
function as different modes
of existence of value.
It's constantly changing
from one form to another.
But the things that
I've emphasized
are the things that
are critical for me.
In the process of this,
it becomes transformed
into an automatic
subject if we bend down
to specific forms of appearance.
By self-valorizing value
in the course of its life,
values life--
capitalist money, capitalist
commodities-- in truth, value
was the subject, the
independent acting agent which
valorizes itself independently.
"By virtue of being value, it
has acquired the occult ability
to add value to itself."
This is Marx talking about
value just before he introduces
the concept of surplus value
in volume one of "Capital,"
extraordinary passage.
So this definition of capital in
terms of self-valorizing value
is significant, but
not the point at which
Marx's explanation runs out.
Rather it signifies, in
Gayatri Spivak's terms,
the possibility of
an indeterminacy.
The ability to add
value to itself
is precisely that which
renders capitalist value
appropriative--
of labor, turning it
into surplus; but also
in other situations
of health, turning it
into surplus; or ethics,
turning it into surplus.
It is also that which
renders the generation
of capitalist value political.
A politics that plays out
toward the consolidation
and the contestation of
modes and relations of power
and production.
And [INAUDIBLE] of
these relations and
of their consolidation
and contestation
allows us to work backwards
towards the conceptualization
of the capitalist
value form itself.
How does this relate to
health, which is my interest?
The most literal
answer to this question
has been provided
by Joseph Dumit, who
developed the notion of
surplus health as an analogy
to Marxian surplus labor.
This refers to the market value
that pharmaceutical capital
gains from the potential for
future illness of those who
might one day consume
drugs, which includes anyone
with the buying
power to constitute
a market for therapeutics
and crucially executes those
without.
Empirically, Dumit
studied the growth
of pharmaceutical marketing
in the United States
in the second half of the 20th
century and its implication
with the growth of clinical
trials, a trajectory that
has resulted in the progressive
growth of prescription rates
in this country with
no signs of stopping.
Analytically, Dumit
you mean substituted
Marxian labor-related keywords
with health-related keywords
in volume one of "Capital."
In the process, Dumit generated
a health theory of value
that is literally analogous
to Marxian labor theory.
It was literally a
search-and-replace of volume
one of "Capital"-- showing how
value creates health that is
appropriate to and
appropriable by capital,
alienated from
embodied healthiness.
Value thus is that which allows
the symptom, which is always
the product of specific
and concrete human health,
to figure as abstract health.
Even as health itself
comes to be sake, so too
does labor, as biomedical
economies and gender,
both multiplications
and divisions of labor,
especially seen in the
various proliferations
and dislocations of
experimental subjectivity
in clinical trials.
There's a further tangle
here because value is never
just about surplus,
it also refers
to be ethical and the normative.
Often pharmaceutical
corporate capital
is contested by taking recourse
to seemingly opposed value
systems grounded in
ethics and morality,
for instance, by an insistence
on the ethical conduct
of clinical trials in
human-subject experimentation
based on principles of
good ethical practice
or by demands for
equitable and broad access
to essential medicines.
So but at the same time,
pharmaceutical companies
also appropriate ethics
for their own purposes.
So one could envisage a value
that is defining of capital,
but also an alternative
normative framework to capital.
So these latter forms of
value are never entirely
outside the fold of capital--
are always appropriated by it,
and this is where some of
the politics comes in, right?
Is the normative
dimension of value
outside captial
capitalism [INAUDIBLE]
What is it approptiated by?
So that's the first part.
The second part is considering
the relationship of value
to knowledge.
The question of "Biocapital"
cannot simply concern itself
with the question of value.
Rather it concerns
the relationship
between value and knowledge.
In the form of this
problem is similar to that
which Michel Foucault
was exploding
in considering what he
refered to as power/knowledge.
Through an analysis
of epistemology,
including especially
in its discursive
an institutional forms
and manifestations,
Foucault was able to
open up different ways
of conceptualizing power.
Questions of value
present similar kinds
of analytic challenges.
This is especially so when seen
in the context of the mutations
over determinations and crises
of contemporary capital,
in the context of new
technoscientific emergence.
Both knowledge and value
were unsettled categories
that require problematization.
So too is the nature of their
historical coming together.
So we need to ask ourselves
why knowledge/value?
Why now?
All right, the question
of history in conjunction.
So I want to present the
problem space of knowledge/value
in two ways.
One, following the extremely
schematic rendering
of Marx's account of surplus
value that I've just given you,
is to suggest that the
question of knowledge
is integral to Marx's
own methodology.
And second, is to
briefly suggest
ways in which the
materialization of value
occurs in different regimes
of technoscientific knowledge
production, especially as
the technoscientific comes
to be appropriated in
[INAUDIBLE] capital.
So in his development of the
concept of surplus value--
back to Marx again, Marx is
analyzing capitalist exchange.
But what is capitalist exchange?
Is it concept, is it
practice, this is it system?
This is, in fact,
crucial because in order
to grasp what Marx
is trying to do,
one has to constantly shift
registers between looking
at concepts practice
systems objects.
How to do that remains a life
methodological challenge today,
is did it for Marx.
It would suggest
that in fact, Marx
was not doing systemic
analysis in any simple sense.
He was not trying to
understand capitalism,
because capitalism as a
singular it is an absurdity.
It never existed
in his kind sense.
Systems of capitalist
exchange certainly have,
but they're constantly
fluid and emergent.
What Marx was trying to do
rather was understand capital.
What is capital, though?
Materially, money
and commodities.
Get money and commodities
by themselves--
do not constitute
capital, they've
existed well before capitalism.
So they only become capital when
operational in a system geared
towards the
generation of surplus.
So here one
confronts a tautology
of a system that
only makes sense
in terms of the modality of
functioning of the objects
that constitute that system,
objects that themselves only
function as constituents
of that system
when already situated
within those system logics.
So what is this thing that
breaks this tautology between--
is capital and money
defined by capitalism?
Or is capitalism defined
by capital and money?
It's labor.
Who comes up with this answer?
Not Marx.
He's playing off of this fact,
which is already well known
by the time of his writing.
Its well-known becuase
political economy,
an emergent but already powerful
body of knowledge said so.
The analysis of labor
power, crucially,
comes not from an
empirical observation
of the accrual of value,
but from the critique
of political economy.
Political economy's
own analysis of capital
failed to account for the
fact that if labor was simply
a mediator in a
process of exchange,
and that labor was
free and remunerated,
then it was capital that
kept growing, while labor
was exploited and alienated.
This is what political
economy failed to explain.
This is what political
economy fails to explain.
Thus, Marx's critique
of capital is not
a critique of capitalism, which
would have been an absurdity,
and it could not have been
a critique of exchange
per se because there was no
way of empirically accessing
exchange per se, except through
the means available to know it.
In other words, Marx, I
argue, was, especially
in his later
writings, critiquing
the ways in which we came to
understand capitalist exchange,
political economy.
An epistemic critique.
After all, "Capital" is
subtitled "A Critique
of Political Economy" not
a critique of capitalism
[INAUDIBLE] capital.
Political economy failed
to take into account
the history of capital, whose
dynamics it came to explain,
yet it functioned as a
[INAUDIBLE] of knowledge.
So what I'm suggesting
here, is that at this moment
Marx is methodologically an
epistemologist, even as he
is a structuralist, a
historian, an anthropologist,
a philosopher of abstraction
and naturalization
and so on and so forth.
Indeed, Marx cannot
understand capital,
except through epistomology.
Now, this doesn't mean that
political economy determines
capitalism, rather
what one sees is
the development of
an analytic that
traces the
co-production of modes
and relations of production
with regimes of knowledge.
So Marx is looking at systems
and regimes of exchange
and value that are
mere intelligible
and naturalized through
knowledge, knowledge that,
in turn, responds to
these forms of exchange
in value in its own
authoritative development.
So Marx presents us with
a challenge of method
and conceptualization.
How to think-- the co-production
of value and knowledge,
with the determination in the
last instance by the economic.
OK, let's remember
that determination
in the last instance
is not determination
of any complex [INAUDIBLE].
Thus, there's an aspect
of the co-production
of knowledge and value
at the very heart
of the labor theory of value.
That there is also at the same
time, the question of knowledge
regimes as
externalities that can
be encroached upon
or appropriated
by capitalist modes and
relations of production.
Thus bringing forth
new articulations
of knowledge/value.
And it was this latter
question, that myself
and a number of colleagues
explored between 2011 and 2014,
through a series of
workshops organized
at The University of Chicago,
the University of California,
Davis, and Exeter University
on the theme knowledge/value.
In conceptualizing the
series, our attempt
was to look for middle
terms or critical sites that
could speak to the problematic
of knowledge/value,
in ways that could
productively unpack
that indeterminacies
over determinations
and multiple determinations.
What we came up
with was a series
of topical frames
for the workshops
that operated in different
schemes and registers.
So the first one we
interrogated the nature
of the fact-value distinction.
The other workshops
were organized
more thematically around
translation and research
in experimental biology,
information databases
and archives, property
and intellectual property,
and dark data and
known knowledge.
And each of these workshops
was organized by someone
else in a different
university and so on.
And what emerged
across these workshops,
was a whole range of
conceptualizations of value
in relation to technoscience.
So my own
conceptualization is deeply
influenced Dumits
reading of Marx,
which I've just given you.
But for instance, some of
the other conceptualizations
that came up across
these workshops,
by no means
comprehensive, include
Laurent Pordie and Jean-Paul
Gaudilliere's focus
on use values and
pharmaceutical development
through a study of reformulation
practices in Ayurveda;
Kris Peterson's focus on the
constitution of different kinds
of markets in Nigeria, from
monopoly markets in patent
medications, to markets
in generic drugs,
to informal markets in fake and
counterfeit drugs all operating
in the same physical
spaces of exchange;
Maurice Cassier's ongoing study
of the reconstiitution of modes
of production and
industrial organization
of pharmaceutical manufacture;
Cori Hayden's analysis
of the politics of
the copy, focusing
on the values in politics
entailed in the constitution
of novelty, similarity,
and genericity in
pharmaceuticals;
Vinh-Kim Yguyen's analysis
of the ways in which
diseased bodies
come to be valued
biomedical situations
of emergency,
such as HIV/AIDS in
Africa; work that
thinks about pharmaceutical
value in terms of embodiment
in bodily relations,
so the different ways
Julie Livingston and Lochlann
Jain's analysis of cancer
as bodily political
economic relation,
work that elaborates
value in relation
to institutions of
national and global health;
Veena Das' focus on
everyday practices
of pharmaceutical consumption
and the experience
health and illness; Judith
Farquhar and Lili Lai's focus
on relating value to
questions of epistomology,
and their work on
ethnic Chinese medicine,
and various kinds of
what Donna Haraway calls
"encounter value" that mediate
transspecies and multispecies
species interactions
in the life sciences;
and here also thinking
of Gail Davies'
his works on the geographies
of mouse research;
Natalie Porter on securitized
economies of bird flu;
Jake Kosek on the history of
the industrialist honeybee,
so a whole range of
approaches to thinking
knowledge/value together.
One of the key
features, in spite
of this huge diversity of
methods to conceptualize
knowledge/value relations--
one of the key features that
came up across our
conversations was
that the problem
space of knowledge
does not just concern
the question of truth,
as it's so central needed for
Foucault in power/knowledge,
but essentially concerned with
the movements of knowledge.
Indeed the transformations
that define
what counts as knowledge
in any given domain
can only be
identified and traced
by looking at
knowledge in transit
as different communities
select an attribute
meaning to various
knowledge forms
through a complex nexus
of commitments and frames.
In our view, the
question of knowledge
concerns itself primarily
with movements across domains.
And what counts as knowledge
in movements across domains?
These domains could be
institution and disability,
lab to clinic, biology to
medicine, academia to industry,
spatial animal facility
to lab, bench geographical
and transnational, the
globalization of research
to different parts of the
world, upstream research
to downstream
research, and so on.
So this question of mobility
and its various entanglements
emerged as a key
uniting trend, one
that even the Marxists and
the non-Marxists in the room
could agree upon.
OK, so the third, final
part of this presentation
is taking the relationship of
value to health and politics.
And this is the work that
I've done more recently
in the book "Pharmocracy."
So in this book,
I'm arguing that we
have to understand the
mechanisms by which health gets
appropriated by capital in
order to understand how health
is dictated by
logics of capital,
how these logics materialize
through regimes of governance,
and how they are contested
rendered the political.
In the process, the
notion of health itself
as it constitutes in
relation to emergent
forms of experimentation and
therapy come to be at stake.
Health is this no longer
just an embodied, subjective,
experiencial state of
well-being or disease.
It can be abstracted
and grown, made
valuable to capitalist
interests, its like labor.
So one part of
understanding "Pharmocracy"
is to elucidate the political
economy of the appropriation
of health by capital.
And this is what they've done
through a reading of Dumit.
The complimentary
part of this is
to recognize that logics of
capital are not seamless.
They become deeply
politicized, deeply contested,
and so undergirding the
relations between value
and politics are
ways of knowing.
And questions of what
kinds of authorities
are vested in particular.
[INAUDIBLE] So the creation
of value on the one hand, then
speaks to these dynamics of
capital that I've talked about.
But on the other hand, speaks
to a historical, epirical,
ethnographic question of the
ways in which value, politics,
and knowledge are in decline
and mediate each teacher.
And here, critically
understanding globalization
is crucial, and we
can talk in discussion
about the ways in which
globilization had come to be
[INAUDIBLE].
So schematically
in "Pharmocracy,"
what I was doing,
was basically to try
and proliferate these
articulations of value,
politics, and knowledge.
So I was arguing that the
establishment of regimes
of value becomes a means
through which global hegemonies
naturalize and reconfigure,
such that value itself
becomes the grounds upon
which politics plays out.
Now in the book, I consider
value in four registers,
as an abstraction that
has material consequences,
as surplus value for capital,
in terms of norms and ethics,
and as antinomy, something that
is contradictory relationship
to itself.
This, in turn, leads me to think
of five sites through which
value in all of
its registers comes
to be explicitly articulated
through, and as politics
in relation to drugs.
The speculative value
of financial capital;
the bioethical
value that underlies
the establishment of
good clinical practice
for biomedical research;
the constitutional values
that underlay modes of
judicial interpretations
of intellectual
property law, this
is very important in India;
philanthropic values that
rationalize corporate monopoly;
and post-colonial values that
contest Euro-American
corporate and state hegemony
through both market
and state intervention.
Additionally, I
consider politics
in terms of six emergent forms
of and spaces representation.
The conjuncture of
policy harmonization
as creating openings for
fears of global capital
and for political mobilizations
of global civil society
around access to essential
medicines and clinical trials;
logics of financialized
capital in the spaces of crisis
that they create, leading
to structural contradictions
requiring political
reconfiguration
of multiple sorts,
including more
intense forms of
financialization,
one of the responses to the
crisis of financialization
is more financialization; civil
society advocacy is activated
and mobilized to public
scandal; judicialization
and the fight to patents
incentivized public good;
competing forms of
social responsibility
is articulated to
corporate philanthropy
and demanded of state;
and corporate alliance making
with civil society groups
for access to medicines in
the context of an imperialist
geopolitics.
The sum of these
politics establish
hegemonic modes and relations
of production, some of them
contested.
Finally, I think through the
ways in which articulations
between value and
politics are mediated
by knowledge, which itself
has multiple meanings, right?
So the kinds of knowledge
that emerged for me
in my study of
pharma were the kinds
of scientific and medical
knowledge required in drug
discovery and development.
A lot of that is small
molecule organic chemistry,
the epidemiological knowledge
that underlies public health
interventions, various kinds
of anticipatory knowledge
that operate in
different domains ranging
from financial markets
to clinical research
to patent law; knowledge
as process and strategy
of making meaning,
modalities of reasoning
and interpretation that operate
in particular situations
with more or less authority,
and in the Indian case
that I studied the
courts were very, very
important to this, OK?
So what results then in is
a more complex, elaborated,
and differentiated
structure of pharmocracy,
which looks something like this.
You won't be able
to read any of this,
but that's how value is inacted.
[INAUDIBLE]
Value emerges through one
of these entanglements.
Even as it operates through
the dynamics of capital
that Marx indeed showed so well.
All
right?
So what's at stake,
through and through,
are the antinomies of value
in its multiple registers.
And antimony is a
contradiction, and of course,
I have known this greatly
from [INAUDIBLE] sitting here,
an antinomy is a contradiction
between two beliefs
or conclusions that are
in themselves reasonable.
Their solution or consensus
is often impossible.
What is at stake is living with
the mutual incompatibility.
Value, in the contested,
conjoined, mulitply jointed
senses of market and surplus
value on the one hand,
and ethical or normative
value, on the other precisely
because of its
inherent indeterminacy,
constitutes the
terrain of politics.
In it's an [INAUDIBLE].
My investments,
therefore, do not
lie in defining what value
really is, and certainly do not
correspond in any
straightforward way
to what people say or
believe what value really is.
I'm not interested in finding
a transhistorical ontology
of value, nor am I
attempting an elucidation
of cosmologies of
value that describe
the ways in which actors resolve
contradictions for themselves.
What I want to do
here, is to stay
attentive to the articulations
and antinomies of value
as its rendered political
through knowledge.
So I'm going to
leave you at that.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: I have a
question for Alex.
I don't know anything about
peer-review [INAUDIBLE]
So I learned a lot.
One of the things
that really struck me,
it may be because of
your mention of Al Gore--
is that you can fit the
history of peer-review
into the history of
regulatory politics-- well,
you also mentioned
regulatory science.
And that science play plays
a very distinctive role
in this context,
Both as the sort
of knowledge that's used for
regulation, and is also itself,
a potential subject
for regulation.
And it's precisely
that contradiction
that leads to weird
flips back and forth as
to who is attacking
science, right?
Depending on whether
the science is
being used as a basis for
regulation, whether science
itself needs to be regulated.
So Al Gore in that situation,
being an advocate of regulation
of science and then later
on being an advocate
for using science to regulate--
What struck me-- and this is
where the question comes in,
is that in your
description of peer-review,
the focus was on its regulatory
in a different sense role.
Its role is as a gatekeeping--
it's a gatekeeping
function and its role as
part of these self-correcting
mechanisms of science.
But in my own experience, just
thinking about peer-review,
peer-review serves
other functions.
So it helps ensure the editorial
legitimacy of publications,
so it distributes responsibility
for editorial decisions, which
is different from deciding
whether or not it was correct
or a claim is correct.
It distributes labor,
so it divides labors
that the editor doesn't have
to literally carefully read
everything result to
result. And it also
creates different kinds
of social networks
ALEX CSISZAR: Social networks?
SPEAKER 1: Social
networks that transcend
the genealogical relationships
of the institutional containers
in which people usually
learn about science, how
it's being done elsewhere.
And it seems that
once you incorporate
all those other things into
the story of peer review,
a simple story of is
it correcting science
or not, Is it true is it
eliminating bad science or not,
doesn't capture
the whole picture.
So I just wonder
if that's ever part
of these discussions,
all the other things
that peer review does.
ALEX CSISZAR: So, in
fact, I sort of skipped
over various things-- that,
of course, what you're
saying is absolutely crucial
to everything here, right?
The idea that these
practices are about
gatekeeping and gatekeeping
alone is preposterous.
And you might even
say that that's
not at all what they're for--
I mean they do that very badly.
And they do lots of other
things reasonably well, at least
as well as everything else.
And so I sort of
rushed through things.
But I think what seems
to me to happen--
So the idea that refereeing
might replace all those other
roles is part of
the conversation
in the '70s because it doesn't--
this sort of regulatory
pressure isn't on it yet.
But that seems to me
to mostly disappear
in most studies of peer-review
that start to sort of get
going in the '80s and '90s.
And indeed so that's one of--
so various kinds of things
are collapsing.
One of the collapses is the
idea that the various sorts
of self-correcting
mechanisms, they
sort get collapsed onto a
particular formal procedures.
On the other hand,
that's sort of what
happens with refereeing
becoming peer-review.
On the other hand,
refereeing itself
ceases to be seen as playing
various kinds of-- so
my historical work
on the subject
has exactly been to say
that refereeing had nothing
to do with gatekeeping for
a large part of history,
like nothing.
It was the opposite--
in some ways,
it was the opposite of that.
And that and that sort
of more fluid notion
of what this practice is for,
and what it might be, kind of
just gets smaller and
smaller in the ways
in which the public discourse
about refereeing and then
peer-review get configured.
And so that's one of the
things I want to change.
Now the difficulty
is that then it
might be that what I'm
saying is, oh, it's
too bad that that political
stuff happened in the '80s,
and things are much
better in the '70s.
But that's not
right because that's
a bad kind of
story structurally,
but it's also not right.
Because what happened
it's not Gore's fault.
Gore was perfectly reasonable
in his being shocked, I think.
But I think one of the
reasons he was shocked,
is actually the
people representing
the sciences as it were, had
no particular political story
to tell.
So one was imposed upon this
institution, it seems to me.
And what would have
been nice, I think,
what was missing
up until that point
or what had been
stripped away already,
was some sort of
notion that there
is a sort of a
politics of judgment,
and a politics of
labor, et cetera,
embedded in these practices.
That were sort of
removed over time,
or through I think the
structural function
was removed-- sociology of
science in the '60s and '70s.
And then a new kind
of politics was
imposed upon it that sort
of reduced that institution.
But absolutely.
Referee practices do all sorts
of things, and they still do.
And yeah there's of course,
just a big distinction
in general between the
way in which people
talk about this institution, the
sort of discourse surrounding
peer review, and, in fact,
it's actual practice.
It's a strong notion
that it is one thing.
It's never been one thing.
It's a whole bunch of
different sorts of things.
And that again,
that was something
that was understood in the
'60s and '70s more or less
and then, more or
less sort of ceased
to be part of the discourse,
for the most part,
starting in the '80s.
AUDIENCE: So, let's take a
couple of questions [INAUDIBLE]
then [INAUDIBLE].
SPEAKER 2: Thank
you, just a comment
about the nature of capital
coming from pharmocracy,
but it also touches on the
question of peer-review,
and that is what the
knowledge processes might
be becoming in this moment
of globalized pharmocracy.
One way of posing the
question is about open access,
and I know that in the
open access debates driven
by the biotech industry,
one of the main drivers
for open access is to set
up biotech companies that
don't have to pay for
knowledge acquisition
through subscription costs
and those sorts of things.
In that system.
The way that open
access is referred to
is through publishing results.
That's something
different than a paper.
And the academic paper may
be OK for us professors,
but I wonder what
people now want
in the new economy of science
where something else is mobile.
It's not just the
published paper now
that is that kind of gold
standard for knowledge.
Something else is moving around.
And I don't know whether that's
commodities, or chemicals,
or pieces of objects, or what
kind of knowledge this is that
might be moving around in a
moment when peer-review is
disappearing as something
that people hold in high value
in many of the movements--
or of course as an academic,
I cherish it very
much, but I'm just--
other things are going on I
wondered what kind of mobility
of knowledge this might be.
Thank you.
MODERATOR: [INAUDIBLE] Do
you want to go ahead and--
JOANNA RADIN: Yeah.
So I'm trying to think
about [INAUDIBLE] question
sort of was helping me
to form the question I
wanted to ask about.
Peer-review, which is a
question about a different way
of thinking about politics,
and especially the geopolitical
that you ended on,
which is thinking
about cases where
scientists themselves
are aware that there are
political ramifications
of the findings that
they have in their hands.
And peer-review, and I've
noticed this in the archive,
peer-review becomes
a place where
some of those political
debates are adjudicated,
but they don't necessarily make
it into the published article.
And so I'm interested in--
so there's a case that
I'm thinking of that I've
been working on about--
human biology in Brazil, where
these two human biologists have
different ideas
about what it will
mean to see indigenous peoples
as having genetic basis
for immunity or not, right?
And this is happening
under a dictatorship,
and there's a sense that if
we published this finding,
it could be used against
indigenous people
in these ways.
And none of this
really makes it,
this back and forth
that's going on
makes it into the paper itself.
And so I guess I'm just
wondering about the political,
in a different sort of register,
as playing out not assuming
that scientists are not ever
concerned with the political,
but you know, how can you
locate that in your story?
And especially maybe this does
articulate to what Kaushik
is trying to reckon with.
What does it mean when
the networks of research
are transnational and
those kinds of issues.
Obviously, this fits
into your critique.
It can't be accommodated
by an automated machine.
But how might we
be able to harness
that archival knowledge,
or that knowledge of what's
actually happening in the
archives of what peer--
actual peer-reviews or referee
reports have looked like,
to maybe contest
or actively disrupt
a narrative of automation.
Just putting it out there.
KAUSHIK SUNDER RAJAN:
OK, I understand.
Thanks for that question.
The simple answer, which of
course is not the simple answer
is to the question, what is
moving around in this moment?
Is that many different things
are moving around, right?
And they can be
differentially monetized.
And often the same
institutions or people
are not monetizing them.
And so for instance,
one of the things
that I was looking at in much
older work on genome science,
when genomics was
becoming something that
was valuable to
industry, is that
what was becoming value
could be biological material,
or it could be information,
and it wasn't often
and the same companies who were
monetizing one or the other.
And of course, there are actual
bodies that are moving around
or knowledge regimes that are
moving to bodies elsewhere,
right?
So the outsourcing
of clinical trials.
But importantly, very
importantly here,
the domain of globaly
reproductive politics.
Things like celibacy or
[INAUDIBLE] and so on.
What militant group would
[INAUDIBLE] labor, right?
So there are lots of mobilities.
And so on the one
hand, what that means
is that it is capitalization
all of the way down.
But it also means
that there are often
contestations between
these different kinds
of appropriations
and monetizations,
and so on and so forth, right?
I just want to say one thing
quickly at the more abstract
level, which is one of the most
useful recent characterizations
of contemporary capital
capitalisms that I have read
is Sandro Mezzadra's
and Brett Neilson's
new book "The Politics
of Operations."
where they talk about what they
call the operations of capital
as being defined by extraction
logistics and finance.
And one of the things to think
about-- and one of the things
that they're doing
that, is that they're
thinking about, for
instance, data economies
as extractive economies,
in a way that we
might think about mining
natural resources, right?
What does it mean
to think about--
literally to think about
processes of value extraction
across long [INAUDIBLE]
of different things
from which value
has been extracted.
And if you put that in
relation to financialization,
and Marx said this
in volume three
of "Capital," the thing
with financial capital
is that value is
not being created,
but it's being appropriated
from the process of circulation.
So what you need is movement for
that, rather than production.
So the dynamics of this again,
are very long [INAUDIBLE]..
But the particular
kinds of resources
that get put into motion
out of which value gets
extracted, I think there's
real empirical specificity
in interest.
ALEX CSISZAR: To get to
this same set of questions--
from my slightly different
perspective on all of this--
another kind of story that I
don't know that much about,
but seems very important to
the story about why peer-review
and became such a big concept
in the last 10-15 years--
a story that's been told, is
it's not so much academics who
care about this, who
have ever cared about it,
but when large
pharmaceutical companies want
to sort of extract knowledge
from the academic world,
they went, and they
started realizing,
oh all these studies suck,
and they aren't good,
proper knowledge.
So this is one source
of the narrative
that peer-review is broken.
Peer-review, they had this
idea that ought to produce--
it ought to add a certain
kind of value, the value that
makes for truth in
all these studies,
and so far that wasn't the case.
Everybody knew that wasn't the
case, but except maybe then
they said it ought
to be the case.
And so that's one source
of the sort of narrowing
of this procedure into this idea
that it ought to produce truth.
But again, this is
something-- the subject
I have very little
to say about what's
happening now, in this regard
and what's going to happen.
Certainly, there's
some sort of notion
that one might peer-review
data in the same way, right?
And here is this notion
of the academic ought
to give their labor, to making
sure this data is not only
reliable but standardized.
And that ought to
happen through some sort
of peer-review system.
To Joanna's question,
this is a complicated one.
So the particular issue
you're referring to
involves a really, really
interesting discussion
of politics.
But one could also imagine
cases that weren't so obviously
political, and which
is a whole bunch
of interesting stuff going
on in this back and forth.
Is it important in
your case, that it's
a political matter or--
JOANNA RADIN: No, it seemed
like a strong urgent [INAUDIBLE]
argument using actual archival--
I mean thinking back in some
ways, to like Steph's argument,
using actual materials
in the archives that
are the forms of what we're
debating to empirically ground
the claim about.
What sorts of knowledge is
being made in these reviews?
ALEX CSISZAR: I mean, there
is a discourse that sort of is
about this, which is that
referee practices ought to be
open referee practices, right?
And that's a very, very big
part of the discussion now.
So we're moving towards
open peer-review--
which the idea
would be that all--
there's actually a lot of
value in this back and forth.
It's now, of course, it's
electronic for the most
part, not so much paper.
And I don't have--
thought through
exactly how this case
how that changes the situation.
But the idea would be that
of course, everything then
does get published together,
and that sort of creates a more
valuable knowledge object.
What's tricky about
that, is it's also
part of that same discourse
that connects to the platform
version of open science in
which that stuff also then--
because it's open, can then be
harvested for other purposes
potentially.
And so that particular
example wouldn't seem, to me,
to disrupt the discourse
that's going on
with respect to the
transformation of peer-review.
But maybe there's invocations
of the political there,
we put might in someway, but
I have not thought about that.
And that is worth talking about.
MODERATOR: OK.
Let's take a couple
more [INAUDIBLE]..
Rafael, did you have your
hand-- and then Lucas.
RAFAEL: I had a quick
question about the beginning
of your talk, Alex.
About the AI use of peer-review.
I thought-- is part of it
because the results could not
be reproduced, or the statistic
analysis was so flawed that any
computerized system could
figure that out, and therefore--
is that part of the motivation?
ALEX CSISZAR: [INAUDIBLE]
With that first slide,
there's was actually
a few different things
going on there.
One of them is this
sort of, you know,
companies who are
claiming to use AI,
indeed to do some basic
statistical analysis,
et cetera, et cetera
to figure out things.
And you know, people are doing
that sort of on particular case
now to show all the fraud going
on in various sorts of papers.
That's one thing
that's going on.
I'm somewhat less
interested in that,
and more interested
in the notion
of a sort of algorithmic
crowdsourcing of judgment
through counting things
such as downloads,
but also using AI to
read public comments that
come from open
peer-review platforms.
That's sort of what
I've been focusing on,
but there's a lot
of work doing this,
sort of attempting to
automatically decide
whether a paper is
automatically faulty.
I haven't really thought
too much about that.
I think, clearly
that kind of work--
another huge thread of the
story is that all of this
tends to assume that
knowledge is this relatively
standardized-- knowledge
of production is really
standardized sort of process.
You'll notice many of my
actors post-'80s are people
in biomedicine, and so a set of
issues that are quite relevant
to a set of fields
in modern medicine,
become this platform through
which discussions of these
issues are spread throughout all
sorts fields and disciplines,
which seems ridiculous
in all sorts of ways.
But yeah, that is
something that's going on.
SPEAKER 3: Thanks.
So I have a question
for Kaushik about value.
And I'm curious
about what you would
say about thinking not
about so much what value is,
but rather where it is.
I'm thinking in particular kind
of along two axes or registers.
Spatially, it sounds like
you wanted to say that--
I'm not sure this is right,
but I'm asking, I'm curious--
that value is
located in transit,
so it's something that's
created through circulation
through exchange, and then also
along the temporal registers.
So I'm thinking about what I
expect something Joanna-- well,
Joanna's talking about
the future, which
will be taking place tomorrow.
So a kind of classic trope, I
think it's very strong in Marx
too--
of capitalism as locating
value in the future.
So you were talking
about surplus value
as something which is--
money becomes capital
when it's invested
in the means of production to
extract surplus from labor.
And so it strikes me in
both of those cases--
or along on both
of those registers,
there is a sense in which
value is always deferred.
It's always somehow just out of
reach, or somehow kind of off.
Yeah, just out of
reach or deferred.
And that this may
help to account
in some ways for the kind of--
what you might describe as
sort of the imperial dimensions
of capitalism.
That the very
concept of value is
one that is predicated
upon growth,
and constant movement,
and deferral,
of trajection into the future.
KAUSHIK SUNDER RAJAN:
Thanks, and yes.
Yeah, yeah I mean
I think that's--
I mean, that's a really
nice way of putting it.
So just a couple of
quick things here, right?
I mean, I think that I've
[INAUDIBLE] dimensions
of this [INAUDIBLE].
And I think the whole question
of futurity is very important.
And I think that exists already
in the question of potentiality
that at the heart of the labor
[INAUDIBLE] value, right?
So it's there in
the dynamics itself.
Having said that, there
are also specific ways
in which the future
itself is made fungible
in historically and
institutionally specific ways.
And that's things
like financialization.
And this is where my question
to you, Stephanie, came from.
When one thinks about a sort
of historical to transition
to securitization, for instance.
Securitization is a category of
finance, amongst other things.
And so it's all
about not just being
able to look to the future,
but look to the future
in ways that allow one to
generate value in the present.
So on the one hand,
value is deferred,
but on the other hand, somebody
is making a lot of money.
Why value is different?
And so the question, is who
is value different for, right?
And who stands to gain
through that deferral?
And I think that becomes a very
interesting political question.
And so that leads
to more than the
earlier thing, value
located in transit.
Yes, value is
located in transit,
but value is also
located out of transit.
As in, people are
able to extract
what institutions or whatever
"the commercial capitalist,"
in Max's terms in volume
three of "Capital."
The commercial capitalist
is able to extract value out
of transit, and that's an
important part of [INAUDIBLE]..
So it becomes
important to get things
to move for movement's sake.
MODERATOR: OK, let's take
another two [INAUDIBLE]
and then [INAUDIBLE].
SPEAKER 5: Thanks so
much, to both of you.
I've actually got a question
for each of you, very different.
Alex, it can be phrased kind
of simply in the beginning bit,
and then it's going to get
hard for me to phrase it.
But it seems to me that
in his lovely paper,
you've really stressed the
review part of peer-review
and not the peer
part of peer-review.
And so the obvious
set of questions--
it came up in that very
nice example actually
where the bunkers claim
that the Third World doesn't
have enough peers
of the right kind,
and hence, enough science
of the right kind.
But I guess part of what
I'm interested in is,
in the '90s and the
last decade and a bit,
when there have been critiques
of an old-boys' network,
particularly White,
particularly male, and so on--
whether there has been more
emphasis on the problems,
or the claims, or the
implicit judgments
involved in that notion
of the word peer.
So that's the first question.
And then in a sense, why
given that you're nodding
and that's clearly
part of what you're
thinking about, why an
answer to that question
wasn't in this version
of your talk, Right?
Because it's clearly
important, but I
wonder why it's absent in this
version except for, you know,
we can't do everything
and time is short.
And then the
question for Kaushik
is-- you know, I'm
always amazed and love
all of the directions you can
go through these great close
readings of Marx.
But I have a question about
the way that Marx commonly
understands value and in a
way, the kinds of value that
might be limited to you,
by the fact that you
work so much with Marx.
So, for example, Marx cannot
be reduced only to economics,
that would be foolish.
He thinks, of course in terms
of moral value, ethical value,
and so on.
But I do wonder whether a
focus on capital and so on--
to make it personal, do you
find that working with Marx
so closely limits some
of the kinds of value
that are most
observable to you--
to of economic forms of value.
And what do you do to make
sure that other forms of value
are there for you to see
when they're in the world,
so to speak.
SPEAKER 6: So, my
question on value
is actually a continuation
of someone's question.
Maybe quite naive, but
when I think about values--
when I started thinking
about values many years ago,
I was not working as Marx.
I was thinking about moral
values, the kinds of thing that
is lost now in
the United States.
Who lost our values.
This president doesn't stand
up to our values, et cetera,
et cetera.
And I wonder if there is any
ontological or epistemological
relation between these
values, and the values
do you were talking about.
Maybe not, maybe it's just a
different type of creature.
But maybe at some point
in the history of value,
they were together,
and there was a split.
And I wonder what you
would think about this.
About peer-review, I would
like to add something
maybe quite speculative.
We may think about peer-review
as a form of judgment,
but also about not just
judgment but judgment
mobilized for making a decision.
So it's a decision
making procedure,
but it's also a mechanism
for distributing decision.
Just by saying this, we
are in the political.
Absolutely.
So this is the way
scientists do politics.
Their own politics.
We can compare it to voting
it's another mechanism of taking
decision.
Within a specific
limited community,
not everyone is allowed to vote.
But there are-- in both
cases there are some values,
in the other sense of values,
that give legitimacy--
equal, fair, et
cetera, et cetera.
But we know in most
cases that there are so
many problems in the way these
processes are implemented--
that undermine the
fairness or the equality,
et cetera, of the election or
of the peer-review judgment.
Now I would like
to ask you if you
agree to take this one or
two steps further and ask
how come the scientists do
not recognize any of this.
From what you've said or what
you both [INAUDIBLE],, I mean,
I don't know the
empirical reason,
but the people who
speak about scientists,
speak about them as
if they are completely
unaware of this analogy.
And when they
consider themselves
as making the decision, they
are not one with the parties,
although the
mechanism is actually
a way to constitute the party
or to reproduce the party,
or to transform the
party, et cetera.
It seems that they consider
themselves, at its most,
as the council or the
committee that supervised
the election with technology.
So you have a neutral,
bipartisan committee that
overlooks the election process.
So this is how they look at
themselves, as one step up,
neutralizing or excluding
the political in the process.
MODERATOR: Two more
questions on the list.
ALEX CSISZAR: So that's a super
interesting set of questions.
And unfortunately the
answer is really complicated
so I will try to-- and I don't
actually know all the answer,
but one thing that is important
to just start with is that,
once you get into-- you know,
the various sort of scientists,
as it were, who are the actors.
And then there are
people who take
themselves to be observers and
researchers of this problem.
And that sort of group of
people, it seems to me,
they're not coming
from political science,
they're not thinking
about questions of say--
so even if these take
the voting issue.
And presumably
there's different ways
of coming out the
voting issue, one
would be to come at it
from the point of view--
OK, so what sorts of values
do we this system to embody?
Another is to say, what's the
most efficient, economic way
to do this?
And that to the sort
of political, but it
takes itself to push
aside the political.
And it seems to me,
that that's the mode
in which a lot of this discourse
happens regarding referees.
So it's not entirely.
I mean, there are very
interesting people talking
about it in ways that I think
we'd find more Interesting
[INAUDIBLE] on why
peer is missing,
you're absolutely right.
It's very good.
You call it.
You called me on it.
It's something I've been
thinking a lot about and trying
to figure it out.
I just don't have a good story.
So one thing I didn't
say, that's very important
is that the word peer functions
in all sorts of different ways
aside from review in
this earlier period.
But what that ceases to
be the case in most cases,
from the '80s on.
I mean it's still
around, but peer-review
becomes a kind of
term on its own,
that is to some
extent abstracted
from any sort of question
[INAUDIBLE] peers.
That's not at all true
in the earlier moment.
But I haven't I don't yet--
I just haven't figured
that story out.
You're absolutely
right that that's
going to be central
to actually making
this a proper good paper, trying
to understand what's going on
and I mean--
there's obvious things
to say, but you can guess
what those obvious things are.
There's something
non-obvious to say
but I haven't
figured it out yet.
KAUSHIK SUNDER RAJAN:
OK, gosh, lots of things.
So let me see three
things that in my head
are sort of connected, but it's
not going to come out that way.
And the third thing that
they're going to see
is the answer that they
should have given you, Lucas,
and didn't and I
remembered after.
In fact, that this is what
I should have told you.
So I'm going to end
actually with an argument.
OK, so the first
thing is and Abby,
this isn't an answer
to your question,
but what you were
saying made me think
of something very interesting
in what they perceived
to be a difference
in tone in Marx
between volume one of
"Captial," when he's talking
about the labor theory of
value and selfless value,
and volume 3, when
he's talking about what
he calls commercial capital,
as sort of a [INAUDIBLE]
financialization.
Which is then by the
time he reaches volume 3,
there's almost a tone
of modern outreach.
That there's almost this sense,
that the commercial capitalist
is a parasite.
That industrial capitalism
is exploitative,
but at least it's productive.
But financial capital
is just [INAUDIBLE]..
And so there's something already
interesting in that trajectory
that's not the uncertainty
of the question,
but what it's prelude
to what I hope will--
MODERATOR: Could
you use the mic?
KAUSHIK SUNDER
RAJAN: Yeah, sorry.
So that was one part of
it, now from this one,
I've started answering
this question
by talking about what Marx
said, but for me, the interest
ultimately is not
in Marx per se,
but in the nature of
particular problems
that I'm contending
with, that I am not
able to tackle methodologically
without kept from Marx.
And this doesn't mean that--
and part of the problem
that I'm tracing
is empirically a
trajectory, such
that both the life
sciences and medicine
fields in which I
trained when I was young
are unrecognizable to me, even
in the course of my adult life
because they have been
capitalized so much.
I mean, literally Merton's
norms kind of helped
when I was a baby scientist,
and it's unthinkable right?
And so that's what Marx
is useful for me for.
But, you know, many of my
best friends are non-Marxists.
But also there are certain
questions that cannot fully be
asked through Marx.
And so one of the things that
I am beginning to wrestle with
is new work in
South Africa, which
is a country that
I don't know well
and I'm just beginning to--
but all of my work
on pharmocracy
has been talking about
monopoly capitalism.
In South Africa, it's
impossible to talk
about monopoly capitalism
without talking about White
monopoly capitalism.
That's the category.
In other words, race.
So how does one think of
race within these dynamics--
through these dynamics?
I'm not saying Marx is useless
for thinking about race,
but it's a different
set of problems.
Where do I want
to go with this--
and this is a jump,
but this is the answer
that I should have given you--
is that in relation to all
of these questions which are
dealing in some ways with the
question of the relationship
between the economic and a
few like the non-economic--
in the conjunctures and
the walls that we live in--
ultimately I want to make
a political argument,
and they will say this,
at this point, what
I'm about to say is radically at
odds with where Sandro Mezzadra
and Brett Neilson end up.
So I find their work very useful
for my thinking about capital,
but I think we end up
in very different places
in terms of what our
political argument are.
I think that in
many important ways,
what defines the relationship
between the economic
and the non-economic is
places and [INAUDIBLE],,
is something like a state.
It doesn't have to
be a nation state.
But I think states matter,
as in states draw boundaries
between--
you know, Indian courts
and South African courts
actually come in at certain
moments of the capitalization
of health and say, no,
no, no, this Is morality,
this is not economics, right?
In other words, boundary
drawing gets done.
And there's
political work that's
done through that kind
of boundary drawn.
Whereas the American
states, since Reagan
especially, has completely
abdicated that drawing.
They basically become and
investor-state, right?
And so part of the
politics that I want to--
that I think is
on the table here,
is one of seizing the state.
As in, are we thinking
about some kind
of a state-based based politics.
The state may not look like
what we know it to look like.
It certainly, I
think, ought to not
to be coupled to the nation
in any kind of [INAUDIBLE]..
But the question of the
political relationship
between economic and
non-economic forms
that value, I think
requires a politics
towards something like the
state, if that makes sense.
That is where you're [INAUDIBLE]
MODERATOR: OK, two
more questions.
Laura and then [INAUDIBLE]
SPEAKER 7: Kaushik just
answered mine, with [INAUDIBLE]..
MODERATOR: Excellent.
[INAUDIBLE]
LAURA: So I wanted to
ask a question, Alex.
And link it two Steph's
talk earlier in the day--
thinking about conversations,
more recently about databases
and fairness questions,
and the possibility
that maybe the questions
ought to be asked.
What sorts of things should
be kept, or not kept?
And I should say that
I am understanding
the history of peer-review
also through the periodization
that I understand from
Kaushik's work of just
an increasing financialization
of data of health
from the 1970s.
So my question is essentially
what would a history
of retraction look like?
Because it seems to
me that peer-review--
the process of peer-review
and the process of retraction
are parts of the same story.
So that I take for granted
the idea that science was
inherently secretive, and
peer-review makes it more
open--
is just sort of a false
narrative-- but actually,
peer-review creates
new forms of secrecy--
Which I feel like it's
what Joanna was signalling
with the sorts of
things that are
left outside of publication.
And then, is it possible that
with the increasing value given
to claims that can be made and
then stricken from the record,
those claims are still made
even if they're summoned.
Sort of like in courts, when
you try to strike things
from the record,
they nonetheless
can have some sort of
actual financial value.
Is it the case that
from, say, the 1970s,
there's actually
an increased effort
to produce retractions
because knowledge--
I'm thinking of climate change
knowledge, and the efforts
to keep climate
knowledge unstable,
and keep uncertainty in play--
that there's an increased
effort to create retractions,
because it's a method of
actually making claims
that have the value, even if the
claims are known to be false.
ALEX CSISZAR: [INAUDIBLE]
So on the one hand,
there's the aspect
of this where claims that are
made public but then cross out,
sort of still exist as claims,
but in an unstable sort of way.
Is the instability of its
publicness crucial to this?
Is--
LAURA: Well, for me, that's
where the value would lie.
I mean, a simpler
way to put it is,
is a history of a retraction
absolutely essential
to a history of peer-review,
or is history of peer-review
actually more like
a footnote to--
what is the history
of a retraction?
ALEX CSISZAR: Well,
so I've been trying
to figure out what my story
might be about history
retraction for a while.
I mean in terms of the
temporarily of it, really kind
of a '90s phenomenon at best.
I mean there's some retraction
starts happening in the '80s,
but you will see is
very little of it.
And obviously, with
my story, it clearly
seems to me that
indeed, this sort
of new conception
of peer-review that
is relatively a sort of
reduced but very powerful
conception of the
peer-review that
emerges by the end of the '80s
is indeed completely coupled
to retraction.
Now, why and how?
The story you're telling
is a non-obvious story.
The story you're
putting out there
is a non-obvious one
that might be the case.
I don't know whether
it's the case.
This is just research
I have not done.
But you're absolutely right
that these two concepts
in their 21st-century
form are absolutely
coupled to one another.
And certainly, historically
that's very clear to me--
from a description
of what's going on,
the causal story about
that I just don't know.
So I'm not going to
try to speculate.
MODERATOR: All right.
We're on break until 5:10.
Thank you.
