We all know the 19th century was fraught with examples of bad and specious scientific practice, but let's not forget the dark period of scientific discovery during the heyday of LSD. Apparently anyone who proposed an experiment of "x" on acid (where "x" was usually a small animal, young child, or counterculture visionary) received the funding and film equipment to document their research. Extra credit for anyone who can do a Latourian analysis of this video in the comments section.
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2 comments:
first, this is clearly a demonstration of the parajuridical method of laboratory conduct that has been a staple of so-called modern scientific practice since Boyle and his demonstrations of his own air pump. The optics of the experiment are clear (so to speak): demonstrate a visually discernalbe change in behavior to your peers, and they become the jury that decides if LSD really does have effects on cats, and what those effects are.
now, we do not have any notion of the context for these experiments, making a fully latourian analysis impossible, for we cannot trace the trafficking of fact and the alliances built between different scientific institutions and figureheads that would translate this experiment into general scientific knowledge.
However, we can still point out that the cat will be judged according to its physical behavior, and that for this experiment, it seems there is only one cat being tested. This will leave the window open for scientists to both interpret their data and, paradoxically, "let the facts speak for themselves." The facts are there, we can see them. There is no real "interpretation" at all, Science says. The mute world of things is its own advocate, and the scientist is its prophet.
How do we go about interpreting this hybrid? How to discuss a topic that is at once scientific but also inseparable from popular imaginations and subcultures of drug use and abuse? How to interpret the cat's behavior through the cataract of so many drug inspired-related/centric films and musical pieces?
This is something we cannot do without abandoning the modernist project of metaphysics, of rejecting Plato's cave, and of going about tracing the workings of things before we decide what their standing is in some higher order. The metaphysics must work themselves out within the collective, however they are defined and positioned in relationship to that collective.
This is not to say that the cat is not on lsd, merely to say that who speaks for the cat is a complicated and vexed question.
Omfg... lmao. A++++++
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