Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence?

Moses' Bridges, Winner's Bridges and Other Urban Legends in S&TS Author(s): Steve Woolgar and Geoff Cooper Source: Social Studies of Science, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Jun., 1999), pp. 433-449 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/285412 . Accessed: 17/02/2011 02:04
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RESPONSES AND REPLIES Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence? Moses' Bridges, Winner's Bridges and other Urban Legends in S&TS
Steve Woolgar and Geoff Cooper
It is a routine teaching day. The advanced level course in science and technology studies (S&TS) is holding its fourth weekly class of the semester.' The students dutifully indulge the professor in his incantation of one of the iconic case studies of the field: Langdon Winner's well-known analysis of Moses' bridges.2 Winner claims that the bridges built by Moses on Long Island are an example of a technology which has political qualities: by this he means that the bridges were designed (consciously or unconsciously) to have a particular social effect. Poor people and blacks, who normally used public transit, were kept off the roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could not get through the overpasses. One consequence was to limit access to Jones Beach, Moses's widely acclaimed public park.3 Needless to say, the eminent professor has a number of sophisticated critical points up his sleeve.4 He will point out the critical structural features of the argument: Winner constitutes a disjunction between the alleged appearance and the reality of the technology; he construes antecedent circumstances - in this case the designer's (Moses') motives - to account for this apparent disjunction; and he renders the effects of the technology as consistent with the designer's motives. But all this is yet to come. In order to get to these critical points, the professor first has to outline the facts of the matter. However, he has hardly started when a voice rings out. It is Jane, a resident of New York, recently arrived from the States: 'That's a crock of shit', quoth she. 'What?' 'That's totally wrong!' 'Yes, well, wait, not yet, we're coming to the criticisms.' 'No, no, I mean it's not true. I ride the buses on the damn parkway all the time.'
Social Studies of Science 29/3 June 1999) 433-49

(CSSS and SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi) [0306-3127(199906)29:3;433-49;009652]

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'What?!' 'I mean the bridgesdon'tpreventbuses going down the parkway.' A brief period of pedagogic turmoil ensues. The iconic exemplar is being challenged at first base. Forget about Winner's argumentative structure, his questionable ascription of motive, the inconsistencies in his critique of technological determinism. The interpolating New Yorker is claiming that the basic material premise of the example is wrong. Winner, she says, has incorrectly specified the base effects of the technology in the first place. A discussion ensues about the ways in which the class might substantiate Jane's Objection. What modes of observation, what kinds of record and report will convince us that she is right and Winner is wrong? How many observers should fly to New York? How many video cameras, how many video recordings of buses passing beneath the bridges will suffice? More far-reaching implications become apparent. If Jane is right, this fact must surely have also been evident for a long time to large numbers of people, including some of those working within S&TS. Why then has no-one previously come forward with this stark challenge? What manner of entrenched orthodoxy are we confronting here, and what can be done to buttress Jane's claims against the received wisdom of the iconic exemplar? Bernward Joerges has done us an admirable service in pursuing and exposing the historical underpinnings (or lack of them) in Winner's iconic example.5 He has brought to the surface the disquiet, which has been simmering in informal discussions for many years, about Winner's partial seizure of Caro's demonization of Robert Moses.6 Our aim in this Response is to demonstrate the necessity of building on Joerges' analysis, of going beyond his appraisal of the historical facts of the matter. In the process, we hope to clarify significant misapprehensions which Joerges attributes to 'Woolgar', and to 'the discourse position'. These misapprehensions are consequential, we suggest, because they lead Joerges to miss some foundational issues about argumentative adequacy which are raised by the Winner example. Joerges' conclusion is that 'Caro and Winner don't know what they are talking about' [BJ, 418]. Our conclusion is that there is much more to be learned from this episode, especially about the deep dynamics of argument which sustain knowledge and practice, in both S&TS and elsewhere.

Words and Things

Joerges deploys a distinction between words and things to contrast the interest of Winner with 'the discourse position'. In this Joerges appears to follow Winner: ButWinnerhas not much use for such semanticgames. ... Winnerseems not to be concerned, to borrow a famous title, with 'how to do things with words'. He seems concernedwith 'how to do things with things'.
[BJ, 413]

But this distinction is misleading, because it introduces an artificially rigid distinction into textual practice. As used by Joerges, the distinction assigns

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ontological priority to things over words, thereby permitting derogatory references to 'semantic games' and to 'mere' words. But if we took this distinction literally, we would have to point out that no things are to be found anywhere in Joerges' text, only words. We would have to say the same about Winner's writing. At the same time, however, it is possible to re-read Joerges', Winner's and this text, and to discover that every word refers to, constitutes and/or brings into the text a 'thing'. But it hardly makes sense to conclude that every text is full of mere things. So it is clearly unhelpful to construe one or other's interest in 'words' ratherthan in 'things', or vice versa. Rather, we suggest the best route out of this particular intellectual traffic jam is to follow the example of, inter alia, Derrida, Latour and Woolgar, and extend the notion of 'text' to encompass both words and things.7 In January 1998, there came into our possession a copy of the bus timetable for the Jones Beach Bus (Figure 1).8 The timetable shows both the schedule of buses run by the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority on the Parkways on Long Island, and the various routes taken by the buses. The existence of this timetable, we supposed, makes it safe to assume the existence of such buses. Hence Jane's Objection is substantiated: the bridges did not prevent buses travelling down the parkways on Long Island. [Figure 1 will appear here if we can find the timetable: see below, note 19.] But is this timetable material proof of Winner's error? Is it an incontrovertible 'thing' that definitively cements the (otherwise mere) 'words' of Jane's Objection? We discussed with the Editor of this journal the idea of simply publishing the timetable as a stand-alone item, as the shortest definitive refutation ever published. On reflection, however, it is easy to see that this object, like any artefact, has an essentially ambivalent status. It is, after all, no less a representation than this Response, orWinner's paper, or Joerges' Comment. And only a very naive bus user would deny the practical value of maintaining scepticism about a timetable's referential accuracy.9Its status as a proof (or the lack of it), just as its status as a thing rather than mere words, is deeply intertwined with its usage and, as we note below, with the community of readership which it performs.'0 Joerges speaks of 'Chinese Whispers'. But he fails to develop an analysis of their functions, with the result that his use of the metaphor (like his usage of 'mere') signals an implicit assumption that some more reliable (preferred?, original?) version underlies the current account. For Joerges, this bottom-line account is one that emerges from close historical analysis. But is not Joerges' historical re-description itself a form of Chinese Whisper, albeit one that is unusually well documented? The importance of understanding narrative forms is that, from an analytic point of view, they are all Chinese Whispers. Occasionally, however, we allow ourselves to forget this profound fact and to dignify the narrative by describing it as a 'description', 'report', 'paper', 'thesis' or 'Response'.

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The Essential Irresolvability of Debunking

Without exception, all the people we approached agreed that Moses' bridges could not and did not obstruct the buses. Jane insisted that buses run on the parkways on Long Island." The story of Jane's Objection to the original story turns out to be itself susceptible to repetition. Thus Laura Colban, herself a native NewYorker, studying S&TS in Norway, spontaneously re-enacted Jane's Objection at the start of a recent presentation (by SW) in Oslo.'2 Laura subsequently supplied some New Yorkers' folk knowledge about Moses and his bridges: I spoke with my parents about Moses, and they are great fans of his. They say he was a 'great visionary who foresaw the rise of the automobile'. As a consequence of the industrial revolution, a middle class began to emerge. These people suddenly had leisure time. Before then, there was no concept of leisure time for the masses. Only very wealthy people had access (or time for) parks and beaches. Robert Moses 'had a vision of opening up the surrounding areas so that people could spend their leisure time in the suburbs'. He did this not only by building highways, bridges and tunnels, but also beaches and parks. My parents claim that he was the most powerful man in NY, controlling all construction of any sort, from the mid-i 920s to the late 1960s. (Think about that, and what was done during that period. He had a hand in all of it.) He controlled the construction of the first highways, bridges, tunnels, and public parks and beaches in the world. These likely include the LIE (the Long Island Expressway), the Holland and Lincoln tunnels (connecting NY and NJ), the Triborough and Brooklyn Bridges. This opened up the suburbs (at the time, there were only farms and summer houses on Long Island and Westchester). He also built many parks and beaches, including not only Jones Beach and all the other Long Island beaches, but also Riis beach in Brooklyn, which was specifically designed for inner city youths. Both my parents are quite certain that buses have always driven on the LIE. In fact, Jones Beach was designed such that a bus terminal was attached to the main bathhouses. Remember, he designed this beach and had complete control over this project. There was no beach there before, it was completely built up (with sand and all). My parents thought it completely preposterous that someone could suggest that Moses could have designed the LIE such that buses could not drive it and get to Jones Beach. They both had a good laugh ... when I told them of Langdon Winner's accusation.13 Jane said: After several frenetic phone calls, I tracked down two curators at the Museum of Transit in New York City who were very au fait with the Winner case. 'Yeah, the bridges that were supposed to keep people away from Jones Beach' both said knowingly, and laughed."4 It would be tempting to conclude from all this folk knowledge in favour of a resuscitation of Moses, and hence in support of Joerges' case against Winner. To do so, however, would be to submit to quite the wrong parameters. In particular, it would be to imply that we are at or near a

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resolution of the matter - that, for example, we have definitively established Moses' true intentions. Instead, we propose that it is more productive to recognize that there are always further possible auxiliary theories that, if given sufficient investment, can undermine the emerging consensus. In this case, the further possibilities include: * The buses now in use are less tall than those in operation when Moses designed the bridges. * The bridges have been replaced since Moses designed them; only the more recent bridges allowed bus travel. * Moses had designed the bridges with the intention ascribed to him by Winner, but for some reason or other he miscalculated: Moses messed up. * The buses actually travel on a road other than those where Moses' bridges were built. * Woolgar and his colleagues have in every case deliberately incited negative views about Winner's analysis on the part of those they have talked to. * There is an extraordinarily elaborate conspiracy designed to make the authors of this Response look foolish. It is important to recognize that the story is itself a dynamic, shifting and essentially inconcludeable narrative."5Some sense of this is given by the following anecdote. One of us (SW) related Jane's Objection to Rob Kling when he visited the UK in September 1998. Rob Kling reported that Stanley Aronowitz had told him the 'same story': that a student in class had objected to the basic material premises of Winner's Moses' bridges story. Subsequently, Kling confirmed that Aronowitz told him the story 'on 12 April 1997, at the Siam House restaurant in Bloomington, during lunch'.'6 And Aronowitz said: 'I remember having lunch with Rob, but not my statement. However, it is, indeed, true that buses can move under the LI Freeway'.'7 Each attempt to articulate the facts of the matter engenders further questions, and hence further auxiliary theories. Colban and Aronowitz both spoke of the movement of buses in relation to the Long Island Freeway: * This does not contradict Winner at all. The Long Island Expressway was designed to carry both commercial and passenger traffic, by contrast with the Parkways which were supposed to enable motorists to enjoy sylvan journeys through the countryside. * On the other hand, Colban and Aronowitz may have been mistaking the Long Island Freeway for the parkways. * On the third hand, these witnesses may have simply been casual in their reference to the primary roads around NewYork City, since few New Yorkers bother to distinguish in speech between an expressway and a parkway. Most are referred to by the first part of the title - for

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example, to the Van Wyck (expressway) or the Grand Central (parkway). * Perhaps the buses could only pass under part of the bridges - that is, under the centre of the bridge, where the span was highest. This would negate the part ofWinner's claim that 'buses could not get through the overpasses'. However, it might support that part of his claim that a consequence 'was to limit access to Jones Beach', if we additionally determined that the bus company decided (and that Moses had also reckoned on this) that it was too inefficient to run buses which were confined to use only the middle lanes. Jane wrote:
The two curators at the Museum of Transit in NYC ... referred me to a man who actually owned the GM 1938 Overland Bus that would've operated on the parkways at the time Moses was designing the bridges, a guy called Mike O'Glicken, who also was the President of the American Motor Bus Society (no comment about obscure organizations Americans manage to dredge up). Unfortunately, O'Glicken works for the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the only phone number anyone had for him was a work number that was engaged solidly no matter when I rang it. I tried at 6am and at 11pm and 48 times in between, all during my gig in Chicago, as well as en route. No success. If it's any consolation, the only thing on the roads prior to the GM bus would've been double-decker omnibuses that were retired in 1930 and wouldn't fit under a goddamned thing: bridge, tunnel, or viaduct. Sorry I couldn't help you guys out on this one.18

The important recurrent feature in all this narrative is that the definitive resolution of the story, the (supposedly) crucial piece of information, is always just tantalizingly out of reach. By a disturbingly curious coincidence, we actually failed to lay our hands on a copy of the bus timetable (mentioned above) in time for the publication of this Response.'9 For purposes of shorthand, in our weariness, in the face of the daunting costs of amassing yet more detail, or just because we're lazy, we tend to ignore the fact that aspects of the story are always (and will always be) essentially out of reach. Instead we tell ourselves that 'we've got the story right'. 20

Iconic Exemplars and Urban Legends

In reaching the conclusion that Winner got it wrong, Joerges ignores this essentially ambivalent quality of artefacts. But how much does it matter that Winner got it wrong? To address this we need to understand how and why stories like Moses' bridges acquire the status of iconic exemplars. We take it as axiomatic - by which we mean it is consistent with large parts of scholarship both in and far beyond S&TS - that such stories do not become exemplary simply as a result of their referential adequacy, or indeed of any inherent property. Their status is the upshot of their usage rather than the result of their internal qualities. In particular, this means

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that their fate can have little to do with their inherent characteristics. The apposite Latourian inversion is that the properties of the artefact are the outcome, not the cause, of their reception.2' This means that in order to understand the fate of artefacts such as the Moses' Bridges stories, we have to translate investigations of the story's characteristics into analyses of the relational contexts in and through which the text moves. Let us start with the obvious contenders. * First, the durability of the story emerges from the 20th-century obsession with individuation. Stories which promote the idea that one man is capable of great deeds (for good or ill) are popular. They feed the maintenance of the hero/demon figure. * Second, the ironic contrast between appearance and reality, especially marked in the contrast between the cute, quaint, deliberately rustic quality of the bridges in a green belt development, and the arrogant, self-serving motives of a heinous power-monger (Moses),22 merely serves to fuel general paranoia at large. * Third, the story concerns a 'technology' of unusual physical simplicity. There are no (complex) moving parts. It is not a black-boxed technology (cf. computers and information and communications technologies). * Fourth, the story is an immutable mobile (about an immutable
immobile).23

* Fifth, the story manages to connect intention with physical materiality in a disarmingly simple manner. * Sixth, the story provides a single iconic visual motif to stand for a whole thematic strand of issues within S&TS; in Latour's terms, it therefore has considerable explanatory power.24 These general descriptions of relational context need tighter specification. We need to ask what gives parables their seductive power. What makes a successful analogy between 'specific instances and human behaviour at large'? [BJ, 416]. We suggest the key is to recognize how the text of the Moses' bridges story performs a community of readers. By this we mean, in brief, that the structure of the story makes available an arrangement of identities and expectations, and it is these characteristics to which readers can orient in making sense of the text. Reading, in this version of textual analysis, primarily involves attention to the configuration of actions and interpretations performed by the text. This approach extends the observation that the appeal of these stories depends on contrast, and on revelatory figures of speech (most decidedly, contra Joerges, including irony), by populating the community of those responding to the story. Our proposal is that the story of Moses' bridges can best be understood as a form of 'urban legend'. Urban legends are familiar-sounding stories, told and retold, often involving bizarre, horrifying or embarrassing incidents which are said to have happened to 'a friend of a friend'. A well-known example is 'The Killer in the Back Seat':

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As the woman walked to her car in a parking lot, she noticed a man following her. She jumped in her car and tore off, only to notice to her dismay that the man was following her in his car. The woman drove through downtown Phoenix trying to elude him, passing stores, houses and bars. When that failed, she drove across town to the home of her brother-in-law, a policeman. Horn honking, she pulled up and her brother-in-law came running out. She explained a man was following her and 'There he is, right there!'. The policeman ran up to the man's car and demanded to know what he was doing. 'Take it easy. All I wanted to do was tell her about the guy in her back seat', the man said. And indeed, there was a man huddled in the woman's back seat. [Sometimes the story has'... a man huddled in the back seat clutching a knife This true incident of several years ago
......

If we look at urban legends in detail, we see that they often possess a four-fold structure which organizes the telling of the tale.26 The first part specifies the occurrence of a boundary violation (transgression, invasion, penetration). A second part reveals the contamination, pollution, illness, guilt or embarrassment which is contingent upon the boundary violation. of boundary transgression engender guilt and/or These consequences embarrassment. The third part articulates the role of delayed realization (uncertainty, hidden intruder) in causing contamination (guilt) when it is least expected. The fourth part of the story makes the point that selfcan occur before the condition replication (further spread/contamination) is detected. In the case of 'The Killer in the Back Seat', the violated boundary is that of the car, the bounded space of the car providing a powerful metaphor for the bodily space of the woman driver. Here the delayed realization is forceful because the feared boundary transgression that the man following may potentially violate (the space/boundary/body of) the women driver - turns out both to be misplaced and to be less horrific than is actually the case. The horror of the eventual realization is premissed on erroneous optimism. The threatening figure is not just near, in the following car: the real threat has already invaded the woman's space. Urban legends thus work as moral tales about the dire consequences of boundary transgression. In the process, they display differences between members of different networks of social relations, and they suggest the negative consequences of violating established boundaries. They have the added twist that the feared violation is actually misplaced. It turns out that another yet more horrendous violation has already occurred. The display of differing membership communities is often focussed upon something that is peculiarly modern, and which can be experienced as strange, foreign or
new. As Noel Williams
...

has put it ... ... which form the hub of the storyline are

many of the phenomena

innovative and mysterious for many people. Just as for earlier cultures, the woods beyond the village and the flint arrowhead were mysterious, hence potentially dangerous and fearsome, so microwave ovens, foreign coats,

Responses & Replies: Woolgar& Cooper: Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence? hitchhikers, superglue can be seen as potentially threatening because
unfamiliar.27

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This makes technology an especially apt focus for urban legends, since new instantiations of technology raise profound questions about the new networks of social relations which might be implicated.28What can these new technologies do, to whom, and who knows what about these new technologies? The revelatory irony at the heart of the Moses' Bridges story - what you thought was the case about mere bridges is significantly otherwise - is a performance of different constituencies of actors and their knowledge. Especially important here is the inclusion of an implied audience of academic analysts. Certain academics are implicated in the tale as entrusted recognizers of the (hitherto hidden) truth about Moses (and hence about the bridges), by contrast with those unspecified others who just thought bridges were bridges. The configured academic reader of the tale will learn, if she does not already know, that appropriate moral practice includes the application of the same simple formula to a wide range of other examples. Moses' Bridges is an urban legend for academics as much as for everyone else.29 Moses' Bridges also fits the feature of certain legends that their general form remains the same over long periods of time, even though the specific substantive focus might alter. Details are forgotten,tales are told in outline only, elaborationor improvement may occur, generalization or specialization of detail may occur, cultural or temporal replacement occurs, anachronism is written out.30

In other words, although the focus (substance), the particular aspect of modernity at the centre of the story, might change, the form (structure) of the tale remains more constant. The current substantive focus is an index of current concerns and anxieties. Thus the constancy of the structure of the Moses' Bridges tale belies the subtle modification of its content as it passes through the hands of various interpreters. Moses' bridges imperceptibly become Winner's bridges: they may yet become Joerges' bridges, or even Woolgar & Cooper's bridges.. We see that urban legends are significantly more than just parables. Urban legends have important functional properties. They display and make tell-able the morally sanctioned properties of boundaries. In the case of academic argument, these are the boundaries of discipline: they reinforce the sanctioned properties of disciplined discourse. In an important sense, then, their analysis in terms of an urban legend suggests that if Winner's bridges didn't exist you would have to invent them. Our subdiscipline depends on them. For this reason we predict that the definitive refutation of Winner's argument will have little effect on the continued use of this argumentative formula. The 'Woolgar-Joerges Dismissal' will rapidly become lost in the history of the field. Indeed, we are unable to contemplate any other outcome, since otherwise we would have to admit, against the axioms of our conventionalist view, that the historical facts of the matter might have a significant bearing on its acceptance.

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The boundary-work done by iconic exemplars such as Winner's bridges highlights an important negative feature of the dynamics of S&TS argument. The urban legend tells of the dire consequences of transgressing the established bounds of academic practice. It is a mark of the success of this function of the urban legend that there have been so few responses to, or comments on, the Winner example, despite what we have shown to be the substantial knowledge that his example is simply wrong. The strength of the exemplar/legend is achieved through a process of articulation,31 in which the bridge connects and is connected to general arguments that are emblematic of S&TS.32 As a result, few people in S&TS have felt able or have been inclined to challenge the story. The implications are profound. Could the same apply to other wellknown iconic exemplars in S&TS: for example, Haraway's patriarchal museum;33 Latour and Woolgar's laboratory;34 Callon's scallops;35 Hirschauer's operating theatre;36 and so on?37 For this reason, Joerges' challenge is to be welcomed. However if, as we argue, the power and significance of the story lies not in its referential adequacy but elsewhere that is, in its rhetorical strategies and its pragmatic value within the field of S&TS argumentation - the challenge must remain only partially successful. Moreover, Joerges constructs an alternative argument which shares certain problematic features with Winner's account. In particular, Joerges stays at the level of intention: that is, through careful historical reappraisal of the evidence, he aims to discern a definitive alternative version of Moses' actual motives. His view is in line with some of the folk knowledge mentioned above: Moses was actually a visionary and environmentalist who opened up stretches of land and beaches to parts of the population who previously had no access. The difficulty here is that Joerges fails fully to interrogate the notion of 'intention'. Thus, although he partially problematizes the assumption that authorial intention can play a significant r6le in the use/reading of a technology/text, his formulation of the symbolic significance of this particular technology relies on, simply, the ascription of different motives; and hence he tends to underplay the significance of the constant availability of competing versions of Moses' 'actual' intentions, and the more general epistemological problems that follow from this. We suggest that Joerges' proposal of a middle-road solution, 'between the two Cs of contingency and control' [BJ, 424] is flawed, and not only because, on the one hand, it is insufficiently critical of the second 'C' and, on the other, it misconstrues the first. As Herrnstein Smith has argued, arguments which aspire to a happy medium between two 'extremes' are often unsatisfactory on a number of counts.38 In particular she notes that, in disputes of this kind, ambivalence arises in that forms of (essentialist) argumentation may be both theoretically problematic and inescapable features of discourse to which one must have recourse. For example, in criticizing the essentialism of Winner's argument with respect to technologies, we have made some use of essentialism with respect to texts and their inherent rhetorical and performative characteristics. Joerges' notion of a middle point between two (equivalent) extremes, his aspiration to build a

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bridge between two separate places,39 thus implies a particular conceptual geography to which we would not subscribe. Furthermore, we suggest that the ambivalent quality of 'the facts of the matter' is a significant manifestation of a number of competing discourses in tension. Instead of trying to resolve these tensions, our analytic preference is to retain and address them, to use them as a lever for discerning the relationships between the different parties involved.40 Conclusions We have demonstrated the need to go beyond Joerges' attempt to specify the facts of the matter. The more important task is to engage the essential ambivalence of artefacts in general. This requires us to give centre stage to our mundane experiences of technology, and to all the contradictions and tensions involved: technology is good and bad; it is enabling and it is oppressive; it works and it does not; and, as just part of all this, it does and does not have politics. These tensions are a significant manifestation of the competing discourses to which our experience of technology is subject, and within which we make sense of them. The very richness of this phenomenon suggests that it is insufficient to resolve the tensions by recourse to a quest for a definitive account of the actual character of a technology. We have shown, contra Joerges, that this is not a matter of choosing between the pursuit of a definitive account or sinking into a solipsistic stupor. Instead, our analysis of Moses' Bridges as a form of urban legend reveals the important function of iconic exemplars in S&TS. In particular, we see that merely establishing that the buses ('actually') run does not prevent Winner's example continuing to run. Nor is this simply a matter of the distribution of knowledge of the facts of the matter - the fact that the buses did run has been known at Brunel since 1992. We should be clear that eschewal of the factual version does not imply political quietism. Winner's assumption seems to be that departure from a particular form of realism will necessarily render one impotent in the political struggle. But the position advocated here, in line with a wide variety of more recent works, is that subscription to this form of naive realism unnecessarily compromises our ability to challenge the more foundationally engrained sources of power.41 By interrogating the relational properties of the various artefacts involved in this episode, we can shed light on the nature of exemplars in a way which Joerges' pursuit of the truth misses. Winner is in no doubt about the motives of the designer of the bridges; Joerges contests Winner's account of Moses' motives, but his analysis remains, in important senses, at the level of intention. By folding these features back on themselves, an alternative scenario emerges. Our analysis of Moses' bridges as a form of urban legend helps account for the endurance of the story in the face of counterfactual evidence. This leads us to recognize that Winner's argument is not what it

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seems to be. For it turns out that Winner's bridges are also artefacts constructed with the intention of not letting certain arguments past. They are deliberately designed to prevent the passage of interpretivist arguments. Winner [cited in BJ, 421, note 52] says: 'I am not interested in theories, I am interested in moral issues. My point is not explanatory, it is about political choices.' He thereby makes a claim for the high ground, simultaneously performing a distinction between those with the correct credentials (interested in moral issues and political choices) and those without (interested in theories and explanation). Winner implies that even theories per se may be morally unsuitable objects for passage along the S&TS freeway. He suggests that all these social phenomena should be subject to discrimination or exclusion: but he fails to recognize that, through his dismissal of reflexive considerations, he inadvertently produces in (what might be called) his 'textual politics' some of the very practices and processes that he wishes to criticize.42In true urban legend fashion, Winner's very attempt to prevent boundary violation actually ends up reduplicating discrimination and exclusion at the core of his practice. What then is the likely fate of Winner's bridges? Our understanding of the natural history of iconic exemplars as urban legends suggests that the popularity of Winner's bridges is unlikely to be derailed by even the most careful reappraisal of historical evidence. The functions served by the tale may outweigh the mere revealed facts of the matter. This suggests that all the cogent critiques of Winner may, in the end, make little difference. On the other hand, it may turn out that despite Winner's (alleged) intentions, interpretivist traffic will continue to flow. To follow Joerges, it may turn out there are many other ways of getting to the interpretivist beach. We simply bypass Winner's bridges. Or perhaps rather few of the great mass of S&TSers actually want to get to the beach in the first place. Have we finally deconstructed the bridges? No. Our analysis suggests that the substance of the legend will yet again metamorphose. Its form will remain essentially unchanged but, perhaps as a result of this debate, it will function as an exemplar of something other than the moral divide between those with and those without the correct political credentials. For example, it may come to stand as a moral tale about the deficiencies of distinguishing between explanation and politics, a landmark discussion of the best routes for S&TS to follow. Under these (Woolgar and Cooper's) bridges, far more traffic might flow. Notes
Our thanks to Laura Colban, Jane Douglas, Christine Hine, David Levinger and Mike Lynch for their assistance in preparing this paper. 1. This scene took place on Thursday 26 November 1992. 2. Langdon Winner, 'Do Artifacts Have Politics?', Daedalus,Vol. 109, No. 1 (Winter 1980), 121-36; reprinted in multiple locations, for example, in Donald MacKenzie and (Milton Keynes, Bucks. & Judy Wacjman (eds), The Social Shaping of Technology Philadelphia, PA: The Open University Press, 1985), 26-38. 3. Winner (1985), op. cit. note 2, 28.

Responses & Replies: Woolgar & Cooper: Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence? 4.

445

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Not unlike those spelled out in Steve Woolgar, 'The Turn to Technology in Social Studies of Science', Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter 1991), 20-50, at 33-35; see also Jane Yellowlees Douglas, 'Abandoning the Either/Or for the And/And/And: Hypertext and the Art of Argumentative Writing', AustralianJournal of Language and Literacy,Vol. 19, No. 4 (1996), 305-36, and Douglas, 'Will the Most Reflexive Relativist Please Stand Up?', in Ilana Snyder (ed.), Page to Screen (Sydney: Allen & Unwin; NewYork: Routledge, 1997), 144-62. Bernward Joerges, 'Do Politics Have Artefacts?', Social Studies of Science,Vol. 29, No. 2 (April 1999), 411-31. In the text, we will refer to this Comment as 'BJ'. Robert A. Caro, The PowerBroker:RobertMoses and the Fall of New York(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1974). See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology(Baltimore, MD & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Steve Woolgar, 'On the Alleged Distinction between Discourse and Praxis', Social Studies of Science,Vol. 16, No. 2 (May 1986), 309-17. I (SW) visited Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in April 1996 and told the story of Jane's Objection to David Levinger, a doctoral student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies. In August 1997, David discovered the existence of the Jones Beach bus when he visited Jones Beach for the first time. He mentioned this to SW at the 4S Meetings in Tucson in October 1997 and subsequently sent SW a copy of the bus timetable. A timetable may be construed to have a more explicit performative function than an academic paper, in the sense that its purpose is not just to describe but (like Winner's bridge) to effect, enforce and regulate the flow of traffic; but, as we shall argue, this contrast may be misleading. See Geoff Cooper and Steve Woolgar, 'Software Quality as Community Performance', in Robin Mansell (ed.), Management of Informationand CommunicationTechnologies (London: Aslib, 1994), 54-68. The NewYork City limits include numerous parkways, including Grand Central, Marine, Belt, Interborough, Cross Island, Hutchinson River, Cross County, Saw Mill River, Bronx River, Henry Hudson, Laurelton and Shore Front. The parkways on Long Island include Northern State, Southern State, Meadowbrook State, Bethpage State, Wantagh and Ocean. On 15 October 1998, at the EASST Conference in the University of Oslo. Laura Colban (private communication, 24 October 1998). Jane Douglas (private communication, 16 November 1998). We use the word 'inconcludeable' to denote the contention that such narratives cannot, in principle, ever be concluded - that is, brought to a mutually satisfactory and convincing end. The term 'inconcludeable' features in discussions of the documentary method of interpretation as it appeared in early writings in ethnomethodology: for example, Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967). For the claim that inconcludeability is a key 'methodological horror' in scientific practice, see Steve Woolgar, Science:TheVeryIdea (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), Chapter 2. Rob Kling (private communication, 2 November 1998). Stanley Aronowitz (private communication, 10 November 1998). Douglas, op. cit. note 14. At the time of writing, my (SW's) office is in such disarray through moving, that it has proved impossible to re-find the actual bus timetable. For a related argument about the importance of sustaining symmetry through attempts to debunk attempts at debunking, see Malcolm Ashmore, The ReflexiveThesis:Wrighting the Sociologyof ScientificKnowledge(Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989); Ashmore, 'The Theatre of the Blind: Starring a Promethean Prankster, a Phoney Phenomenon, a Prism, a Pocket, and a Piece of Wood', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 1993), 67-106.

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21. This corresponds to Latour's third Rule of Method: Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes, Bucks.: The Open University Press, 1987), Chapter 2. 22. These descriptions of Moses are taken from John Q. McDonald's Review of Caro's book (op. cit. note 6), in 'The Thumbnail Book Reviews', John's InternetReviews (17 February 1998). Laura Colban passed this item to us: we have no further details. 23. Bruno Latour, 'Drawing Things Together', in Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds), in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 19-68. Representation 24. Bruno Latour, 'The Politics of Explanation', in Steve Woolgar (ed.), Knowledgeand Reflexivity (London: Sage, 1988), 155-77. 25. Jan Harold Brunvand, The Mexican Pet: More 'New' Urban Legendsand some Old Favourites (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1986), 58. Vol. 16, No. 4 (December 26. Steve Woolgar, 'A New Theory of Innovation?', Prometheus, 1998), 441-53; Woolgar, 'Living in Viral Times: Computer Viruses and Disciplinary Temptation' (forthcoming); Woolgar and Geoff Russell, 'The Social Basis of Troubles with Software: The Case of Computer Viruses', CRICT DiscussionPaper 17 (Uxbridge, Middx: Brunel University, December 1990), also published as 'Las bases sociales de los virus informaticos', Politicay Sociedad,Vol. 14/15 (1994), 171-95. 27. Noel Williams, 'Problems in Defining Contemporary Legends', in P. Smith (ed.), Legend (Sheffield, Yorks.: CACTAL, 1984), at 220. on Contemporary Perspectives 28. Perhaps one of the most celebrated recent applications of urban legends to technology is the case of stories about computer viruses: see note 26. 29. In some manifestations of the legend, the enabling/prohibitive properties of the technology are equivocal. For example, it is said that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was granted permission to build viaducts across Eton College playing fields on condition that he made the arches sufficiently high to allow Eton scholars to pass beneath them wearing their top hats. Is the technology exhibiting enabling politics (allowing the passage of the schoolboys) or merely pandering to the concerns of the pampered offspring of the upper class? 30. Williams, op. cit. note 27, 217. 31. Ernest Laclau, Politicsand Ideologyin Marxist Theory (London: Sage, 1977). 32. Both of us, for example, use the bridges for pedagogic purposes. 33. Donna Haraway, 'Teddy Bear Patriarchy:Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City 1908-1936', in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry B. Ortner (eds), Culturel PowerlHistory(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 49-95, originally published in Social Text(1984). 34. Sorry, Bruno, it had to come out some time!: Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, LaboratoryLife: The Constructionof ScientificFacts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2nd edn, 1986). 35. Michel Callon, 'Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay', in John Law (ed.), Power,Action and Belief. A New Sociologyof Knowledge(London: Routledge, 1986), 196-229. 36. Stefan Hirschauer, 'The Manufacture of Bodies in Surgery', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 21, No. 2 (May 1991), 279-319. 37. Michael Schudson has recently challenged the historiographic basis of Donna Haraway's well-known analysis (op. cit. note 33) of the American Museum of Natural History: M. Schudson, 'Cultural Studies and the Social Construction of "Social Construction": Notes on "Teddy Bear Patriarchy" ', in Elizabeth Long (ed.), From Sociology to CulturalStudies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 379-98. Schudson objects that the 'semicanonical' and 'celebrity' status of Haraway's essay is based on a 'wrong' history. He charges the inadequacy of Haraway's synecdochal reasoning, and claims that 'it is shocking that in the ten reviews . . . I have read and the dozen references to the work I have come upon, not once has any of this been noted' (392). Schudson suggests that the reason for this is that Haraway's readership - 'cultural studies' comprises an interpretive community with a political commitment to revealing the constructions of a system of monopoly capitalism and white male patriarchy. Schudson's view here is intriguingly reminiscent of what used to be called 'weak

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38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

programme' explanations in the asymmetric sociology of error. We would want to argue that the performance of interpretive community achieved by the Moses' Bridges story does not depend upon the truth or error of Winner's analysis. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance:Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), xviii. Cf. Georg Simmel, 'Bridge and Door', in David Frisby and Michael Featherstone (eds), Simmel on Culture(London: Sage, 1997), 170-74. Textual conventions tend to encourage the suppression and/or eradication of ambivalence, in line with the realist epistemological auspices of reporting. This has been the subject of some experimentation with 'new literary forms' and reflexivity: see, for example, Ashmore (1989), op. cit. note 20, and Woolgar (ed.), op. cit. note 24. For an argument that hypertext applications offer a practical realization of the maintenance of ambivalence, see Douglas (1996), op. cit. note 4. See Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar, The Machine At Work: Technology, Workand Organisation(Cambridge: Polity, 1997); Woolgar and Grint, 'A Further Decisive Refutation of the Assumption That Political Action Depends on the "Truth" and a Suggestion That We Need to Go beyond This Level of Debate: A Reply to Rosalind & Human Values, Gill', Science, Technology, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Summer 1996), 354-57; Herrnstein Smith, op. cit. note 38. Jacques Derrida, 'But, beyond . . .', Critical Inquiry,Vol. 13 (Autumn 1986), 155-70.

Steve Woolgar is Professorof Sociology and formerly Directorof CRICT and Head of the Department of HumanSciences at BrunelUniversity.He is currentlyDirectorof the ESRC Programme:'VirtualSociety?- the social science of electronic technologies' (http://www.brunel.ac.uk/research/virtsoc). His most recent book (with Keith Grint)is
The Machine at Work: Technology, Work and Organisation (Polity Press, 1997).

Address:VirtualSociety? Programme,BrunelUniversity,Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK;fax: +44 1895 203071; email: steve.woolgar@brunel.ac.uk Geoff Cooper is a Lecturerin the Department of Sociology, and a member of the Digital World ResearchCentre, at the Universityof Surrey.His recent work and publications have focused on changing researchculture: he is currentlybeginning research into the development of mobile multimedia personal communications. Address: Department of Sociology, Universityof Surrey,GuildfordGU2 5XH,UK;fax: +44 1483 259551; email: g.cooper@soc.surrey.ac.uk

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