Pergamon Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., Vol. 30, No. 1, pp.

139–147, 1999
 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
Printed in Great Britain
0039-3681/99 $19.00⫹0.00

‘Mangled Up in Blue’

Trevor Pinch*

I lived with them on Buccleuch Place in a basement down the stairs. There was music
in the cafes at night and revolution in the air… (Bob Dylan, ‘Tangled up in Blue’,
mangled version)

In The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, Andy Pickering sets out
an ambitious new agenda for the field of Science and Technology Studies (S&TS).
He thinks the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) and indeed S&TS at large
have for too long fallen under the shadow of ‘representation’. He urges us to adopt
a new performative idiom. He writes:
Within the representational idiom, people and things tend to appear as shadows of
themselves. Scientists figure as disembodied intellects making knowledge in a field
of facts and observations… But there is quite another way of thinking about science.
One can start with the idea that the world is filled not, in the first instance, with facts
and observations, but with agency. (Pickering, 1995, p. 6)

It is, in particular, the attempt to come to terms with material agency which is
at the heart of the book’s big idea—the mangle of practice.1 The mangle in its
elementary form is the dialectic between human and material agency. In the course
of practice (in the sense of activities occurring in real time), such as building a
new scientific instrument (e.g. a bubble chamber), or a new technology (e.g. a
numerically controlled machine tool), human agency and material agency get inter-
twined. Human agency, in the shape of goals, encounters resistance from the

* Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, 632 Clark Hall, Ithaca, NY
14853-2501, USA.
1
Many women of my mother’s generation would no doubt be surprised and delighted that a household
device which squeezed water from newly washed clothes (I can still remember our two-roller mangle
sitting on top of the ‘copper’ out in our back garden on wash day) is at the centre of a new philosophical
theory about science. My mother is Irish: in the U.S. a mangle more usually refers to a pair of large
heated rollers kept in the basement and through which sheets are fed in order to press them.

PII: S0039-3681(98)00033-8
139
140 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

material world, in the shape of non-human agency. In accommodating to this resist-

ance during real-time practice, human agency and material agency get ‘mangled’.
The consequences of this mangling are profound: it is not possible to identify a
pure social realm as SSKers would want. Talk of social goals, interests and so on
will no longer work; even the fuzzier language of ‘constraints’ will no longer pass
muster. New mixes of material and human agency are always emergent during the
course of real-time practice.
This is the guts of the mangle. It is developed and refined (or perhaps
‘mangled?’) in the course of several case studies. For example in Chapter Two,
on the building of bubble chambers, we see how actors’ goals (e.g. one of the
physicists responsible for developing the new instrument), get mangled in the
course of practice. Chapter Three deals with an Italian physicist, Morpurgo, and
his search for free quarks. We learn how Morpurgo’s conceptual or interpretative
account of the physics of quarks links with his phenomenal account of material
agency. A process of ‘tuning’ the apparatus enables the phenomenal and interpret-
ative accounts to be translated into each other. In this way material agency is
framed or captured in a piece of apparatus—a process described by the felicitous
term ‘interactive stabilization’. What is being described here is something which
I’m sure is familiar to many scientists: the process of fine-tuning, ‘tinkering’, or
‘frigging around’ which accompanies the successful operation of any new piece
of apparatus. Practice is a constantly open-ended process; the desired outcome
being some form of stabilization. This view of practice provides a far more sophisti-
cated account than the moribund ‘theory-ladenness of observations’ language
beloved by philosophers.
Chapter Three also contains an interesting discussion of historian of science Otto
Sibum’s attempts to repeat Joule’s measurements to determine the mechanical equival-
ent of heat. While Sibum prefers to talk about a new language of gesture (drawing
upon Marcel Mauss’s notion of ‘body technique’) as an important constituent of Joule’s
practice, Pickering extends the Foucauldian notion of ‘discipline’ to show how Sibum’s
own performances in trying to repeat the experiments are disciplined (and of course
mangled). This is a way, then, that the social is reintroduced into the mangle.
Chapter Four enters the realm of mathematics with an examination of Hamilton’s
development of quarternions and here the notion of ‘discipline’ is again found
useful (meaning certain rules and procedures to be followed in the course of math-
ematical activity), as it provides a source of resistances which leads to conceptual
accommodations (usefully termed ‘bridges’ and ‘filling’), and of course mangling.
For me, this was the most powerful part of the book. Some of the most exciting
recent work in Science Studies has shown how conceptual developments in science
(and the role of mathematics and formalisms) can be treated with the same analytic
tools as earlier have been applied to instruments and experiments.2

2
For other important work on the technology of formalism see Warwick (1992).
‘Mangled Up in Blue’ 141

Pickering’s mangle in this chapter is directly pitted against SSK as he challenges

Bloor’s views on the role of Hamilton’s metaphysics in the place of algebra in
mathematics. Bloor has Hamilton opposed to a group of Cambridge formalists who,
unlike Hamilton, thought that mathematical symbols in themselves and the systems
in which they were embedded needed no further extra-mathematical foundations.
Bloor relates Hamilton’s metaphysics and that of the Cambridge group to different
social positions and ideals. According to Pickering, Hamilton’s metaphysics gets
mangled in the course of his practice and hence Bloor’s explanation of metaphysics,
being shaped by social interests, is not adequate.
The last empirical chapter focusses upon the development of numerical con-
trolled machine tools, drawing in particular upon David Noble’s (e.g. Noble, 1986)
well known account. It is here, in technology, that we see the most brutish form
of the mangle at work. Technology is arguably the direct attempt to capture human
agency in machines.
The last two chapters of the book extend the idea of the mangle further with a
discussion of macro-mangling during the Cold War, and we end up in the heady
world of cultural studies. Those who feared that science studies would have to
change its name to the rather ungainly ‘Mangle Studies’ can at least be somewhat
reassured—all that is called for is the usual nods in the direction of cultural studies.3
SSK has been remarkably successful in challenging traditional views in the his-
tory and philosophy of science. Certainly Pickering’s departure from the SSK camp
has been met with glee by some traditional philosophers. They take it that his
return to a form of realism is some sort of endorsement that SSK was wrong all
along.4 In abandoning SSK, with its roots firmly set in humanism, Pickering is
calling for a new ‘post-humanism’. He finds that SSK fudges on the issue of
realism. His complaint is that non-human agency is always translated within SSK
as ‘accounts of non-human agency’, thus leaving humans in ascendancy.5 Such
accounts are posed as being in opposition to the traditional anti-humanist accounts
which scientists themselves provide. Posthumanism and the performative idiom,
which Pickering sees as being closed linked with the Callon–Latour actor-network
approach, strives to establish a space where human actors are still there, but are

3
I cannot but remain sceptical about the fruitfulness of adopting the label of cultural studies. I see
little link between the work at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (from which
the vogue for cultural studies in the U.S. can be traced) and Pickering’s work in science studies. If we
take some of Donna Haraway’s recent work as paradigmatic of what a cultural studies slant to science
studies could be, I find little overlap with Pickering’s own work. Haraway grounds her recent texts
(e.g. Haraway, 1997) in her own situatedness, including an explicit politics of race and gender, and
this is all accomplished with a radical textual politics of disjunctions (including visual disjunctions and
radically different readings) which interrupt the narrative structure.
4
See, for instance, David Papineau’s review of Pickering’s book in THES (Papineau, 1995). For a
more sympathetic treatment by philosophers, see Hacking’s review (Hacking, 1996).
5
SSKers, according to Pickering, can only conceive of accounts of non-human agency as being
provided by the scientist’s traditional realist account of science—an account which is anathema to SSK.
See for instance, Collins and Yearley’s criticisms on these lines of the Latour–Callon school in the
‘epistemological chicken’ debate (Callon and Latour, 1992; Collins and Yearley, 1992).
142 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

inextricably entangled with the non-human. As Pickering pithily puts it (Pickering,

1995, p.26): ‘The world makes us in the one and the same process that we make
the world.’
This book is provocative. Those in SSK, as well as traditional philosophers, will
find plenty of meat to sink their teeth into. I found the book infuriating in places.
But the arguments are well put together, and it is worth persevering with once you
overcome the silliness of calling anything a ‘mangle’.6 There are a range of
examples and the mangle is allowed to roll into such perverse territory as the new
forms of non-human agency found in Carlos Castaneda’s tales of Don Juan. The
book even ends with a mischievous speculative prod to physicists to take up the
mangle in order to help revitalize S-matrix bootstrap theory. Somehow I doubt that
the physicists will heed that particular call.
The crucial questions for SSK are two: (1) Is there any need to go beyond SSK?
(2) Does the mangle, as claimed, offer a compelling new model upon which to
found S&TS?

1. Beyond SSK?
I am certain it will be no surprise to Pickering that I find the answer to both
these questions to be in the negative. I think the book is important and indeed fits
in with ideas in Science Studies which others in SSK are developing. I have always
taken SSK to be more eclectic than Pickering countenances. If he had taken as his
points of departure Shapin’s recent work on trust (Shapin, 1994) or MacKenzie’s
book on missile accuracy (MacKenzie, 1991), rather than the early formulations
of the Edinburgh interest theory, I think that he could have easily presented this
book as an extension of SSK. I sense a straw-man quality to the attacks on SSK,
which is all rather unfortunate.
The treatment of practice is not as neglected in SSK as he suggests. For instance,
Collins and I in Frames of Meaning (Collins and Pinch, 1982) noted that the social
sciences lacked terms for dealing with practices, and in particular how concepts
and praxis get bound up together. There are a few terms on offer and it is the great
merit of Kuhn’s term ‘paradigm’ that it is one such term. We gave paradigm a
Wittgensteinian reading, treating it as being equivalent to a term like ‘form of life’
(a term also used by Shapin and Schaffer (1985)). Such terms get at the holistic
way that language, concepts, praxis and the world all get bound up together.7 I

6
I suppose we should be thankful that Pickering didn’t settle upon other household technologies like
the ‘blender’ or the ‘food processor’ as his chosen metaphor!
7
Pickering’s claim that his ‘real-time’ notion of practices somehow separates off his enterprise from
the rest of SSK seems to me to be a red herring. Frames of Meaning certainly deals with experimental
practice and the writing up of experiments as they occurred in real time—as do many laboratory studies.
One continuation of this work is in the analysis of skills (See for instance Pinch et al., 1996). I cite
my own work not because it is particularly important, but to demonstrate that the analysis of real-time
practices has always been part of the SSK agenda.
‘Mangled Up in Blue’ 143

see the mangle as being a similar term and, in that we have few such terms, it is
to be welcomed.
I am, however, puzzled by the relationship between the mangle and more con-
ventional SSK positions. For instance, the mangle is said to entail a position of
pragmatic realism. How does this differ from, say, the benign realism advocated
by Barry Barnes? Barnes (1992) makes clear that his ‘benign realism’ is distinct
from ‘double-barrel’ realism (a form of realism wedded to a notion of correspon-
dence, which he rejects).8 Pickering too, rejects correspondence-type realism and
thus seems to agree with Barnes here. So what does pragmatic realism have to
offer over the benign realism of Barnes (and also Bloor)? It seems that the main
plus for the mangle is that it leads to an ‘active’ realism. The problem I have here
is in delineating what exactly is at stake with the notion of ‘active’. The mangle
is active in the sense that material agency figures in the account of individual
scientists’ practice,9 but the realism does little more than other benign forms
because material agency never alone constrains the scientific facts (or technological
artefacts) that we get. The mangle may be active, but it is a mangle without teeth
(without rollers?). The mangle cannot explain anything specific about the scientific
facts or technological artefacts we get. All we are told is that mangling will always
take place. This will not satisfy most realists.
Mangle talk does not in any way make a difference as to whether, say, we
believe Fairbank’s claim that fractional charges (free quarks) exist or Morpurgo’s
claim that they do not exist (and Pickering explicitly says that his mangle is neutral
on such issues, as both Fairbank’s and Morpurgo’s experimental practices follow
the mangle pattern). The mangle seems to be active only in the sense that it gives
us a more detailed understanding of how individual scientists interact with their
apparatus.
Another way of putting the issue is this: the mangle could be successfully applied
to Blondlot’s N-Rays. We might learn how Blondlot successfully interactively stab-
ilized his N-Ray apparatus, but this does not help us in learning whether N-Rays
themselves can be stabilized. It seems as if the mangle is silent on what is surely
the key performative issue for scientists—whether they are performing so as to
produce claims about the world which will be accepted as having veracity. It seems

8
For more discussion of realism in recent SSK see Pinch (1994).
9
One issue to think about here is ‘Why bother to model what individual scientists do anyway?’ If
the goal is completeness then surely we need also to include scientists’ psychological propensities and
the physiological states of their bodies and brains during the course of practice for a full account. Post-
humanism, if it is serious, must include everything or say why it precludes certain material realities
from non-human agency. Humanism, by limiting itself to humans at least delineates the sorts of entities
to which it can give voice. The trouble with extending agency to non-humans to any significant degree
is that it opens the flood gates. There is simply too much non-human agency to consider. Every neuron
firing is a form of material agency, so why isn’t this included? This problem is usually solved pragmati-
cally by those who focus on non-human agency. Thus Latour’s Aramis (Latour, 1996) is full of accounts
given by humans and only occasionally is the non-human, Aramis, allowed a voice. The voices of the
rails on which Aramis runs, the electrons in its circuits, the neurons in the circuits of its creators and
users, and so on, are all silenced.
144 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

that indeed it is just here that standard SSK-type issues on how Blondlot’s claim
is stabilized or not stabilized within the wider community of scientists need to be
added to the mangle. And here talk of general ‘disciplining’ will not suffice—often
the sorts of controversies investigated by SSKers involve groups of actors who, to
all intents and purposes, appear disciplined in the same way. In other words, it is
not obvious that, say, Fairbank and Morpurgo are representatives of very different
disciplinary regimes.
The need to pitch the analysis at a broader level can also be seen in the account
of numerical controlled machine tools (NC). If we turn to another part of Noble
we find that he examines why a different form of machine tool—the piano-player
type where a traditionally machined template is copied by a machine—loses out
to NC. Noble gives a social explanation for why NC wins (a traditional Marxist
explanation running on the lines of the greater managerial control and deskilling
which NC offers). Whether or not Noble’s explanation is the full story, it seems
that the mangle explanation is incapable of dealing with this sort of issue. All the
mangle tells us is that both types of machine tool could be interactively stabilized
to frame non-human agency.
The perplexing thing is that Pickering seems to want to cast the mangle as being
somehow opposed to or as in some way undermining social explanation. Of course,
as Noble was all too well aware, in practice workers’ skills were not totally
replaced. NC always required fine-tuning on the shop floor by skilled workers. The
mangle is good at telling us why this is so, but we are still left with some explana-
tory work to do if we choose a wider canvas. The mangle cannot tell us why NC
wins out, and it seems there is still a job for social explanation along the lines
Noble suggests. Noble’s account may need refining, but I cannot see why the man-
gle makes it redundant.
If the mangle was just a way of cashing out benign realism then no-one would
have any objections to it. However, Pickering does seem to want to claim it pre-
vents traditional SSK-type explanations. For instance, what do we make of the
mangle account of Hamilton versus Bloor’s account? Here again I am puzzled.
Because, if I understand the mangle correctly, then it is neutral as to any particular
outcome. The mangle cannot tell us what accommodations Hamilton should make.
In some cases scientists will make accommodations and in other cases they will
not. All Bloor is saying is that in looking at Hamilton’s mathematics and that of
his rivals one possible cause of their adopting particular metaphysical views at one
time are their social alignments. This does not negate the possibility that individuals
might change or complexify their views over time. Bloor explicitly says that social
causes are only one sort of cause to be investigated.
The dangers of slipping into double-barrel realism talk are evident. It is almost
as if Pickering wants to say that Hamilton, as he solved the puzzles posed by
quaternions, started to get things right in some essentialist way and this slowly led
to him abandoning his incorrect, socially driven metaphysics. We are close to the
‘Mangled Up in Blue’ 145

very sort of social epidemiological explanation which SSK and symmetry were set
up to caution us against. I am not sure whether Pickering is saying this, but it
seems to me that he has no need to. The extent of mangling in any particular case
is a purely contingent matter and it seems quite possible that interactive stabiliz-
ation can occur even when there is a social cause driving matters. Thus there need
not be any conflict with SSK. If there is a limit on social explanation we need to
be told explicitly what it is—when and under what circumstances is it no longer
appropriate to pursue social explanations?
There is no doubt that Pickering is correct in pointing to the need to understand
how social interests become emergent. This is something which the original social
interest explanations were uncomfortably vague about. However, some SSK
analysts these days are prepared to grant that, say, actors’ identities can in part be
constituted by objects.10 This does not mean we have to give up on social expla-
nation; the social explanations just have to be more sophisticated.

2. Will the Mangle Wash?

But let us suppose that Pickering is right and that SSK just isn’t up to it these
days: will the mangle suffice as our new unifying doctrine? Here I see the biggest
problem with the mangle being the fact that it is such a generalized explanation
of practice that it seems to work too well. The mangle simply applies to everything.
Try this: the other day I observed my four-year old daughter, Benika, struggling
to put on a new pair of socks. Her toe obstinately got stuck in the wall of one
sock. Her old discipline of wiggling her toe didn’t work. She looked at her daddy—
no doubt with the conceptual and phenomenal alignment in mind that daddy would
help out—but then much to her (and her daddy’s) delight she creatively came up
with a new extension of her culture; she folded the sock back on itself and tried
again—this time with success. She had successfully stabilized material agency—
her sock—by tuning her conceptual and phenomenological models of sock pulling.
The interactive stabilization of her sock with her foot, the dance of agency between
accommodation and resistance, were all there to be seen.
Try and think of a new practice that does not follow the mangle. Is it not just
a rather more sophisticated way of talking about trial and error? This may be no
bad thing, but I doubt if we should found a whole discipline upon it.
One last problem I had with the mangle was that everything was mangled all
the time. In which case how is it possible ever to identify pure human or non-
human agency which is not already mangled? Again it seems the mangle does too
much and limitations need to be set upon what can be mangled and when.
If the mangle is good as a model for how new practices are developed, it is rather

10
See, for instance Kline and Pinch (1996), in which we discuss how the rural auto in the U.S.
shaped gender identities as well as how gender shaped the rural car. Mutual shaping, co-construction,
or co-production does not make social explanation redundant.
146 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

weak on how practices get stabilized in a wider community and how practices are
learnt and passed on to others. It is here that ‘skill talk’ still seems to have more
to offer. In my own recent work with Collins (Pinch et al., 1996) we have tried
to unpack the notion of skill and attempted to develop what we call ‘second order’
notions to understand the accomplishment of particular skilled tasks. The philo-
sophical problems of skill and practice, raised by Stephen Turner (1994) and ech-
oed by Pickering in his book, are no reason for a loss of nerve about using the
notion of skills (Pinch, 1997).
I think part of the generality of the mangle comes from the level at which Picker-
ing chooses to pitch his analysis. I kept asking myself—how does he know what
Morpurgo, Glaser, etc., actually did? His model is not at the social level because
he rarely treats the actors as representatives of collectivities. Also, these are not
the terms the actors themselves use (he notes that Morpurgo himself actually rejects
mangle analysis). They are not psychological terms either. The nearest I came to
understanding the warrant for the mangle was to think of it as a form of rational
reconstruction. Mangle reconstruction seems to have replaced rational reconstruc-
tion.
And here it may be no accident that a large part of the empirical material in the
book is based upon reworking first-order accounts of other analysts.11 Pickering
strips the accounts of much of the messiness of the contextual history—and rede-
scribes events using the mangle. I get none of the feel of the struggles of real
actors working in the complex world of modern techno-science. In the end I cannot
resist turning Pickering’s own words back on him. Paradoxically the actors in his
cases also appear as ‘shadows of themselves’.
I think back to my own account of Ray Davis building his solar neutrino detector,
how he negotiated with mine companies to get his apparatus housed, how he nego-
tiated with equipment suppliers, the delicate business of forming an alliance with
the theoreticians, the legal wrangles he encountered, the need to get funding and
publicity, the need to maintain his credibility (Pinch, 1986). I imagine Pickering
rewriting my account in terms of simply the interactive stabilization of the appar-
atus, conceptual and phenomenal models and discipline. Such a language would
enrich my account, but I would not want to use it unless I could keep in sight the
broader terrain over which scientific activities occur.
Most worrying in this loss of richness is the danger of the loss of the social.
And here we have to ask why for so many the word ‘culture’ or ‘cultural studies’
is preferable. Positing social explanations of science was once a revolutionary thing
to do; perhaps it still is.

11
I was somewhat disappointed and perplexed by the book’s lack of original case material. The
exhilaration produced by Pickering’s earlier book (Pickering, 1984), Constructing Quarks, came from
the mixture of the challenge to dominant ways of thinking about science and the riveting history told
gracefully by someone with a great deal of insider understanding. Although the present book has
moments of great lucidity and technical insight I prefer a diet of pure new Pickering rather than the
sometimes less than appetizing meal of regurgitated Galison, Sibum, Noble and old Pickering.
‘Mangled Up in Blue’ 147

Now I’m going back again

I’ve got to get to her some way…
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view.
Tangled up in Blue.
(Bob Dylan, ‘Tangled up in Blue’)

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