Experimental Systems - continued

Third, experimental systems are those units within which the material signifying units of knowledge are produced. They are usually termed data, but they should be rather addressed as facta in the sense of primary products of the research process. They acquire the horizon of their possible meaning within spaces of representation in which material traces and inscriptions – graphemes in a very general sense – become recorded, articulated, dislocated, reinforced, marginalized, and substituted. Researchers “think” within the confines of such spaces of representation, within the opportunistic and hybrid context of the representational machinery at hand making up the technical conditions of an experimental system.

Fourth, and finally, conjunctures and ramifications of experimental systems can lead to ensembles of such systems, or experimental cultures. Conjunctures and ramifications themselves are, as a rule, the result of unprecedented events within experimental systems, events that are often connected to the introduction of new technologies of representation. In the last instance, it is such experimental cultures that determine the contours of scientific disciplines, their emergence as well as their historical obsolescence. The concept of experimental culture as an articulated ensemble of experimental systems should allow to write histories of research fields without the burden of a disciplinary history. But this is not only a historiographical issue. The more basic argument is that experimental science does derive its dynamics less from the shaping of disciplinary boundaries and their social solidification than from the digressions and transgressions of smaller units below the level of disciplines in which knowledge is not yet labeled and classified, and in which new knowledge forms can take shape.