Experimental Systems - continued

A note will be advisable in this context on scientific instruments. Instruments have received much attention from historians of science participating in the practical turn of science studies. Instruments, however, should not be hypostasized as such. They receive their meaning less from the technical identity conditions built into them, than from the experimental contexts in which they become inserted as technical objects. They receive their meaning for research from the epistemic objects with which they are brought into connection and into friction within an experimental system. This appears to be a general feature of research enabling technologies. It is therefore the boundary between an instrument and an epistemic thing that is of particular relevance for the historian of experimental systems.

Second, experimental systems must be able to undergo series of differential reproductions, if they are to remain arrangements for the production of new bits of knowledge that lie beyond what one is actually able to conceive of and to anticipate. They are, therefore, “research generators” (Hoagland 1990, p. xvii). Difference and reproduction are the two inseparable faces of that coin. Their game determines the delays and breakthroughs in the course of a research process. In order to remain productive, experimental systems must be organized in such a way that the generation of differences becomes the reproductive driving force of the whole machinery. Differential reproduction conveys a peculiar kind of historicity to experimental systems. They can acquire, to speak with Ian Hacking “a life of their own” (Hacking 1983). They are units extending in time: emerging, growing, and eventually also disappearing again.