Reading Hawking's presence: An interview with a self-effacing man

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 29, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 571-598

  Mialet, Hélène ^a  

^a Cornell University ^*

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 3042786862     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/377721     Document Type: Review

References (51)

1. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (1957; New York, 1972), pp. 68-69.
2. See Stephen Hawking, "Disability: The Computer," http://www.hawking.org.uk/text/disable/computer.html
3. Hawking, "Disability: My Experience with ALS," http://www.hawking.org.uk/text/disable/disable.html
4. For an examination of the relationship between asceticism and truth, see Steven Shapin and Christopher Lawrence, introduction to Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, ed. Lawrence and Shapin (Chicago, 1998), pp. 1-19.
5. See Hélène Mialet, "Do Angels Have Bodies? Two Stories about Subjectivity in Science: The Cases of William X and Mr. H," Social Studies of Science 29 (Aug. 1999): 551-82.
6. See Mialet, "Do Angels Have Bodies?"
7. For a description of a similar feeling created in the presence of Hawking, see Rosanne Allucquère Stone, "Split Subjects, Not Atoms; or, How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis," Configurations 2 (Winter 1994): 173-90.
8. This question could be linked to certain reflections about the relationship between historiography and anthropology. See Paul Ricoeur, "What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding" and "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text," Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, trans, and ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, 1981).
9. For a critique of the ideology that claims that representations produced by anthropologists - like keeping good field notes, making accurate maps, writing up results - are transparent, see James Clifford, "Introduction: Partial Truths," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 1-26.
10. See, for example, Isabelle Stengers, who proposes that we give the subjects of the human sciences the power of putting into question the tools of the analyst; see Isabelle Stengers, Pour en finir avec la tolérance (Paris, 1997).
11. See Mialet, "Is the End in Sight for the Lucasian Chair? Stephen Hawking as Millennium Professor," in From Newton to Hawking: A History of Cambridge University's Lucasian Professors of Mathematics, ed. Kevin Knox and Richard Noakes (Cambridge, 2003).
12. See Shapin, "The Invisible Technician," American Scientist77 (Nov.-Dec. 1989): 554-63.
13. Arthur Lubow, "Heart and Mind," Vanity Fair (June 1992) : 44-53.
14. Stone was responsible for organizing the transcripts from the film interviews into Stephen Hawkings "A Brief History of Time": A Reader's Companion, ed. Hawking and Gene Stone (New York, 1992).
15. See Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (New York, 1994), pp. 481-82.
16. Except if we communicated by email. See Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge, 1967).
17. Like Garfinkel's famous breaching experiment that consists in disturbing routines, Hawking's disruption reveals something about the necessary requirements of fluent social interactions/conversation and/or about the disruption itself. It also tells us that who Hawking is reflects differences in the microsociology of face-to-face relations with him, especially with regards to the importance of familiarity in this process of communication. See David Goode, A World without Words: The Social Construction of Children Born Deaf and Blind (Philadelphia, 1994).
18. After the present text was completed, I discovered a fascinating book written by Albert Robillard (Meaning of a Disability: The Lived Experience of Paralysis [Philadelphia, 1999]). Robillard has ALS and describes - with the tools of ethnomethodology - the implication of his disease for interactions in daily life. I found, from the point of view of one who can't read an interaction, the same things he found through his difficulty with everyday interactions and from his feelings of isolation: the role of mutual gaze, what he calls "real time" in conversation, and in general the use of the body and voice to create and maintain participation in a social setting.
19. Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, "A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation," Language 50 (Dec. 1974): 696-735; hereafter abbreviated "SS."
20. Mary Rose Barral, Merleau-Ponty: The Role of the Body-Subject in Interpersonal Relations (Pittsburgh, 1965), pp. 92-93.
21. See, for example, Adam Kendon, "Some Functions of Gaze Direction in Social Interaction," Acta Psychologica 26 (1967): 22-63.
22. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, pp. 146-47.
23. See Stefan Hirschauer, "The Manufacture of Bodies in Surgery," Social Studies of Science 21 (May 1991): 279-319.
24. Hawking's role can be compared to the role of the psychoanalyst in general. I am also thinking about Garfinkel's discussion of an experimenter, falsely represented as a student counselor in training, who responds to his patients' questions in a predetermined sequence of yes and no answers without taking into account the content of the patients' questions. The patients do almost all the work of the counselor (like the people around Hawking, his students, colleagues, and assistants) but still attribute all the merit to the counselor himself. See Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, pp. 76-103.
25. On the role of fulfillment in interactions between persons or between persons and machines, see Harry Collins, Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, Mass., 1990);
26. Collins, "The Turing Test and Language Skills," in Technology in Working Order, ed. Graham Button (London, 1993), pp. 231-45;
27. Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Action: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (Cambridge, 1987);
28. Donald MacKenzie, Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 131-59;
29. Joseph Weizenbaum, "ELIZA: A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine," Communications of the ACM1 (1966): 36-45;
30. and Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York, 1997), pp. 102-24.
31. On the fundamental role of routine as an intersubjectively shared resource in negotiating daily life, see Goode, A World without Words, pp. 65-73. In a certain sense, we can say that we all have a more or less routinized environment around us. Nevertheless, the able-bodied seem able to navigate more or less freely in this environment. Hawking never manages to escape from this little microenviroment, this extended body that I have just described.
32. In this sense, there are obvious parallels between Hirschauer's article on surgery (Hirschauer, "The Manufacture of Bodies in Surgery"), Edwin Hutchins on the functioning of a cockpit (Edwin Hutchins, "How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds," Cognitive Science 19 [July-Sept. 1985] : 265-88), and this article on Hawking. In a forthcoming article I also describe how this extended body travels from one point to another and the complications this implies.
33. Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being, ed. Marjorie Grene (London, 1969), p. 148.
34. "A highly skilled user like Hawking can use the software to speak about 20 words per minute in conversations, compared with 150 to 200 for natural speakers" (David Colker, "Giving a Voice to the Voiceless; Technology: Software Enables Severely Disabled People to Communicate by the Touch of a Button," Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1997, p. 8).
35. Woltosz, interview, Dec. 2000.
36. Polanyi, The Study of Man: The Lindsay Memorial Lectures (Chicago, 1959), p. 31; hereafter abbreviated SM.
37. Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago, 1990), p. 179 n. 70; hereafter abbreviated AB.
38. See Polanyi, Knowing and Being, p. 145
39. and M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, 1962), p. 143
40. or the example of the handheld tool discussed by Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962), pp. 95-107. Don Ihde describes a similar phenomenon: "I may describe these relations as embodiment relations, relations in which the machine displays some kind of partial transparency so that it itself does not become objectified or thematic, but is taken into my experiencing of what is other in the World" (quoted in AB, p. 179 n. 69).
41. Quoted in Colker, "Giving a Voice to the Voiceless," p. 8.
42. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, N.Y., 1966), p. 15.
43. This point agrees with what Leder says: I do not notice my body, but neither do I, for the most part, notice the bed on which I sleep, the clothes I wear, the chair on which I sit down to breakfast, the car I drive to work. I live in bodies beyond bodies, clothes, furniture, room, house, city, recapitulating in ever expanding circles aspects of my corporeality. As such, it is not simply my surface organs that disappear but entire regions of the world with which I dwell in intimacy. [AB, p. 35]
44. This transparency is never complete; as Ihde points out there is always an "echo focus," a subliminal awareness of the instrument at my body boundary. Moreover, especially at times of malfunction, the tool can become thematically central. [AB, p. 179 n. 69] When incorporating a tool, one's concurrent incorporation by it may have a series of unanticipated results. As Ihde notes, every instrument imposes an "amplification-reduction" structure on one's natural capacities. The telephone, while allowing communication through its amplification of voice, in other ways yields a reduced encounter devoid of direct sight and touch. As a result of such transformations, each technology provides a "telic inclination" toward certain modified modes of interaction. [AB, p. 181 n. 72] See also a similar argument in Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology (Minneapolis, 2002), chap. 1. Hence, the problem this implies in my mode of communication with Hawking.
45. René Descartes, The "Meditations" and Selections from the "Principles,"Trans. John Veitch (Chicago, 1913), p. 94.
46. Barral, Merleau-Ponty, p. 94. Also, according to Polanyi, "We must realize then also that our own body has a special place in the universe: we never attend to our body as an object in itself" (SM, p. 31). Or, "Dwelling in our body clearly enables us to attend from it to things outside, while an external observer will tend to look at things happening in the body, seeing it as an object or as a machine" (Polanyi, Knowing and Being, p. 148).
47. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 92.
48. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston, 1963), p. 213.
49. Louis-Marie Morfaux, Vocabulaire de la philosophie et des sciences humaines (Paris, 1980), p. 67, s.v. corps; translation mine.
50. Quoted in Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J., 1957), p. 13.
51. "One evening... shortly after the birth of my daughter, Lucy, I started to think about black holes as I was getting into bed. My disability makes this a rather slow process, so I had plenty of time" (Hawking, A Brief History of Time [London, 1988], p. 99).