Media Orthogonal: Science and Religion, Experiment and Experience

    Langlitz, in an article/chapter concerning the "Contextual Mediation of Drug Effects" in pharmacological research, cites to observations by Anthony Wallace, in the 1950s, that the same hallucinogenic substance was observed to produce markedly different effects in population of whites under laboratory conditions as compared to native peoples in religious ceremonies.  Where Wallace attributes these effects to culture, which he argues needs to be taken into account as an independent variable in scientific experiments, Langlitz hints at another dimension, in providing an example of a trial run where two researchers, both presumptively of the same "culture", insofar as that term might be usefully used without reification, nonetheless experience wildly different reactions to the same test substance, in part, we are given to believe, as a function of their social (rather than "cultural") relationship to the substance, the experiment, their institutional setting, and to one another.  More on this in a moment.

    The characterization of this as a dimensional difference is important here, as like Latour's characterization of the religion and science as not being commensurable nor incommensurable, there being "no point of contact between the two, no more than nightingales and frogs have to enter into any sort of direct ecological competition", I would suggest that any idea of "culture" as interacting with, of being in any way commensurable or incommensurable with, the variables of scientific experiment is likewise, again in Latour's words, a "category mistake".   That said, unlike a nightingale or a frog, we cannot say that there is "no point of contact" between experimental variables and cultural conditions.  The very challenge of contextually mediated pharmacological effects is that cultural conditions and experimental variables make contact at every point.  When the very architecture of the space in which the experiment is conducted is a factor in the dependent experiential variables--the decorating of the walls in the lab by our two experimenters mirroring the introduction of wire mesh into rat cages in the experiments described by Gomart in his discussion of methadone substitution treatments for heroin addiction--makes evident that there is no point at which culture does not intersect with experiment.  This state of neither commensurable nor incommensurable is thus best described as orthogonal.  It is not simply the lack of opposition between nightingale and frog, but the lack of opposition between up and left.  Indeed, going back to Latour's discussion of icons in religion, and referencing Wallace's discussion of the architecture of religion, it is perhaps not too much of a stretch to claim that religion and science two, rather than being Gould's non-overlapping magisteria, the most uninteresting of Venn diagrams, religion and science hold an orthogonal relation congruent to that of culture and experiment, making contact at every point, without having to "enter into any sort of direct ecological competition".

    Let us, however, come back to the example of two experimenters subjecting their experimental setup to a trial run, acting themselves as test subjects.  If we hold that culture and experiment are in orthogonal relation, that they intersect at all points, what are we to make of the very different reactions of the two experimenters in the position of experimental subject?  If both are permeated by the same cultural and experimental axes, what is different?  Here, Gomart provides insight, when he describes the interaction between clinic, professionals, patients, methadone, and the jointly enacted "performance" of substitution treatment.  Drawing on Foucault's conception of capillary power, we find a mode of control, given and received, prepared for and depended upon, a bidirectional flow of control, in every way reminiscent of the flow invoked by Latour in his attempt not to speak about religion, but to speak religiously, to perform religion, just as one performs an experiment, in some other dimension.  In the story related by Langlitz, it is the experimenter who "wanted to keep everything under control", yet "was losing control", who "got all worked up" and thereby had deeply troubling hallucinations during the course of the experiment.

    Here, we are not talking about culture, nor experiment, but relation.  The experimenter in his dual role of experimental subject and experimental lead "tried to stay in charge supervising how Anna was looking after me", all the while trying to act both as observer of the experimental setup of which he was the subject.  These relationships play upon the field of which culture and experiment are dimensions, but are not dimensional themselves.  Rather, these relationships, the possibilities for flow, like the agape relationships explored by Latour in mundane love language, (de/in)form the topological geometry of the points at which culture and experiment orthogonally intersect.  Just as with love language, there is a movement, close or distant, the dimensions warping as points play in relationship.

    What then, of Langlitz's hope that "second-order observation should inspire the invention of new practices of first-order observation"?  If the first-order observer must always contend with a shifting field of orthogonal dimensions, where the weft of the scientific method of the experiment and the weave of culture (including religion) of the self-reporting subject describe a non-reproducible fabric of experience, how then can any practice relate meaningfully to these dimensions?  Experimental controls fail insofar as they fail to control culture.  Geertzian thick description meanwhile strand us in second-order observations, an unwefted weave of how out of relation to what.  Langlitz places methods "based on reductionism" in antagonism with "the complexity of life itself", yet perhaps the issue is not reduction, so much as reduction along a single dimension in ignorance of orthogonal relations.  I would suggest that the practice Langlitz seeks might be found by turning an orthogonal corner, to examine what elements of substantive experience might be found configured to play coincidently with the configuration of chemical elements that perform a pharmaceutical substance.