Credible Performances

Abstract

Taken within its own terms, Science on Stage delivers a more than credible performance. Staging the constitution of scientific authority as an influential form of cultural production, the text deploys a dramaturgical device to render visible and audible the workings of the 'social machinery of credibility' (Hilgartner, 2000: 146). Taking three publicly contested National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reports on diet, nutrition, and health as his proximate object, Hilgartner demonstrates how scientific authority is constituted as a cultural achievement through the finite set of social routines, protocols, and textual processes that comprise science advice.' Through the literal application of the metaphor of the theater, he casts science advice as a series of morality plays designed to guarantee textual and social credibility in ways that foreclose dissent, and thus reproduce the institution of the NAS as a source of consensual expertise. By treating this production of expert advice as 'performance', Hilgartner joins a widening current of scholars who extend and sometimes over-extend performance studies to the practices of politics and everyday life.2 We in science and technology studies (STS) argue that scientists repeatedly enact an 'interested' form of disinterest that lies at the base of their claims to authority and credibility. Taken in by their own act, the actors use stage management techniques that prevent their audiences from seeing this performance as the authoritarian ruse that it is (Butler, 1995). By subjecting their engrossment to scrutiny from a critical position like that of STS, we are in the business of 'breaking frame', to use Erving Goffman's term: 'All frames involve expectations of a normative kind as to how deeply and fully the individual is to be carried into the activity organized by the frames' (Goffman, 1974). Engrossment, involvement, or

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