User:Cristinac/SomeResearch

S N I P P E T S

SECRECY, AUTHORSHIP AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCIENTISTS - Hugh Gusterson

...refused science’s cult of individual fame by publishing, starting in 1934, under the collective nom de plume Nicolas Bourbaki.

... The Livermore Laboratory, America’s second weapons laboratory, was founded in 1952 in order to intensify work on the atomic and hydrogen bombs as the cold war escalated. Most parts of the laboratory are off-limits to the public, and access to spaces and to information for its 8,000 employees (almost 3,000 of them scientists and engineers with Ph.D.s) is regulated by an elaborate system of rules and taboos.

... A few areas on the perimeter of the laboratory are “white areas” accessible to the public. (These areas include two cafeterias, the Public Affairs office, the Visitors’ Center, etc.)

...Large parts of the laboratory are “red areas” that are off-limits to the public, although only open research is done there.

...“green areas,” constituting roughly half of the laboratory in the 1980s, where secret research is done.

...Within the green areas, there are also special exclusion areas, set apart by barbed wire fences and guard booths, accessible only to a few. The plutonium facility, for example, is in an exclusion area, as is the facility where intelligence reports are handled.

...In the localized face-to-face community of weapons designers, this credit would be established and circulated as much by word of mouth—in gossip and in formal presentations—as through the written documentation of individual contributions and achievements.

...In some ways the national security state has created a national intellectual economy analogous to the traditional unmonetarized African economies described by Paul Bohannon in which there were separate spheres of exchange that could not be integrated so that, for example, the beads of one family could be exchanged for the cloth but not the food of another family, since beads and food, circulating in different spheres, were untradeable and non-convertible.

...At the other extreme are scientists the very titles of whose publications are secret, so that their resumés are, to the outside world, surrealistically blank after years of labor.

...one scientist told me that one of his colleagues won the prestigious Lawrence Award for his work, but he was never able to find out what his colleague had done

...There was a mill for publishing the results of test shots, the latest methods for calculating opacities and so on. But there was no serious library for these reports in the early days. The reports would get thrown in a room, then someone would take one and hold on to it and that article would now be officially “misplaced.” (That’s why the GAO found that 10,000 secret documents were missing at Livermore. They’re not exactly lost. They’re not floating around outside the lab. They’re in people’s offices somewhere.) Old-timers would have safes full of documents inherited from someone else who retired ten years earlier. So, when they retired, you’d get those documents transferred to you, and that was a sort of library. In other words, even within the laboratory, knowledge could be stored and exchanged in highly localized ways.

...In these large hierarchical science institutions intellectual value, or capital, tends to behave in the same way as material value in large capitalist institutions: it is extracted from those on the bottom, who create it through labor, accruing as wealth to those on the top. Thus in the large science laboratories the labor of a Seth Neddermeyer is transmuted into the reputation of a Robert Oppenheimer.

...Michel Foucault (1977, 147) has observed that the modern individualist idea of the author has a “classificatory function,” since the author’s “name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them with others.”

...As Martha Woodmansee (1994a) argues, while copying and embellishing the work of others used to be seen as a form of authorship in its own right in mediaeval Europe, in the context of contemporary copyright law and current ideologies of authorial individualism, copying is now seen as a highly degraded form of creativity.

...And, far from circulating freely, the written knowledge produced within the laboratory often cannot leave the laboratory (unless it is going to Los Alamos) and, even within the laboratory, may lie dormant in safes or travel eccentric routes of exchange marked by chains of friendship rather than being universally available.

...The knowledge they have produced largely circulates outside the commodified sphere of exchange regulated and constrained by copyright laws and the academic promotions treadmill. And many Livermore scientists, in a critique of academic culture that is increasingly resonant for this author, criticize the cult of individual assessment in the university and the emphasis in academia on stockpiling refereed articles as commodities, even if hardly anyone reads many of them.