A point of exteriority: Reflections about the institutional researcher

Abstract

As institutional researchers we split our day in the lab between some experiments, some writing, occasionally some reading, and an excruciating pile of paperwork to get that extra money to keep our project ongoing. We consider the latter a hindrance to progress, an unbearable distraction, completely unrelated to our main objective scientific interest. This feature creates a tension within our everydayness between the modern scientist we believe we should, but are not allowed to be, and some sort of heretic researcher that does politics by other means. Yet, the institutional researcher we refer to, embody the latter, in other words, the possibility of sending us over to an outside in which the subject is not suppressed, in which we have the possibility of thinking ourselves differently and, for that matter, to reassess how we relate to our research project. This does not advocate for letting the subject back in with an extra load of sociology, politics and/or philosophy of science seminars on the side, but to ascertain that it was always with us in the lab as in immanent “point of exteriority”, a position that is both intimate and yet also “extimate” to science, that it is both within science and, at the same time, it is a movement to its limits.