The legitimation of local knowledges: introducing the postmodern into laboratory science

The idea that science simply mirrors nature has been challenged by postmodernism that has considered the way it contructs the world, our bodies and identities. But such criticisms, apart from the odd exception, have been directed at science in general with little insight or attention to actual empirical procedures that take place in laboratories, for example. This article investigates the idea that Enlightenment is not redundant, and that in fact laboratory procedures are not so different to those used in the humanities. The article shows that scientific procedure shares much with the way narratologists might analyse story. It likens representations of cancer development and cell cycles to the narratological models used by Barthes and Greimas. Science does not so much make nature reveal its secrets but offers an epistemological opportunity for examination, expression and ultimately creativity.