On the Narrative Order of Experimentation

The claim to do nothing else than to let the things themselves tell their stories has a long tradition in the sciences.The venerable metaphor of the legibility of the world and of the letters in which the book of nature is written plainly correspondswith that demand of self-exposure. AsHans Blumenberg has shown, it has accompanied the sciences from the early modern times to the present, from the mathematical vision of Galileo Galilei to the letter-universe of the Human Genome Project. The demarcation criterion for a discourse that can rightly claim to be scientific would thus be to allow things to express themselves according to their own grammar and their own lexicon. Succeeding in creating such a space of self-exposure would render scientific discourse transparent, and the congenial knowledge would be one that is essentially undistorted by the medium of its representation. To put it in another way: It would coincide with that representation. The question would thus not so much be whether scientific texts do narrate or not. Their scientificity would not consist in the fact that they would operate, in contrast to a descriptive narration, in the mode of an explanation, or according to different, but equivalent epistemological distinctions. Scientific texts would rather distinguish themselves from the many and multiple, invented or true stories that we tell ourselves about anything and everything, by the fact that they have another author.What I would like to do in this paper is to give this vision a particular twist: In trying to subvert it, I will take it up in a peculiar way. Posing the question of narration with respect to scientific knowledge thus means not only to pose the question of its content, or object, but in the last