Negotiating Truth:Semmelweis, Discourse on Hand Hygiene and the Politics of Emotions

This project will advance a new concept of understanding politics through emotions. The main argument is that emotions are key to politics because they frame the establishment of "truth" through their relationship with discourse. Current poststructuralist political theories on truth cannot sufficiently explain how discourses develop to "be true" because these theories overlook the negotiation between discourse and emotions. Emotions develop along with discourses but, reciprocally, affect them because they organize values and beliefs (Norval 2007, Solomon 1976 or Tappolet 2000). The aims to fill this gap by framing the figure of "truth" as seen from the perspective of poststructuralist political theory (Glynos & Howarth 2008, Howarth 2000 or Norval 2007), knowledge-oriented approaches in social studies of science (Barnes & Dupré 2008, Latour & Woolgar 1979, Jasanoff 2005 or Woolgar 2002), and discourse linguistics (Charaudeau 2000, Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1999). It elaborates a concept of politics, in which the relationship between discourse and emotions is negotiated, organizes values and beliefs and associates actors. By focusing on the "negotiation," we can explain how truth comes to being and then work toward a novel notion of power through which politics operates.
The will look at a key medical dispute of the 19th century, initiated by Viennese gynecologist Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis. Semmelweis claimed that "childbed fever," a disease that afflicted many women giving birth in hospitals, could originate in the fact that doctors did not wash their hands before assisting in the birth. His thesis grew into a dispute over the duty of hand washing among physicians. The Semmelweis case demonstrates that a practice of hand washing, which has become implicit in Western medical practice, once was a matter for scientific dispute. The project will put this historical dispute in the light of the current medical evidence concerning hand washing in order to show how discourses develop over time along with their negotiation of emotions.
The project will, first, synthesize three intellectual traditions - poststructuralism, STS and discourse linguistics -and argue that truth comes into being through the negotiation of discourses and emotions. Emotions are neither causal factors nor urges motivating actions (foreseen by Barbalet 2002, Edwards 1997, and mentioned by Jasper 2006): the project defines emotions as communicated experiences of values and beliefs that are inherent to discourses but that also affect them. For that reason, and second, the project will work toward a concept of truth that is a negotiation of discourse and the communicated experience of that discourse that is detractable through emotions. Third, the project will analyze Semmelweis's dispute and its echo in the current public health discourse on hand washing. Through analysis of images, research protocols, correspondence, symbolic objects, manuscripts, scientific debates, biographical work, and the current scientific debate over the necessity of hand washing, in which Semmelweis appears as a point of reference and even an icon, the analysis illustrates how the truth about hand washing came to be revealed. The analysis will explain what impeded Semmelweis's introduction of hand washing in his era and why, in ironic contrast, Semmelweis is today used as an icon of the current public health discourse on the necessity of hand washing.