Kultura mezi materialitou a diskursem: případ Higgsova bosonu a „božské částice'

The article discusses the neglect that cultural sociology pays to the sciences and technology. Even though the “strong program” in cultural sociology claims that cultural meanings exist in every social fact, its research focuses mainly on culture in a narrow sense, e.g. ethics, aesthetics, politics, memory, religion etc. I overcome this shortcoming by development of two approaches: 1) ethnography of a scientific facility based on science and technology studies (STS); and 2) cultural-sociological analysis of symbols, discourses and narratives related to the research of a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. Re-interpreting ethnographic studies conducted at CERN and sociological research focused on quantum physics, the article demonstrates that media and popular-cultural discourses on the Higgs boson are tightly related to its material aspects. While the strong program traditionally presumes the arbitrariness of symbolic structures, the “iconic turn” in cultural sociology stresses the importance of the aesthetic material surface in the resulting meaning. Conceiving the Higgs boson as a “secular icon”, we can see that the practically oriented actions of researchers at CERN relate to cultural meanings that reach far beyond the “laboratory” of quantum physics.