The pasteurization of France by Bruno Latour

Author:Bruno Latour
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2010-03-29T01:12:20+00:00

Chapter 4

Transition

In this part of the book I chose an indisputable, revolutionary, esoteric science, whose applications alone, outside the laboratory, had a prodigious influence on various groups-some open and modern, which adapted to them; others closed and backward-looking, which remained inert. Before such a succession of mysteries-the mystery of the invention of facts, the mystery of their diffusion, the mystery of adequatio rei et intellectus, the mystery of recognition-it was possible to challenge the agnostic (an incompetent sociologist) to provide even the beginning of an explanation. All one could do was to keep silent, to be content, to admire theories, to write glosses on the "social,"

or worse still, to study nothing but the "symbolic and cultural dimension," the bone that those who have given up the good fare of reality are content to gnaw.

By means of this journey through the weakened microbes I think I have shown that this vision of the sciences and of society is a myth, our myth, the only one to which we who think ourselves so clever subscribe in simple faith. The sciences have no more content than the social groups. Those two symmetric phantasmagoric beings are obtained only by a reductio ad absurdum, and we are only just beginning to perceive both its danger and how to face up to it.

146

Transition 147

Out of the magical combat between "Napoleon" and "Kutuzov,"

Tolstoy created a battle of crowds, which act sometimes in great masses and sometimes as individual characters. In the middle of those crowds, acting sometimes as crowds and sometimes as characters, Napoleon and Kutuzov (without quotation marks), among other things that they do, give orders which are misunderstood, wrongly obeyed, badly transmitted, distorted, and betrayed, and which culminate, from hour to hour, in the movements of regiments and cannon about which the information comes back belated, distorted, and betrayed. The words that the troops give to what is happening also act as selffulfilling prophecies. Depending on whether someone shouts the word

"victory" or "each man for himself," this or that part of the front retreats or rushes forward. The battle to know what is happening and what has happened is endless. The stories begun so warmly between Fabrice and the canteen girl at Waterloo end coldly in the archives and manuals, where they continue to influence the history of Europe and to stir crowds, enthusiasms, and responsibilities. Nowhere can we escape from the consequences of the translations and trials, which are the things themselves. We can never do better. We can never know more clearly.

The same goes for that war and peace of the niicrobes, which I have recounted so sketchily, as we wait for someone to turn up who will describe the Natasha of rabies and the Prince Andre of yellow fever. I had to give back to the sciences the crowd of heterogeneous allies which make up their troops and of which they are merely the much-decorated high command whose function is always uncertain.

I had to show that these disreputable allies (hygienists, drains, Agar gels, chickens, farms, insects of all kinds) were an integral part of socalled scientific objects.

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