 |
Bruno
Latour
Paper prepared for a chapter in Don Idhe (editor)
Chasing Technoscience: Matrix of Materiality
to be published in the Indiana Series for the Philosophy of Technology
[German translation in Jorg Huber Interventionen, Zurich]
Warning:
those texts are made available for private academic use only; there
might be huge differences between this version and the final published
one, especially concerning footnotes; always report to the author
and publisher for any other use
" The experience also taught me a great lesson. I had not
carefully designed an experiment that would prove diffusion; I had
managed it by accident. That and all tehe other observations I had
made told me that the slime molds were in charge, not I. They would
let me know their secrets on their own terms, not mine. " John
Tyler Bonner, Lives of a biologist : Adventures in a century of
extraordinary science, Harvard, 2002, p. 78 (quote kindly provided
by I. Hacking).
For Albena Yaneva, architect-watcher
What has gone so wrong ?
It first looked like a good idea : it was fun, it was original,
it was enlightening to use the word 'constructivism' to designate
the work I was doing on science and technology : laboratories
indeed looked infinitely more interesting when described as so many
construction sites than when portrayed as dark mastabas protecting
mummified laws of nature. And the adjective 'social' seemed at first
rather well chosen, since I and my colleagues were bathing the venerable
work of science into a hot tub of culture and society that aimed
at making them young and lively again. And yet everything has gone
awry : I had to withdraw the word 'social' with shame 'scrapping
it in haste from the title of Laboratory Life like faces of Trostky
deleted from pictures of Red Square parades ; as for the word
'constructivism', it does not seem possible to salvage it from the
furies triggered by the 'science wars' nor from the detritus left
by the passage of 'deconstruction', this new Attila whose horse's
hoofs leaves no grass behind. Everything I wanted to achieve, namely
to associate reality and construction into one single dynamic with
one single term has been wrecked like a badly designed aircraft.
Times have changed : in order to show that one is not a dangerous
outcast, it seems compulsory to swear a pledge of allegiance to
'realism' ' now meaning the opposite of constructivism. ''You have
to chose'', roar the guardians of the temple, 'Either you believe
in reality or you cling to constructivism''.
And yet saving constructivism is precisely what I wish to accomplish
in this paper : I want to deploy the promises hidden in this
confusing concept, promises which are at once epistemological, moral
and political 'perhaps religious as well. My point is that constructivism
might be our only defense against fundamentalism defined as a tendency
to deny the constructed and mediated characters of the entities
whose public existence have nonetheless to be discussed. Negotiations
toward a viable and peaceful common world are possible among constructivists,
but radically impossible if fundamentalists are expected to show
up at the diplomatic table 'and religion is not the only domain
for bigotry : nature can trigger zealots as well, so can markets,
so can 'deconstruction'. Between war and peace stands a realistic
definition of what a construction is ' this, at least, is my argument.
What is wrong with constructivism ? Everything
To begin with, it might be useful to review everything that is wrong
with the notion of construction. Then, once the list had been drawn,
we might decide if this concept can be repaired or if it should
be abandoned for good.
An implausible role for the social
The first confusion is at once the most widespread and the easiest
to redress. When people hear the word 'construction' they substitute
it with the expression 'social' construction, meaning that the construction
is made of social stuff. In the same way as the houses built by
the Three Little Pigs were either made of straw, of wood or of stone,
it is thought that the proponents of social construction are defining
an ingredient, a material, a type of fabric to account for the fabrication
of facts. And exactly in the same way as the Big Bad Wolf's blow
could destroy the Pigs' houses built of straw and wood, but not
the one built of stone, it seems that 'social constructivists' have
chosen a material so light that the slightest wind would dismantle
it. The house of science, it will be argued, is made of solid walls
of facts and not of a fragile scaffold of social ties. But such
a theory of building is imputed to constructivists only by their
enemies : I have never met a social constructivist who claimed
that science was a house built on sand with walls made of air.
The word 'social' no matter how vague 'and Ian Hacking, to whom
I will turn later, has nicely ranked the many variants of constructivism[1]'
does not designate a 'kind of stuff' by comparison with other types
of materials, but the process through which any thing, including
matters of fact, has been built. Houses do not fall in place like
pies from the sky, and facts no more than babies are brought by
storks. The Three Little Pigs built houses of differing resistance,
but they were all house-builders and, besides, they worked together
or in competition with one another : it is this common and
collective process to which 'social construction' refers, not to
the various materials from which things are made. Why call this
process 'social' ? Simply because it is collective, requiring
the complex collaboration of many trades and skills. As soon as
the word 'construction' succeeds in gaining some of the metaphoric
weight of building, builders, workers, architects, masons, cranes
and concrete poured into forms held by scaffolds, it will be clear
that it is not the solidity of the resulting construct that's in
question, but rather the many heterogeneous ingredients, the long
process, the many trades, the subtle coordination necessary to achieve
such a result. The result itself is as solid as it gets.
Unfortunately, this first clarification does not solve anything
and does not yet allow one to save the concept of construction from
damnation. The reason is that if hard core social constructivists
who argue that things consist of or in social ties do not exist
in science studies, there exist many people elsewhere 'most of those
reviewed by Hacking' who claim that society itself, its power relations,
its violence, its norms, its laws, provide a framework, a structure,
a solid basis, a foundation that is so durable, overpowering and
systematic that it could indeed resist the Big Bad Wolf's attempt
to blow it down. The claim now is not that the house of facts is
really made of the softer material of social ties, but that the
soft and superficial links provided by laws, culture, media, beliefs,
religions, politics, economics are 'in reality' made of the harder
stuff provided by the social frame of power relations. Such is the
standard way for the social sciences and cultural studies to explain
why any thing holds : things do not stand upright because of
the inner solidity of what they claim to be built with, but because
their superficial facades are propped up by the solid steelwork
of society. Law for instance has no solidity of its own, it merely
adds 'legitimacy' to the hidden strength of power : left to
their own devices, laws are no more than a fragile layer of paint,
a cover up for domination.[2].
The same goes for religion. Ditto for popular culture, market relations,
media, and of course, for politics. Every thing is made of one and
the same stuff : the overarching, indisputable, always already
there, all-powerful society. Most of the cases reviewed by Hacking
fall into this mode, where social constructivists proudly exclaim:
'You naively believe that law, religion etc. hold by themselves,
but I will show you how they are really made of social relations
which are infinitely more solid, long lasting, homogeneous and powerful
than the dust and straw that hides their structure like a curtain,
a varnish, a decoy''. Those who pride themselves in being relativist
are, most of the time, social realist.
That this type of 'explanation' makes a sham of the very notion
of constructivism, science studies was quick to discover 'perhaps
I should speak for myself here ! First, how on earth could
one invoke the more solid stuff of social relations to account for
the solidity of the harder facts of nature? Are the facts discovered
by sociologists and economists so much stronger than the ones constructed
by chemists, physicists and geologists? How unlikely. The explanans
certainly does not match the explananda. More importantly, how could
the homogeneous stuff of almighty 'society' account for the bewildering
variety of science and technology? Constructivism, at least in our
little field of science and technology, led to a completely different
program than the one repeated ad nauseam by critical sociology.
Far from trying to explain the hard facts of science with the soft
facts of social science, the goal became to understand how science
and technology were providing some of the ingredients necessary
to account for the very making and the very stability of society.
This was the only way to give the word construction some of its
original meaning, to higlight the collective process that ends up
as solid constructs through the mobilization of heterogeneous crafts,
ingredients and coordination.[3].
The two things science studies did not need were to replace the
fascinating site it was uncovering by an unconstructed homogeneous
overarching indisputable 'society' and of course an unconstructed,
already there, indisputable 'nature'. This is why science studies
found itself fighting on two fronts : the first against critical
sociology it wrongly appeared to descend from (as if it was merely
extending social explanation coming from law and religion to science
and technology) and the second against nature fundamentalists who
wanted facts to pop up mysteriously from nowhere.[4].
If 'social' means either the stuff out of which things of science
are made 'a position which, to the best of my knowledge, has never
been defended by any one' or the harder structure that explains
the long term solidity of scientific facades 'as most people, including
Hacking regarding what he calls 'human kinds', still believe' it
is better to abandon it altogether. This is also why, if I quickly
deleted the adjective 'social' from the title of my first book,
I carefully kept the word 'construction' since, thanks to science
studies, most of the interesting connotations of the building metaphors
were at last beginning to appear : history, solidity, multiplicity,
uncertainty, heterogeneity, risk taking, fragility, etc. Obviously
'social' did not refer to the stuff out of which other things were
made 'to be critically denounced', but to the associations of many
different sources of relatively solid ingredients. The social sciences
were becoming not the sciences of the social, but those of heterogeneous
associations.[5]
Constructivism is like the
word 'Republic': the more adjectives you add 'socialist, islamic'
the worse they become.
Miscasting creators as well as creatures
Once 'social' has been crossed out, the problem of construction,
however, remains just as irritating as before. This time the reason
has not to do with the demise of critical sociology, the weakness
of our own case studies or the persistence of the 'science wars',
but rather with the inner mechanism of construction itself. The
problem with constructivism is that no one could account for the
building of anything, even the simplest shack, by using this metaphor
as it has been popularized in social sciences. Nothing in it works :
neither the role given to the builder or the maker, nor the role
of the material being used ; neither the solidity and durability
of the result, nor its contingencies or necessity ; neither
its history nor its lack thereof. If any mason, any architect, any
Little Pig was trying to build anything with the theory of action
implied by constructivism, they would fail hopelessly to assemble
any durable whole.
Let us measure the utter inadequacy of this notion 'even if this
seems to render its salvation even more hopeless. First to fail
is the role attributed to the maker. Implied in constructivism is
an agent which masters its own acts of making 'I use a neutral term
here because society, nature, fields of force, structure as well
as humans can be asked to fulfill the role of master-builder in
some account. When someone says 'This is a construction'' it is
implied: 'It was built by some agency''. But then by what sort of
agency? If it is an all powerful creator who has full command of
what is produced out of nothing, this is certainly not a realistic
account of the building of any real structure. Even if some architects
see themselves as God, none would be foolish enough to believe they
create ex nihilo.[6] On the contrary,
architects' stories of their own achievements are full of little
words to explain how they are 'led to' a solution, 'constrained'
by other buildings, 'limited' by other interests, 'guided by the
inner logic of the material', 'forced to obey' the necessity of
the place, 'influenced' by the choices of their colleagues, 'held
up' by the state of the art, and so on.[7]
No God is less a Creator than an architect, even the most innovative
and daring one. To 'become sensitive to the many constraints that
lead to a rather autonomous scheme that begins to take over a sort
of life of its own'' is precisely what they will try to emphasize.
But then, if we become attentive to humbler ways of speaking, this
agency shifts from the all powerful master to the many 'things',
'agents', 'actants' with which they have to share the action.
And of course, the vocabulary of 'making' will divert attention
from the maker to the materials even more quickly if one consideres
engineers instead of architects 'nimbed by the aura of the 'free'
modernist artist. Learning how to become responsive to the unexpected
qualities and virtualities of materials is how engineers will account
for the chance encounter with practical solutions : they will
never think of describing themselves as little kids molding reality
at will.[8]If there is one thing
toward which 'making' does not lead, it is to the concept of a human
actor fully in command. This is the great paradox of the use of
the word construction : it is used by critical sociology to
show that things are not simply and naturally there, that they are
the product of some human or social ingenuity, but as soon as this
metaphor of 'making', 'creating', or 'constructing' barely begins
to shine, then the maker, the creator, the constructor has to share
its agency with a sea of actants over which they have neither control
nor mastery. What is interesting in constructivism is exactly the
opposite of what it first seems to imply : there is no maker,
no master, no creator that could be said to dominate materials,
or, at the very least, a new uncertainty is introduced as to what
is to be built as well as to who is responsible for the emergence
of the virtualities of the materials at hand. To use the word 'constructivism'
and to forget this uncertainty so constitutive of the very act of
building is nonsense.
Second to fail is the conception of the material involved in the
process of construction. If you think that builders were treated
unrealistically, wait for the poor portrait usually given of matter
'the two being obviously linked, as we will see. To exert a determinate
and obstinate blind force, to be there as the mere support for human
fanciful ingenuity, or simply to offer some 'resistance' to human
action, these are the only three roles given to things in the constructivists'
scenarios. The first one gives material agencies the exact same
implausible function given to the creator in the ex nihilo story,
but in reverse : things command assent by their sheer force
that simply has to be obeyed. The second saps any possibility
of agency from things : they are left merely plastic, only
able to retain an abundance of shapes offered by the rich, creative
and totally free human mind. The third conception of things differs
from the former by simply adding some resistance for no other reason
but to provide the creator with some surprise while he retains full
power over matter 'and it has to be a ''he''. To complete this sad
inventory, one should add the comical role of being-there-just-to-prove-that-one-is-not-an-idealist
role invented by Kant and replayed over and over again by philosophers
all the way to David Bloor : things are there but play no role
except that of mute guardians holding the sign 'We deny that we
deny the existence of an outside reality'.[9]
Quite a function well worth hapless 'things in themselves'.
Any constructivists worth their salt should be ashamed to see that
everywhere things have been gypped their due : the first treats
matter as master, the second as no more than wet sand in a sandbox
and the third as an occasion to feel one's own force being resisted.
But with such theories of forces no one could succeed in accounting
for even the simplest task : baking a cake, weaving a basket,
sewing a button 'not to mention erecting sky-scrapers, discovering
black holes or passing new bills. And yet most debates on 'realism'
and 'constructivism' never go further than the next child's toy
box 'to which, for good measure, one should add a few 'mugs', 'mats',
'cats' and 'black swans'. Let us be serious : if the word constructivist
has any sort of meaning, it is because it leads us to agencies never
falling into these silly and childish roles. Yes, they act, yes
they order, yes they resist, yes, they are plastic, but what proved
interesting are all the intermediary positions they are able to
simultaneously occupy.[10] The
paradox is that critiques retain three or four points in trajectories
for which artists, artisans, engineers, architects, house-persons
and even children in kindergarten have a rich and talented vocabulary.
Certainly Gianbattista Vico never did build much with his hands,
to believe that what he had made was for this reason fully and completely
known. I have never met scientists at the bench who were content
to chose between 'realism' and 'constructivism', except of course
when giving science war pep talks. Show me one single artist who
would denigrate the complex material he is shaping into form to
the low point of 'infinitely plastic' clay 'certainly not potters.[11]
Show me one single programmer who would think in full command of
the software she is writing. Have you ever seen a cook who could
account for a cheese soufflé by defining its delicate and
crusty substance with the simple notions of 'plasticity', 'resistance'
and 'pure obedience to the forces of nature' ?[12]
Everywhere, building, creating, constructing, laboring means to
learn how to become sensitive to the contrary requirements, to the
exigencies, to the pressures of conflicting agencies where none
of them is really in command.[13]Especially
not the 'maker' who spends nights and days trying to live up to
his or her responsibility to what Etienne Souriau has magnificently
called instauration, or l''uvre à faire'.[14]How
come we account for construction, either from the side of the maker
or from the side of the made, with a theory of action that any one
of our own acts fully contradicts ? Yes I know, the bad example
comes from high above : the ex nihilo Creator playing with
His dust, clay and breath has given a bad name to all of us. But
it is not because He was the first 'social constructivist' inventing
everything from the fancy of His own imagination that we have to
follow His example' Or maybe, when kicked out the Garden of Eden,
we also lost the meaning of this Creation story. Not only would
'we toil at the sweat of our brow'' and 'with pains give birth to
children'' but we would also be cursed with the impossibility of
understanding what laboring and constructing and creating could
mean. 'Thou shall no longer grasp the meaning of God's agency''.
Will we live for ever punished with the original sin of mistaking
constructivism for 'social' constructivism ?
An impossible sentence : 'the more constructed the more
real'
To the Garden of Eden there is no trail back. It might be possible
however to regain some of the lost powers of the original idiom
of constructivism if only we could undo the curse that paralyses
our tongues every time we wish to use it. For that, it is not only
necessary to delete the word 'social', to redistribute agencies
and to add some uncertainty concerning what is doing the making,
as I just did : in order to salvage the constructivist manners
of speech, another even more difficult move is requested of us since
we also have to be able to stick to practice in just the way the
sophisticated versions of constructivism forbids us to do.
Any architect, mason, city planner, tenant, in accounting for the
reality of the building they designed, built, planned or inhabit
will consider the amount of work done as one of the reason why the
building is well designed, well built, well planned or well furnished.
So, for them, working hard and having a building standing solidly
and independently of their work is one and the same thing 'provided
it has been well done. In their implicit accounting system, they
have one credit column in which they enter their own work as well
as the autonomous solidity of the building, and a debit column in
which they enter what has been badly designed, planned or built
and what for this reason has been left dangerous, shaky, unfinished,
ugly, inhabitable. How come then that they are asked by rather crooked
constructivists to keep another book with an entirely different
accounting practice ? One in which all the items showing that
the building stands solidly and independently are entered in the
credit column while all the items tending to show that work has
been done are noted in the debit column? Even Enron and Arthur Andersen
would not dare massage their account books to that extent. And yet,
this is exactly what we do when we move from the practical language
of construction to a theoretical one. We cheat, we lie, we enter
into shabby double-dealing.
It is exactly such a betrayal of constructivism that science studies
has contested. In the practical parlance of scientists at work,
it is because they work and work well that facts are autonomous
and stand independently of their (the scientists') own action.[15].
And yet, as soon as they reflect back on what they have done 'or
as soon as they come under the influence of some sort of realist
philosopher'' they cook their book, doctor their accounts and begin
to draw two opposite lines : one for the independent reality
of the facts (the credit) and another for the mundane, human, social,
collective work they have done (the debit line).[16]
Silly deal, first because the very word 'fact' still retains traces
of the other accounting system clumsily erased ''les faits sont
faits'' ; second, because in manipulating this new account,
scientists lose any chance of gaining credit for their own hard
work which now goes into the debit column !; and third, because
they deprive themselves of any authority to ask for grant money,
since it seems, by reading their massaged ledgers, that they will
know even better, faster and truer if they were not working, if
they had no instruments, no collective undertaking, no construction
site' Independent reality stands alone and they are standing on
the other side of a huge gap, unable to bridge it. But the fourth
reason is really the one that exposes best the silliness of this
double-dealing : the difference between good and bad science,
well designed and badly designed experiment, well fabricated and
badly fabricated facts has disappeared, whereas it was exactly this
crucial difference that the other accounting system captured so
well 'and the one to which all the attention of scientists at work
has been directed : the difference between a good and a bad
scientist.[17]
If it is clear, in the case of architects, that the only real interesting
choice is between good and bad construction and not between construction
and autonomous reality, why is not the case for scientists and facts ?
Because of two added features that seem to condemn the language
of constructivism for good. When we say of a building that it stands
on its own weight after the work of engineers, planners, architects
and masons, and because of their good work, we don't have to engage
ourselves in a tricky metaphysical question : everyone will
agree that, whatever its autonomy, the building was not there before.
No matter how elegant, coherent, necessary, adjusted the shape of
a house in a landscape might end up being, no matter how 'necessary'
it appears to be, no matter how pleasing to the eye, it does not
provide the sort of necessity requested from matters of fact. It
still has a source and origin in some architecture studio signaled
by a marble or brass plaque fixed somewhere on the wall 'like all
of us have the mark of our navel on our belly to humble our dream
of self-construction. But it is precisely this navel that irritates
(with good reason) scientists and philosophers when they see the
word 'fabrication' used in relation to 'facts' 'even though they
might be painfully aware of the word's damning etymology. The autonomy
they strive for is that of a building which has always stood erect
on its own weight no matter what work has been necessary to discover
its exact location, to measure its height and to visit or inhabit
its interior. Such a degree of certainty, such an occupation of
time and space, such an unquestionable autonomy, solidity and durability,
no idiom of construction, no architectural metaphor can provide
'even if we stick as closely as possible to the confusing practice
of really building real buildings' since construction, by definition,
leaves exactly these traces that should be erased. If the double-book
accounting system can be exposed for architects and engineers, it
does not seem possible to do the same when hard facts are
in question : autonomy and labor indeed seem contradictory.
Is this then the last breath of constructivism ?
Probably, especially when, to add insult to injury, critical sociology
seizes this most difficult of all metaphysical questions and trivializes
it into a Q & A at the end of a course in Continental Theory
101 : 'Is constructed reality constructed or real ?''
Answer : 'Both''. Commented with a mildly blasé smile :
'Are we so naive as to think that we have to chose ? Don't
we know that even the maddest ideologies have real consequences ?
That we live in a world of our own construction and that it is no
less real for that ?''[18]How
I despise this little 'both' that obtains so cheaply a veneer of
depth that passes nonetheless for the ultimate critical spirit.
Never was critique less critical than when accepting as an obvious
answer what should be, on the contrary, a source of utter bewilderment.
'We' never build a world of 'our own delusion' because there exist
no such free creator in 'us' and because there exist no material
pliable enough to retain the marks of our playful ingenuity. 'We'
are never deluded by a 'world of fancy' because there exist no force
strong enough to transform us into the mere slaves of powerful illusions.
On both accounts 'as creations of our own imagination, or as what
those creatures impose upon us in return' the critical spirit fails
since it uses the least realistic definition possible of what it
is to create, to construct, to be influenced, to be deluded. It
transforms into a simple thing exactly what is most mysterious in
the sharing of agencies with other actants, with aliens. The critical
spirit slumbers just when it should be wide awake : no one
was ever taken in by the return reality of a world of one's own
making. Once again, constructivism is a victim of its own apparent
friends and the least probable version of what it is to 'build a
world of one's own' is used to render impossible any account of
this very construction. This belief in naive belief is the only
naive belief ever visible 'only if you hold a Ph.D. in critical
theory can you maintain this illusion against the constant disproof
of practice.
So, in the end, things don't look very good : there seems to
be no plausible way to say that because something has been constructed
and well constructed it is thus solid, durable, independent, autonomous
and necessary 'even though this is what the manifold languages of
practice obstinately belabor, and what science studies has tried
to extract by staying as close to the bench as possible. The threat
will be carried out, we will have to submit to the examination :
''You have to chose : either it is real, or it is constructed'',
and if we dare answer 'both'' our own positive both will be confused
with the weak, cheap and blasé negative answer of our worst
enemies, i.e. our dear friends the critical sociologists' It seems
that if deconstruction, more voraciously than termites, has been
able to turn into dust all the claims to solidity, autonomy, durability
and necessity, it is because constructivism was too fragile a material
to begin with. There seem to be no antitermite treatments, no fumigation
to protect constructivism against falling into ruins. Only what
has not been constructed will stand the test of time.
A scale to qualify the right amount of constructivism
One solution would be to abstain from the word constructivism altogether.[19]But
that would leave the field to whom ? Naturalists, on the one
hand, deconstructionists, on the other. There would be a place in
the sun only for those who link reality with the absence of labor,
and those who have the front of using labor to debunk claims to
existence, solidity, necessity and durability. Science studies will
have no room for itself. A strange accounting system will render
practice opaque to enquiry.
Fortunately, Ian Hacking has done good work on clarifying this most
muddled topic in The Social construction of what ?.
Thanks to his attempt, I might succeed in offering a convincing
inventory of what sentences such as 'X should be taken as constructed'',
where X stand for 'laws of nature'', 'divinities'', 'technologies'',
'political representations'', 'market organizations'', 'subjectivities'',
could mean. And we need such sentences to possess clear meaning
since they designate all the ingredients which are up for grabs
in the progressive definition of the common world 'the name I now
give to political process.[20]
Could the curse on the theory of action implied by the many metaphors
of construction be lifted ?
Hacking understood that the reason these disputes around the right
mix of reality and construction trigger so much passion is that
they are political : they seem to talk about epistemology but
they are really about how we should go about living together. To
classify the various schools of 'social constructivists' (only a
branch of this family, as I will show), he offers a scale that goes
from stage 0 (X is given by nature), then to stage 1 (X could have
been otherwise), then to stage 2 (X is bad), then to stage 3 (X
should be overthrown) (p.6). In this view 'social constructivists'
can be ordered from the most innocuous 'things have not always been
the way they are, they have a history' to the more radical :
they should be changed. And all the brands are opposed to a stage
'1, which Hacking implies but does not define : X is the way
it is, period.
Although it is a very important step forward to reveal the inherently
political nature of the argument, Hacking's gradient is too asymmetric.
If it nicely orders the different brands of 'social constructivists',
he says nothing of the politics of those who should be called 'naturalists',
namely those who need this implied stage '1 which allows for X to
be there as a permanent fixture of nature. To be able to use Hacking's
scheme, it seems fairer to also include the politics of those who
use this indisputable necessity of nature to define the common world :
it is already made and remains off limits for any political process.
Once this is done, constructivists and realists are all engaged
in what I call 'political epistemology', namely the organization
of the arenas in which the various candidates that claim to inhabit
the same shared world 'humans and non-humans' are represented in
all the many meanings of the word. Thus, the debate should not be
seen as what pits scholars who object to the politicization of nature
against militants who politicize everything, including the facts
of nature for their various radical goals : rather, it allows
different factions, parties, leagues to make explicit and public
how they are supposed to distribute what is disputable and indisputable,
what is contingent and necessary, what should be kept and what should
be changed. To use a traditional set of metaphors, political epistemology
is not an unfortunate distortion of good epistemology or good politics,
but rather the necessary task of those who write a 'Constitution'
distributing powers in the various 'branches' of this vast 'government
of things', looking for the best arrangement of 'checks and balances'.[21]
Once this common ground is recognized 'once Hacking's asymmetric
treatment of the various claims has been redressed' it might be
possible to abandon, for a moment, the various labels given to the
contending parties 'realists, naturalists, constructivists, deconstructionists,
etc' to look instead at the list of guarantees they all wish to
obtain from participants in the common world, although through different
means. The list below appears to me to offer more generality, and
maybe more clarity on ordering the sub-family of social constructivists,
than the one offered by Hacking. It deals with his same 'sticking
points', but offers a different diplomatic opening.
First guarantee : once there, and no matter how it came about,
discussion about X should stop for good. This is an essential assurance
against endless controversies, heckling, superfluous doubts, excessive
deconstruction. Such is one of the two meanings of the word 'facts' :
once in place, reality should not be allowed to be disputed and
should be used as the indisputable premise of other reasonings.
This is the only way to assure a base of solid and stable facts
to rest upon 'if only to occasionally thumb a table in good spirit...
If this leverage is taken out, it seems that discussion is no longer
possible any longer (Hacking's 'sticking point' #3, p.84). If a
party named 'constructivists' appear to be jeopardizing this essential
guarantee, then 'that means war'', and it is no surprise that the
other factions will try and exclude it from any 'parliament'.[22]What
went so wrong in the earlier debates around 'social construction'
was that such a guarantee went ignored 'or rather was confused with
the equally important one just to follow.
Second guarantee : in spite of the indiscutability insured
by the former, a revision process should be maintained, an appeal
of some sort, to make sure that new claimants 'which the former
established order had not been able to take into account' will be
able to have their voices heard 'and 'voice', of course, is not
limited to humans. This is exactly what the crowd reviewed by Hacking
requires when they attack the 'naturalized', indisputable, taken
for granted stage O. Only what has been made can be unmade or remade,
such is an indispensable source of energy. If all the means of revision
are taken away, if we are simply faced with the indisputable matters
of facts which have always been the way they are, an essential guarantee
has been jeopardized and that, too, 'means war''. New candidates
to existence will be forbidden access to the common world. If a
party called 'naturalists' appears to forestall all discussions,
all revisions, because they use the state of nature to shortcut
due process in the name of 'law and order', then it is not surprising
that the other factions will try to exclude it from the parliament.
The delicate checks and balances of political epistemology require
both guarantees, there is no due process without them. But the discussion
does not stop at these two.
Third guarantee : the common world is to be composed progressively,
it is not already there once and for all. This guarantee is totally
muddled when transformed into an argument for contingency against
necessity 'and on that account Hacking falls into the trap (his
'sticking point' #1). To prove that matters of facts have been 'constructed',
it is argued, one has simply to show that they are contingent, that
they could have been otherwise, that they are not necessary.[23]To
disprove the contructivist account, it is counterargued, one has
simply to show that there are no two ways for X to exist, only one.
But such a debate is a profound misreading of the real argument
in science studies, especially in the history of science :
the point is not about demonstrating the existence of 'alternative'
physics, chemistry or genetics, but about the impossibility of absorbing
the world 'in the singular' in one single chunk.[24]
'The' unified world is a thing of the future not of the past. In
the meantime we are all in what James calls the 'pluriverse', and
those 'scientists, philosophers, activists, commoners of all sorts'
who strive to make it one are taking risks and they could fail.
Danger, contingency, uncertainty does not qualify the result 'which
might well be Necessity herself' but the process through which 'the'
world becomes progressively shared as one same world. The opposition
is not between contingency and necessity, but between those who
want to order the world once and for all on the cheap pretexting
that it is already 'one', so that they can subtract everything else
from it, and those who are ready to pay the price of its progressive
composition into one because they cannot subtract anything.
Fourth guarantee : humans and non-humans are engaged in a history
that should render their separation impossible. Again, this feature
of constructivism is deeply misread when seen as a debate between
realism and nominalism (Hacking 'sticking point' #2, p.80). Words
and worlds do not represent two statues facing one another and marking
the respective territories of two kingdoms 'only to one of them
will loyalty be sworn. Rather, words and worlds mark possible and
not very interesting extremities, end points of a complex set of
practices, mediations, instruments, forms of life, engagements,
involvements through which new associations are generated. To imagine
that a choice has to be made between statements and matters of fact,
would be like pitting the two banks of a riverbed against one another
while ignoring the huge and powerful river that streams in between.
If philosophy has only registered the choice between realism and
nominalism, this has nothing to do with the way we all deal with
the truth content of matters of facts, but with a precise political
order that has requested a strict separation between humans and
non-humans.[25]As soon as the
political assembly is modified 'and this is precisely what is registered
by science studies' the guarantee is not to finally obtain a clear
separation between words and worlds, nature and culture, facts and
representation, but just the opposite : to insure that there
is no such separation.
Fifth guarantee : institutions assuring due process should
be able to specify the quality of the 'good common world' they have
to monitor. As I have shown above, what is so crucial in the accounting
proper to constructivism is to be able to differentiate good and
bad construction 'and not to be stuck for ever in the absurd choice :
is it or is it not constructed ? Although the philosophical
tradition has separated the moral question of the 'good life' from
the epistemological one of the 'common world', it is just a question
of which common world is best and how it can be shared as one which
occupies the stage when the subtle discourse of practice is foregrounded.[26]This
is where the composition of the common world takes its meaning and
what has been expressed from the Greeks onward by the word cosmos
'by opposition to kakosmos.[27]The
quest of the common world cannot even begun to be raised when an
opposition is drawn between an 'unconstructed' world already there,
already unified, devoid of values, on the one hand, and a 'constructed'
motley of conflicting social or subjective value claims, on the
other. Simply to 'be there' is not enough for matters of fact to
be absorbed, associated, digested, rendered compatible with other
conflicting claims : they have to be composed, they have to
become instead state of affairs.[28]
The idea of my (very rough) list is that it should now be possible
to compare propositions entering the common arena 'the new public
space' to check if they lead toward a strengthening or a weakening
of those five guarantees taken together. My claim is that this list
allows a much more efficient classification than the scoring system
proposed by Hacking (p.199).[29]For
lack of a better term (I'd like to introduce 'compositionism' but
it has no pedigree), I wish to retain the word 'constructivism'
for the propositions that foot the bill and either 'naturalism'
or 'deconstruction' for that who fail to fulfill them 'the former
because it maximizes the first guarantee while being indifferent
to the others, the latter because it sticks to the second and fifth
guarantee but minimizes the others. I am prepared to abandon the
term completely, as long as a new one is used to describe the constitutional
order that I have wished to describe with this embarrassing word.
Any term will do as long as it can allow me to designate something
which a) has not always been around, b) which is of humble origin,
c) which is composed of heterogeneous parts, d) which was never
fully under the control of its makers, e) which could have failed
to come into existence, f) which now provides occasions as well
as obligations, g) which needs for this reason to be protected and
maintained if it is to continue to exist. Too many traits, I confess,
for one poor little word 'and one ending with this rather damning
postfix '-ism'.
If only constructionism and deconstruction could part company
The reason why my solution will most probably fail is not only because
its usage raises the red flag for science warriors (I still think
that they can be reassured),[30]
but because of its much more dangerous association with de-construction.[31]Even
though the prefix 'de'- should be enough to indicate that it goes
exactly in the opposite direction, the critical spirit will always
hold back its ironical head and exclaim with glee : 'If X is
constructed, then I can easily 'deconstruct' it to dust''. The relation
seems as inevitable as the ecological one between prey and predator.
When the word 'construction' is uttered, instead of immediately
looking for which tools and resources would assure its upkeep and
maybe even restore the built structure, the Big Bad Wolf chomps
his deconstructionist jaws in eager anticipation. The reason is
that critical minds share at least one thing with fundamentalists,
their harsh ennemies : they too believe that if something is
built, that alone is a proof that it is so weak that it should be
deconstructed until one reaches the ultimate ideal they all share,
namely what has not been built at all by any human hand.[32]
Deconstruction meanders down a steep slope that constructionism
'or compositionism' tries to ascend by painful zigzags. How strange
that these two movements get confused when their goals are so different.
It is true that viewed from above and afar they look alike since
they both greatly diverge from the straight line fundamentalists
always dream to trace. Both insist on the inevitable tropism of
mediations, on the power of all those intermediaries that make impossible
any direct access to objectivity, truth, morality, divinities, or
beauty. Resemblance stops there, however. Deconstruction goes downhill
to avoid the peril of presence, compositionism goes uphill to try
to catch as much presence as possible. One behaves as if the main
danger was for words to carry too much meaning, the other fights
to wring out as much reality as possible from the fragile mediators
it has painfully assembled. If the former meanders so much it is
because it has to constantly delay saying something, while the other
strives for rectitude and is diverted only by the extreme steepness
of the slope it tries to ascend. One tries to flee as far as possible
from the face of the God it wishes to erase, the other knows there
is no face of God, and thus nothing is to be erased. A face is to
be produced instead, to be painted and repainted through as many
non mimetic re-productions and representations as possible.[33]
Deconstructionists behave much like those illustrious French generals
who were always one war late : they fight an old battle against
naiveté, immediacy, naturalization as if intellectuals still
had to free the masses from too much belief. Have they not realized
that critical minds have long died from an overdose of disbelief ?
The miniaturization of criticism, like that of computers, has cheapened
doubt so much that now every one, with no effort, can doubt the
strongest and most entrenched certainty, deconstruct the most solid
and high standing building at no cost 'any box cutter will do. Why
are they so slow to realize that the diffusion of conspiracy theory
has taken the place of the 'naive confidence in authority' ;
that this expanded, popularized and cheap revisionism has pushed
criticism to mutate into its exact opposite, which one could call
'naive diffidence in authority' or 'critical barbarity'.[34]By
contrast, compositionists do not have to debunk belief, but rather
to slowly produce confidence again. They don't see naiveté
as the ultimate sin, but as a refreshing virtue to be regained with
great pain. They don't jump to their gun when the word 'certainty'
is uttered, since they know what price has to be paid to produce
a little bit of this most precious ware.
To convince the critically minded that constructivism means our
only slow and progressive access to objectivity, morality, civil
peace and piety, and that, for this reason, all the subtle mediations
of practice, should be protected and cherished instead of being
debunked and slowly destroyed, would require such a deep alteration
in our intellectual ecology that it is hard to see how it would
come about.[35] And yet, this
first move would be necessary if the next one, even more problematic,
is to be attempted : namely to convince fundamentalists that
the idiom of constructivism might provide them with more solid and
durable guarantees for preserving the values they all too quickly
are ready to die for. How long will it be before the word 'construction'
does not sound either like an insult to be repaid in blood or like
a confession of weakness inviting deconstruction ? How long
will it be before the word is heard not as a war cry to take up
arms or hammers, but as an appeal for the extension of care and
caution, a request to raise again the question : 'How
can it be built better ?'' ?
To finish with a quizz (in the spirit of Ian Hacking's scoring system),
I propose the following test :
'When you hear that something you cherish is a 'construction', your
first reaction is (check the right circle):
o to take a gun
o to seize a hammer
o to erect a scaffold
Answer: If you checked the first, then you are a fundamentalist
ready to anihiliate those who appeal to the destruction of what
remains strong only if it is unconstructed by human hands ;
if you ticked the second, then you are a deconstructionist who sees
construction as a proof of weakness in a building that should be
pressed to ruins in order to give way to a better and firmer structure
untouched by human hands ; if you checked the third, then you
are a constructivist, or, better, a compositionist engaged at once
in the task of maintaining and nurturing those fragile habitations ;
if you ticked them all, then you are hopelessly muddled''
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[*]English
kindly corrected by Duana Fullwiley. I thank Isabelle Stengers and
Graham Harman for their suggestions.
[1] Hacking, I. (1999). The Social
Construction of What? Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press..
[2] For such a standard account,
Bourdieu, P. (1986). 'La Force du droit.' Actes de la recherche
en sciences sociales(64): 3-19 ; for a powerful and definitive
critique, see Favereau, O. . 'L'économie du sociologue ou
penser (l'orthodoxie) à partir de Pierre Bourdieu' in Le
travail sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu. Dettes et critiques. Edition
revue et augmentée. B. Lahire (editor). (2001) Paris,
La Découverte: 255-314.
[3]
For telling examples of this realistic constructivism, see Haraway,
D. (1989). Primate Visions. Gender, Race and Nature in the World
of Modern Science. Londres, Routledge and Kegan Paul ;
Pickering, A. (1995). The Mangle of Practice. Time, Agency
and Science. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press ; Rheinberger,
H.-J. (1997). Toward a History of Epistemic Thing. Synthetizing
Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, Stanford University Press ;
Knorr-Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences
Make Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press. For
a more philosophical argument, see my Latour, B. (1999). Pandora's
Hope. Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, Mass,
Harvard University Press.
[4]
In what follows I make no distinction between critical sociology
and deconstruction : the first destroys in bulk, the other
in detail ; the first is sacrificing the present to the revolution,
the second sacrifices everything, including the dreams of revolution,
to the jealous god of presence.
[5]
Tarde, G. (1999réédition). Monadologie et sociologie.
Paris, Les empêcheurs de penser en rond and my account of
his social theory (2002). Gabriel Tarde and the End of the
Social. The Social in Question. New Bearings in the History and
the Social Sciences. P. Joyce. London, Routledge: 117-132.
[6]
Yaneva, A. (2002). 'Scaling Up and Down: Models and Publics in Architecture.
Case Study of the Extensions of Whitney Museum for American Art.',
paper presented at the seminar of Max-Planck Institute
for the History of Science in Berlin, department II, 21th March
2002.
[7]
For a rich repertoire of such terms see the now classical work of
Koolhaas, R. and B. Mau (1995). Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large.
Rotterdam, Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
[8] Many rich examples can be
found for instance in Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and Situated
Actions. The Problem of Human Machine. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press ; MacKenzie, D. (1990). Inventing Accuracy.
A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. Cambridge
Mass, MIT Press ; McGrew, W. C. (1992). Chimpanzee Material
Culture. Implications for Human Evolution. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press ; Lemonnier, P., Ed. (1993). Technological
Choices. Transformation in Material Cultures since the Neolithic.
London, Routledge ; Bijker, W. (1995). Of Bicycles, Bakelites,
and Bulbs. Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge,
Mass, MIT Press ; Petroski, H. (1996). Inventing by Design.
How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing. Cambridge, Mass, Harvard
University Press.
[9]
See Bloor, D. (1999). 'Anti-Latour.' Studies in History and Philosophy
of Science 30(1): 81-112 and my response 'For Bloor' and Beyond''
in the same issue.
[10]
Latour, B. and P. Lemonnier, Eds. (1994). De la préhistoire
aux missiles balistiques - l'intelligence sociale des techniques.
Paris, La Découverte.
[11]
Van der Leeuw, S. (1994). Innovation et tradition chez les potiers
mexicains. De la préhistoire aux missiles balistiques
- l'intelligence sociale des techniques. B. Latour and P. Lemonnier
(eds). Paris, La Découverte: 290-310.
[12]
Surface physics as it has been beautifully shown by Bensaude-Vincent,
B. (1998). Eloge du mixte. Paris, Hachette has a complex ontology
which could not hold a minute either in the poor materialist vocabulary,
as Gaston Bachelard has shown earlier in many of his examples.
[13]
According to Jullien, F. o. (1995). The Propensity of Things.
Toward a History of Efficacy in China. Cambridge, Mass, Zone
Books and (1997). Traité de l'efficacité. Paris,
Grasset, those thoughts would be much easier to conceptualize in
chinese'
[14]
Souriau, E. (1935). 'L'oeuvre à faire.' ; Souriau, E.
(1939). L'instauration philosophique. Paris, Félix
Alcan.
[15]
Latour, B. (1996). Petite réflexion sur le culte moderne
des dieux Faitiches. Paris, Les Empêcheurs de penser en
rond.
[16]
Still inspired 'or rather contaminated' by the antifetishism of
critical theory I misunderstood this shift in Laboratory Life :
I thought that the product of their own hand 'fabricated facts'
became what no hand had produced 'unfabricated facts' so that scientists,
like good fetishists, were inverting causality by granting to what
they had themselves done the reason why they had done it. But they
were right' and so was I : in effect, there was indeed a shift,
but from the first accounting system 'the more hands the more autonomy'
to the second'you have to chose between work and autonomy. To ferret
this out, though, I had to dig at the heart of antifetishism which
remains to this day the main staple of critical theory.
[17]
Difference which is at the heart of Isabelle Stengers's epistemology
Stengers, I. (1993). L'invention des sciences modernes. Paris,
La Découverte ; Stengers, I. (1997). Power and Invention.
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
[18]
For a typical example see Heinich, N. (1993). 'Les objets-personnes.
Fétiches, reliques et oeuvres d'art.' Sociologie de l'art(6):
25-56. For a 'critique' of this critcal position, see Robert Koch
'The critical gesture in philosophy'' in Latour, B. and P. Weibel,
Eds. (2002). Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion
and Art. Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press pp. 524-537.
[19]
And delete the word 'construction' from the subtitle of Laboratory
Life after having deleted the word social 'before facts, I am
sure, go away too !
[20]
The necessary link between constructivism and diplomacy is explored
in Latour, B. (2002). War of the Worlds: What about Peace?
Chicago, Prickly Press Pamphlet. Chicago University Press which
is very much a companion paper to this one.
[21]
For all of this complex set of moves, see Latour, B. (1999). Politiques
de la nature. Comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie.
Paris, La Découverte (in translation by Harvard University
Press).
[22]
Stengers, I. (1998). La guerre des sciences: et la paix? Impostures
scientifiques. Les malentendus de l'affaire Sokal. B. Jurdant
(ed). Paris, La Découverte: 268-292.
[23]
In technology studies the same role is played by the tired old notion
of 'interpretive flexibility' or 'pliability', as if being flexible
and pliable were the only two states of matter worth registering.
[24]
Hacking himself, in the beautiful last chapter 7 on dolomite shows
how, even on such a simple case as rocks 'the one Steven Weinberg
liked to kick with his foot to prove that it was 'there' !'
the 'oneness' of 'the world' is hard to come by, because of the
multirealism any enquiry leads to. The author does not seem to be
aware that this chapter renders his former analysis of the 'sticking
points' moot. My list of guarantees simply try to do justice to
his empirical chapter better than he has been able to do.
[25]
For a political and intellectual history of nominalism, see de Libera,
A. La querelle des universaux. De Platon à la fin du Moyen
Age. (1996) Paris, Le Seuil.
[26]
Stage 2 and 3 of Hacking's list aims at this when they transform
the contingent history of X, stage 1, into what 'is bad' and 'should
be discarded', but they abandon the fourth guarantee as well
as the third since their world, the one promised by 'revolution',
is exactly as uncomposed and as unnegotiable as the one they want
to replace.
[27]
The conditions under which the fact/value distinction could be replaced
by another set of two questions : what entity should we take
into account ? how can they be associated ? is the main
object of Politiques de la nature op.cit.
[28]
To register the differences between two tradition of empiricism
and the two stages in political epistemology they imply, I trie
to give a technical meaning to the difference in English between
matters of fact and state of affairs.
[29]
With which I am simply unable to grade myself although I am one
of the guinea pigs of his book 'and with which it would be impossible,
in my view, to score Hacking's own chapter on dolomites'
[30]
This is at least what I have attempted in (1999). Pandora's Hope.
Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, Mass, Harvard
University Press.
[31]
It is interesting to notice that there is one explicitly deconstructionist,
even Derridian, architect, Daniel Liebeskind, but even a quick visit
at his moving, claustrogene and magnificent Jewish museum in Berlin
is enough to show that he too is, first of all, a constructivist,
and a master one at that.
[32]
On this acheropoietic dream see the articles by Galison, Koerner,
Mondzain in Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion
and Art. B. Latour and P. Weibel. Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press
[33]
See Koerner, J. (2002). The Icon as Iconoclash in op.cit. 164-214
[34]
I don't think it is a coincidence that these two critical barbarities
have struck the World Trade Center one after the other: the first
by destroying it to rubble, the second, adding insult to injury,
by claiming that it was the deed of victims themselves, helped by
the CIA or the Mossad' But it is Baudrillard who has the honor of
putting the last nail in the coffin of criticism: has he not claimed
that the Towers, 'icons of a self destroying capitalism' (Mr. Bin
Laden dixit), had deconstructed themselves by attracting passing
planes to commit suicide ?' ((2002) L'esprit du terrorisme,
Galilée, Paris). One can only hope that this ultimate gesture,
this ultimate self-destruction of nihilist thought about a nihilistic
act of self-destruction, will be the last gasp of critical barbarity'.
History shows, alas, that nihilism has no bottom.
[35]
The exhibition Iconoclash 'see op.cit. for the catalog' was, in
my view, such a small effort at a local ecological alteration in
the gardens of our prejudices.
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