The Pasteurization of France

Bruno Latour, Alan Sheridan, John Law, Alan Sheridan, John Law

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Année: 1993
• Imprimer l'ISBN: 9780674657618, 9780674657601
• ISBN de l'eBook: 9780674265301
• Sujet: Biological Sciences
• Sujet: Science History

What can one man accomplish, even a great man and brilliant scientist? Although every town in France has a street named for Louis Pasteur, was he alone able to stop people from spitting, persuade them to dig drains, influence them to undergo vaccination? Pasteur's success depended upon a whole network of forces, including the public hygiene movement, the medical profession (both military physicians and private practitioners), and colonial interests. It is the operation of these forces, in combination with the talent of Pasteur, that Bruno Latour sets before us as a prime example of science in action.

Latour argues that the triumph of the biologist and his methodology must be understood within the particular historical convergence of competing social forces and conflicting interests. Yet Pasteur was not the only scientist working on the relationships of microbes and disease. How was he able to galvanize the other forces to support his own research? Latour shows Pasteur's efforts to win over the French public—the farmers, industrialists, politicians, and much of the scientific establishment.

Instead of reducing science to a given social environment, Latour tries to show the simultaneous building of a society and its scientific facts. The first section of the book, which retells the story of Pasteur, is a vivid description of an approach to science whose theoretical implications go far beyond a particular case study. In the second part of the book, "Irreductions," Latour sets out his notion of the dynamics of conflict and interaction, of the "relation of forces." Latour's method of analysis cuts across and through the boundaries of the established disciplines of sociology, history, and the philosophy of science, to reveal how it is possible not to make the distinction between reason and force. Instead of leading to sociological reductionism, this method leads to an unexpected irreductionism.

Part One

War and Peace of Microbes

Introduction

Materials and Methods

From War Machines to War and Peace

On October 6, 1812, Kutuzov, general of the Russian troops, won a major battle in Tarutino over the Grande Armée led by Napoleon. At least, this was the impression gathered in Saint Petersburg by the czar, who offered Kutuzov a diamond star, his chief of staff, Benningsen, diamonds and a hundred thousand roubles in cash, and promotion to many of his officers. It was also the impression gathered by the French, who took this brief encounter with the Cossacks of Orlov-Denissov as a major defeat. Tolstoy, who writes about the battle in War and Peace, is not quite sure that it took place at all. He is sure, however, that Kutuzov did not want to fight it; rather he tried to delay it for several weeks: “Despite all his supposed power, his intellect, his experience and his knowledge of men, Kutuzov … could no longer restrain the inescapable move forward, and gave the order for what he regarded as useless and mischievous—gave his assent, that is, to the accomplished facts” (p. 1175).¹

Even after accepting the fait accompli and signing the command, Kutuzov kept stopping his troops every hundred feet for three-quarters of an hour! “The dispositions as drawn by Toll were perfectly satisfactory. Just as for the battle of Austerlitz it was stated—though not in German this time—that ‘the first column will proceed this way and that way, the second column will proceed to this place and that place,’ and so on …. Everything had been admirably thought out, as dispositions always are, and as is always the case not a single column reached its objective at the appointed time” (p. 1176). “That’s how things always are with us—the cart before the horse!” (p. 1183). Indeed, no one during the battle knew for sure which was the horse and which the cart, the action continually drifting away from what was intended. On October 2, after Kutuzov had been forced to act against his better judgment, his signed order kept being diverted. The young officer who held it got lost and could not find the generals; eventually he arrived late at night at a mansion between the front lines where, to his surprise, the high staff were carousing. When in the morning Kutuzov got up to fight a battle he did not want to fight, he discovered to his fury that not a single soldier was prepared. No officer had received any marching orders. On the whole, however, Tolstoy considered that the battle—though not planned, not decided upon, and not fought—was a success from the Russians’ point of view: “It would be difficult and even impossible to imagine any issue of that battle more opportune than its actual outcome. With a minimum of effort and at the cost of trifling losses, despite almost unexampled muddle the most important results of the whole campaign were obtained” (p. 1184).

What is this talk about attribution of responsibility, multitude of people, and missing orders? Are we not talking about strategy—the epitome of planned action—and about military chains of command—the most ordered system of direction there is? Indeed we are, but Tolstoy has forever subverted the notion of leader, strategy, and chain of command: “If in the accounts given us by historians, especially French historians, we find their wars and battles conforming to previously prescribed plans, the only conclusion to be drawn is that their accounts are not true” (p. 1184).

So what conclusion should we draw when we hear historians, especially French historians, describe not the victory or defeat of Napoleon but the victories of Pasteur, that other French genius, over the microbes? On June 2, 1881, in the little village of Pouilly-le-Fort in Beauce, Louis Pasteur defeated a terrible disease of sheep and cows, called anthrax. A friend of Pasteur’s gives this account: “Pouilly-le-Fort is as famous today as any other battlefield. Monsieur Pasteur, a new Apollo, was not afraid to deliver oracles, more certain of success than that child of poetry would be. In a program laid out in advance, everything that was to happen was announced with a confidence that simply looked like audacity, for here the oracle was pronounced by science itself, that is to say, it was the expression of a long series of experiments, of which the unvarying constancy of the results proved with absolute certainty the truth of the law discovered” (Bouley: 1883, p. 439). The strategy was conceived entirely in advance; Pasteur concocted it and had every detail figured out; it went according to plan, following a strict order of command from Pasteur to the sheep by way of his assistants and the caretakers. Following Tolstoy’s advice, we can say that such an account has to be false. We do not know what happened, but we can be sure that a multitude of people took part in the work and that a subtle translation, or “drift,” of their intentions led them to the little village in order to watch vaccinated and unvaccinated sheep withstand tests.

We would like science to be free of war and politics. At least, we would like to make decisions other than through compromise, drift, and uncertainty. We would like to feel that somewhere, in addition to the chaotic confusion of power relations, there are rational relations. In addition to Tarutino, we would have Pouilly-le-Fort. Surrounded by violence and disputation, we would like to see clearings—whether isolated or connected—from which would emerge incontrovertible, effective actions. To this end we have created, in a single movement, politics on one side and science or technoscience on the other (Shapin and Schaffer: 1985). The Enlightenment is about extending these clearings until they cover the world.

Few people still believe in such an Enlightenment, for at least one reason.² Within these enlightened clearings we have seen developing the whole arsenal of argumentation, violence, and politics. Instead of diminishing, this arsenal has been vastly enlarged. Wars of science, coming on top of wars of religion, are now the rage. “Thanatocracy” is the word that Michel Serres had to forge to name our disappointment in the redeeming virtue of science.³ Few people still believe in the advent of the Enlightenment, but nobody has yet recovered from this loss of faith. Not to believe in it is to feel that we have been thrown back into the Dark Ages.

We cannot count on epistemology to get us over this disappointment. Although epistemologies have varied over time, they have always been war machines defending science against its enemies—first in the good old days against religion, then against some of the illusions generated by too much optimism in science itself, still later against the dangers that totalitarian states represent for the autonomy of free scientific inquiry, and finally against the abuses of science distorted by politicians or corporate interests. These polemical versions of what science is and should be are convenient to fight the barbarians and keep them at arm’s length; they are of no avail for describing what a polemic is and how science and war have come to be so intermingled. Epistemologists, like generals, are always one war too late. The problem is no longer to defend science against religion, abuses, brown-shirts, or devious corporate interests. The problem we now face is to understand that obscure mixture of war and peace in which laboratories are only one source of science and politics among many sources. Agnosticism in matters of science is the only way to start without being trapped on one side of the many wars being fought by the guardians of science’s borders.

Even if few people still believe in the naive view, courageously defended by epistemologists, that sets science apart from noise and disorder, others would still like to provide a rational version of scientific strategy, to offer clear-cut explanations of how it develops and why it works. They would like to attribute definite interests to the social groups that shape science, to endow them with explicit boundaries, and to reconstruct a strict chain of command going from macrostructures to the fine grain of science. Even if we have to give up our beliefs in science, some of us still wish to retain the hope that another science, that of society and history, might explain science. Alas, as Tolstoy shows us, we do not know how to describe war and politics any better than we know how to explain science. To offer well-conceived Machiavellian strategies to explain science is as meaningless as to write “Die erste Colonne marschiert, die zweite Colonne marschiert.” Our problem in simultaneously describing wars of science, religion, and politics comes from the fact that we have no idea how to describe any war without adding to it the result of a science: strategy, history, sociology, theology, or economics.⁴

To understand simultaneously science and society, we have to describe war and peace in a different way, without ourselves waging another war or believing once again that science offers a miraculous peace of mind. Appealing to an example from an earlier period might help us find a way out. To reestablish democracy in the troubled time of the religious wars, Spinoza had to become agnostic as far as the biblical text was concerned and to devise new ways of understanding the shocking mixture of evangelical messages and massacres. His new style of biblical exegesis in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus points to a solution different from those offered by beliefs in religion or the sciences (be they natural or social).⁵ Here I deal with scientific wars by using resources offered by an exegesis of scientific texts. My “Tractatus Scientifico-Politicus,” instead of clearly dividing science from the rest of society, reason from force, makes no a-priori distinction among the various allies that are summoned in times of war. Recognizing the similarity among allies, I offer no a-priori definition of what is strong and what is weak. I start with the assumption that everything is involved in a relation of forces but that I have no idea at all of precisely what a force is.⁶

To make this new tack perfectly clear, I take it twice. In the first part of the book I study a series of texts taken from a famous historical battle. In the second part, I work out the principles to show how other politicoscientific mixtures can be studied in the same way. To use outdated terms, the first part of the book is more empirical, the second part more theoretical. To use more appropriate words, the first part pertains to the literary genre of sociology or social history, the second to that of philosophy. Instead of dividing the realm into those who empirically study science in the making and those who claim to guard the borders or establish the foundations of science, I combine the two, and it is together that they should stand or fall.⁷

How Are We to Dispute an Indisputable Science?

It has always seemed that if a science were not independent of politics, something would be missing and the sky would fall on our heads. To show that the sky holds up perfectly well on its own, we have to be able to prove in a particular scientific discipline that belief in the sciences, like the old belief in God, is a “superfluous hypothesis.” We have to give evidence that “science” and “society” are both explained more adequately by an analysis of the relations among forces and that they become mutually inexplicable and opaque when made to stand apart.

The only way to demonstrate a proof that might win consent is to take an example that is as far removed as possible from the thesis I am trying to prove. We have to take a radical, unchallengeable scientific revolution, one that has profoundly transformed society and yet owes it very little. There are a number of reasons for believing that there is no better example than that of the revolution introduced into medicine, biology, and hygiene by the work of Louis Pasteur.

First, this revolution took place at the high point of the scientific religion. Indeed, for some decades between the Franco-Prussian War and World War One, it seemed reasonable to expect the sciences to eliminate political dispute. Second, no one—except extreme cynics—can doubt the value of Pasteur’s discoveries to medicine. All of the other technological conquests have their embittered critics and malcontents—not to mention those suffering from radiation—but to prevent children from dying from terrible diseases has never been seen as anything other than an advantage—except, of course, by the microbes of those diseases. Up to our own time biology has derived its prestige from its influence on health (and most of its income from the social security system). Third, in no other scientific or technological innovation has there been so short a route between fundamental research and its rapid, far-reaching application—so much so that it is reasonable to wonder whether this is not the only example, which has been exaggerated into a general law. All the other sciences either influence only sections of society or require such a long-term mediation that in the end industry or the military always intervenes. Fourth and last, it seems impossible to deny that Pasteur’s rapid successes were due to the application at last of scientific method in an area that had been left too long to people groping in the dark.⁸ Most people would agree that, with Pasteur, the medical art became a science. The Pasteur blitzkrieg, in striking contrast to the physicians’ and surgeons’ blind struggle against an invisible enemy, reveals a convincing scientific manner, free of compromise, tinkering, and controversy. In sum, it is an indisputable case and and therefore a perfect example for my argument.

But what does “explaining” this example mean? To explain does not mean to confine the analysis to the “influences” exerted “on” Pasteur or to the “social conditions” that “accelerated” or “slowed down” his successes. To do so would once again be to filter the content of a science, keeping only its social “environment.” Just as we cannot explain a myth, a ritual, or a custom connected with hunting simply by recopying or repeating it, so we cannot explain a science by paraphrasing its results. In other words, to explain the science of the Pasteurians, we must describe it without resorting to any of the terms of the tribe.⁹

But where can we find the concepts, the words, the tools that will make our explanation independent of the science under study? I must admit that there is no established stock of such concepts, especially not in the so-called human sciences, particularly sociology. Invented at the same period and by the same people as scientism, sociology is powerless to understand the skills from which it has so long been separated. Of the sociology of the sciences I can therefore say, “Protect me from my friends; I shall deal with my enemies,” for if we set out to explain the sciences, it may well be that the social sciences will suffer first. What we have to do is not to explain bacteriology in sociological terms but to make those two logoi once more unrecognizable.

In order to make my case, I seem to be putting myself in an indefensible position. I shall try to explain the least controversial episode in the history of the sciences without bypassing its technical content and without refusing the help that the social sciences might like to offer. The conditions of failure, at least, are clear enough. I shall fail in three cases: if this analysis becomes a sociologizing reduction of a science to its “social conditions,” if it offers a satisfactory analysis of the applications of Pasteurism but not of some of its technical content, or if it has recourse to notions and terms belonging to the folklore of the people studied (terms such as “proof,” “efficacy,” “demonstration,” “reality,” and “revolution”).¹⁰

A Method for Composing Our World

What will we talk about? Which actors will we begin with? What intentions and what interest will we attribute to them?¹¹ The method I use does not require us to decide in advance on a list of actors and possible actions. If we open the scientific literature of the time, we find stories that define for us who are the main actors, what happens to them, what trials they undergo. We do not have to decide for ourselves what makes up our world, who are the agents “really” acting in it, or what is the quality of the proofs they impose upon one another. Nor do we have to know in advance what is important and what is negligible and what causes shifts in the battle we observe around us. Semiotic studies of the texts of the time will do the job of interdefinition for us. Take, for instance, this article by Tyndall: “Consider all the ills that these floating particles have inflicted on mankind, in historic and prehistoric times … This destructive action is continuing today and continued for centuries, without the slightest suspicion as to its causes being permitted to the sick world. We have been struck by invisible scourges, we have fallen into ambushes, and it is only today that the light of science is reaching those terrible oppressors” (1877, p. 800).¹²

Without any other presuppositions, we can take this sentence as our beginning and study it with the tools offered by semiotics. Tyndall defines actors. Are they human or nonhuman? Nonhuman. What do they want? Evil. What do they do? They lie in wait. Since when? Since the beginning of time. What has happened? An event: they have become visible. What has made them visible? Science, another actor, which must in turn be recorded and defined by its performances.¹³

The fact that we do not know in advance what the world is made up of is not a reason for refusing to make a start, because other storytellers seem to know and are constantly defining the actors that surround them—what they want, what causes them, and the ways in which they can be weakened or linked together. These storytellers attribute causes, date events, endow entities with qualities, classify actors. The analyst does not need to know more than they; he has only to begin at any point, by recording what each actor says of the others. He should not try to be reasonable and to impose some predetermined sociology on the sometimes bizarre interdefinition offered by the writers studied. The only task of the analyst is to follow the transformations that the actors convened in the stories are undergoing. For instance, an anonymous editorial, written just after the Franco-Prussian War, states: “It is science and the scientific spirit that have conquered us. Without a complete resurrection of the great French science of former times, there is no possible salvation” (1872, p. 102).

Is this an “ideological” rendering of what really caused the French defeat?¹⁴ Is it a “false” representation of what happened? Is this a pure “expression” of late nineteenth-century scientism? The analyst does not have to know. In 1872 the editorialist attributed defeat to a lack of science. This attribution is enough for us to be able to follow the drift at work in the editorial. You want revenge? asks the writer. For that, you need soldiers. In order to have soldiers, you need healthy Frenchmen. But what is it that wa...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Part One. War and Peace of Microbes
• Part Two. Irreductions
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Figures
• Index