12-GIVE ME A LAB

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6Give Me a LaboratoryandI will Raise he WorldBruno LatourcoledesMines.Paris

Now that field studiesof laboratorypractices restarting o pour in, weare beginning to have a better picture of what scientists do inside thewalls of these strange placescalled 'laboratories' (Knorr-Cetina, thisvolume). But a new problem h emerged. f we arenot able o followup our participant-observationtudies ar enough o take in questionsoutside the laboratory, we are at greatrisk of falling back into the so-called'internalist' vision of science.From the very beginnings fthesemicrostudies, this criticism was levelled at us by scholarspreoccupiedby largerproblemssuch as science olicy, history of science, r morebroadly, what is known asScience, echnoloryand Society STS).Forsuch topics, laboratory studies seemedutterly irrelevant. At tlte time,our critics were largely wrong becausewe first of all had to penetratetheseblack boxes,and to get firsthand observationsof the daily activityof scientists.This was the foremost priority. The result, to summarize tin one sentence,was that nothing extraordinary and nothing'scientific'was happening nside Jresacredwalls of these emples Knorr, l98l).After a few years of studies, however, our critics would be right inraising again the nave but nagging question: if nothing scientific ishappening n laboratories,why are there aboratories o begin with andAuthor's note: Many axguments evelopedhere are commentaries n ideasdiscussedwith my colleagueMichel Callon. I wish to thank Mark Smith for hisassistancen preparing he manuscript.


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*h1. strangely nough, s the societysurroundinghem paying or theseplaceswherenothing specials produced?Thequestionappearsnnocent enough,but is actuallya rather rickyone because here is a division of labour between scholarsstudyingorganizations,nstitutions, public pocy on the one hand, and peoplestudying micronegotiations nside scientific disciplines on the other. Itis truly difficult to seecommon elementsbetween the analysisof thelaetrile controversy (Nelkin, 1979) and the semiotic study of a singlescientific text (Bastide, 1981); between the study of indicators or

following the growth of R&D and the history of the gravitationalwavedetector (Coilins, 1975); or between the Windscale nquiry and thedecipheringof the mutteringsof a few scientistsduring a chat at a bench(Lynch, 1982); it is so hard to graspcommon featuresamong theseinterests, hat people end to think that there are ndeed'macroscopic'problems,and that the two setsof issues ught to be treateddifferenfly,with different methods, by different breedsof scholars.This belief in areal differenceof scalebetweenmacro- and micro-objects n societyis common among sociologists Knorr and Cicourel, l98l), but isespeciallystrong in sociology of science.Many analystsof STS areproud of not entering at all into tfte content of science nd into themicrolevel of scientific negotiations, while, at the other end of thespectrum,some analystsclaim that they are interestedonly in con-troversies etweenscientists Collins, 1982),or evenclaimthat there sno society at all or at least no macrosociety about which somethingseriouscould be uttered (Woolgar,1981). The funny thing about thismisunderstanding s that it reproduceson slightly different grounds heage-oldpolemic between internalist' and 'externalist'in the study ofscienceand technology. While the debatesof earlier times opposed'sociai influences' o 'purely internal development' n accounting orthe movementof scientificdisciplines, eopleare now opposing'publicpolicy', 'large-scaleeconomic push and pull' to 'micronegotiations','opportunism' and 'laboratory folklore'. The terms have changed, hebelief in the 'scientificity' of sciencehas disappeared, ut the samerespect or the boundariesof scientific activity is manifestedby bothschools fthought.The time has now comefor the analystsof scientistsat work to dealwith the naive but fair criticism put to them by scholars nterested n'macro' issues. ut there s of courseno way that wecaneasily nciliatesuchprofoundly different perspectives nd methods. n particular, t isimpossible or observers sed to laboratory studies o leave his firmgroundwhere so much has beenachieved nd simply dive nto'macro'


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Give me a laboratory...problems,computinggrossnationalproduct percentages,itationsandrewardsand so on. If we do deal with thesequestionst will be on ourown terms.In this chapter, I would like to proposea simple ine of enquiry: thatis, to stick with the methodology developedduring laboratory fieldstudies, ocusing t not on the laboratory tselfbut on the constructionof the laboratory and its position in the societalmilieu (Callon,1982).Indeed, hope to convince he reader hat the very differencebetweenthe 'inside' and the 'outside'. and the difference of scale between'micro' and 'macro' levels, s preciselywhat laboratoriesare built todestabilize or undo. So much so, that without keeping back the dis-coverieswe made while studying laboratory practiceswe can reassessthe so-calledmacro'probiemsmuch more clearly han beforeandeventhrow some ight on the very construction of macroactors hemselves.I simply beg the readers o put aside or a time their belief in anyrealdifferencebetweenmicro- and macroactors t least for the readineofthis paper Callonand I-atour, 1981).

I. 'Give me a place o standand I will move the earth'To illustrate my argument will extract an example rom a recent studydone n the history of scienceLatour, 1981a).We are n the year 1881the French semi-popularand scientific press s full of articlesabout thework being done n a certain aboratory, that of Monsieur Pasteurat thecole Normale Suprieure.Day after day, week after week, ournalists,fellow scientists, physicians and hygienists focus their attention onwhat is happeningto a few colonies of microbes n different mediums,under the microscope, inside inoculated animals, in the hands of afew scientists. The mere existence of this enoilnous interest showsthe irrelevance of too sharp a distinction between t}te 'inside' andthe 'outside' of Pasteur's ab. What is relevant is the short circuitestablishedbetweenmany goups usually uninterestedby what happensinside laboratory walls, and laboratories usually isolated and insulatedfrom such attention and psion. Somehow,something s happening nthese dishes hat seemsdirectly essential o the projects of thesemanygoups expressingheir concern n the journals.This interest of outsiders or lab experiments s not a given: it is theresult of Pasteur'swork in enrolling and enlisting them. This is worthemphasizingsince there is a quarrel amongsociologistsof scienceaboutthe possibility of imputing interests to people. Some, espocially the

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t44 Briln() L.t!()urEdinburgh school, claim that we can impute interests to social groupsgiven a general dea of what the groups are, what society is made of,and evenwhat the nature of man is like. But others(Woolgar,1981)deny the possibility of such imputation on the grounds hat we do nothave any independant way of knowing what the groups are, whatsociety is after and what the nature of man is like. This dispute, likemost, misses the fundamental point. Of course there is no way ofknowing which are the groups, what they want and what man is,but this does not stop anyone from convincing others of what theirinterestsare and what they ought to want and to be. He who is able totranslate others' interests into his own languagecarries the day. It isespecially mportant not to rely on any scienceof society or scienceofman to impute interestsbecauseas I will show, sciences re one of themost convincing tools to persuadeothers of who they are and whatthey should want. A sociolory of science s crippled from the start ifit believes n the results of one science,namely sociolory, to explainthe others. But it is still possible to follow how sciencesare used totransform society and redefinewhat it is made of and what are ts aims.So it is uselesso look for the pro{it that people can reap from beinginterested n Pasteur's aboratory. Their interestsare a consequence ndnot a causeof Pasteur'sefforts to translatewhat they want or what hemakes them want. They haveno a priori reason o be interested at all,but Pasteurhas found them more than one reason.

l. Move one: captuing others'interestsHow has Pasteursucceeded n capturing the interests of other indif-ferent groups?By the samemethod he has alwaysused Geison,1974;Salomon-Bayet,1982). He transfershimself and his laboratory into themist of a world untouchedby laboratory science.Beer,wine, vinegar,diseasesof silk worms, antisepsy and later asepsy,had already beentreated tfuough thesemoves.Once more he does the samewith a newproblem: anthrax. The anthrax diseasew said to be terrible forFrench cattle. This 'terrible' character was 'proven' by statistics toofficials, veterinariansand farmers and their concernswere voiced bythe many agricultural societiesof the time. This diseasewas studied bystatisticians and veterinarians,but laboratory practice had no bearingon it before Pasteur, Koch and their disciples.At the time, diseaseswere local events hat were to be studied with all possiblettention bytaking into account all the possiblevariables the soil, the winds, the


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Givemea aboratory... 145weather, the farming system,and even the individual fields, animalsandfarmers. Veterinary doctors knew these idiosyncrasies,but it was acareful, variable, prudent and uncertain knowledge. The diseasewasunpredictable, and lecurred according to no clear pattern, reinforcingthe idea that local idiosyncrasieshad to be taken into account. Thismultifactorial approach made everyone extremely suspicious of anyattempt to cut through all these diosyncrasiesand to link one diseasewith any singlecause,such as a micro-organism. Diseasesike anthrax,with all their variations, were typically what w thought not to berelated to laboratory science.A lab in Paris and a farm in Beaucehavenothing in common. They are mutually uninteresting.But interests, like everything else, can be constructed. Using thework of many predecessors ho had already started to link laboratoriesand anthrax disease,Pasteur goes one step further and works in amakeshift laboratory right on the farm site. No two placescould bemore foreign to one another than a dirty, smelling,noisy, disorganizednineteenth-century animal farm and the obsessively lean Pasteurianlaboratory. In the first, big animals are parasited n seemingly randomfashion by invisible diseases;n the second, micro-organismsare madevisible to the observer's eye. One is made to grow big animals, theother to grow small animals.Pasteur the 'shepherd'in French) is oftenseen n the enthusiasmof the moment as the inventor of a new animalhusbandry and a new agriculture, but at the time these two forms oflivestock have little relation to one another. Once out in the field,however, Pasteurand his assistantseam from the field conditions andthe veterinariansand start creating these relations. They are interestedin pinpointing all the variations in the onset and timing of the out-breaks of anthrax and in seeinghow far these could fit with their oneliving cause, he antfuax bacillus. They learn from the field, translatingeach tem of veterinary sciencento their own terms so that working ontheir terms is alsoworking on the {ield. For instance,the spore of thebacillus (shown by Koch) is the translation through which dormantIelds can suddenly become infectious even after many years. The'spore phase' s the laboratory translation of the 'infected field' in thefarmer's language.The Pasteuriansstart by learning this languageandgiving one of their own names for each of the relevant elements ofthe farmer's life. They are interested in the field but still uselessanduninteresting or the farmers and their various spokesmen.


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1462. Move two: moving the leverage oint

from a weak to o sffongposition

BrunoLatour

At this point Pasteur,having situated his laboratory on the farm, isgoing to transfer it back to his main workplace at the cole NormaleSuprieure,taking with him one element of the field, the cultivatedbacillus. He is the master of one technique of farming that no farmerknows, microbe farming. This is enough to do what no farmer couldever have done: grow the bacillus in isolation and in such a largequan-tity that, although invisible, it becomes visible. Here again we have,because f laboratorypractice,a variationofscale: outside, n dre'real'world, inside the bodies, anthrax bacilli are mixed with millions ofother organismswith which they are n a constant stateof competition.This makes them doubly invisible. However, in Pasteur's aboratorysomething happens o the anthrax bacillus that never happenedbefore(I insist on these two points: something happens to the bacillus thatnever happenedbefore). Thanks to Pasteur'smethods of culture it isfreed from all competitorsand so growsexponentially,but, by growingso much, endsup, thanks o Koch's atermethod, n such argecoloniesthat a clear-cut pattern is made visible to the watchful eye of thescientist. The latter's skills are not miraculous.To achievesuch a resultyou only need to extract one micro-organism and to find a suitablemilieu. Thanks to these skills, the asymmetry in the scale of severalphenomena s modified: a micro-orgnism an kill vastly argercattle,one small laboratory can learn more about pure anthrax cultures thananyone before; the invisible micro-organism s made visible; the untilnow uninteresting scientist in his lab can talk with more authorityabout the anthrax bacillus than veterinariansever have before.The translation that allowsPasteur o transfer the anthrax diseaseohis laboratory in Paris is not a literal, word-for-word translation. Hetakes only one element with him, the micro-organism, and not thewhole farm, the smell, the cows, the willows along the pond or thefarmet's pretty daughter.With the microbe, however,he also drawsalong with him the now interested agriculturalsocieties.Why?Becausehaving designated he micro-organismas the living and pertinent cause,he can now reformulate farmers' interests n a new way: if you wish tosolveyour anthrax problem you have to pass hrough my laboratoryfirst. Like all translations there is a real displacement through thevarious versions.To go straight at anthrax, you should make a detourthrough Pasteur'sab. The anthrax diseasesnow at the ,coleNormaleSupdrieure.


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Give me a laboratory. .But this versionof the translation s still a weak one. In Pasteur'sab,there is a microbe, but anthrax infection is too disorderly a thing to beexplained with a singlecauseonly. So the outside nterestscould as well

say that the laboratory has no real bearing on the spreadof anthraxdisease, nd that it isjust plain arroganceor a scientist o claim that heholds the key to a real diseaseout there'. But Pasteur s able to make amore faithful translation than that. Inside the walls of his laboratory,he can indeed inoculate animalshe has chosenwith pure, much-dilutedculture of anthrax. This time, the outbreak of an epizootic is mimickedon a smaller scale entirely dominated by the charting and recordingdevicesof the Pasteurians. he few points deemedessentialare mitatedand reformulated so as to be scaled down. The animals die of themicrobes, and only of that, and epizootics are started at will. It cannow be said that Pasteurhas nsidehis laboratory, on a smallerscale,the 'anthrax disease'. he big difference s that 'outside'it is hard tostudy because he micro-organism is invisible and strikes in the dark,hidden among many other elements,while 'inside' the lab clear figurescan be drawn about a cause that is there for all to see, due to thetranslation.The changeof scalemakespossible reversal fthe actors'strengths; outside' animals, armersand veterinarianswere weaker thanthe invisible anthrax bacillus; nside Pasteur's ab, man becomes trongerthan the bacillus, and asa corollary, the scientist n his lab gets he edgeover the local, devoied, experiencedveterinarian. The translation hasbecome more credible and now reads: 'If you wish to solve youranthrax problem, come to my laboratory, becausehat's where theforces are reversed. f you don't (veterinariansor farmers) you will beeliminated.'But even at this point, the strength s so disproportionate etweenPasteur'ssingle ab and the multiplicity, complexity and economic sizeof the anthrax outbreaks, that no translation could last long enough okeep the aggregationof interest from falling apart. Peoplereadily givetheir attention to someonewho claims that he has he solution to theirproblems but are quick to take it back. Especially puzzling for allpractitioners and farmers, s the vaiation of the disease.Sometimes tkills, sometimes not, sometimes it is strong, sometimes weak. Nocontagionist heory can account for this variety. So Pasteur'swork,although interesting, could soon becomea curiosity or more precisely,a laboratory curiosity. It would not be the first time that scientistsattract attention, only to have nothing come out of it in the end.Microstudies remain 'micro', the interests captured for a time soongo to other translations from groups that succeed n enrolling them.

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148 Bruno LatourThis was especially true of medicine which at the time was tired ofcontinuous fashionsand fads(konard, 1977).But here Pasteurdoes somethingon chicken choleraand on antfuaxbacillus inside his laboratory that definitively modifies the hierarchybetween veterinary science and microbiolory. Once a geat manymicrobes are cultivated in pure forms in laboratories and submitted tonumerous trials to make them accelerate heir growth or die, a newpractical know-how is developed. n a few years,experimentersacquireskills in manipulating sets of materials hat never existed before. This isnew but not miraculous. Training microbes and domesticating hem isa craft like printing, electronics,blue-ribbon cooking or video art. Oncethese skills have accumulated inside laboratories, many cross-oversoccur that had no reason to occur anywhere else before. This is notbecause of any new cogritive attitude, or becausesuddenly peoplebecomeconsciousof micro-organisms hey were unawareof before. Itis simply that they are manipulating new objects and so acquiringnewskills n a new diosyncratic etting Knorr, l98l).The chanceencounter that madepossible he lust attenuated cultureof chicken cholera is well-known (Geison, 1974), but chance avoursonly well-prepared laboratories. Living causesof man-made diseasesundergo so many various trials that it is not that surprising f some ofthese trials leave some microbes alive but weak. This modificationwould have been invisible if the laboratory had not tried to imitate thesalient featuresof epizootics by inoculating many animals.The invisiblemodification of the invisible microbes is then made visible; chickenspreviously inoculated with the modified strain don't get cholera butthey resist inoculation of intact microbes. Submitting cultures ofchicken cholera to oxygen is enough to make them less virulent whenthey are inoculated into the animals. Vhat is made visible through thelab statistics is the chain of weakened microbes, then strengthenedmicrobes and eventually, strengthened animals. The result is thatlaboratories reno\ry ble o imitate thevariationof virulence.It is important to understand hat Pasteurnow doesmore and morethings inside his laboratory which are deemedrelevant by more andmore groups to their own interests. Cr-rltivating he microbes was acuriosity; reproducing epizootics in labs was nteresting; but varying atwill the virulenceof the microbes s fascinating.Even f they believed ncontagion, no one could with this one cause explain the randomnessof the effects. But Pasteur s not only the man who has proved therelaton of one microbe/one disease, e is also the one who h provedthat the infectiousnessof microbes could varv under conditions that


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Givemea laboratory... 149could be controlled, one of them being, for instance, a first encounterof the body with a weakened orm of the disease. his variation in thelaboratory is what makes he translationhard for others to dispute: thevariation was the most puzding element that previously justified thescepticism towards laboratory science, and made necessary a cleardifferentiation between an outside and inside, between a practical eveland a theoretical level. But it is precisely his variation tJratPasteurcanimitate most easily.He can attenuatea microbe;he can,by psing tthrough different speciesof animals,on the contrary, exalt its strength;he can oppose one weak form to a strong one, or even one microbialspecies o another. To sum up, he can do inside his laboratory whateveryone tries to do outside but, where everyone fails because hescale s too large, Pasteursucceeds ecausehe works on a small scale.Hygienists who comprise the largest relevant social movement of thattime are especially ascinatedby this imitated variation. They dealwithwhole cities and countries, rying to pinpoint why winds, soil, climates,diets, crowding, or different degreesof wealth accelerateor stop theevolution of epidemics.They all see- they are all led to see- in thePasteurianmicrocosmos what they are vainly trying to do at the macro-scopic level. The translation is now the following: 'If you wish tounderstand epizootics and soon thereafter epidemics, you have oneplace to go, Pasteur's aboratory, and one science o learn that will soonreplaceyours: microbiology.'As the reader is aware, I am multiplying the words 'inside' and'outside', 'micro' and 'macro', 'small scale'and 'large scale',so as tomake clear the destabilizing role of the laboratory. It is tfuoughlaboratory practices that ttre complex relations between microbes andcattle, the farmers and their cattle, the veterinariansand the farmers,the veterinarians and the biological sciences,are going to be trans-formed. Iarge interest groupsconsider that a set of lab studies talk tothem, help them and concem them. The broad concerns of Frenchhygiene and veterinary scienceswill be settled, they all say, insidePasteur's aboratory. This is the dramtic short circuit I started with:everyone s interested in lab experiments which a few yearsbefore hadnot the slightest relation to their fields. This attraction and capturewere madeby a double movement of Pasteur's aboratory to the Iieldand then from the field to the laboratory where a fresh source ofknow-how has been gained by manipulating a new material: pureculturesof microbes.


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1503. Move three: moving the world with the lever

Bruno Latour

But even at this stage,what w in the laboratory could have stayedthere. Thc macrocosmoss linked to the microcosmosof the laboratory,but a laboratory is never bigger than its walls and 'Pasteur'is still onlyone man with a few collaborators.No matter how great the interestsofmany social $oups for what is being done in one laboratory, there isnothing to stop interests from fading and dispersing f nothing morethan laboratory studies happens. If Pasteur stays too long inside hislaboratory and, for instance, shifts his researchprogramme using theanthrax microbe to learn things in biochemistry, like his discipleDuclaux, people could say: 'Well after all, it w just an ilterestingcuriosity!' It is only by hindsight that we say that in this year 1881,Pasteur nvented the first artificial vaccination. By doing so we forgetthat to do so it was necessaryo move still further, this time from thelaboratory to the field, from the microscale o the macroscale.As forall translations t is possibleand necessary o distort the meaningsbutnot to betray them entirely. Groups that accepted to passthroughPasteur'shands in order to solve their problems,nevertheless nly gothrough him to their own ends. They cannot stop in his laboratory.Pasteur, from the start of his career, was an expert at fosteridginterest groups and persuading heir members hat their interestswereinseparable rom his own. He usually achieved his fusion of interests(Callon, l98l) through the common use of some aboratory practices.With anthrax he does ust that but on a more grandiosescale,sincehe isnow attracting the attention of groups hat are the mouthpiece of largersocial movements (veterinary science,hygiene, soon medicine), andabout issues hat are the order of the day. As soon ashe hasperformedvaccinationsn his laboratory he organizesa field trial on a largerscale.This field experiment was organized under the auspices of theagriculturalsocieties.Their attention had been captured by Pasteur'sformer moves, but the translation ('solve your problems throughPasteur's ab') implied lhat their problemscould be solvedand not onlyPasteur's. o the translation s alsounderstoodn part as a contract, hecounterpart of which is now expected rom Pasteur.We are ready todisplaceall our interests hrough your methods and practices o thatwe can use them to reach our own goals.' This new tr4nslation (ordisplacement) s ashard to negotiateas he first one.Pasteurhasvaccinefor anthrax in his laboratory at Paris. But how can aboratory practicebe extended? n spite of all the nicetieswritten by epistemologists nthat point, the answer is simple: only by extending the laboratory


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Give me a laboratory. ..itself. Pasteurcannot ust hand out a few flasksof vaccine o farmersandsay: 'OK, it works in my lab, getby with that.'If he were o do that, itwould not work. The vaccination can work only on the condition thatthe farm chosen n the viilage of Pouilly le Fort for the field trial be insome crucial respects transformed according to the prescriptions ofPasteur'saboratory.A hard negotiationensues et\ileenPasteuriansndagricultural interests on the conditions of the experiment. How manyinoculations? Who will be the umpire? And so on. This negotiation issymmetrical to the initial one when Pasteurcame to the farm site, try-ing to extract the few pertinent elements of the disease hat he couldimitate inside his laboratory. Here, the problem is to find a compromisethat extends Pasteur's aboratory far enough - so that the vaccinationcan be repeatedand work - but which is still acceptable o the farmingrepresentativeso that it is seenasan extensionoflab science utside.If the extension s overreached, he vaccinationwill fail and Pasteurwillbe tfuown back inside his laboratory by the disappointed farmers. Ifthe extension s too modest, the same hing will happen: Pasteurwill beconsidered o be a lab scientistuninteresting or others' outside use.

The Pouilly le Fort feld trial is the most famousof all the dramaticproofs that Pasteurstagedn his long career.Themajor massmedia ofthe time were assembledon three successive ccasions o watch theunfolding of what w seenas Pasteur'sprediction. 'Staging'is the rightword because,n practice, t is the public showingof what has beenrehearsedmany times before in his laboratory. It is strictly speakingarepetition, but this time in front of an assembledpublic which haspreviously nvestedso much interestand is now expecting ts rewards.Even the best performer has stage fright, even f everything h beenwell rehearsed.ndeed this is what happened Geison,1974). But forthe media t was not seenas a performance,t w seenasa prophecy.The reason behind this be[ef shows us exactly why the distinctionbetween inside and outside of the laboratory is so misleading. f youisolate Pasteur's aboratory from the Pouilly le Fort farm, so that oneis the inside and the other is the outside world. then of course here isa miracle for all to see. n his lab Pasteursays, all vaccinatedanimalswill be alive by the end of May; all the untreated animalswill have diedby the end of May; and outside the lab the animals die or survive'.Miracle.Prophecy,asgood as hat of Apollo. But if you watch carefullythe prior displacement of the laboratory to capture farmers' interest,then to learn from veterinary sciences,hen to transform the farm backinto the guise of a laboratory, it is still interesting, extraordinarilycleverand ingenious, but it is not amtracle. I will show later that most

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152 Bruno Latourof the mystified versions of scientific activity come from overlookingsuchdisplacementsf laboratories.But there is still one step to make so that we reach our point ofdeparture: the anthrax outbreaks and their impact on French agri-culture. Remember that I said it w a 'terrible' disease.While sayingthis I heard my ethnomethodologist friends jumping on their chairsand screaming that no analyst should say that 'a disease s terrible'or that 'French agriculture' exists, but rather that these are socialconstructions. Indeed they are. Watch now how the Pasteurgroup isgoing to use these constructions to their advantageand to France's.Pouilly le Fort was a stagedexperiment to convince the investors inconfidence and later in money - that the translation made by Pasteurw a fair contract. 'If you want to solve your anthrax problem gothrough my microbiology.' But after Pouilly le Fort, everyone isconvinced hat the translation s now: 'If you want to saveyour animalsfrom anthrax, order a vaccine flask from Pasteur's aboratory, coleNormale Suprieure, ue d'ulm, Paris.' In other words, on the conditionthat you respecta limited set of laboratory practices disinfection,cleanliness,conservation, noculation gesture, timing and recording -you can extend to every French farm a laboratory product made atPasteur's ab. What was at first a capture of interest by a lab scientistis now extending through a network much like a commercial circuit -not quite since Pasteursends his doses free of charge- that spreadslaboratory products all over France.But is 'all over France' a social construction? Yes indeed: it is aconstruction made by statistics-gatheringnstitutions. Statistics is amajor science n the nineteenth century, and is what 'Pasteur',now thelabel for a larger crowd of Pasteurians, s going to use to watch thespread of the vaccine, and to bring to the still uncertain public a freshand more grandiosely staged proof of the eflicacy of the vaccine.Throughout France as t is geographicallymarked out by its centralizedbureaucracy, one can register on beautifully done maps and diagramsthe decree of anthrax wherever the vaccine is distributed. Iike anexperiment in the Pasteur lab, statisticians inside the office of theagricultural institutions are able to read on the charts the decreasingslopes hat mean, so they say, the decreaseof anthrax. In a few years,the transfer of the vaccineproduced in Pasteur's ab to all farms wasrecorded n the statisticsas he causeof the decline of anthrax. Withoutthese statistical institutions it would of coursehavebeenUtterly impos-sible to say whether the vaccinew of any use, as it would havebeenutterly impossible to detect the existenceof the diseaseo begin with.


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Givemea aboratory.. 153We have now reached the point we started from. French society, insome of its important pects, h been transformed through thedisplacements f a few laboratories.

II. Topolory of laboratory positioningI have chosen one example but many could be found in Pasteur'scareerand I am confident that every reader has many more of tlese inmind. The reason why we do not acknowledge hesemany examples sto be found in the way we treat science.We use a model of analysis hatrespects he very boundary between micro- and macroscale, etweeninside and outside, that sciencesare designed o not respect.We all seelaboratcjriesbut we ignore their construction, much like the Victorianswho watched kids crawling all over the place, but repressed he visionof sex as the causeof this proliferation. We are all prudish in mattersof science, social scientists included. Before drawing some generalconclusions about laboratories n the third part, let me propose a fewconcepts that would make us become essprudish and would help toliberate all the information that we cannot help having.

1. Dissolution of the insidefoutside dichotomyEven in the brief outline given above, the example I have chosen isenough to show that, at worst, the categoriesof insideand outsidearetotally shaken up and fragmented by lab positioning. But what wordcan be used that could help us to describewhat happened, ncludingthis reversion leading to the breaking down of inside/outside dichoto-mies? I have used several imes the words 'translation' or 'transfer','displacement' or 'metaphor', words that all say the same thing inIatin, Greek or Englistr(Serres,19741,Callon, 1975). One thing is suretfuoughout the story told above: everyactor you can think of has beento some extentdisplaced Armatte,l98l). Pasteur'sab is now in themiddle of agricultural interestswith which it had no relation before; inthe farms an element coming from Paris,vaccine lasks,has beenadded;veterinary doctors have modified their statusby promoting 'Pasteur's'scienceand the vaccine flasks: they now possess ne more weapon intheir black bags; and sheep and cows are now freed from a terribledeath: they can give more milk and more wool to the farmer and beslaughteredwith geater profit. In McNeil's terms (McNeil, 1976), the


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154 Bntno Latourdisplacement of microparasitesallows the macroparasites here thefarmers - to grow fatter by feeding off healthier cattle. By the sametoken all the macroparasitic chain of tax collectors, veterinarians,administrators and landlords prosper by feeding off the richer farmers(Serres,1980). One ast element s pushedout - the anthraxbacillus.Wherever he veterinarian comes the small parasitehas to go. In thissuccession f displacements, o one can saywhere the laboratory is andwhere the society ls. Indeed the question 'where?' is an irrelevant onewhen you deal with displacements rom a lab in Paris to some farmsthen back to Paris, drawing alongwith it the microbesand the farmers'interests; then to Pouilly le Fort where an extended repetition isstaged, then to the whole agricultural system through statistics andbureaucracy. But it is clear that the situation of the farms after themoves s not the sameas before. Through the leveragepoint of the lab,which is a moment in a dynamic process, he farm system has beendisplaced. t now includesa routine annualgesture, art ofwhich usedto be a laboratory practice and still is a lab product. Everyone haschanged, ncluding the 'whole society', to usecommon terms.This iswhy I used n the title a parody of Archimedes's amous motto: 'giveme a laboratory and I'll move the earth'. This metaphor of the leverto move something else s much more in keepingwith observation hanany dichotomy between a scienceand a society. n other words, t isthe same set of forces that drives people inside Pasteurian labs tostrengthenmicrobiology and outside to stage he Pouilly le Fort experi-ment or to modify French agriculture. What we will have to understandlater is why in ttis moment the laboratory gainsstrengthto modify thestateof affairs of all the other actors.Another reasonwhy the inside/outsidenotion is irrelevant, s that inthis example the laboratory positions tself preciselyso as o reproduceinside its walls an event that seems o be happeningonly outside- thefust move - and then to extend outside to all farmswhat seemso behappening only inside aboratories.As in some opological theorem, theinside and the outside world can reverse nto one another very easily.Naturally, the three relations outside, inside, outside again, are in noway identical. Only a few elements of the macroscopicepizootics arecaptured in the lab, only controlled epizooticson experimental animalsare done in the lab, only specific inoculation gesturesand vaccineinoculant are extracted out of the lab to be spreadto farms. That thismetaphorical drift, which is made of a succession f displacements ndchangesof scale (see below p.164), is the sourceof all innovations iswell known (Black, 1961). For our purposehere, t is enough o say


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Give me a laboralory..that each translation from one position to the next is seenby theapturedactors to be a faithful translation and not a betrayal, a defor-mation or somethingabsurd.For instance, he diseasen a Petri dish, nomatter how far away from the farm situation, is seen as a faithfultranslation, indeed the tnterpretation of anthrax disease.The samething is true when hygienists see equivalent the trials microbesundergo n Pasteur's ab, and the variationsof epidemics hat masses fpeople undergo in a large city like Paris. It is uselessrying to decide fthesetwo settingsare really equivalent- they are not since Paris s nota Petri dish - but they are deemedequivalentby those who insist thatif Pasteur solves his microscale problems the secondary macroscaleproblem will be solved. The negotiation on the equivalenceof non-equivalent situations is always what characterizes the spread of ascience,and what explains, most of the time, why there are so manylaboratories nvolved everytime a difficult negotiation h to be settled.For the vaccineto be effective, it has to spreadoutside in the 'realworld out t-here',as people say. This is what best shows the absurdityof the dichotomy between inside/outsideand the usefulnessof micro-studiesof science n understandingmacroissues.Most of the difficultiesassociatedwith scienceand technolory come from the idea that thereis a time when innovations are in laboratories, and another time whenthey are tried out in a new set of conditions which invalidate or verifythe efficacy of these nnovations. This is the 'adequatiorei et intellectus'that fascinates epistemologistsso much. As this example shows, thereality of it is more mundaneand lessmystical.First, the vaccineworks at Pouilly le Fort and then in other placesonly if in all theseplaces he same aboratory conditions areextendedthere beforehand.Scientific facts are like trains, they do not work offtheir rails. You can extend the rails and connect them but you cannotdrive a locomotive through a field. The best proof of this is that everytime the method of extension of the anthrax vaccinew modified, thevaccine did not work and Pasteur got bogged down in bitter con-troversy, for instance with the ltalians (Geison, 1974). His answerwasalways to check and see f everything w done according to the pre-scriptions of his lab. That the same thing can be repeated does notstrike me as miraculous, but it doesseem o be for all the peoplewhoimagine that facts get out of laboratorieswithout the extension of labpractices.But tlere is a secondreasonwhy the laboratories have no outside.The very existence of the anthrax disease n the first place, and thevery efficacy of the vaccine at the end of the story, are not 'outside'

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156 Bruno Lotourfacts given for all to see.They are, n both cases,he result ofthe priorexistence of statistical institutions having built an instrument (statisticsin this case),having extended their network through the whole Frenchadministration so ili to gather data, and having convinced all the officialsthat there wasa 'disease',a 'terrible' one, and that there wasa 'vaccine',an 'efficient' one. Most of the time when we talk about the outsideworld we are simply taking for granted the pior extension of a formersciencebuilt on the sameprinciple as the one we are studying. This iswhy lab studies n the end hold the key to the understandingof macro-problems,as will show at the end of this chapter.2. Playing havoc with differences of scaleBut if the inside/outside dichotomy does not hold true, what are wegoing to say about differences of scale which, the reader should bereminded, are at the origin of many discussionsn sociolory of science,since t is becauseof this belief in differencesof scale jrat microstudiesare accusedof missingsome essentialpoints? In the example I sketchedout above, we are never confronted with a social context on one handand a science, aboratory, or individual scientist on the other. We donot have a context influencing, or not influencing, a laboratory immunefrom social forces. This view, which is the dominant view amongmostsociologists, s exactly what is untenable. Of course,many goodscholarslike Geison could show why the fact that Pasteur is a Catholic, aconservative, a chemist, a Bonapartist, etc., do count (Farley andGeison, 1979). But this sort of analysis, no matter how careful andinteresting, would entirely miss the main point: ln his very scientifcwork, in the depth of his laboratory, Pasteur actively modifie's thesociety of his time and he does so directly - not indireclly - bydisplacingsome of its most important crctors.

Here again Pasteur is a paradigmatic example. As a politician hefailed so completely that he was unable to get more than a few votesthe few times he tried to get elected senator. But he has along withCarnot, and the Republic itself, the greatestnumber of streets bearinghis name in all French villagesand towns. This is also a nice symbol ofthe studies about Pasteur. f you look for examples of his 'politicking'politics, you will of courseflnd them but they arepoor, disappointing,and never in keeping with the importance of his scientific work. Thepoverty of your lindings will make readerssay that 'there is somethingelse n Pasteur, n his scientific achievements,hat escapes ll social or


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Givemea aboratory.. lS7political explanation'. Peoplewho would utter this ciich would indeedbe right. A poor critical explanation always protects science. This iswhy the more radical scientistswrite againstscience, he more scienceis mystiled and protected.To study Pasteur as a man acting on society, it is not necessary osearchfor political drives, for someshort-term monetary or symbolicprofits or for long-term chauvinistic motives. It is no use ooking forunconscious deologiesor devious drives (drives which, by some mys-tery, arc clear only to the analyst'seyes). t is no usemuckraking. Youjust have to look at what he does in his laboratory as a scientist. Tosummarizea long study in a nutshell (Iatour, 1981a),Pasteuraddstoall the forces that composedFrench society at the time a new force forwhich he is the only credible spokesman the microbe. You cannotbuild economic relations without this 'tertium quid' since lte microbe,if unknown, can bitter your beer, spoil your wine, make the mother ofyour vinegar sterile, bring back cholera with your goods,or kill yourfactbtum sent to India. You cannot build a hygienist social movementwithout it, sinceno matter what you do for the poor masses rowded nshanty towns, they will still die if you do not control this invisibleagent.You cannot establisheven nnocent relations between a motherand her son, or a lover and his mistress,and overlook the agent thatmakes the baby die of diptheria and h the client sent to the madhouse becauseof syphilis. You do not need to muckrake or look fordistorted ideologies o realize that a group of people, equipped with alaboratory - the ory place where the invisible agent s made visible-will easily be situated everywhere n all these relations, wherever themicrobe can be seen to intervene. If you reveal microbes as essentialactors in all social relations, then you need to make room for them,and for the people who show them and can eliminate them. Indeedthe more you want to get rid of the microbes, the more room youshould grant Pasteurians.This is not.false consciousness,his is notlooking for biasedworld views, his is just what the Pasteurians id andthe way they wereseenby all the other actors of the time.

The congenital weakness f the sociologt of science s its propensityto look for obvious statedpolitical motives and interests n one of theonly places, the laboratortes,where sourcesof Treshpolitics asyet un-recognizedas such are emerging. f by politics you meanelectionsandlaw, then Pasteur,as I have said, was not driven by pottical interests,except in a few marginal aspects of his science. Thus his science sprotected from enquiry and the myth of the autonomy of science ssaved. If by politics you mean to be the spokesmanof the forces you


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rJ8 Bruno Latourmould society with and of which you are the only credible and legitimate authority, then Pasteur s a fully political man. Indeed,he endowshimself with one of the most striking freshsourcesof power ever. Whocan imagine being the representativeof a crowd of invisible, dangerousforces able to strike anywhereand to make a shamblesof the presentstate of society, forces of which he is by definition the only credibleinterpreter and which only he can control? Everywhere Pasteurianlaboratories were established the only agecy able to kill thedangerousactors that were until then perverting efforts to make beer,vinegar, to perform surgery, to give birth, to milk a cow, to keep aregiment healthy and so on. It would be a weak conception of socioloryif tJle readerwere only to say that microbiolory 'hasan influence' or 'isinfluenced by the nineteenth-century social context'. Microbiologtlaboratoies are one of the few placeswhere the very composition ofthe social context hasbeenmetamorphosed. t is not a small endeavourto transform society so as o include microbesand microbe-watchersnits very fabric. If the reader s not convinced, hen he can compare hesudden moves made at the same time by socialist politicians, talkingon behalf of another crowd of new, dangerous, undisciplined anddisturbing forces for whom room should be made in society: thelabouring masses.The two powers are comparable in this essentialfeature: they are fresh sources of power for modifying society andcannot be explained by the state of the society at the time. Althoughthe two powers were mixed together at the time (Rozenkanz, 1972),it is clear that in political terms the influence of Pasteurian aboratoriesreached further, deeper, and more irreversibly since they could inter-vene n the daily details of life - spitting, boiling milk, washinghands-and at the macroscale rebuilding sewage ystems, olonizingcountries,rebuilding hospitals - without ever being clearly seenas statedpoliti-calpower.This transformation of what is the very composition of society canin no way be defined through distinctions of scales and of levels.Neither tlre historian nor the sociologist can distinguish he macrolevelof French society and the microlevel of the microbiology laboratory,since the latter is helping to redefine and displace the forrner. Thelaboratory positioning, as I insisted on eadier,was n no way inevitable.Pasteur could have failed to link his work on microbes to his manyclients' iaterests. Had he failed, then I agreethat the distinction oflevels would hold true; there would indeed be French agricultural,medical, social, political interests on the one hand, and the insulatedlaboratory of a disinterestedscientist at the cole Normale Supdrieure


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Give me a loboratory...on the other. ClaudeBernardhad sucha laboratory.But this was n noway Pasteur'sstrategy, and still lessthat of the larger lnstitut Pasteur,which was always situated in such a way that all the interested com-mercial, colonial, and medical interests had to pass through theirlaboratories to borrow the technics, the gestures, he products, thediagrostic kits that werenecessaryo further their own desires. abora-tories were set up everywhere:on the front line during the first worldwar in the trenches they largely made possible;before the colonistsarrived in the tropics, allowing the very survival of the white colonistsand their soldiers; n the surgery ward that was transformed from ateachingamphitheatrento a laboratory (Salomon-Bayet, 982);in theplants of the food industries in many public health services;nside thesmall offices of generalpractitioners; in the midst of farms,and so on.Give us laboratories and we will make possible he Great War withoutinfection, we will open tropical countries to colonization, we will makeFrance's army healthy, we will increase he number and strength ofher inhabitants, we will create new industries. Even blind and deafanalystswill see hese claims as 'social' activity, but on condition thatlaboratories areconsideredplaceswhere societyandpolitics arerenewedand transformed.

III. How the weakestbecomes he strongestWhat I have said about the example treated in Part I now leads us tothe more generalproblem of laboratory practice and of the relevanceof microstudies for understanding the 'large-scale'problems raisedby the field known as Science,Technologr and Society (STS). If Iwere to summarize the argumentpresented n Part II I could say thata sociolory of sciencehamstrings tself from the start: if, that is, ittakes or granted he differenceoflevels or ofscale between he'socialcontext' on the one hand and the laboratory or tlre 'scientific level' onthe other; and if it fails to study the very content of what is being doneinside the laboratories. I claim that, on the contrary, laboratoriesareamong the few placeswhere the differencesof scalearemade rrelevantand where the very content of the trials made within the walls of thelaboratory can alter the composition of society. The methodologicalconsequenceof this argument is, of course, ttrat we were right instarting with on-the-spot aboratory studiesand looking for a socioloryof the contents of science Iatour and Woolgar, 1979). It is not onlythe key to a sociologicalunderstandingofscience that is to be found in

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Bruno Latourlab studies, t is also, I believe, the key to a sociologicalunderstandingof society itself, since it is in laboratories that most new sourcesofpower are generated.Sociolory of sciencecannot always be borrowingfrom sociologr or social history the categoriesand concepts to recon-struct the 'social context' inside which scienceshould be understood.On the contrary, it is time for sociolory of science o show sociologistsand social historians how societiesare displacedand reformed with andthrough the very contents of science. But to do so, sociologistsofscientific practice should avoid being shy and sticking only to the levelof the laboratory (for this level does not exist) and being proud ofdiving inside laboratory walls, because laboratories are the placeswhere the inside/outside relations are reversed. n other words. sincelaboratorypracticesead us constantly nside/outside ndupside/down,we should be faithful to our field and follow our objects throughout alltheir transformations. This is simply good methodolory. But to do sowithout getting dazy, we should understand n more detail the strangetopology that laboratorypractices resent.The most difficult problem for understandingthis positioning oflaboratory practice s to definepreciselywhy it is that in the laboratoryand only there new sourcesof strength are generated.Using the meta-phor of the lever,why is a laboratory a solid lever and not a soft straw?In asking this question we are back to the problem of understandingwhat has been achieved hrough microstudies of science.Many answerswere given by epistemologistsbefore lab studies started pouring in. Itwas said that scientistshad specialmethods, specialminds, or in moreculturalist forms of racism, some kind of special culture. It w alwaysin something 'special', usually of a cogritive quality, that this sourceofstrength was explained.Of course, he moment sociologistswalked intolaboratories and started checking all these theories about the strengthof science, they just disappeared.Nothing special, nothing extra.ordinary, in fact nothing of any cognitive quality w occurring there.Epistemologistshad chosen he wrong objects, they looked for mentalaptitudes and ignored the material local setting, that is, laboratories.The same hing happenedwith most of the so-called Mertonian socio-logy. No special sociologicalrelations could explain anything about thestrength of science.The 'norms' faded away like the 'invisible college'and the 'precapitalist recognition of debt', and went into the limbowhere 'falsification', and the 'angels'sexes'are put for a well-deservedetemal rest. The first sociologistsmade the same mistakeasthe episte-mologists. They looked for something specialeverywhereexcept in themost obvious and striking place: the settings.Evenscientists hemselves


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Givemea aboratory... 161are more awareof what makes hem special han many analysts.Pasteur,for instance, a better sociologist and epistemologist han most, rtrotea kind of treatise on sociology of science simply pointing to tirelaboratory as the causeof the strength gainedby scientist over society(Pasteur,1871).l-aboratory studies have been successful,but so far only in thenegative sense of dissipating previous beliefs surrounding science.Nothing special s happening n the cogritive and in the social aspectoflaboratory practice. Knorr-Cetina has reviewed his (this volume,ch. 5)and there is nothing much else to add, nothing except that we nowhave to explain what happens n laboratories that makes them suchan irreplaceable source of political strength, strength which is notexplainedby any cogrritiveor socialpeculiarities.ln earlier work (Latour and Fabbri, 1977; Latour and Woolgar,1979),I have ndicated a line of enquiry to answer his most tricky ofall questions.This approachcan be summedup by the sentence: ook atthe insciption devices. No matter if people talk about quasars,grossnational products, statistics on antJrrax epizootic microbes, DNA orsubparticlephysics; the only way they can talk and not be underminedby counter-arguments plausible as their own statements s if, andonly if, they can make the things ttrey say they are talking about easilyreadable.No matter the size,cost, length, and width of the instrumentsthey build, the final end product of all these inscription devices salwaysa written trace that makes lre perceptive udgment of the otherssimpler. The race for the invention of these nscription devicesand forthe simplification of the inscriptions provided leads either to simpleforms (dots, bands,peaksand spots) or, evenbetter, to another writtentext directly readable on the surface of the inscription. The result oftlis exclusive nterest in inscriptions is a text that limits t}re number ofcounter-argumentsby displaying, for each difficult displacement,oneof thesesimplified inscriptions(diagrams, ables,pictures). The purposeof the construction of this double text that includes argumentsandinscriptions is to alter the modalities a reader could add to the state-ments. Moving a modality from 'it is probable that A is B', to 'X hasshown that A is B', is enough to obtain a scientific 'fact' (Latour andWoolgar,1979: ch.2).This kind of enquiry had the immenseadvantageof revealingspecialfeatures of the laboratory - obsession or inscription devices andwriting specific types of texts - which left the rest of the setting com-pletely ordinary. To take up Feyerabend'ssaying: 'in the laboratoryanything goes,except the inscription devicesand the papers'.


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r62 Bruno LatourScientific fact is the product of average, rdinary peopleandsettings,linked to one another by no specialnonns or communication forms,but who work with inscription devices. This argument which at firstappearedreductionist and too simple h since received much moresupport and is now well established.Semiotics Bastide, l98l) hasdemonstratedhow far one can go in the content of scienceby lookingat this matter of the rext itself, but it is fro-n cogritive anthropolory,cogritive psychology, and history of science that stronger support isnow coming. The technolory of inscribing(writing, schooling,printing,

recording procedures) s seen by more and more analysts as the maincause of what was attributed in earlier times to 'cognitive' or 'vaguecultural' phenomena.The books of Jack Goody (1977), and above allof Elizabeth Eisenstein 1979), show well the extraordinary fecundityof looking at this material level that had escaped he attention ofepistemologists, historians, sociologists and anthropologists alikebecause nscription technology seemed o them to be too obvious andtoo 'light'. This mysterious thinking process hat seemed o float likean inaccessible host over social studies of scienceat last has lesh andbones and can be thorougltly examined. The mistake before was tooppose heary matter (or 'large-scale'infrastructures like in the first'materialist' studies of science) o spiritual, cogrritiveor thinking pro-cessesnstead of focusing on the most ubiquitous and lightest of allmaterials: he written one(Havelock,1981;Dagogrret, 973).But if we accept this approach, are rnr'e ot back again o the micro-level and far from the macroconcernsof all the other analysts n STS,preoccupied by serious things like disarmament, technolory transfer,sociolory of innovation or history of science?Looking at the inscrip-tions is interesting one could say,but it leavesus with a long way to goto explain how the strength is gained in laboratories to transform ordisplace societies. This is precisely why the first laboratory study Imade was weak; it was weak for a simple methodological reason. Ifocused on one laboratory, taking for gfanted its existence as a unitand its relevance o the outside. So I had no occasion o watch the mostpuztng procedure of all, how a set of inscription proceduresare madeto be relevant to issueswhich at first sight seem utterly foreign andmuch too grandiose,complicated or disorderly ever to end up on thetop of a desk in a few easily read diagramsand charts discussed uietlyby a few white-coated PhDs. The last point of this chapter will be toformulate, thanks to Pasteur's strategy, the simple answer to thispuzzJe, o simple ndeedthat it had escapedmy attention.The answer is visible if we bring together the three threadsof my


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Givemea oboratory... f63argument: the dissolution of the inside/outsideboundary; the inversionof scalesand levels;and finally the processof inscription. These hreethemespoint to the sameproblem: how a few peoplegain strength andgo inside someplaces o modify other placesand the life of the multitudes. Pasteur, or instance,and his few collaboratorscannot tackle theanthrax problem by moving all over France and gatheringan intimateknowledge of all the farms, farmers, animals and local idiosyncrasies.The only place where they are able and good workers s in their labora-tory. Outside they are worse at farming than the farmen and worse atveterinary medicine than the veterinarians.But they are expert insidetheir own walls at setting up trials and nstruments so that the invisibleactors- which they call microbes- show their movesand developmentin pictures so clear that even a child would see them. The invisiblebecomes visible and the 'thing' becomes a written trace they canread at will as f it were a text. This expertise, n their case, s alreadyobtained by a complete modification of the scale. As has been pre-viously explained, the microbe is invisible as ong as t is not cultivatedin isolation from its other competitors. As soon as t growsuninhibitedon an aptly chosen medium, it grows exponentially and makes tselflargeenough o be counted as small dots on the Petri dish. I don't knowwhat a microbe is, but counting dots with clear-cut edgeson a whitesurface is simple. The problem now is to link this expertise to thehealth field. I showed the solution earlier by these three-prongedmovements that displace he laboratory. The consequences clear. Bythese moves an epizootic occurs inside the laboratory walls that isdeemed relevant to the macroproblemsoutside. Again the scale of theproblem is reversed,but this time it's the 'macro' that is made smallenough to be dominated by the Pasteurians.Before this displacementand inversion that allowed Pasteurians o hook an expertise n settingup inscription devicesonto the health field, no one had everbeenableto master the courseof an epidemic.This 'mastery'meansthat eachevent - the inoculation, the outbreak of an epidemic, he vaccination,the counting of the dead and of the living, the timing, the places-becomes entirely readable by a few men who could agree amongthemselvesbecauseof the simplicity of eachperceptive udgment theywere able to make about simplediagramsand curves.The strength gained in the laboratory is not mysterious. A fewpeople much weaker than epidemics can become stronger if theychange the scale of the two actors - making the microbes big, andthe epizootic small - and others dominate the events through theinscription devices hat make each of the steps eadable.The changeof


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t64 Bruno Latourscaleentails an acceleration n the number of inscriptions you can get.Obtaining data on antfuax epidemicson the scaleof France was a slow,painstaking,and uncertainprocess.But in a year Pasteurcould multiplyanthrax outbreaks. No wonder that he becamestronger than veterina-rians. For every statistic they had, he could mobilize ten of them.Before Pasteur, heir statementscould be interrupted by any number ofother statementsust asplausibleas heirs. But when Pasteurcomesoutof his lab with this many Iigures who is able to mount a seriousattackagainsthim? Pasteurhasgainedstrength simply by nrodifying the scale.So, in discussions bout anthrax, Pasteurhas two sourcesof strength:the epizootic and the microbes. His opponents and predecessors adto work 'outside' on a 'large scale', constantly stabbed in the backhaphazardly by the invisible agent that made their statistics lookrandom. But Pasteur, by building his laboratory and inserting it inthe farms as we have seen, dominates the microbe - that he madebigger- and the epizootic - that he made smaller- and multiplies theexperiments at small cost without lening his laboratory. This con-centration of forces makeshim so much stronger than his competitorsthat they cannot even think of a counter-argumentexcept in the fewcases here, like Koch, they are equippedas well as he is.To understandthe reason why people pay so much for laboratorieswhich are actually ordinary places, one just has to consider theseplacesas nice technological devices o invert the hierarchy of forces.Thanl$ to a chain of displacements both of the laboratory and of theobjects - the scale of what peoplewant to talk about is modified so asto reach this best of all possiblescales: he inscription on a flat surfacewritten in simple forms and letters. Then everything they have to talkabout is not only visible, but alsoreadable,and can be easilypointed atby a few people who by doing this dominate. This is as simple and assufficient asArchimedes'spoint about moving the earth and making theweakest the strongest. t is simple ndeedbecausemaking simple movesis what this device s about. 'Accumulated knowledge' peoplesay withadmiration, but this acceleration s made possibleby a changeof scale,which in turn makes possible the multiplication of trials and errors.Certainty does not increase n a laboratory becausepeople in it aremore honest, more rigorous, or more 'falsificationist'. It is simply thatthey can make as many mistakes as they wish or simply more mistakesthan the others 'outside' who cannot master he changes f scale.Eachmistake is in turn archived,saved, ecorded,and made easily readableagain,whatever the specific field or topic may be. If a greatmany trialsare recorded and it is possible o makea sum of their inscriptions, that


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Givemea aboratorJt.. 165sum will always be more certain if it decreaseshe possibility of acompetitor raising a statement asplausibleas he oneyou are defending.That is enough. Whenyou sum up a seriesof mistakes,you are strongerthan anyonewho has been allowed fewer mistakes han you.This vision of the laboratory as a technologicaldevice o gainstrengthby multiplying mistakes, s made obvious if one ooks at the differencebetween a politician and a scientist. They are typically contrastedoncognitive or social grounds. The flust is said to be greedy, full of self-interest, short-sighted, vzzy, always ready to compromise,and shaky.The second is said to be disinterested, far-sighted, honest, or at leastrigorous, to talk cleuly and exactly and to look for certainty. Thesemany differences are all artificial projections of one, simple, materialthing. The politician hasno laboratory and the scientisth one. So thepolitician works on a full scale, with only one shot at a time, and isconstantly in the [melight. He gets by, and wins or loses out *rere'.The scientist works on scale models, multiplying the mistakes insidehis laboratory, hidden from public scrutiny. He can try as many timesas he wishes, and comes out only when he has made all the mistakesthat have helped him gain 'certainty'. No wonder that one does not'kno\ry' and the other 'knows'. The difference, however, is not in'knowledge'. If you cor-rldby chance reverse he positions, the samegreedy,short-sightedpolitician, once in a laboratory, is going to chumout exact scientific facts, and the honest, disinterested, rigorous,scientist put at the helm of a political structure that is full scale andwith no mistakes allowed will becomefvzzy, vncertain and weak likeeveryoneelse.The specificity of science s not to be found in cogritive,social or psychological qualities, but in the special construction oflaboratories in a manner which reverses he scale of phenomenaso asto make things readable, and then accelerates he frequency of trials,allowing many mistakes o be made and registered.That the laboratory setting is the cause of the strength gainedbyscientists s made still clearer when people want to establishelsewhereconclusions as certain as those reached n the laboratory. As I haveshown above, t can be said hat there is no outside to laboratories.Thebest thing one can do is to extend to other places the 'hierarchy offorces' that was once favourable inside the first laboratory. I showedthis for antluax but it is a general case.The mystification of sciencecomes most often from the idea that scientists are able to make'predictrons'. They work in their labs and, sure enough, somethinghappensoutside that verifies thesepredictions. The problem is that noone h ever been able to verify these predictions without extending


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r66 Bruno Latourfirst the conditions of verification that existed in the laboratory. Thevaccine extends on the condition that farms are transformed into anannex of Pasteur's ab and that the very statistical system that madeanthrax visible in the first place is used o verify if the vaccinehad anyeffect. We can watch the extension of laboratory conditions, and therepetition of the final trial that was favourable, but we cannot watchpredictions of scientistsextending themselvesbeyond laboratory walls(Iatour and Woolgar,1979: ch.4).If this seemscounter-intuitive to the reader, a little reasoningwillconvince him that every counter-example he can think of in factconforms to the position stated here.No one haseverseena laboratoryfact move outside unless he lab is first brought to bear on an 'outside'situation and that situation is transformed so that it fits laboratoryprescriptions. Every counter-example is a belief that such a thing ispossible.But a belief is not a proof. If the proof is giventhen the twoconditions I stated will alwaysbe verified. My confidence n this answeris not basedon presumptionbut on a simplescientific belief, sharedbyall my fellow scientists, that magic is impossible and that action ata distance is always a misrepresentation. Sciensts' predictions orprevisionsare alwayspost-dictions or repetitions. The confirmation ofthis obvious phenomenon is shown in scientilic controversieswhenscientists are forced to leave the solid ground of their laboratories.The moment they really get 'outside' they know nothing, they bluff,they fail, they get by, they lose all possibility to say anything that isnot immediately counter-attacked by swarms of equally plausiblestatements.The only way for a scientist to retain the strength gained nsidehislaboratory by the process have described s not to go outside wherehe would lose t at once. t is again ery simple.The solution sinnevergoing out. Does that mean that they are stuck in the few placeswherethey work? No. It means that they will do everything they can toextend to every setting some of the conditions that make possible hereproduction of favourable laboratory practices. Since scientific factsare made inside laboratories, n order to make them circulate you needto build costly networks inside which they can maintain their fragileefficacy. If this means ransformingsociety into a vast aboratory, thendo it. The spread of Pasteurian aboratories to all the places hat a fewdecadesbefore had nothing to do with science s good example of thisnetwork building. But a look at systems of Standard Weights andMeasures,called 'mtrologie' in French, is still more convincing. Mostof the work done in a laboratorv would stav there for ever if the


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Give me a laboratory...principal physical constants could not be made constant everywhereelse.Time, weight, ength, wavelength, tc., are extended o evermorelocalities and in ever gteaterdegreesof precision. Then and only then,laboratory experiments an be brought to bear on problemsoccurringin factories, he tool industry, economicsor hospitals.But if you justtry in a thought experiment to extend the simplest law of physics'outside', without first having extended and controlled all the mainconstants,you just could not verify it, just as it would have beenimpossible to know the existence of anthrax and to see he efficacy ofthe vaccine without the health statistics. This transformation of thewhole of society according o laboratory experiments s ignored bysociologists f science.There is no outsideof science ut there are ong, narrow networksthat make possible the circulation of scientific facts. Naturally thereason for this ignorance is easyto understand.Peoplethink that theuniversality of science is a given, because they forget to take intoaccount the size of the 'mtrologie'. Ignoring this transformation thatmakesall displacementspossible s like studying an enginewithout therailway or the freeway networks. The analog' is a good one since theseemingly simple work of maintaining the physical constantsconstantin a modern society s evaluated o be three imesmore than the effortof all the science nd technolory themselvesHunter, 1980). The costof making society conform to te inside of laboratories so that thelatter's activity can be made relevant to the society is constantlyforgotten, becausepeople do not want to see hat universality s a socialconstructionas'/ell Iatour, I 98 b).Once all these displacementsand transformations are taken intoaccount, the distincticn between the macrosocial evel and the level oflaboratory science ppeius iizzy or evennon-existent. ndeed, abora-tories are built to destroy this distnction. Once t is dissolved,a fewpeople can inside their insulated walls work on things that can changethe daily life of the multitudes. No matter if they are economists,physicists, geographers,epidemiologists,accountants, microbiologists,they make all the other objects on such a scale - maps, economicmodels, figures, tables, diagrams- that they can gain strength, reachincontrovertible conclusions, and then extend on a larger scale theconclusions hat seem avourable o them. It is apohticalprocess.ftl'snot a pohtical process. t is since they gain a sourceof power. It is notsince it is a source of fresh power that escapeshe routine and easydefinition of a stated political power. 'Give me a laboratory and I willmove society', I said, parodying fuchimedes. We now know why a

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168 Bntno Latourlaboratory s sucha good ever.But if I now parodyClausewitz'smotto,we will have a more complete picture: 'scienceis politics pursuedbyother means'. It is not politics since a power is always blocked byanother counter-power. What counts in laboratory sciencesare theother means, he fresh, unpredictablesourcesof displacements hat areall the more powerful because hey are ambiguousand unpredictable.Pasteur, representing the microbes and displacing everyone else, ismaking politics, but by other, unpredictablemeans hat force everyoneelse out, including the traditional political forces. We can now under-standwhy it w and is so mportant to stick to laboratory microstudies.In our modern societiesmost of the really fresh power comes fromsciences- no matter which - and not from the classicalpoliticalprocess.By staking all socialexplanationsofscience and technolory onthe classical view of politics and economics - profit, stated power,predictable evils or goods - analysts of sciencewho claim to study themacrolevels ail to understand precisely what is strong in scienceandtechnolory. In speakingof scientistswho makepolitics by other means,their boring and repetitive critique is always that they Just makepolitics', period. Their explanation falls short. The shortnessof it is inthe period - they stop where they should start. Why though are themeans different? To study these other means, one must get insidethe contents of the sciences.and inside the laboratories where thefuture reservoirsof political power are in the making. The challengeoflaboratories to sociologists s the same as the challengeof laboratoriesto society. They can displacesociety and recompose t by the verycontent of what is done nside them. which seemedat first irrelevant ortoo technical. The careful scrutiny of laboratory scientists cannot beignored and no one can jump from this 'level' to the macropoliticallevel since the latter gets all its really efficient sourcesof power fromthese very laboratories that have ust been deemeduninterestingor tootechnical to be analyzed.

But we can also understand why students of laboratory practicesshould not be shy and accept a vision of their own method that wouldlimit them to the laboratory, whereas he laboratory is just a momentin a seriesof displacementshat makes a complete shamblesout of theinside/outside and the macro/micro dichotomies. No matter howdivided they are on sociolory of science, he macroanalystsand themicroanalysts share one prejudice: that sciencestops or beginsat thelaboratory walls. T\e laboratory is a much trickier object than that,it is a much more efficient transformer of forces than that. fhat is whyby remaining faithful to his method, the microanalyst will end up


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Give me a laboratory...tackling macroissues s well, exactly like the scientistdoing lab experi-ments on microbeswho ends up modifying many details of the wholeof French society. Indeed, I think an argumentcould be made to showthat the existenceof the macrolevel tself, the famous'socialcontext',is a consequenceof the development of many scientific disciplines(Callon and [.atour, 1981). It is already clear to me that this is theonly way that sociology of sciencecan be rebuilt in keeping with theconstraints now set by laboratory studies. I also think that it is oneof the few ways that sociolory of science can teach something tosociolory instead of borrowing from it categoriesand social structuresthat the simplest laboratory is destroying and recomposing. t wouldbe high time, since the laboratory is more innovative in politics andin sociology than most sociologists(including many sociologists ofscience).We are only just starting to take up the challenge hat labora-tory practices resent or the study ofsociety.

ReferencesArmatte, Michel (1981) Camarche, es traductionsde 'homme au travail,Mdmoirede DEA. Paris:CNAM-STS.Bastide,Franoise 1981) 'Le Foie Lav,analyse miotique 'un texte scienti-fiqne',Le Bulletin, 2: 35-82.Black,Max (1961)Models and Metaphors, thaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Callon, Michel (1975) 'Les Oprationsde Traductions', n P. Roqueplo(ed.),Incidence des Rapports Sociaux sur le DveloppementScientiftque, Paris'.CNRS.Callon, Michel (1981) 'Strules and Negotiations o Define What is Problematicand What is Not: The SociologicTranslation', n K. Knorr, R. Krohn andR. Whitley (eds\,The Social hocess of Scientific Investigotion, Sociology of

the SciencesYearbook,vol. 4, Dordrecht: D. Reidel.Callon, Michel (1982)'La Mort d'un Laboratoire Saisipar I'Aventure Technolo-gique' (in preparation).Callon, Michel and Latour, Bruno (1981) 'Unscrewingthe Big Leviathan,or Howdo Actors Macrostructure Reality?', in K. D. Knorr-Cetina and A. Cicourel(eds'S,Advdncesn Social Theory and Methodology Towardan Integraton ofMicro and MacroSociologies,London: Routledgeand KegaaPaul.Collins,H. M. (1975) 'The SevenSexes:A Study n the Sociology f a Phenome-non or the Replication of Experiments n Physics', Sociology9 (2\: 205-24.

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Perspectivesonthe Sociql Studyof Science

editorsIT{RIND KNORR.CETINh&MICHAEIMUII3TY

)SACU Publications o London o Beverly Hills e New Delhi


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Copyright @ t9at tySAGE PublicationsLtdAll rights reserved.No part of this book may bereproduced or utilized in any form or by anymeans,electronicor mechanical,ncludingphotocopying,recording,or by any informationstorageand retrieval system,without permissionin writing from the Publishers.

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rsBN 0-8039-9782-5ISBN0-8039-9783-3bkPrinted n GrestBritrin byJ. W. Arrowsmith td., Bristol


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ContentsPrefaceI Introduction:EmergingPrinciplesn SocialStudiesof ScienceKarin D. Knon-Cetina ond Michael Mullav2 On the ConventionalCharacter f Knowledgeand CognitionBarry Barnes3 The 'Mooting' of ScienceStudies:Research rogrammes ndScience olicyDaryl E. Chubin and SalRestivo4 An Empirical Relativist Programme n theSociologyof ScientificKnowledgeH. M. Collins5 The EthnographicStudy of ScientificWork:Towardsa Constructivist nterpretationof ScienceKarin D. Knon-Cetina6 GiveMe a LaboratoryandI will Raise he WorldBruno Latour7 Why an Analysis of Scientific Discourse s NeededMichael Mullcay,JonathanPotter and Steven Yearley 17l8 TemporalOrder n LaboratoryWork

Michael Lynch, Ertc Livingston and Harold Garfinkel 2Os9 Irony in the SocialStudy ofScienceSteve lloolgar 239SubjectIndex 267

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12-GIVE ME A LAB

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