[French]Bruno Latour: Science in Action, translated by Liu Wenxuan and Zheng Kai, Dongfang Publishing House, 2005
Although for the original course in the sociology of science the only assignment was to report on Latour: Drawing things together, if I had not first gone through this book, it would have been truly impossible to imagine myself managing to read that article… um… now I’ve finally figured out what Latour wants to do~~
113[68] Any set-up or organizational structure, no matter how large or small, what sort of thing it is, or how much it costs, so long as it can provide any kind of visible display in a scientific text, I shall call an instrument (or inscription device【铭写装置】). …… This set-up or organizational structure provides a kind of inscription, which is used in a scientific text to serve as its final layer. (Visible evidence, hard facts)
115[69] What lies behind a scientific text? Inscriptions. How are these inscriptions obtained? Through the setting up of instruments. So long as there is no controversy, this other world lurking just beneath the text, the world of instruments, remains invisible. An image of the mountains and valleys on the moon is placed before us as if we could see them directly. But the telescope that makes them visible is itself invisible; likewise invisible is the fierce controversy Galileo had to set off centuries ago in order to produce an image of the moon.
132[79] What lies behind a claim? Texts. And behind texts? More texts, increasingly technical, because they introduce ever more papers. And behind articles? Layer upon layer of charts, records, labels, operating tables, and diagrams. And behind inscriptions? Instruments, which, whatever their appearance, whatever their age, and however much they cost, ultimately can paint, record, or draw all kinds of different traces. And behind instruments? All kinds of spokespeople, who comment on charts and “merely” state what they mean. And behind spokespeople? Great numbers of instruments. And behind these instruments? Tests of strength, which estimate the degree to which the links between representatives and the things or people for whom they speak can withstand resistance. Now not only are words lined up against dissenters, not only do charts support these words and citations, thereby supporting the whole assemblage of allies, and not only do instruments produce innumerable newer and clearer records; behind the instruments, new objects are also lined up, objects whose existence is explained by their resistance to the test.
[The Construction of Facts]
134[80] Figure 2.4
149[89] Of what are these famous things, supposedly behind the text, composed? They are composed of a series of victories: in the hydrogen sulfide match it defeated uranium and thorium; in the ammonium sulfate match it defeated antimony and arsenic; then it forced lead and copper to sink into a foamy sponge. Only bismuth made it through all the rounds into the semifinals, but it too was defeated in the final hot-and-cold showdown. Initially, “things” were scoreboards of a series of trials. …… The “things” behind scientific texts are therefore similar to the hero we saw in the story at the end of Chapter 1: they are all defined by their performance. …… At the beginning, there was no other way to understand the essence of the hero. But that did not last long, because every performance presupposes a competence that retrospectively explains why the hero was able to withstand all those merciless torments. The hero is no longer a scoreboard of actions; he, she, or it is an essence, …
150[89] Behind the text, behind the instruments, inside the laboratory, we do not have nature… What we have is an array, …
151[90] The action of defining it by the answers recorded on the window of an instrument through the inscriptions of new objects provides scientists and engineers with their ultimate source of strength. …… Scientists and engineers speak in the name of the figures they have already endowed and of the new allies they have already brought into their own possession.【The black box is sealed; new objects become things】
156~157[93] As the Latin word res suggests, what is “real” is what resists (resists). Resists what? Tests of strength. If, in a particular situation, no dissenter is capable of modifying the image of a new object, then that is reality, …… The day the controversy stops is the day I write down the word “real.” A new, formidable ally suddenly appears in the camp of the victors, an ally that until this moment had never been seen, yet behaves as though it had always been there: that is nature.
163[97] Since controversy is ubiquitous, nature can never be used as the final arbiter, because no one knows what she is, or what she is saying. But once the controversy has been resolved, nature is the final adjudicator.
164[98] …… No one can intervene in this controversy in the following way, by saying: “I know what it is; nature told me so; it is an amino acid sequence.” Such a claim would be greeted with peals of laughter, unless the advocate of that sequence can produce his charts, put forward his citations, and provide his sources of support.
Once the controversy has been resolved, nature is the ultimate cause of the resolution of all controversies.
So long as the controversy is still going on, nature is merely the final outcome of the controversy.
175[103] We must reject the adequacy of the view that nature is the main reason we explain the ending of a controversy; instead, we must calculate the long list of various different resources and allies gathered by scientists, thereby making dissent impossible.
204[121] In order to construct a black box, two things are necessary: first, it is necessary to recruit others, so as to get them to believe in, purchase, and spread this black box across time and space; second, it is necessary to control them, so that what is borrowed and spread by them remains more or less unchanged. 【Translating back】
214[127] We often feel that it is important to determine the nature of an ally: is it a human factor or a non-human factor? Is it technological or scientific? Is it subjective or objective? Yet the only question that really matters is this: is this new alliance stronger or weaker than the other one?
224[133] …… People’s actions seem to be caused by the spread of facts and machines. However…… it is precisely people’s acts of compliance that transform assertions into facts and machines.
239[142] …… Scientists and engineers at work…… just as they do not know in advance what the nature of nature is, they also do not know what society is made of.
326[198] Three classification cases before and after: the little girl flifli; the Karam people’s turkey; the paleontologist’s Archaeopteryx.
351[215] Starting with La Pérouse mapping Sakhalin Island……【accumulative cycle】
359[220] Figure 6.1
【The moving world】 Kant’s Copernican revolution concentrated in the drawing room 365[224] The balance between scientists and the world has tilted; cartography has become a true science; Europe, as the center of the world, has been constructed, and the rest of the world has been forced to revolve around it. …… The history of science is, to a very great extent, the history of the migration of things, 【mobility, stability, aggregation】……【immutable and combinable mobiles】
Capitalized inscriptions that mobilize allies (the advantages of scientific symbolization): portability\certainty\at-a-glance clarity\easy homogeneous substitution\easy copying and dissemination\integrability\capacity for unified theorization\ease of teaching\geometrized explanations of the world
【Abolishing “abstract theory”】390[241]
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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