Desacelerar a ciência com Stengers (2018 [2013])

1. Towards a Public Intelligence of the Sciences

teste

Should ‘the public’ ‘understand’ the sciences?

matters of concernXmatters of fact (Stengers 2018:1-3)
inteligência pública da ciênciaXcompreensão pública da ciência(Stengers 2018:1-3)

What should the public understand?

États généraux de la recherche (2004)

Citizens expect solutions from science for all sorts of social problems: unemployment, depleted oil reserves, pollution, cancer . . . the path that leads to the answers to these ques- tions is not as direct as a programmatic vision of research would have us believe . . . Science can only function by dealing with its own problems in its own way, shielded from urgency and from the distortions inherent in economic and social contingencies. (Stengers 2018:5)

The goose that lays the golden egg

[S]tand back, keep it well fed, and don’t ask difficult questions, otherwise you will kill it and there will be no more eggs. Of course, it is not the business of the goose to wonder for whom her eggs are golden, and the generally beneficial character of scientific progress is taken for granted. The small ques- tion as to why this progress may today be associated with ‘unsustainable development’ is not asked. […] I don’t think that scientists are ‘naive’, like the goose whose egg we remove from under it in order to give it a new value for the sake of humankind. They know perfectly well how to attract the interest of those capable of turning their results into gold. But they also know that the knowledge economy marks the end of the compromise that guaranteed them a minimum of vital independence. They can’t, however, talk about that openly, because they fear that if the public were to become aware of the ways in which science ‘is made’, they would lose confidence and reduce scientific proposals to simple expressions of particular interests. ‘People’ must continue to believe in the fable of ‘free’ research, driven by curiosity alone towards the discovery of the mysteries of the world (the kind of candy that helps so many well-meaning scientists to set about seducing childish souls). […] In short, scientists have good reason to be uneasy, but they can’t say so. They can no more denounce those who feed them than parents can argue in front of their children. Nothing should upset the confident belief in Science, nor should ‘people’ be urged to get involved in questions they are not, in any case, capable of understanding. (Stengers 2018:6-7)

Sciences need connoisseurs

PUBLIC INTELLIGENCE OF SCIENCE (connoisseurs, amateurs)

a public intelligence of science would involve an intelligent and lucid relationship to scientific claims, an intelligence that would concern the scientists as much as the ‘people’, since they are all vulnerable to the same temptation. (7)

people who are able to evaluate the products, assess the kind of information they are given, discuss its relevance, and differentiate between mere propaganda and calculated risk. For specialists, the existence of such connoisseurs, or amateurs, creates a demanding environment, which obliges them to maintain a ‘cultivated’ relationship with whatever they are proposing – they know the danger of skipping over the weak points, because the people they are addressing will pay just as much attention to whatever is neglected or omitted as to what is asserted. (8)

Connoisseurs are not advocates of ‘alternative’ knowledge, looking for professional recognition. But their interest in the knowledges produced by scientists is different from the interest of the producers of these knowledges. It is for this reason that they can appreciate the originality or the relevance of an idea but also pay attention to questions or possibilities that were not taken into account in its production, but that might become important in other circumstances. In other words, they are able to play a role the crucial character of which must be recognised by all those who care about rationality. They are agents of resistance against a scientific knowledge that pretends it has general authority; they partake in the production of what Donna Haraway calls ‘situated knowledges’. (9)

Good will is not enough

UNCULTIVATED SCIENCE=CULT OF SCIENCE

uncultivated science can easily turn into occult science or into the cult of science (10)

CIENTISTAS PRECISAM APRENDER A OUVIR PARA SEREM APOIADOS

Henceforth, those scientists who fight to conserve some basic autonomy will not be able to limit themselves to an appeal to ‘save research’. They will have to have the courage to say what it is that research needs to be saved from; they will have to go public on the ways in which they are urged or compelled to become simple providers of industrial opportunities. And they will need a public intelligence that is inclined to hear them. […] But the scientists will also have to know how to earn the support that they need, which will not be the case unless they are capable of hearing and taking seriously those questions and objections which today they too often dismiss as opinions that ‘don’t understand the science’. (10)

HUMANIDADES PARA NATURAIS/EXATAS/ENGENHARIAS

Those who opt to take scientific studies might be inclined to tolerate courses they consider ‘mere talk’, but they will not see them as a crucial part of their training – and many of their ‘real’ teachers will not fail to reinforce this prejudice with their shrugs, ironic smiles and wise counsel on the importance of not ‘spreading oneself too thinly’. (11)

CIÊNCIA ANTI-AMADORES

scientists refuse to allow their own type of knowledge to be made part of the general culture: in their view amateurs are just chatterers who descend on these correct solutions and drag them into a world of idle gossip. (11-2)

Science on trial

O PREÇO DA AUSÊNCIA DE UMA CULTURA CIENTIFICA

Here we are paying a high price for the absence of a culture of ‘facts’ – of their rigorous fabrication through a laborious collective process by which ‘viable facts’ and the theories they authorise are co-constructed. (14)

INTERNET e CONTROVÉRSIAS

The internet […] makes it possible for a large audience to put forward counter-arguments that expose the weakness of the reasons given. And the counter-attack will be all the more formidable if it can draw on numerous cases of conflicts of interest, and denounce the way in which the science in question ignores facts which run against the interests it serves. (15)

MERCHANTS OF DOUBT

The current situation is all the more catastrophic in that the internet audience consists not only of busy isolated individuals, more or less enlightened and usually sincere, but also of shrewd, paid strategists. (16)

Inconvenient truths

ALIADOS TRAIÇOEIROS

Scientists then discover, sometimes to their astonishment, that their traditional allies can be relied upon only when the ‘facts’ help ‘increase productivity’ (17)

O REINO DA OPINIÃO (ideologia da prova)

‘There is no proof, so it is only an opinion, and can therefore be put on a par with other opinions.’ The idea that it is the authority of proof that makes the difference between science and opinion is here turned against the scientists themselves. (17)

A CIÊNCIA FUNDADA NA AUTORIDADE DOS FATOS É INDEFESA

When presented as being founded on the authority of facts, the sciences had no need of connoisseurs. […] This image was only good for generating respect; but it leaves science defenceless when it comes to confronting its real enemies. (18-9)

Resisting the merchants of doubt

SOMOS TODOS VULNERÁVEIS À TENTAÇÃO

But, in the end, who amongst us would not wish for the prospect of climatic disorder to disappear? Who would not want the world to appear less dangerous, and our activities and lifestyles to have more benign consequences than they do? We are all vulnerable to the temptation to put our heads in the sand when confronted with this particular ‘inconvenient truth’. (20)

COMPRANDO TEMPO=OPORTUNIDADE

For those in business, gaining time doesn’t just mean making money for a little bit longer, it also means preparing the way for a future in which we will have no other choice than to turn to them and their ‘solutions’, which can duly be presented as ‘unfortunate but necessary’. (20)

A VULNERABILIDADE DA CIÊNCIA BASEADA NA AUTORIDADE DA PROVA

ignoring this plurality [of sciences and what we can legitimately ask of each], and continuing to promote the model of ‘sciences which prove things’, has given the merchants of doubt the capacity to attack with impunity. (21)

A NECESSIDADE DE AMADORES (connosseurs)

What climate scientists in particular need is a public understanding of what it takes to decipher the climate, mediated by connoisseurs capable of mobilising against the strategies of their attackers. (21)

2. Researchers With the Right Stuff

The gender of science

ESVAZIAMENTO DAS CIÊNCIAS BASEADAS EM FATOS (desilusão)

Only sciences that can prove things, that is, that can evoke facts as authoritative, are worthy enough to avoid disqualification, and these are the sciences that young people are leaving in droves. (23)

They [students] are supposed to grin and bear it: the great adventure of human curiosity presented to them as children is replaced by the theme of a vocation that demands body-and-soul commitment. And this is what we accuse today’s young people of no longer accepting: compliance with the sacrifices that service to science demands. (25)

A CARREIRA DE PESQUISADOR FOI PENSADA PARA HOMENS (ou para pessoas sem família ou que tenham uma mulher para cuidar da família)

One could say that the research career was designed for men, and even specifically for men who benefit from the support of women at home – bringing up children, taking care of practical matters, allowing them to do all-nighters at the laboratory and go off on numerous training workshops or on the kind of overseas trips expected in a research career. In the case of women, the price paid for such a career is all the more discriminatory in that judgements as to who counts as a ‘real researcher’ are part of the very definition of the vocation. It will often be said of a woman who also has family responsibilities that the very fact that she chose to take on such responsibilities shows that perhaps she never had the ‘stuff’ of a real researcher. (25)

It is this ethos, this stuff, that I want to focus on here. It is a construction whose prototype is certainly the differentiation of men and women, but which also spreads everywhere. As it happens, the construction of a ‘real test pilot’ is confined to an exclusively virile group, while the duty of the widows, and of the wives of those who survive, is to keep quiet, to not make a fuss. (27)

NÃO FAZER PERGUNTAS

The question of stuff points fairly specifically to the construction of a difference linked to questions that are on the table, but will not be asked, to a kind of gritting of the teeth and resistance to what is an ever-present temptation. Test pilots have to resist expressing concern about what is for them a matter of life and death; the test pilot gets behind the controls of whatever plane he is given, no questions asked. (26)

Real researchers

O PESQUISADOR MACHO É MANIPULÁVEL (pois se baseia em uma abstração sem conteúdo)

This brutal and puerile male often appears when he feels that the ‘mystic demarcation’ separating ‘real scientists’ from other humans is under threat or being ‘relativised’; when he feels that the way in which most scientists present themselves, and are represented – that is, as heroic researchers resisting the temptations of ‘opinion’ – is in danger. This violent being is also manipulable, precisely because this demarcation is abstract, lacking any content apart from its opposition to this marked ‘other’ that they call ‘opinion’. Those who ‘don’t want to know about’ anything that might cause them to hesitate are always manipulable. (30)

O TOMADOR DE DECISÕES MANIPULA O CIENTISTA MACHO

The ‘worth’ of the decision-maker (another unmarked type) lies in knowing that a line must be drawn. And he would like the experts to tell him where that line should be drawn: ‘Be men; not finicky, chattering sissies. If you mean yes, say yes! Don’t wallow in doubt or incertitude.’ (31)

A FRENTE UNIDA DO MÉTODO CIENTÍFICO AUTORIZOU CIÊNCIA BASEADA EM “DADOS”

Those who have decided that in order to keep opinion quiet it is necessary to present a united front, i.e. a ‘scientific method’ assuring objectivity, have had to tolerate the proliferation of experts armed with new methods whose characteristic blindness has become synonymous with objectivity. The ‘data-’ or ‘evidence- based’ sciences have given themselves the project of defining any situation or choice in terms that allow objectively measurable data to evaluate and decide the issue. (32)

Data are objective in the sense that they are ‘unmarked’, and so capable of being used as benchmarks against which all is measured, without hesitation or discussion. (33)

GENDERED STUFF (anti-dados)

Today we encounter everywhere this ‘gendered stuff’ which defines the worth against which people without the stuff discuss, think and hesitate – this stuff which has nothing to say for itself, except that it must be accepted in the name of what Woolf identified so well as abstract, mystical ideals. And as she diagnosed it, these ideals are inseparable from brutal disqualification and noisy advertising; and from the stupid pride of resisting the insistent question that women must ask themselves over and over, everywhere and always: what is this civilisation in which we find ourselves? (33)

The construction of a real researcher

NÃO-HISTORIADORA ANTI-IDEALIZADORA

My aim is not to act as an historian, but to sharpen the appetite for possibilities that run the risk of being obscured by denunciations of the present in the name of a past that we can always idealise. (33)

VIRILIDADE CIENTÍFICA
QUESTIONANDO A MASCULINIDADE DA TESTEMUNHA MODESTA

In fact, how can one uphold a man’s virile qualities if he does not heroically risk his life, cultivate personal glory, or allow himself to be carried away by his passions or his opinions? How can one talk of the virility of a man who presents himself as a modest witness, deferring to the facts and seeking no glory other than that of revealing them? Isn’t the reputation of the gentleman engaged in the experimental life in danger if he claims the modesty and reserve usually expected of the feminine gender? Aren’t such chaste beings going to be disqualified for lack of virile virtues if they refuse the joys of flamboyant rhetorical conquests? (34)

RAZÃO VIRIL-ESPIRITUAL-MONÁSTICA (cega a seus próprios interesses e preconceitos)

What Boyle proposed was the worth of spiritual (not corporeal) chastity and modesty, a discipline of monastic origins. He who follows the experimental path serves God via the disciplined exercise of reason. And this reason is well and truly virile in the sense that it is part of masculine heroism to make an abstraction of one’s own interests, of one’s prejudices, and to resist the temptations and seductions of questions that would lead one astray. (34)

O SONÂMBULO

The sleepwalker is always perched on the ridge of a high roof, walking up and down without vertigo, fear or hesitation. He poses no questions that might throw him off balance.(35)

Having the right stuff, then, means having faith that what a scientific question doesn’t make count, doesn’t count; a faith that defines itself against doubt. He or she who has been bitten by doubt will not recover the faith that research requires. Waking up the sleepwalker kills the researcher. (36)

RIDICULARIZANDO A DÚVIDA DO SONÂMBULO

Furthermore, the range of these questions has become broader, since they now encompass, for example, questions about the role of the sciences in society. Certainly, such questions can’t be officially banished in the same way as theological and metaphysical ones can. But they are still half-implicitly dismissed through the subtle smile, the ill-disguised warning, or the snickering and gossip about so-and-so ‘who doesn’t do science any more’. (36)

NOVA ABORDAGEM ANTI-SONÂMBULO AO ENSINO DE HUMANIDADES PARA NATURAIS/EXATAS/ENGENHARIAS

Sleepwalkers refuse to hesitate when it is a matter of differentiating between what is important for them and what they judge to be secondary or anecdotal. Give us leave to be obstinate and aggressive, to decipher the world in terms of conquests and obstacles to be overcome, otherwise you will no longer have any researchers left! Such is the argument that those who advocate a new approach to science training have come up against. (36-7)

HUMANAS =/= HARD SCIENCES (paradigmáticas)

It is these sciences that Thomas Kuhn identified in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as functioning paradigmatically, and which he begins by characterising in terms of the question of how students are trained. Training in sociology or psychology involves a panorama of rival schools, courses in different methodologies, divergent definitions and debates, as students are introduced to the founding texts in their discipline, those that set out the choices that will engage them. In contrast, Kuhn emphasises, the strength of the paradigm is its invisibility. The young people being trained are well and truly on track to become sleepwalkers for whom the right way to ask a question goes without saying: it relates to incontestable evidence. From this educational perspective, for a (hard) science student to read anything other than her textbooks is not only a waste of time; it is also a disturbing sign, a bad omen for her future, implying that she might not have the right stuff. (37-8)

O PESQUISADOR DE BOYLE como SONÂMBULO FÓBICO

Boyle’s chaste researcher has a general enough definition of the proper value of scientific objectivity: it requires a refusal of the ‘big questions’ that would seduce opinion, which is ‘always wrong’. And this chastity can be claimed by all sciences, in the name of not confusing ‘facts’ and ‘values’. For his part, however, the phobic sleepwalker belongs specifically to those sciences which, since the nineteenth century, may be characterised by their crucial role in the development of the so-called productive forces. And this is no accident. Sleepwalking researchers were born in a laboratory which is no longer analogous with the monastic discipline of the cultivation of the spirit, wherein wasting time was a sin. The laboratory is now defined by the imperatives of gaining time, competition and speed. It is no longer for the sake of ascetic discipline that researchers refrain from asking ‘big questions’, but rather because their training actively turns them away from such questions. Everything that might distance them from their discipline has been excluded, deemed a ‘waste of time’ or, worse, a pathway to doubt. In other words, the phobic, for whom doubt is the enemy, is first of all the person who has never learned to take a step sideways, and who therefore does not know how to slow down without losing their balance. (38)

O SONÂMBULO REAL MANTÉM UM OLHO ABERTO ÀS OPORTUNIDADES (o exemplo dos OGM)

But, for all that, ‘real’ sleepwalking researchers are not totally blind to the world around them. They don’t ignore it, but they certainly won’t allow it the power to make them hesitate. They decipher it in terms of opportunities. One could even depict them as being on the alert, attentive to the possibilities of presenting what counts for them in a way that will interest whoever is likely to add value to their results. And they will be all the more innovative and free to be entrepreneurial to the extent that they despise, with a properly virile contempt, the multiple and interlocking aspects of the problem they are supposed to be looking into. (39)

A recent and striking example is, of course, the claim of molecular biologists that their strains of genetically modified plants could solve the problem of world hunger. The gendered dimension was clear in the phobic contempt with which they dismissed the doubts of their colleagues who pointed to the socioeconomic reasons for famine, to social inequalities that were in danger of widening, to the destruction of agricultural modes of production, or to the difference between laboratory-created GMOs and those planted on hundreds of thousands of hectares. In this case, the social scientists and field scientists were like women with too many sensitivities, who can speak only of risks and uncertainties. Had we had listened to them in the past, we would have thought electricity dangerous, and we’d all still be getting around on horses and carts. A real researcher must know how to take risks on board and accept the price of progress. But as far as knowing who might be exposed to these risks, well that’s a big question . . . (39)

intellectual prostitution

the docility of those who, without being tied down like wage-labourers, nevertheless agree to work and think just where and how they are told (41)

O PESQUISADOR VIRIL NÃO FAZ A PERGUNTA DE WOOLF

The researcher’s ‘right stuff’, and his dependence on mystical demarcations, prohibit him from asking, together with others, Woolf’s question about this civilisation in which we find ourselves. He can only groan and try – but every man for himself – to find ways and means to pursue what he will call ‘good research’ which ‘advances science’. (41)

Demobilisation?

ANSIEDADE/ANGÚSTIA

The unmarked gender is equally defined by anxiety – the anxiety of being found not to have had the right stuff. (41)

EXÉRCITO MOBILIZADO (hesitar=trair)

A mobilised army will not slow down for anything. The only question that matters is, ‘can we get through?’, and the price that others will pay for their passing though (ravaged fields, devastated villages) will cause no hesitation. Hesitation and scruples become synonymous with treason. (42)

SALVAR A PESQUISA = ACORDAR O SONÂMBULO

My conviction is that the only possibility of ‘saving research’ goes by way of waking up the sleepwalkers, who will only wake up if they are compelled to do so. And they will not be compelled except by demands that rejig the question of what can or should be expected of researchers, by new requirements prohibiting them from adopting an attitude of denial when faced with questions that ‘real’ researchers have not been supposed to ask themselves. (43)

TRIBUNAIS CIDADÃOS

Today such requirements are prefigured in what are called ‘citizen juries’, ‘citizen consultations’ or ‘citizen conventions’ – the term preferred by the French Sciences Citoyennes association. […] In short, it creates the type of testing-ground essential for the reliable evaluation of an innovation, because the concern for reliability excludes a priori any hierarchy between what counts and what may be overlooked, between what corresponds to an objective or scientific point of view and that which would be merely a matter of opinion or conviction. (43-4)

O JOGO DUPLO DO SONÂMBULO (não sei nada das grandes questões, mas elas não são importantes)

the duplicitous game typical of sleepwalking scientists: pretending to a humble ignorance of the ‘big questions’ – that is, of questions that do not interest their science – while presenting a problematic situation in such a way that whatever doesn’t interest them appears as secondary, with the scientific point of view then appearing as the first, objective, rational step to take in approaching the problem. (44)

THE TEST (situated knowledges against sleepwalkers)

The test will disqualify the sleepwalker, but it doesn’t require scientists to take on board questions they don’t know anything about, only that they actively situate what they do know – that is, explain how their knowledge can contribute to the problem, without identifying it with a ‘scientific’ or ‘rational’ perspective that would predetermine the way in which the problem should be cast.(44)

The test that interests me, corresponding to what Donna Haraway called ‘situated knowledge’ way back in 1988, designates that which precisely, and in a concrete fashion, has the task of questioning this privileged relationship of the sciences to questions of collective interest. (45)

SITUATING ONESELF

Situating oneself has nothing to do with the Google Earth point of view, where you can see the whole Earth, then locate your own country, town, street and house. Being capable of situating oneself – situating what one knows, and actively linking it to questions that one brings in and to ways of working that respond to it – implies being indebted to the existence of others who ask different questions, importing them into the situation differently, relating to the situation in a way that resists appropriation in the name of any kind of abstract ideal. (45)

CITIZEN JURIES (Tribunais cidadãos)

Their [citizen juries] interest (the unknown factor with which I associate them) is to propose a distinction between scientific practices and the gendered construc- tion that constitutes the stuff of the researcher. […] A solution exists, but it is not reached by way of a society that respects its researchers. It goes via a society that forces its researchers not to despise it. (45-6)

LADIES UPSET

In Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases, Elizabeth Potter relates how the high-society ladies who joined the audience for the air-pump experiments were upset at seeing asphyxiated birds suffering simply in order to prove that the air evacuated by the pump was necessary for life. (46)

WHAT WOMEN ARE FIGHTING FOR
what women have been, and still are, fighting for: a society in which no single position can legitimate the silencing of others, who are supposed not to count. But it is also a struggle in which humour, laughter and mockery are crucial in face of the power of abstract ideals. Some researchers may learn to laugh at those who condemn them as traitors if they dare not devote everything to the advancement of science, avoiding idle questions. Demobilised, they will learn to appreciate the landscape that situates them, instead of passing through it at top speed. (47)

3. Sciences and Values: How Can we Slow Down?

In the grip of evaluation

TOP RANKING JOURNAL

As it happens, in the field of research, competition for the recognition of ‘excellence’, which has become a condition for academic survival, puts into play that rare resource which is publication in a top-ranking journal. This condition for publication thus demands that researchers pitch their research on the basis of what these journals impose in terms of norms: conformity, opportunism and flexibility – such is the formula for excellence. (49)

PESQUISADORES SOB CONSTANTE VIGILÂNCIA E PRESSÃO

Under constant surveillance and pressure, they [researchers] have effectively been cut off from whatever it was they cared about. They are either reduced to the sadness we call depression, or end up as the kind of opportunistic cynics who know how to make all the right moves. (50)

PARECERISTAS

This peculiarity stems directly from the functioning of the ‘modern sciences’ themselves, where evaluation is immanent to the community, a community in which authors are read by other authors who assume the key role of taking into account, extending or contesting what they have read. (50)

SISTEMA DE AVALIAÇÃO POR PARES (feito para ciências rápidas)

Even if the peer-review system worked perfectly – good articles being given the time to mature, referees being attentive and competent, etc. – it would remain the case that the various sciences, all the different ways of ‘doing science’, are not, never have been, and never will be, equal under this model of evaluation. […] What I want to demonstrate here is that this model has been invented for the ‘fast’ sciences, with their strict differentiation between the cumulative production of knowledge addressed only to competent colleagues, and ‘vulgarised’ forms of knowledge. In conjunction with this, I would like to make a plea for a slowing down of the sciences. This would not be a return to a somewhat idealised past, where honest and worthy researchers were justly recognised by their peers. Rather, it should involve an active taking into account of the plurality of the sciences, in dialogue with a plural, negotiated and pragmatic (that is, evaluated on its effects) definition of the modes of evaluation and valorisation relevant to different types of research. (52)

Who are the peers?

PARES (leitores interessados)

What is studied must be susceptible to extraction from one milieu and transplantation to another, typically that of the experimental laboratory. Only under this condition can ‘experimental success’ be achieved, because only in the laboratory can the questions posed receive so-called ‘objective’ answers, the publication of which is destined to be read by ‘competent colleagues’; that is to say, by those who know how to evaluate them because they share not only the same milieu as the authors (their know-how and instruments), but also the same requirements when it comes to determining what counts as an ‘objective answer’, i.e. the same definition of the ‘facts’ deemed capable of authorising well-determined interpretations. The evaluation is therefore ‘fast’, not in the sense that it demands little work or effort, but in the sense that no objection will lead to compromise on questions of principle or doctrine, since it will correspond to the verification of the concerns of all the ‘competents’ involved – the extension of the domain of success. Do ‘the facts’ hold water? Do they authorise the author to conclude whatever it is she concludes? (53)

‘Science’, an amalgam to be dissolved

DISSOLVENDO AMÁLGAMAS

The question of the plurality of the sciences can only be raised after this first amalgam is dissolved, when the argument ‘you have to accept this hypothesis, otherwise we can no longer define our object in a scientific manner’ is referred to the imperative of objectivation proper to the cameral sciences. Then the expression ‘in a scientific manner’ is replaced by ‘in a manner that makes a decision or an action possible’. And then comes the question of plurality: if we turn to those sciences that, unlike the cameral sciences, can be said to be ‘modern’, how can we dissolve a second amalgam produced, this time, by the injunction to establish ‘facts’ authorising an interpretation that will be said to be ‘objective’? (61-2)

Can what is studied be submitted to laboratory conditions? Can what the extraction elimi- nates be defined as simply ‘parasitic’ on the question? And finally, is what is being investigated indifferent to the intentionality inherent in the milieu to which it is transplanted, a milieu ‘made’ to get an answer from it? Is it ‘its behaviour’ that constitutes the response, or is this behaviour merely the way it replies to the scientist? This last condition dissolves the amalgam that was facilitated by terms like obedience and submission. Public enemy number one of experimental success corresponds to something the social sciences never exclude: the possibility that the ‘subjects’ may behave in the way they think the scientist is expecting them to behave. (63)

HARD=/=SOFT

A priori, the questions put by ‘hard’ science only interest competent colleagues – hence, by the way, the need to solicit the interest of the ‘public’ (vulgarisation) and of those who can draw ‘non-scientific’ consequences (‘benefits’) from their propositions. A science will be called ‘soft’ when non-specialists feel competent to comment on it, to give their opinions on the questions it asks, because these questions concern or interest them. (63)

PROTAGONISTAS RECALCITRANTES como CONDIÇÃO DE CIENTIFICIDADE

Pragma means ‘affair’, and the affairs of scientists always proceed by putting things into relation, creating very particular relationships with other beings, so these beings have to answer a well-defined question. But there are many types of relation in this genre, including those under the headings of seduction, or torture, or statistical inquiry. . . . In the case of what I am calling the ‘modern sciences’, we are dealing with collective practices that assemble ‘competent colleagues’ around the question of the kinds of relationships that will allow them to learn from what they are studying. In other words, such relationships, in order to have a ‘scientific’ value that will prolong the values of the successful experiment, must allow what is being investigated to have the capacity to put at risk the question that is being asked of it. […] This proposition is intended only to contribute to the opening of a problem, not the resolving of it. Because ‘prolong’, here, doesn’t mean resemble. And ‘having the capacity’ doesn’t just mean ‘having the possibility of’, but rather, when dealing with those ‘polite’ beings known as humans, that they should feel themselves empowered to understand – and, as the case may be, to contest – the way in which a question ‘targets’ them. […] Only with ‘recalcitrant’ protagonists – those who demand that what matters for them be recognised and taken into account in how they are addressed – can a relation be created that has a claim to scientific value. (65-6)

Contrasts

CIÊNCIAS EXPERIMENTAIS CONTRASTADAS COM HUMANAS (indiferença do respondente à pergunta)

The typical risk for the experimental sciences is the accidental production of an ‘artefact’ for which the questioning operation can be shown to be partly responsible. This risk implies that what is questioned should be indifferent to the question it answers. In contrast, the social sciences as I characterise them require their subject’s non-indifference to the question. (66)

ETONGRAFIA COMO DESCOLONIZAÇÃO DO PENSAMENTO

This [ethnography] is what Eduardo Viveros de Castro calls a ‘decolonisation of thought’ process, but my approach leads me to think of it without any connotations of blame or heroism, and rather in terms of apprenticeship – the ethnologist can certainly keep at the forefront of her mind the dense relation between ethnology and colonialism, but this is not what will make her capable of learning from those who agree to welcome her in. (69)

OUTROS VALORES

[ethnography, archival sciences] the way in which the ‘science’ amalgam enters into conflict with what makes a science fruitful that we can feel other values pushing forward, values other than that of ‘facts that prove’, introducing other ways of evaluating. (70)

ESTUDAR A REALIDADE COMO APRENDIZADO

This is the exploration of what reality asks for when what needs to be reported about it is indissociable from what it has compelled us to learn. (72)

Symbioses

SIMBIOSE

Here I shall employ the notion of symbiosis as a joining of heterogeneous beings – where each has its respective world matter in heterogeneous ways, from which each benefits, or which each valorises, in its own way. (73)

SIMBIOSE (pluralização dos modos de valorização + perigo de captura)

What is interesting about the notion of symbiosis is that it communicates with both a pluralisation of modes of ‘valorisation’ and with an active attention focused on the danger of capture. […] The symbiosis between science and technical-industrial innovation has now flipped into a straightforward relation of capture. (74)

INTERVIR NA FORMAÇÃO DO CIENTISTA

In this perspective, the idea of ‘slowing down’ the sciences communicates with the question of how scientists might be trained to take part in such slowing down, notably by challenging all those modes of appreciation and judgement through which they are supposed to take on board their duty ‘not to waste their time’. (74)

SIMBIOSE ENTRE PESQUISADOR E PESQUISADO

This double condition is a symbiotic interlinking. Both the ‘visiting’ investigator and her hosts should be capable of agreeing not to capture each other. If this condition is met, then they are likely to learn things that matter to them, but in different ways. (75)

C.SOCIAIS

So the social sciences would be in a symbiotic relationship with processes through which groups become capable of formulating their own problems. (75)

DEMOCRACIA

When we ask the question, ‘How do we want to be evaluated?’, it is a real test requiring the collective dynamic of empowerment that I associated above with democracy. And it is obviously here that the social sciences could both learn and valorise their knowledge in an environment where that knowledge would not be an authority but a resource – not ‘against’ governance, but in a way that activates possibilities for resisting cameral capture. The link between the social sciences and the State would be neither antagonistic nor collaborative, just a link as precarious as the very definition of a ‘democratic State’. It would unify two ways of making things matter, each being the other’s nightmare in its own way. The social sciences should never dream of being the State’s best friend; the successes of these sciences are more likely to make life complicated for it. But the way in which the State anticipates and expects such complication, or indeed suffers and tolerates it at best, is a measure of the effectiveness of its relation to what we call democracy. (76-7)

PROIBIDO GENERALIZAR A RELEVÂNCIA

The sciences function through extraction, through a process of apprenticeship in which something implanted in one place is extracted and reported to others for whom it will make sense. What poses the problem is the way in which extraction and modernisation have been linked, transforming the question, ‘What can we learn here?’, into a principle of judgement that identifies what has been extracted with what really matters, and relegates the rest to an overlay of beliefs and parasitical habits. A genuine prohibition is needed to dissolve this link: no one should be authorised to define generally ‘what really matters’. This is not a moral prohibition, but a condition of symbiotic culture, of a culture in which the capacity of each protagonist to present what matters for them is important, and where each will know that what they may learn from the other will always be understood as a response to a question that matters for them. Our questions are ours. (79)

Slowing down . . .

A ESTRANHA LIBERDADE DO INDIVÍDUO DEMOCRÁTICO

The democratic individual, the one who says, ‘It’s my right . . .’, is the one who takes great pride in an ‘autonomy’ which, in fact, hands back to the State the responsibility for ‘thinking through’ the consequences. A strange liberty it is not to have to think further than one’s own immediate interests. (80)

SLOWING DOWN (aprender novamente)

Speed demands and creates an insensitivity to everything that might slow things down: the frictions, the rubbing, the hesitations that make us feel we are not alone in the world. Slowing down means becoming capable of learning again, becoming acquainted with things again, reweaving the bounds of interdependency. It means thinking and imagining, and in the process creating relationships with others that are not those of capture. (81-2)

4. Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn and the Challenge of Slowing Down the Sciences

A PERGUNTA PERTENCE AO INTERESSADO

The answer to the question, ‘Is it a fact?’, belongs to those for whom this question is a matter of concern. (83)

É PRECISO INTERESSAR OUTROS COLETIVOS

I will propose that scientific thought collectives, facing the prospect of their destruction, should actively accept that their concern for ‘facts’ must include the way these facts come to matter for other collectives. (84)

PARADIGMA MATERIALIZADO NO EQUIPAMENTO

A paradigm does not disappear like a dream, but lingers on in laboratory instruments. What those instruments have reliably established will be different but still significant. (91)

PROVÉRBIO DE FLECK

‘Provided enough water flows in the rivers and a field of gravity exists, all rivers must finally end up at the sea.’ (94)

ECONOMIA DO CONHECIMENTO

Today, the murder of the goose means that whatever the differences among scientific fields, paradigmatic or not, the new institutional landscape called the ‘knowledge economy’ has erased them. Only one criterion now differentiates them, their ‘attractivity’, the way they fit into the race for competitiveness and profit. (96)

FORÇA GRAVITACIONAL EMPRESARIAL

in the new situation, the ‘field of gravity’ is no longer that of a public noisily addressing trusted professionals. It is provided by the pressure of multiple industrial strategies that reconfigure both the public, by segmenting it into potential profitable markets, and researchers, who are bound by patents and industrial secrecy. Disease-mongering and other market strategies are constantly creating new demands and new kinds of expectations. As for the general public itself, its confidence, as we know, is already rather deeply shaken, in particular by troubling news stories about the unforeseen effects associated with prioritised drugs that are meant to be taken not simply while one has a disease but right up until the death of the consumer. (97)

SLOW SCIENCE MANIFESTO (bear with us)

In 2010, a text entitled The Slow Science Manifesto was published in Berlin, which ends with these lines: “Slow science was pretty much the only science conceivable for hundreds of years; today, we argue, it deserves revival and needs protection. Society should give scientists the time they need, but more importantly, scientists must take their time. […] We do need time to think. We do need time to digest. We do need time to misunderstand each other, especially when fostering lost dialogue between humanities and natural sci- ences. We cannot continuously tell you what our science means; what it will be good for; because we simply don’t know yet. Science needs time. […] – Bear with us, while we think. (97-8)

O LAMENTO DA GALINHA DOS OVOS DE OURO

What we are in fact hearing here is the lament of the golden goose missing the Golden Age when scientists benefited from both autonomy and the respect due to their role in serving the general interest. (98)

A PROPOSTA DE SLOW SCIENCE DE STENGERS

My whole point is to associate the idea of slow science with a more ambitious agenda, one that takes into account the need for a deep break with the ideal of academic science shaped during the nineteenth century, a model of research that promoted as a general ideal the fast, cumulative advance of disciplinary knowledge along with a correlative disregard for any question that would slow this advance down. […] The opposite of ‘disregard’ is not ‘actively including’ but ‘taking seriously’, or ‘paying attention’. (98-9)

SLOW SCIENCE AS BECOMING-CIVILISED OF SCIENCE

But slow science is not about scientists taking full account of the messy complications of the world. It is about them facing up to the challenge of developing a collective awareness of the particularity and selective character of their own thought-style. This, however, should not be confused with a call for lucid reflexivity to be developed inside thought collectives. It is rather a matter of collective learning through the test of an encounter with dissenting voices around issues of common interest. Such a learning process demands of modern collectives what I would characterise as a ‘becoming-civilised’. So slowing down the sciences means civilising scientists, civilisation being equated here with the ability of members of a particular collective to present themselves in a non-insulting way to members of other collectives, that is, in a way that enables a process of relation-making. […] Presenting oneself in a civilised manner means presenting oneself in terms of one’s specific matter of concern, that is, admitting that others also have their matters of concern, their own ways of having their world matter.(100-1)

CIENTISTAS CIVILIZADOS SE PREOCUPAM COM O QUE SEUS FATOS CAUSAM FORA DO LABORATÓRIO

Civilised scientists would make it public, a matter of exoteric knowledge, that the reliability of their results is related to matters of concern as well as to competent knowledge; and that the very particular conditions required by the latter come at the price of ignoring what may be important factors outside the laboratory. They would acknowledge that when what they have achieved leaves its native environment – the network of research laboratories – and intervenes in different social and natural environments, it may well be leaving behind its specific reliability. And they would recognise that restoring reliability means weaving new relations proper to each new environment, which entails welcoming new objections – no longer just the objections of colleagues, but those of other collectives concerned by aspects of the environment that the scientists themselves were not concerned with. (101-2)

O MOTE DA CIÊNCIA RÁPIDA

talk of slow science is a direct challenge to the motto structuring research collectives: do not waste your time with idle questions, questions that cannot be reduced to scientific terms; this would be betraying your sole duty, the advancement of knowledge! This motto promoting and mobilising fast science is the very recipe for channelling attention and eagerness, and for restraining imagination. It enforces the idea that the rational approach to situations should extract those dimensions that can be defined as scientific or objective, and leave the remainder to be addressed by other means which are not the scientists’ concern . . . and, it will be added, which should not be their concern because they trespass on matters to be decided in terms of political or ethical values. ‘Society will decide’, they say, never wondering about how and by what means such decisions are taken. (102-3)

A APOSTA DA CIÊNCIA LENTA

Slow science thus represents not only a challenge to fast, mobilised science. It is also a wager. A wager on the capacity of scientific thought collectives to enter into new symbiotic relations with other collectives that have different matters of concern. (103-4)

Slow science, as I defend it, is rather expressing the trust that this specialised dynamic does not need mutilated, channelled, mobilised minds. It also trusts that scientists may well find it rewarding to participate in other dynamics and learn from their encounters with empowered collectives. (104)

5. ‘Another Science is Possible!’ A Plea for Slow Science

PUBLISH OR PERISH

We now have to tell our students to choose subjects that will lead to fast publication in high-ranking journals specialising in professionally recognised issues – issues which, in general, are of interest to nobody except other fast-publishing colleagues. We have to tell them that, if they want to survive, they have to learn to conform to the blinkered normative frames imposed by such publications. (107)

FEITIÇO QUE NOS SEPARA DE NOSSA CAPACIDADE PARA IMAGINAR

Everywhere a similar cut-off is introduced, separating people and collectives from their capacity to envisage, to feel, think or imagine. Everywhere the same kind of attack has been launched, which can be characterised as a form of sorcery that obstinately, sneakily and wickedly paralyses our capacity to resist. (107-8)

O NASCIMENTO DO ESPECIALISTA NO SÉCULO XIX

Indeed, what turned him [Whitehead] from the mathematician he was into the philosopher he became cannot be disentangled from his deep feeling of anxiety about the effects of what he characterised as an important discovery marking the nineteenth century: ‘the discovery of the method of training professionals, who specialise in particular regions of thought and thereby progressively add to the sum of knowledge within their respective limitations of subject’. (110)

CONTROLE SUAS ABSTRAÇÕES

for him [Whitehead] rationality was not the capacity for abstraction, it was rather the ability to be vigilant about one’s abstractions, to not be blindly led by them. As we should recall, a good craftswoman does not know only how to use her tools, and will not look at a situation in terms of the demands of the particular tool she is used to. Rather, she will judge the fitness of the tool for the situation. For Whitehead, it is the same with the exercise of thought – you need to be vigilant about your modes of abstraction. (111)

CRÍTICA À SONAMBULIZAÇÃO (cultivo da atenção, dosar as abstrações)

While Whitehead does not object to the professionals’ specialisation, he characterises them as ‘lacking balance’. Their training, while neglecting ‘to strengthen habits of concrete appreciation of the individual facts in their full interplay of emergent values’, leaves them prey to the power of a particular set of abstractions, promoting a particular value. I rather like the ‘lacking balance’ formulation, for its affinity with the image of the ‘sleepwalker’ that accompanied the invention of the method of training scientists as professionals during the nineteenth century, at the time when what I call ‘fast science’ was being invented. Whitehead’s plea regarding the task of universities was thus also aimed at a ‘slowing down’ of science, which is the necessary condition for thinking with abstractions rather than obeying them. (112)

LIEBIG (inventou ao mesmo tempo o sonâmbulo e a galinha dos ovos de ouro)

It is striking that Liebig, who played a very important role in the development of industrial chemistry, also became, as early as 1863, a passionate promoter of the need for pure, autonomous academic research. He is the father of what we now call the ‘linear model’, together with the famous ‘goose that laid the golden egg’ argument: it is in its own best interest that industry should keep its distance from academic research, leaving the scientific community free to determine its own questions, because only scientists can tell, at each step, which questions will be fruitful, which will lead to fast cumulative development and which will result only in some empirical gathering of facts leading nowhere. For industry to dictate its own questions would be like killing the goose and losing the eggs. (113)

AS DUAS ALEGORIAS (galinha dos ovos de ouro e sonâmbulo)

The official story is that the goose lays her eggs and is happy to learn that some of them have turned golden, in industrial development terms. She hopes that this will ultimately result in benefits for humanity, but she cannot be considered responsible for any misuse. She insists that her only loyalty is, and must be, to the advancement of knowledge, and thus, as Whitehead wrote, she is entitled to treat the remainder ‘superficially, with the imperfect categories of thought derived from [her] profession’. This corresponds to the ‘ivory tower’ image of academic science, and it is reinforced by the other current image of scientific creativity, that of the sleepwalker walking on a narrow ridge without fear or vertigo because he is blind to the danger. Asking creative scientists to be actively concerned about the consequences of their work would be the equivalent of waking the sleepwalkers, making them aware that the world is a long way from obeying their categories. Struck by doubt, they would fall from the ridge into the morass of turbid opinions. They would, that is, be lost for science. (114)

O APRENDIZADO DO CIENTISTA VELOZ-SONÂMBULO

One way or another, explicitly or not, scientists learn that questions which concern the wider world, the world where the golden eggs will make a difference, should be globally defined as ‘non- scientific’, even if such questions are the object of a lot of scientific work in other departments dealing with cultural, social or economic problems. Interest in the world we live in becomes like a temptation that researchers who have ‘the right stuff’ should be able to resist. […] Fast science refers not so much to a question of speed but to the imperative not to slow down, not to waste time, or else. . . . (115)

A ANESTESIA INDIZIDA DO CIENTISTA-SOLDADO-MOBILIZADO

What Whitehead called the training of professionals rather refers to the kind of induced anaesthesia generated by a mobilised army on the move, where the imperative is to go as fast as possible. Such an army does not wander and wonder. The imperative means that the landscape it moves through will be of no interest, only the obstacles it has to move around. Those in the army who complain about the damage its advance causes (destroying crops, stealing goods, raping women . . .) certainly don’t have the right stuff. Such things should not slow down the advance. Soldiers must forget their attachments to their own crops, goods and wives. Likewise scientists when they dismiss a question as ‘non-scientific’. (115)

A GALINHA EMPREENDEDORA

The goose is also an entrepreneurial strategist. She is on the lookout for those who might draw golden consequences from what she has laid. What characterises fast science is not isolation, but rather working in a very rarefied environment, an environment divided into allies who matter and those who, whatever their concerns and protests, have to recognise that they are the ultimate recipients of the golden benefits, and therefore should not disturb the progress of science. (116)

SIMBIOSE CIÊNCIA-CAPITAL

the dimensions that correspond to fast science’s categories are rather naturally the very ones that are relevant for industrial development, since both agree on ignoring the same type of complications. No direct mobilisation on the part of industrial interests is necessary here; only this symbiotic relation between two modes of abstraction. (117)

A DESTRUIÇÃO DO TECIDO SOCIAL DA CONFIABILIDADE CIENTÍFICA

what is in the process of being destroyed is the very ‘social fabric’ of scientific reliability. In the future we may well see scientists at work everywhere, producing facts at the speed our new sophisticated instruments make possible; but the way those facts will be interpreted will mostly conform to the landscape of vested interests. (117)

OBJEÇÕES CIENTÍFICAS x PROMESSAS EMPRESARIAIS

As all working scientists know, if a scientific claim can be trusted as reliable, it is not because scientists are objective, but because the claim has been exposed to the demanding objections of competent colleagues concerned about its reliability. And it is this shared concern that may well be destroyed if these colleagues are mostly bound to industrial interests, that is, bound by the need to keep the promises that attract their industrial partners. (117)

ECONOMIA DO CONHECIMENTO COMO ESPECULAÇÃO

in the guise of the ‘knowledge economy’, the speculative economy, the bubble and crash economy, has succeeded in recruiting scientific knowledge production. (118)

QUANDO O FATO SAI DO LABORATÓRIO (quando o ovo vira ouro)

The reliability of fast science’s results is relative to purified, well-controlled laboratory experiments. And competent objections are competent only with regard to such controlled environments. Which means that scientific reliability is situated, bound, to the constraints of its production. Which also means that when the eggs leave their native environment and turn golden, they will have left behind this specific reliability and robustness. What reliability they now have is no longer an issue of scientific judgement only, but a social and political issue. (118-9)

THE GOOSE ANSWER (a resposta galinácea)

And the response of many scientists is just as superficial when they claim that it’s not their fault that sustainability was not a public concern, since they cannot be held accountable for the way ‘society’ decides to use what they produce. This is the typical goose answer. As usual it ignores the fact that the claimed irresponsible use of their products never prevented academic scientists from associating scientific progress with social progress; from joining in with the ‘back to the cave’ insults; from presenting their science as offering, at last, rational solutions to problems of general concern; or from framing objections in terms of a simple opposition between science and value – as if all those aspects of a concrete situation that they are not equipped to deal with could be reduced to a question of value! (119)

RACIONAL (reconhecendo os limites de seus próprios valores) e CIVILIZADO (reconhecendo os valores dos outros)

the seemingly modest definition given by Whitehead of what universities should foster: rational thought and civilised modes of appreciation. Rational thought would mean being actively lucid about what is actually known, avoiding any confusion between the questions that can be answered in a purified or constrained environment and those that will inevitably arise in the wider and messier environment. A civilised mode of appreciation would imply never identifying what is well-controlled and clean with some truth that transcends the mess. What is messy from the point of view of fast science is nothing other than the irreducible and always embedded interplay of processes, practices, experiences, and ways of knowing and valuing that makes up our common world. (120)

O DESAFIO DA CIÊNCIA LENTA (aceitar o valor científico do não-cientifico)

This may be the challenge that slow science should answer, enabling scientists to accept that what is messy is not defective but simply that which we have to learn to live in and think with. […] So I would characterise slow science as the demanding operation that would reclaim the art of dealing with, and learning from, what scientists too often consider messy, that is, what escapes general, so-called objective, categories. (120)

RECLAIMING (se interessar pelo sapo)

‘reclaiming’, as used by US activists, refers to healing operations that would reappropriate what we have been separated from, recovering or reinventing what that separation has destroyed. Reclaiming always begins by accepting that we are sick rather than guilty, and understanding how our environment makes us sick. (121)

Reclaiming is never only a matter of goodwill, of the kiss of peace turning the disappointing frog into a nice, polite and constructive prince. Learning is needed to get interested in the frog itself, that is, in the mess in which everyone, scientists included, are participants. (122)

TÉCNICAS CIVILIZACIONAIS

We know a lot about developing material, and so-called immaterial, technologies, but when it comes to much older techniques – the kind needed when people are divided on an issue, and have to learn from each other through their disagreements – we are not very good at all, having lost what we once knew and what other peoples would call civilisation. (122)

O APRENDIZADO ATIVISTA (ativar o objeto da reunião, promover fatos individuais)

We have our departments of psychology, social psychology, pedagogy and so on, but we have not learned even a fraction of what activists engaged in reclaiming operations have to learn when they want to work together with others without asserting their authority. They have indeed learned to consider each meeting to be what, following Whitehead, I would call an ‘individual fact’, depending on the interplay of emerging values; values that can emerge only because the participants have learned how to allow the issue at the heart of their meeting the power to matter, the power to connect everyone present. (123)

Producing knowledge about such individual facts no doubt demands an approach that will not conform to the model of fast science. Moments at which values emerge [and] cannot be disembedded and submitted to general categories; for instance, the moment when someone feels transformed by having understood someone else’s perspective; or the gathering that discovers the transformative power of its participants thinking together; or the experience that something which until now appeared insignificant may indeed matter. Such moments have been treated superficially, with inappropriate categories derived from the imperative of reproducibility. They have been judged unfit for knowledge, or worse, relegated to the irrational, and so deemed unworthy of our attention. But it may well be that the approach they need is just a bit different, that what we need to learn is not how to define them, but rather how to foster them. We need to find out what supports and sustains them, and what thwarts or poisons them: to gain something like the slow knowledge of the gardener as opposed to the fast knowledge of ‘rationalised’ industrial agricul- ture. (123-4)

SUGESTÕES PARA DESACELERAR A ACADEMIA (reuniões lentas)

As for us academics, what about introducing slow meetings, that is, meetings organised in such a way that participation is not only formal? What about slow talks, not just inviting people one really wishes to hear, but reading and discussing before-hand so that the meeting is not reduced to the ritual of attending a prepared lecture that ends with a few banal questions? What about demanding that when colleagues speak or write about issues that are beyond their field of expertise, they present the information, learning and collaborations that have allowed them to do so? What about ensuring, when expertise is needed on an issue of common concern, that co-experts are present and able to represent effectively the many dimensions relevant to the issue? (124)

REINVENTANDO INSTITUIÇÕES CIENTÍFICAS PÓS-PROGRESSO

The name of the poison is progress, mobilisation for the advancement of knowledge as an end in itself, and its consequence is the extraordinary contrast between the imaginative, demanding cooperation between colleagues for whom reliability is the primordial value, and the easy, arrogant way in which those same colleagues dismiss or ignore the world reduced to a field of operation for rational progress. […] Challenging mobilisation – which divorces scientists from their power to think, imagine and connect, which defines whatever would slow them down as necessarily secondary since what would be slowed down is progress – entails rethinking and reinventing scientific institutions. (125)

RECLAIMING REASON & CIVILISATION + PARTIAL CONNECTIONS

Reclaiming rational thought from mobilisation, and reclaiming civilised modes of appreciation from their temptation to contrast themselves with others who need enlightenment (whatever light an academic field claims to provide), are clearly not enough. […] It rather demands what I would call an ‘ecology of partial connections’, which requires learning from others, being transformed by what is learned, and acknowledging our debt to this transformative experience as we explore its problematising impacts in our own terms. (127)

FAZER CONEXÕES PARCIAIS (encontrar o ponto de humilhação)

Making partial connections means first of all accepting being situated. Reclaiming operations, whether conducted by activists, academics, Indian peasants, feminists, or others, are always particular and partial because they are always situated, starting at the very point where we have been humiliated, that is, separated from our power to think, feel, imagine and act. And this is the very reason why the participants need each other and may connect with each other; or rather, need to learn how to connect with each other in order to learn and draw new consequences from each other’s experience. (127)

O TESTE (o valor do que foi acrescentado)

The test here may well be whether we can reclaim, for those ideas that make us feel and think, the capacity to ‘add’ something to reality, rather than considering ideas and knowledge in terms of truth, explanation or objectivity. Relaying is never ‘reflecting on’, but always ‘adding to’, and thus communicating with what William James defined as the ‘great question’ associated with a pluriverse in the making: does what we relay ‘with our additions, rise or fall in value? Are the additions worthy or unworthy?’ […] This is a testing question indeed: demanding, as Haraway expresses it, that one consent to ‘responsibility’ in her sense of the term; accepting that what we add makes a difference to the world and becoming able to answer for the manner of this difference. (128)

Far from struggling to retain our ancient privileges, we should dare to think with the possibility that we are able to make worthy additions to the weaving of situations that will enable resistance against the coming barbarism. (129)

A EFICÁCIAL DO RITUAL ATIVADOR

The point is the efficacy of the ritual, an aesthetic one, enhancing what Whitehead called ‘the concrete appreciation of the individual facts in their full interplay of emergent values’; or the appreciation of this, always this, concrete situation accompanied by the halo of what may become possible. (130)

ACADÊMICOS ATIVISTAS

if we academics wish to reclaim our practices as worthy, we also need to become reclaiming activists in our own way, inventing our own ways of answering the barbarism that gains ground every time we bow down before necessity, including the necessity of either accepting the rules of the game or being excluded from it. (131)

APRENDER COM AS BRUXAS (círculos de proteção)

We have to learn, as the witches did, how to cast circles that protect us from our insalubrious, infectious milieu without isolating us from the work to be done, from the concrete situations that need to be confronted. (131)

6. Cosmopolitics: Civilising Modern Practices

É O EFEITO QUE DEFINE A NOMEAÇÃO

Naming is a pragmatic process; its truth depends on its effects. (135)

INTRUSÃO DE GAIA COMO OPORTUNIDADE

from the perspective of capitalist logic, the intrusion of Gaia indeed offers new and interesting possibilities, that is, a source of multiple new opportunities to be exploited. But I can only wonder how anybody can really hope that this opportunistic logic will save us from social and ecological disaster. Such a hope is fuelled, rather, by despair: since it is impossible to do otherwise, we have to put our trust in capitalism. (138)

No guarantee

FÉ NO PODER CONECTIVO DA REATIVAÇÃO

Reclaiming operations are initiated at the leading edge of the cut, where each practice has been humiliated, separated from its power to make practitioners think and envisage. My trust is in the plurality of reclaiming operations and the ways in which they may connect, weaving relations with and learning from each other. (141)

NÃO BASTA ABRIR MÃO DO ANTROPOCENTRISMO, É PRECISO SE REDEFINIR COMO CIVILIZAÇÃO

If our practices have to play a part in reclaiming the capacity to answer to the consequences of the intrusion of Gaia, I propose that they don’t just have to give up the idea of a purely human history of progress and conquest, which is precisely what this intrusion challenges. They also have to reclaim a different, positive, definition of themselves and of civilisation, in order to regain relevance and become capable of weaving relations with different peoples and natures. (141)

O PODER DAS IDEIAS

I see my proposal as a little derisory, as will be the case for any particular reclaiming operation. But I do not see it as pointless, because ideas have an efficacy of their own: to poison or to activate, to close down or to open up possibilities. (142)

RESGATAR O ALISTAMENTO DE FENÔMENOS-PARCEIROS

And today, as they have become tools of the knowledge economy, we may say that scientists are the victims of the lie that made them modern, masking the strange specificity of their practice. For this is a strange practice, indeed, which Galileo initiated. It may be characterised as depending on a very particular ‘enrolment’ of phenomena. Phenomena are invited to accept the role of what we might call ‘partners’ in a very unusual and entangled relation. Indeed, they not only have to answer questions but also, and first and foremost, answer them in a way that verifies the relevance of the question itself. (143-4)

O DESAFIO DA RELEVÂNCIA

We can only dream of another story, in which the unifying thread of what we call Science would have been the demanding, specific character of scientific achievement – the commitment to create situations that confer on what scientists address the power to make a crucial difference in regard to the value of their questions. If relevance rather than authority or objectivity had been the name of the game, the sciences would have meant adventure, not conquest. […] Instead of a general ideal of objectivity, a positive, radical, plurality of sciences would have been generated, each scientific practice answering the challenge of relevance associated with its own field. (144)

CIVILIZAÇÃO como CULTIVO DA ARTE DA RELAÇÃO

But civilisation understood as the cultivation of an art of relation-making also precludes whatever would turn relation-making into the normal outcome of something more general, such as Habermas’ idea of communicative rationality. Relation-making does not consist simply in the recognition that we are related; it is an achievement. It implies the risk of failure, the hesitation between peace and war. (146)

A CONQUISTA EXPERIMENTAL x O MÉTODO CIENTÍFICO

The experimental achievement is a case, a very specific case, of relation-making between passionate human beings and what might verify the relevance of their questions. Such achievements may be seen as the creation of bridges between heterogeneous beings gifted with radically divergent ways of behaving, bridges that open up new possibilities of action and passion on both sides. Those scientists for whom this kind of relation-making practice matters, that is, who are not serving a so-called scientific method, know very well that it would be destroyed if the questions to be answered were imposed upon them. (146-7)

CIENTISTAS CIVILIZADOS AMPLIAM SUA INTERLOCUÇÃO

Civilised scientists would be the first to affirm that both the reliability of their results and the competence of their objecting colleagues are relative to experimentally purified, well-controlled laboratory experiments, which require ignoring what may be important factors outside the laboratory. They would thus acknowledge that whatever they achieve may well lose this specific reliability when it leaves the network of research laboratories. The only way to regain reliability would then be to weave new relations proper to each new environment, and to welcome new objections – no longer just from colleagues, but also from those for whom this new environment is a matter of active concern. (147-8)

Political ecology

COLOCAR A CIÊNCIA NA POLÍTICA SEM REDUZÍ-LA À POLÍTICA (porta-vozes)

The first feature is that political ecology needs to ‘put the sciences into politics’, but without reducing them to politics. This requires fully developing, around each issue, the primordial political question: who can talk of what, be the spokesperson of what, represent what, object in the name of what? […] Reclaiming it as such, resisting its hijacking by a general model of objective, rational knowledge, means that a continuation of the political question is needed in each new environment, requiring new spokes-persons, and framing new issues. (148-9)

ESCOLHA entre ECOLOGIA e ECONOMIA

The second feature is obvious. A choice has to be made between political ecology and political economy, and more precisely what I called above capitalist logic. (149)

RESISTIR À ECONOMIA DO CONHECIMENTO E AO TREINAMENTO DO SONÂMBULO

The third and correlative feature, before I come to the limitation, is the need to resist not only the knowledge economy, which is obvious, but also the kind of training scientists receive in modern academic settings, which are dominated by the sharp opposition between questions defined as scientific and those that should be left to politics, or rather to ‘ethics’ (which has taken the place of politics). (149-50)

CONSCIÊNCIA DAS EXIGÊNCIAS DO CONHECIMENTO CIENTÍFICO

they [scientists] should cultivate an active, concrete awareness of the very special and demanding character of their knowledge, and the way its reliability depends on the distribution between what they define as mattering and what can be ignored. Acquiring and maintaining such a concrete awareness, as a condition for the capacity to enter into new relations, takes time, and this may be the true challenge here. (150)

Civilising politics

COSMOPOLÍTICA (hesitação, ativação):

What I call cosmopolitics is not the solution to this difficulty, but a name for it, a name calling for the invention of modes of gathering that complicate politics by introducing hesitation. This is what Donna Haraway has now turned into a thought-provoking motto: ‘staying with the trouble’. (151)

Cosmopolitics has therefore nothing programmatic about it. It has far more to do with activating a passing tremor of fright in a gathering that may be tempted to think it is sufficient to give every concerned party a voice (151)

COSMOS como OPERADOR EQUALIZADOR (desacelerador)
The cosmos, as alluded to in cosmopolitics, thus intervenes as a way of ‘slowing down’, of resisting the idea that it must matter for everybody that a correct position be reached, which should be accepted by all those concerned. […] We could say that the cosmos, here, acts as an equalising operator, slowing down the political voices mobilised by the agreement to be crafted, imbuing them with the feeling that not every concerned party might have, can have, or wants to have, a political voice. Equalisation is thus distinct from political equivalence, demanding that everybody have the same, equivalent, say about an issue. It rather demands that all concerned parties be present in the mode that makes the decision concrete, that is, as difficult as possible, precluding any shortcut or over-simplification, any a priori differentiation between that which counts and that which does not. […] Its mode of existence is rather reflected in an artificial staging to be invented, the efficacy of which would be to expose, to the fullest extent, the consequences of decisions that are made. (152-3)

EXPERTS (contribuem) & DIPLOMATS (defendem)

I call experts those who give voice to a position that is able to accept the constraints of the political procedure, that is, those who are called to contribute to a relevant decision representing a group that will not be existentially threatened by this decision, whatever it may be and whatever the way their contribution is taken into account by it. The experts’ role requires them to present themselves, and to present what they know, in a mode that does not preempt how that knowledge should be taken into account. By contrast, diplomats are there to provide a voice for those whose practice, mode of existence, world, or what is often called identity, may be threatened by a decision: ‘If you decide that, you’ll destroy us.’ The diplomats’ role is therefore above all to force experts to think about the possibility that an envisaged course of action may effectively amount to an act of war. […] It is important to emphasise that the distribution of diplomats and experts is not an essentialist one. It is issue-based; that is, it reflects the position of each concerned group in relation to the formulation of the issue. Even scientists may need diplomats, because their world can also be destroyed, as indeed it is by the ‘knowledge economy’. (153)

WITNESSES (lembram)

What about what I would call the ‘weak’ parties, those who are unable or unwilling to send diplomats, those who have no spokespersons, nobody to defend them or speak in their name? I would suggest calling them ‘victims’, because victims need witnesses. It is the witnesses’ role to make them ‘present’; not arguing in their name but conveying what the issue may mean for them. It is their role to denounce any downplaying of the consequences, any anaesthesia about the price the voiceless ones might have to pay for the political game being played out over their heads. (154)

COSMOPOLÍTICA COMO CONSCIÊNCIA DAS CONSEQUÊNCIAS DA DECISÃO

Cosmopolitics has nothing to do with the miracle of decisions that ‘make everyone agree’. It rather concerns the demand that decisions be taken in the full and vivid awareness of their consequences. No decision is ever innocent. What is important here is the prohibition against ignoring, forgetting, or, worse still, humiliating. Those who gather around an issue have to know that nothing can erase the debt binding their decision to its eventual victims. (154)

MÁXIMA COSMOPOLÍTICA

‘Thou shall not define as dispensable.’ (155)

O PODER DAS IDEIAS e a CIVILIZAÇÃO DAS CIÊNCIAS

the power of ideas is not to be downplayed. The idea that we belong to a tradition that is doomed to define other peoples as entertaining mere beliefs, or nature as a mere resource, is a very infectious one, which you meet everywhere. It breeds guilt and poisons our capacity to resist, leading us instead to identify with the capitalist logic that has captured us. As for the idea of cosmopolitics, its efficacy, however speculative, is to activate the possibility of resisting and reclaiming what this capture has systematically attacked or poisoned. The idea is not to transcend the particularity of the so-called modern tradition, but to think with this particularity, to induce the capacity to imagine the possibility that it can be regenerated or civilised – which does not mean universalised. On the contrary, it means thinking with its own specific, dangerous and never innocent ways of weaving relations. It means thinking with the resources – imaginative, scientific and political – that it may be able to activate in order to enable us, perhaps, to think with other peoples and natures. (155-6)