Translation, or How Everybody Wins

Yesterday I finished Latour's magisterial case study of The Pasteurization of France. (I'll be doing a separate post on Irreductions, its more "philosophical" counterpart, and probably a couple of follow-up notes on Pasteurization this week as well.) The title's a somewhat dry English translation of Pasteur: Guerre et Paix des microbes — which is better, both because it creates a closer link with Tolstoy's War and Peace (which Latour uses as a working model for his vision of how the Pasteurian victory over the microbes was accomplished), and because it introduces a theme that is clearly important to Latour. Namely, how essential are agonistic and adversarial metaphors to a sociological understanding of reality? Much of Latour's later work will be built around the theme of war and peace, as even some of his titles (like "War of the Worlds — What About Peace?" and "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?") attest. Clearly Latour finds it difficult to do without the language of war and confrontation — Pasteurization of France is chock-a-block with military metaphors — but he also looks for ways to resist or deflect this violent language (see, he's got me doing it too).

It seems to me that, in Pasteurization, Latour is trying to do an end run around what Randall Collins has called "the conflict tradition" (metonymically, and roughly: Marx, Weber and Talcott Parsons) via semiotics, and in particular the notion of "translation." BL uses this word very frequently in both Pasteurization and Irreductions and it does a tremendous amount of work for him, but seems not to lean on it so heavily in his later work. And I think part of the reason he jettisons "translation" (along with much else of his semiotic vocabulary) is that it's too redolent of linguistics, and brings him too close to the 80s-era discourse of deconstruction. (Mike, I'm sure you're more sensitive to these tropes than I am, so please, let me know what you think of this idea.) Here's how Latour glosses "translation" in a useful footnote on page 253:

The notion of translation has been developed by M. Callon (1986), M. Callon, J. Law and A. Rip, eds. (1986) and B. Latour (1987) and applied to the study of science and technology in order to fuse the notions of interest and research program in a more subtle way. First, translation means drift, betrayal, ambiguity … It thus means that we are starting from an inequivalence between interests or language games and that the aim of the translation is to render two propositions equivalent. Second, translation has a strategic meaning. It defines a stronghold established in such a way that, whatever people do and wherever they go, they have to pass through a contender's position and to help him further his own interests. Third, it has a linguistic sense, so that one's version of the language game translates all the others, replacing them all with "whatever you wish, this is what you really mean."

While conflict sociology tends to see agents pitting their respective interests against another, and thus inevitably producing "winners" and "losers," "haves" and "have-nots," this semiotic sociology is more interested in how interests are converted, how we arrive at a local, temporary sense that "everybody wins." For this to take place, there doesn't necessarily need to be communication — no Habermasian transcendental chitchat need take place; but there does need to be mutual awareness of one another's respective positions. And here we see why "translation," in its most familiar literary sense, might be a good metaphor: a translator doesn't (necessarily) talk to the author she is translating; rather, she reads, reads about, thinks about, takes cognizance of that author and his interests, and finds a way to bring those interests to a new place. Inevitably, there will be "drift" and "betrayal" along the way: by the time the author is translated, he will no longer be saying exactly what he once said. But he has not been defeated, or destroyed, or even (necessarily) deconstructed: he has just been moved.

So, in Latour's account of the Pasteurians and hygienists against the physicians, who were notoriously reluctant to accept bacteriology because it obviated their usual methods and, by emphasizing prevention over cure, threatened to put them out of business, we don't see the doctors holding out against innovation until they are finally ground down, or have a change of heart, and have to give in: instead, we see how their interests are translated, around 1895, by the development of sera which could be inoculated by doctors in their offices, thus finally giving them a crucial role in the bacteriological campaign (129). In so doing, their position has been rendered (partially) equivalent to the Pasteurians; they have "passed through" the Pasteurians' stronghold, thus furthering the bacteriological agenda; and they have been made to speak differently, even mean differently, while still maintaining a continuity of interests ("whatever you wish, this is what you really mean"). Translation in all three senses.

"Translation" thus allows Latour to keep the concept of "interests" in play without letting it take over his analysis completely. Another revealing footnote on page 260 makes clear that when he speaks of “interests” he is not referring to the “interest theory” of David Bloor and Barry Barnes; he's also, implicitly, I think, repudiating the Frankfurt School and Bourdieu. Citing Callon again, Latour states that “‘Interest’ means simply what is placed ‘in between’ some actor and its achievements. I do not suppose that these interests are stable or that groups can be endowed with explicit goals … Interests cannot explain science and society: they are what will be explained once the experiment is over” (260). In other words, "interests" are not what there really are, with all of the rest of society an epiphenomenon of these primary interests (class struggle, struggle for various forms of capital, etc.). Rather, interests are temporary obstacles between one position and another, which are frequently translated in order to bring us to a new place.

Lest this all sound too nicey-nicey, like we all always end up getting everything we want, it should be remembered that "[t]ranslation is by definition always a misunderstanding, since common interests are in the long term necessarily divergent” (65). This caveat explicitly contradicts the essential Marxian view, held by everyone from Marx himself to Adorno to Habermas to Jameson, that real social interests are in fact held in common. (See Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests for the most extensive unfolding of this position, and Raymond Geuss' Idea of a Critical Theory for a good critique of it.) But the idea that interests are ultimately shared makes no sense for Latour, because we cannot all actually be occupying the same place, and interests are what is in between us. This is where I intuitively feel that Latour is actually close to Derrida, but I'll resist the urge to work out why — perhaps Mike has some thoughts on this subject. At any rate, the coffee's running low, and my interest is flagging.