Chrestomathy

Because, as I mentioned in my introductory post, I admire Latour as a phrasemaker and rhetorician as much as I do him as a thinker, I wanted to give a little unannotated list of my favorite lines from Pasteurization of France that haven't already come up in conversation. I'll probably continue this practice as we go along — the man's just so quotable!

From Guerre et Paix de microbes:

“I use history as a brain scientist uses a rat, cutting through it in order to follow the mechanisms that may allow me to understand at once the content of a science and its context.” (12)

“It is not given to everybody to become a century, any more than it is to have one’s name on the principal street of every town and village in France, or to prevent people from spitting, to persuade them to dig drains, to get vaccinated, or to create serotherapy.” (14)

“Since anything might cause illness, it was necessary to act upon everything at once, but to act everywhere is to act nowhere.” (20-21)

“[P]olitics is made not with politics but with something else.” (56)

“‘Pasteur’ or ‘bacteriology’ are names given to crowds. Trying to write the history of these phantasmagorias or trying to make one the product of the other would be like writing the history of France on the basis of the popular press filled with crime, sex, or aristocratic weddings.” (60)

“‘Chance favors only well-prepared laboratories.’” (84) [This one is actually Pasteur himself.]

“For me, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that anyone should regard as incomprehensible the nevertheless simple way by which we make it comprehensible.” (90)

“All the attempts to classify or distinguish these entities [hygiene, science, and medicine] have no interest in themselves; they merely indicate the number of freeways that were converging on this enormous cloverleaf exchange.” (137)

“…the ‘symbolic and cultural dimensions,’ the bone that those who have given up the good fare of reality are content to gnaw…” (146)

“I had to give back to the sciences the crowd of heterogeneous allies which make up their troops and of which they are merely the much-decorated high command whose function is always uncertain.” (147)

From Irreductions:

1.1.5.4: “Nothing is known — only realized.” (159)

1.1.14.1: “Order is extracted not from disorder but from orders …
“We always make the same mistake … We are always lamenting decadence and the dissolution of morals. Bad luck! Attila speaks Greek and Latin; punks dress with the same care as Coco Chanel; plague bacteria have strategies as subtle as those of IBM; the Azande falsify their beliefs with the gusto of a Popper. No matter how far we go, there are always forms; within each fish there are ponds full of fish.” (161)

1.2.5.4: “The freest of all democracies reigns between instants.” (165)

1.4.4: “I am willing to talk about ‘logic,’ but only if it is seen as a branch of public works or civil engineering.” (171)

2.1.3.2: “Only teachers claim to be able to extract one sentence from another by means of ‘pure, formal deduction.’ They know in advance the conclusion of the argument they claim to be unfolding. Organized arguments learned slowly and in disorder are unfolded by them at high speed, one after another, concealing what went on backstage behind the blackboard, the tumultuous history that led this proposition to be linked to that one. They offer that which contains in potentia all the consequences for the worship of their pupils, who fervently believe that they have deduced one thing from another.” (177)

2.1.7.1: “In theory, theories exist. In practice, they do not.” (178)

2.4.6: “‘[L]ogic’ is a branch of public works. We can no more drive a car on the subway than we can doubt the laws of Newton. The reasons are the same in each case: distant points have been linked by paths that were narrow at first and then were broadened and properly paved. By now nothing short of revolution or natural cataclysm would lead those who use these paths to suggest another route to the traveler.” (185)

2.5.5: “…Why … is this trade of thought, unlike all others, held to be nonmanual? Because otherwise it would have to give up the privilege of going outside its networks. It would no longer be able to extend itself above the simple practice of tradesmen. Everyone prefers to set intellectuals apart (even if only to ridicule them) rather than to recognize that they work. Even if the believers do not benefit themselves from these free trips, they do not wish others to be deprived of the privilege of hovering outside time and space.” (187)

3.3.6: “We always misunderstand the strength of the strong. Though people attribute it to the purity of an actant, it is invariably due to a tiered array of weaknesses.” (201)

3.4.7: “The meaning of the ‘social’ continually shrinks — it has now been reduced to the level of ‘social’ problems. It is what is left when everything else has been divided up among the powerful; whatever is neither economic, technical, legal, nor anything else is left to it. Do we really expect to bind everything together with this impoverished version of the social? Like a mayonnaise that does not take, it is bound to fail. The ‘social’ — its actors, its groups, and its strategies — is too closely identified with human beings to pay heed to the feckless impurity and immorality of alliances." (205)

3.5.1: “What can we compare with the weaknesses that make up a force? A macramé. Is there a knot that links men to men, neurons to neurons, or sheets of iron to sheets of iron? No. The rope of this Gordian knot has not yet been woven. But every day we see before our very eyes a macramé of strings of different colors, materials, origins, and lengths, from which we hang our most cherished goods.” (206)

3.6.6: “Worlds probably look more like Rome than a computer.” (211)

4.1.3: “…Be strong maybe, but potent never. Kill me, but do not expect me to wish for death and kneel before power. To force I will add nothing.” (213)

4.7.1: “[T]here are not two ways of learning — one academic, human, rational, or modern, and the other popular, natural, disorganized, or ancient. There is only one way. We can always learn in the same way, without short cuts, foresight, or ever leaving the networks that we build. We make each mistake as many times as is necessary to move from one point to another.
“We will never do any better. We will never be able to go any faster. We will never see any more clearly.” (231)

More to come!