Oleg Kharkhordin WHAT DO WE DO WITH LATOUR? Some Reflections on His Methods (paper for the Helsinki meeting, 16-17 Dec. 2004) ------Note on abbreviations for English versions of Latour’s books:

LL - , 2nd ed, 1986 SA – , 1987 PF – The Pasteurization of France, 1988 PH – Pandora’s Hope, 1999 PN – , 2004 RS – Reassembling the Social, forthcoming in 2005 ------

I thought that by writing an introduction to the Russian edition of We Have Never Been Modern, which is due to appear in the summer of 2005, I would be able to supply some remarks of use for our project. However, this introduction right now has clearly gotten out of hand and threatens to become a separate book, so I would just enumerate now its main points, and then proceed to discuss our more immediate concerns.

First, I would claim that the overall approach of Latour can be called “new positivism”. Positivist social science was classically conceived as a way of mimicking the indisputable achievements of natural sciences. However, instead of following what the natural scientists were really doing, positivists followed what the natural sciences were telling they were doing. Hence we developed the demands for verification, falsification, operationalization of research questions, causal modeling, hypothesis construction and testing – but all of these clearly are not what the natural scientists are doing in the majority of cases, when we look at the current practice and the history of natural sciences. For example, Pasteur would have never been satisfied to be proven wrong but scientific (that is, his hypotheses being falsified) during his decisive set of tests at the Pouilly-le-Fort farm: he needed victory, not defeat (PF 89). Politics of agonistic competition and clash is at the heart of science in action. Also, as the early books of Latour have shown (see e.g. SA 103, PF 183), the main logic of science is about a) a proliferation of inscription devices that directly visualize what the things are trying to tell us in a direct and simple way (for example, a graph, written by a stylus of a device measuring the electric charge of a muscle, or traces left in the bubble camera by micro-particles) and then amassing and sorting this visual data to infer an object behind the visible traces; and b) constructing blackboxes – pieces of working equipment or organizations - that solidify assembled networks of diverse elements into a functioning mechanism that gives these networks durability and tangibility. These features are hard to disentangle, and serve as obvious referents to the successes of natural sciences: “see, after we discovered the laws of gas flow physics and metal resistance, airplanes fly, while all your dialectics (or – polling techniques, or – interpretive methods) do not give us the same durable predictable results.” Latour himself was practicing this new positivism. For example, his books can be seen as attempts at visualizing what the natural sciences are really doing (he is explicit about that in the reflexive conclusions to his early texts), serving as a sort of a inscription device to register the minute workings of science. His latter-day concerns can be interpreted as trying to construct some blackboxes that would render the successes of network building - lying at the heart of this new positivism - durable and tangible: the recent congress of STS studies in August 2004 in Paris lasted almost a week and brought together a huge crowd of people, and two exhibitions in Karlsruhe aim at effecting and embodying the achievements of STS and ANT.

Second, his studies are about faith and belief. In innumerable places Latour mentions that science is a new system of convincing that replaced the previous system (religion), and he is interested how this new type of faith functions. For example, he is concerned with studying how such a small group of people as Pasteur’s lab had managed to persuade us all in the existence of the microbes – and this durable faith immediately and mostly automatically makes us wish to move to another seat, when someone starts protractedly coughing next to us in a metro. Michel de Certeau once noted (Practice of Everyday Life, ch. 13) that seeing now has become believing: before modernity Christians believed in what they did not see, but witnessed and attested by the Apostles, now they trust only what they see themselves and what they tested in their experience. As commentators like Cyril Lemieux pointed out, Latour’s theory (together with the one of Boltanski-Thevenot) can be called sociologie de l’epreuve, a sociology of testing or trials. Thus, the second part of PF presents a reader with a Deleuzian ontology of the world that consists only of trials of strength that establish what we call experience: these trials supply us with proofs that something is real, they give us what Ludwig Fleck called Wiederstandaviso, a signal of a resisting entity, on which we can ground our claims of reality, in which we can believe. Furthermore, competition between Kuhn’s paradigms is only one case among the trials of strength between different networks of elements usually dubbed ‘research programs”: the one that wins overpowers an enemy by – most frequently – not the power of persuasion in a debate, but by a better blackbox or by developing a larger networks of associated elements. The statements that the winning program produces are hard to challenge in a debate since a production of an alternative statement is too costly for a contender.

Third, Latour develops a theory of truth as fairness. I propose this title on the model of Rawls’s “justice as fairness” that described a just society as the one where everybody would subscribe (in the original position under the veil of ignorance) to the fair rules of the political game. Latour wishes to establish fair rules for the game of truth. Thus he looks at the pragmatic aspects of making a credible statement (say, that a scientific phenomen X exists) and shows that the costs to produce such a statement should be honestly accounted for. For example, in order to have universals, like a concept of a microbe or electron, which would function in Gabon or Saudi Arabia, one has to extend to these remote places the networks, in which they exist. This is a costly process – a few years and million dollars later one can test in the newly constructed labs the electrons and microbes, as anywhere in the world: “I simply want the cost of these universals and the narrow circuits along which they run to be added to the bill.” (PF 220) Similarly, a delivery of a microbe to a remote French township during the days of Pasteur was like bringing there electricity instead of gas light (PF 85 and PF 263, fn. 29): without extending the “grid” for the production of microbes, that is, supplying every farm with lab equipment, how could one say what was the cause of a cattle disease? Latour offers another analogy in LL (186): a steam engine from Newcastle eventually became the railroad network, but no one would expect these engines to run without rails – then why do we adore that a scientific proves right in every place, to which the network for the production of these facts has been extended and “happily forget the cost for the extension of the network”? A production of truthful statements in every locality should be paid for; the strength of networks to produce them frequently consists in a capacity to pay for such statements: “there are no longer any equivalences, reductions or authorities unless the proper price is paid and the work of domination made public.” (PF190) Domination mentioned here comes from the fact that the designation “true” is attached in science to statements coming from networks that have already won in the trials of strength. The problem here is that politics of competition between networks is usually unaccounted for – so, in order to make this truth game fair, one should be clear about its rules and procedures, and one should not take an unfair advantage of other players. This morale, admits Latour, “does not get us very far,” but when it moves to another place, it pays its dues (PF 189).

Now, it should be clear why extending Latour’s theory to a field of study, different from his , is clearly costly. One should pay one’s dues to establish and maintain equivalences between what he was doing in his STS books (or what he is doing in his recent philosophical manifestos) and our concerns. This is also hinted at in a fictional dialogue between an LSE student and Latour that appeared as a separate recent article (see his website for “On Difficulty of Being an ANT”) and then as an interlude linking the two parts of the most recent book (RS) together. A professor in the dialogue claims that the ANT approach is useful, but is not directly applicable to other problems. Rather, it is a negative argument, on how one should not study things. That is, there is no theory to be automatically applied to any empirical case, particularly there is no theory of networks - notwithstanding the title of the ANT approach - that can be applied to all networks. Perhaps the word “worknet” should have been chosen by ANT authors instead of “network”, writes Latour, since right now “everyone thinks we mean the World Wide Web or something like that”, when in fact it is the pragmatic rather than the structural aspects - the work, the movement and the flow - that should be stressed (RS 124). The word “network” in ANT title means how one does the study of one’s phenomena (by creating and extending a network of diverse elements in trials of strength - like natural scientists do – a network that might lead to new visibility and new blackboxes), and not necessarily how one conceives of the structure of the studied phenomena.

This conclusion seems a bit disheartening since many would think of our Academy project as transforming a usual network studies approach, by adding attention to the non-humans. Indeed, when we first conceived of the current project, it was clear that the main premise was the need to bring non-humans into the focus of a study of associational life in Russia. Largely intuitively, our case studies were linked to a certain piece of community infrastructure that helps coordinate or holds associational life together in communities of different grandeur – of a network of friends (birthday party machinery), of an apartment block (co-proprietorship or TSZh), of a university, or of a city. This community infrastructure, however, should not be necessarily seen, if one is to trust the latest statements by Latour I have just quoted, as a central non- human core of a human network or as a set of important elements of a certain hybrid human-non-human network. That is, one should not take this infrastructure as participating on equal terms with people in the construction of a community. As Latour often stated, without the preliminary exchange of features between non- humans and humans, gluing them together in a compound whole is meaningless (see e.g. PN 58). And by all means, this infrastructure should not be seen as consisting of objects influencing people to do certain things: as he says in a most recent book (RS 59): without introducing the uncertainties of groups being performed and of action being overtaken by others, granting agency to objects boils down to primitive classical technological determinism. (These are, by the way, three of the five uncertainties that ANT introduces into sociology, which, in his opinion, ensures the usefulness of ANT – we should read the book by our next meeting, I guess).

Still, I will offer some suggestions about a possible extension of a Latourian “framework” or “method”, even if both words are very infelicitous, as he says in a number of places. In order to do so, I will look at his statements on networks and associations, and will try to articulate possible translations of these statements into our concerns. (Thank God, the Academy has already paid for this extension of Latourian reasoning to another terrain; in order to make it stick, however, much more than just an extension is needed – ideally, we need to develop a novel inscription device and build a network that could be later blackboxed. Will we manage to do so in the remaining three years of the project?)

Networks and Blackboxes

As Latour frequently notes, action is a quality of a network, not of its singular elements of either human or non-human kind: it is the US Air Force that flies, not individual B-52s or individual pilots (PH 182). Imagine a couple of drunken service workers forgetting to refuel an aircraft or check the reliability of steering mechanisms and you can easily guess the result. However, people habitually ascribe action to functioning blackboxes that only crown the gestation of a network; thus, in habitual parlance physics is said to be working since this airplane in the sky is flying now. The role of a piece of machinery that is usually ascribed the effects of a whole network is interesting. First, this blackbox appears when many elements are starting to work as one (SA 131), and the blackbox achieves relative independence from observers and opacity towards their gaze. But this blackbox is just the latest in line among the series of technical inventions that allow solidifying the network and making it rigid and durable. That means, second, that the blackbox embodies previous elements of the network and in particular what Latour calls “the obligatory points of passage” (PF 44 and SA 152), through which the network passes in order to transform itself and arrive at a new condition, solidified in a blackbox. Third, even the blackbox still requires a support network: machines never leave the networks that have created them – they run along their lines (SA 246); also, since no machine is idiot-proof (SA 137), it needs care in the form of servicing and repairs. The third point is more or less self-evident; so let me analyze the first two points in a more detailed way.

First, the blackbox appears when a newly added element allows hooking up some forces together, in such a way that they can mutually control each other. They thus become a piece of self-contained machinery, embodying a certain number of forces – a “machination of forces,” as Latour says (PF 199). Blackboxes are the most successful elements in an attempt to stabilize and rigidify a scientific network, to make it real. Up until this moment the network was expanding, by adding more and more allies, which increased its durability, if they were of a technical kind. However, only a blackbox makes a decisive breakthrough: the form of the phenomena studied, whose claims to reality could be doubted or put into question until now, becomes real – because it is very hard to challenge the soundness of facts against the background of a purring engine that allegedly embodies these facts. We call these machinations of forces “mechanisms,” says Latour, but this is a bad word, because it implies that all forces are mechanical (when this is not so), and that all mechanisms are made by people (but this is the very point put into question by Latour’s approach). An engine, purring under the hood, is only one form that a conspiracy of forces can take: e.g. Diesel thought that his principles can be well embodied in social engines, that is, organizations. The word “technology” is inadequate as well, since it was applied usually to describe nuts and bolts; what is more important here is that a “technical” element “creates a gradient that obliges other allies to adopt a shape and retain it for the time being.” (PF199) Technical invention, in other words, makes all the diverse empirical characteristics of a phenomenon X, tried out and sorted in experiments, cohere as a stable shape – e.g. as an atom, a microbe, a combustion reaction.

An important point to remember, however, is that this invention is the last in line. Only if we ignore all other forces, to which it was added in the last moment, can we speak of a pure piece of self-sustaining technology: the combined force of all the network is ascribed here to the last-added element (PF 200). This implies that a network is not interiorized in a blackbox, rather it is decisively completed: now it has an element that ensures its stability and durability. In other words, a blackbox is an embodiment of only certain elements that control each other within it, but not all previous elements get into its composition – it is not the embodiment of a whole network. Rather, it is the last element in the previous development of the network: after some forces get interiorized in it, other elements stay loosely linked to it or adopt the shape of an external support network.

Second, obligatory passage points matter. These are the elements, without which a network could not expand in the way it did. After recognizing microbes as parts of the hygienic network, it made no sense to invest much into collecting all data on the circumstances of outbreaks and variations of diseases, as the hygienists have been doing so far. What mattered was efficient concentration on collection of infectious samples and their analysis in the labs in order to stop the spread of diseases. This redefinition of the hygienists’ activities was further solidified with the invention of new “technical” elements – vaccines, serums, anti-septic bandages – that made the need to pass through these obligatory points even more evident. Medicine became impossible without these vaccines and serums, surgery became impossible without anti-septics – and all of them allegedly embodied knowledge about the functioning of Pasteur’s microbes. In another example, the extension of a telephone network to link the two coasts of the USA became possible through the new obligatory point of passage – a triod, invented to boost the signal which otherwise would not travel far because of the resistance of a copper wire (SA 124-128). After that telephone industry and electric research were redefined, while the combined network of both grew. For networks, asserts Latour, what is important is not what they are built of (a disappearance of a sponsor or of a crucial experimental guinea pig may spell death to a research project in equal measure), but their extent – how many elements they unite (SA 176). Obligatory passage points allow expanding the networks rapidly in a specific direction, but these extending networks always require more rigid facts to rely upon (SA 205), so these durable props are progressively added to the network. Still, only blackboxing seals the question of a reality of a network. A very specific agent runs along the lines of this solidified network – in the case of microbiology it was a microbe-whose-virulence-Pasteurians-varied (PF 101): an element, which served initially as just a passage point to a new network, becomes the main currency of a new network.

When a blackbox breaks down, we might have an insight into the secrets of three different types of networks. First, of a network that was folded into it, second, of another one that serviced its maintenance and, third, of the overall network, of which it was the last decisive element that gave it indisputable durability. As Latour writes (PH 192), when we are facing a “technical” problem this means that we might be facing a temporary opening up of a blackbox that will soon fold back - when this problem will be logically fixed, repackaging the blackbox - or it might be the ultimate breakdown, when the blackbox proves to be a labyrinth hiding unruly multitudes. In the first case the adjective “technical” means that we have to make a detour from our main (political or social) goal – just for a short period of time, to fix the recalcitrant mechanism. It also means that the mechanism in question is subordinate to our goals, but is nevertheless indispensable (when the mobile phone battery runs out during a conversation, communication has to be restored somehow): we have to make multiple detours, if the usual one fails (one cannot find a charger, or a public phone booth, or an e-mail outlet, or just let the conversation end interrupted, etc.), and unless one of the detours succeeds, we do not regain our subjectivity (do not return to our disrupted political and social goals). Our subjectivity in the network is durably reestablished only corollary to repackaging back of a blackbox: a modern European subject, who follows his or her goals unproblematically, reappears only when all “technical” problems have been solved and the network is once again nicely sliced into intentional subjects and functioning objects. In the second case – when repackaging a blackbox turns out to be impossible at all – the whole life of a subject or a human collective undergoes the crisis: imagine the effect of the terminal blackout of mobile phone use for a modern St. Petersburg teenager who uses it to constantly coordinate and re-coordinate actions with relevant others.

Our Research Goals

These imagined situations of the breakdown of a blackbox are less interesting than the real problems of blackbox use in Olga B and Rosa’s projects (I have not read Olga K’s project attentively enough to include it here as a case, because it was sent later than others – will comment on it during our discussions).

In the case of heating/hot water supply network we can hypothesize the following. Possible breakdowns here refer to the crisis of an internalized network, packaged into the blackbox, or crisis in the external support network. (In Cherepovets, according to Olga’s data heating and hot water problems were fixed faster than cold (drinkable) water supply problems: major reforms followed, which implies that the heating/hot water crisis was pretty acute). Breakdown in the internal system can be seen as cases of usual metal fatigue and corrosion, or water flow and pressure problems, or popular mobilization in the event of a temporary heating collapse during winter – one should just recover stories of these events from existing published and oral accounts. But it is most likely that a more serious crisis arrived with the collapse of the external support network, which should have changed corroded pipes every ten years or so: because of the initial Soviet-era decision to supply heating water and hot washing water with the same pipeline, which propels aggressively treated water under big pressure, pipes corrode fast. In the centralized USSR system there were money to change these pipes in toto every ten-twenty years; now poor municipalities mostly cannot afford it: external repairs network is not working.

Of course, if the external support network has itself changed – e,g,, corporate Severostal’ or bank credit could now help with financing pipe overhaul - it would be interesting to learn what allowed or contributed to a rather successful refurbishing of the entire heating system, when it happened, instead of just a standard pipe overhaul (if I am not mistaken, decentralized heating stations were introduced): was it the urgency of the threat of collapsing heating during the winter, a possibility of breaking down centralized hot water supply by installing apartment heaters on cold water supply pipes, political and economic factors, or the total intermixture of the above? Controversies at the time of the proposed heating reform should be attentively studied. Perhaps in order to see how the blackbox was opened and repackaged, one needs to also look for the elements added – these might have been new obligatory passage points. That is, one needs to consider what additional elements were brought into play – family water heaters, new housing, class considerations, social security schemes, etc. For example, a municipal planner should perhaps install heretofore non- existent family heaters on cold water lines to ensure hot showers, if one kills the hot washing water supply lines of the old centralized hot water/heating system, in order to make decentralized heating (with low pressure circulation) possible. Or perhaps one only installs a new decentralized heating station in the area of new private middle- class and luxury cottages, thus opting for a depopulation of old apartment blocks with a run-down centralized heating system, etc.

The last sentences suggest that there might have been novel obligatory points of passage added to the whole network (this is a version of developments number three instead of hypothesized change number one - breakdown in internal blackboxed network, and number two – changes in external support network), which allowed it to transform itself into a new one. That is, some elements have been added and might have become indispensable for the new heating system, so that now only decentralized heating makes sense (like only lab tests made primary sense for hygienists after the microbes’ appearance on stage, not heretofore widespread investments into construction of well-ventilated airy halls of the hospitals). In order to understand those, one should perhaps study the history of other obligatory passage points in the past, when the centralized system of high-pressure hot water/heating system was initially created. Olga’s account does not say when it happened, it only seems to mention the introduction of novel obligatory passage points for the cold water supply: in 1939 the old pre-revolutionary water scoop system, destroyed by the creation of the Rybinsk sea in 1930, was decisively refurbished. A really drastic 1939 increase in the capacity of drinkable water supply should have been explained, one might suspect, either by massive new investment (that might have just magnified the existing blackbox, if this arithmetic expansion were possible at all) or a massive repackaging of the old blackbox. Looking for the historical accounts of the previous packaging of the current blackbox might help us also understand better what are the current problems in re-blackboxing cold water supply.

The fact that reform in this area is not progressing as fast as in heating is a godsend: Olga can still follow the controversies played out in front of her, rather than collect accounts of those that happened before her arrival. Latour’s method is anthropological and ethnographic to a large extent – it aims at a visualizing description, and participant observation at the time, when the blackbox is about to be repackaged, is most illuminating since it could show different networks at play, engaged in clash or collusion. What versions of new blackboxing are on offer – decentralized water supply like in Britain, a single municipal Betrieb that simultaneously supplies water, gas, electricity, and garbage disposal, as in Germany, or something other? What are the new obligatory points of passage that make some version of blackboxing likely, if the network that includes these points wins in the trials of strength with other networks?

(One final suggestion concerns a successful recent installation of ultra-violet treatment of cold water supply. What has precipitated this change – breakdown in internal or external networks? Or, perhaps, there has been an extension of the overall network (e.g. people started installing additional cold water filters on their individual outlets, which has lowered the pressure in the supply system and has threatened to kill the flow altogether)? Why is it considered insufficient? Fieldwork will give us much to ponder.)

Rosa’s project is concerned with a new legal form of organization called TSZh that might become a new universal way to package the relationships in common area- linked housing complexes and apartment blocks (at least, the St. Petersburg city government is pressing for it on all fronts). Legal organization, of course, is a sort of machine: Weber did not write for nothing in Economy and Society (vol. 2, p. 1305?) that a bureaucrat is an automaton of a paragraph. The old forms of packaging elements of housing networks are clearly in crisis: common areas, like the staircases, roofs, courtyards, parking lots in both ZhEK and ZhSK are not looked after – so, the obvious question could be: is it because of the collapse of a former inner workings of a blackbox, of its external maintenance and support nets, or because additional elements were added to the old networks?

(My suggestion, however, would be once again not to give an explanation, but an illuminating ethnographic-oriented description that could a) serve as an inscription device for the elements spotted during the trials of strength, characteristic of participative fieldwork, and b) build a network of elements around this description that could help make spotted features become progressively more real. But let’s keep this larger objective of a Latourian sociologist in the background, so as not to complicate things hopelessly in the foreground exposition.)

The case studies could be different here. First, a successful TSZh - i.e. a well- functioning blackbox: one should study it to learn what people take for granted in such a community, that is, what features they do not notice since the blackbox mechanics is a non-important mystery to them. Second, a TSZh that faces a breakdown of its blackbox. Here three variants are possible: one, internal network collapses – e.g. pensioners stop payments for utilities and still cannot be evicted from their apartments for lack of adequate laws or law enforcement; two, external network breakdown – e.g. a new private service firm, similar to YIT in Finland, raises its prices to monopoly levels and then stops delivering services for the reason of the insolvency of the TSZh; three, extension of the old TSZh network into a new one through adoption of new obligatory points of passage – e.g. a centrally-located TSZh privatizes the land in the courtyard, starts renting it for parking or retail trade and becomes a commercial enterprise. A third possible case study is about perhaps going into controversies over a creation of the TSZh by a house willing to do it now. This would be most fruitful once again, as in the case of cold water supply reform for Olga B: here the networks have not been stabilized yet. By the way, this might be the most widespread case in contemporary St. Petersburg that is in the throes of the TSZh reform.

Whether one should better look here for the ZhSK or a ZhEK unit transforming itself into a TSZh, I cannot guess now – preliminary interviews are needed, and perhaps the choice of research site might be guided by the availability of access to participant observation and interviews. That is, choice might be guided by the networks already available for building inroads into the phenomenon under study. Here involvement in these networks might not be a handicap (this is a usual criticism from the standpoint of traditional positivism: if you are involved in certain relations of exchange or gift- giving in order to find access to your object of study, you are not impartial enough), but an advantage. These initial access networks might be also used to help to progressively make the result of studies (a visualized phenomenon) more real with the help of extending the network by means of adding allies - many of which would be durable entities. This expanding network could finally get solidified by a specific machination of forces - which would appear last in the line of these more and more durable elements – and this new machination is a newly created blackbox called the TSZh.

In lieu of Conclusion

And what has happened to our initial objects of study – popular mobilization, civic activities and the like? Initially it seemed for us that the predicament of Russia – its collapsing infrastructure – might be its saving grace, because it forced mobilization and discussion on the agenda of most cities, districts, courtyards and houses.

But as Walter Lippmann, whom Latour now frequently cites, says, when we are durably connected, we do not have to agree. Publics appear when we have to come into agreement – that’s when the debate starts: coordination is then achieved not through common things, but through conscious rearrangement of our individual actions. But in the majority of cases of a well-functioning democracy it is the absence of the need to constantly engage in debates, establishing agreement, which makes these debating and deliberation moments meaningful. Lippmann was perhaps fostering here liberal freedom for enjoyments in private, which is threatened by the expansion of an imposed continuous participation in public proceedings. But another interpretation of his thesis is possible as well. Gathering in order to repair is not like gathering in order to re-pair, i.e. really establishing or re-establishing pairs or other forms of human bonding for the sake of this bonding. This is Lippmann, interpreted in Arendt’s terms, of course: getting together to solve inescapable household problems humiliates and lowers a human being who forgets higher goals of life, like voluntary (rather than forced by circumstances) acting with others in concert in order to reveal unique individuals engaged in this activity.

From this standpoint, a debate over the quality of cold water and a future of its supply system that is still going on in Cherepovets is not a feature of well-functioning democracy: it is the result of a broken blackbox whose contents need to be rearranged by common effort. The same is true about the projects on how to build a TSZh in a former ZhSK or ZhEK: only if they are settled, by whatever means available - and the network is solidified by a blackbox - then democratic politics becomes possible. People could then think about higher things than just about setting up the arena for living together: such would be a Lippmann-Arendt type of argument.

But who said that the skills, learned in the construction of functional blackboxes on the housing or municipal level, cannot then be transferred to a higher-arranged community of free expression? One has perhaps to just pay the dues needed to move (translate, another Latourian term) the principles of mundane network formation to spheres of higher concerns, and fostering freedom of an almost Arendtian, Greek kind, might become possible. Alternatively – if fairness in games of freedom is not the same as fair game in games of truth (which is about paying the dues for extending the science networks, remember?) - one has just to articulate the specificity of fairness in this domain as well. Then one can make the game of freedom as fair as Rawls made the game of justice and as Latour is trying to make the game of truth: freedom as fairness is the goal.