You might be reminded of the Foot & Mouth disease essay now. Both the authors of that work were hugely inspired by Latour and were early adopters of a method of analysis he championed called "Actor-network-theory" ANT. Just mentioning this for those of you who may be interested in reading further.

As you might recall, this is the difference between Veterinary Science and Epidemiology - vets study individual animals (sheep, goats, pigs etc) while epidemiologists study the conditions which allow diseases to spread so not animals but things like sewage, water, wind, soil etc

Latour is appealing to a minimalist understanding of Science - we don't need fancy sociological, psychological or cognitive theories (is his claim). What makes science successful are laboratories - the fact that labs allow scientists to repeat experimetns i.e. simply trial and error - nothing more is needed to explain the success of Science .

Latour explicitly casts scientific work as a power relation: laboratories are spaces where Man can gain control over the environment i.e. the place where Man can most thoroughly dominate nature. Outside of a lab, viruses or monkeys maybe stronger than Man - he may even fear them but inside a lab Man has complete control over these forces - everything in a lab exists to ensure that Man has the upper hand

This is crucial - if we don't take concepts like "culture" or "emotion" a a given or if we don't take moves like "contextualization" i.e. understanding something with respect to its context as sacrosanct then we free ourselves to consider alternatives - alternatives that might be better suited for the task at hand.

Latour is addressing many types of readers in this paper - his colleagues as well as members of the general public. Accordingly he will switch his style and manner of speaking - sometimes he will be sarcastic and poke fun of his colleagues, at other times he will slip into a professorial lecture mode wherein he will start explaining something patiently, at other times he will say something casually like he is having a casual conversation at a dinner party and at other times he will give Pasteur dialogues as if he is a playwright and finally sometimes he will write as if he is delivering a sermon. You can keep an eye out for the genres or styles of speech he switches between but more importantly this is something you can incorporate in your writing as well. Academic writing doesn't always have to have one style of speaking.

This is a nice sentence: it builds momentum by moving from curious to interesting to fascinating.

We might read Knorr Cetina's work next semester. One of her main points is to think of Science as also a skill based activity like playing sports, learning to bake bread, learning pottery etc i.e. it requires considerable physical skill to be a good lab technician. Our imagination of Science tends to be focussed so much on the mind that we forget the role of other sorts of technical skills that are involved in Science that have less to do with consciously thinking and more to do with doing things

This is the sort of lazy story that Harari tells: a bad historical account which claims that "something called the Scientific Revolution happened" when "humans gave up religion and started becoming curious about the world around them" - a new cognitive attitude.

This is what makes Latour an entertaining writer for me: now he has slipped into a playwright mode: he is giving Pasteur dialogues as if he was a character in some play that Latour is writing.

Latour's description makes Pasteur sound more like a tactician or a strategist i.e. someone playing a game of chess almost. Why he is describing Pasteur in this way will become apparent eventually

Latour too is going to be analyzing this in terms of language and translation. One has to start somewhere. The trick is to not fall into a trap of correspondence truth - that emotions are really out there, culture is really out there, that what Pasteur is doing is to learn a new language etc. and so on - these are just useful ways of coming to grips with a complicated reality, nothing more

Sometimes people will say "so you mean everything is ______" for eg science or religion are "cultural" or everything (including science) has to be understood contextually. This is the move that Latour is resisting. Because he doesn't want to explain one science (say biology) using another (sociology). What we call culture or what we call a contextual explanation are simply the units of analysis used by particular fields i.e. just like emotion - "context" or "culture" too are epistemic things (we will be reading a paper on how culture is an epistemic thing next semester similar to how we discussed emotion this semester)

I find Latour to be a very entertaining writer. Here he is paraphrasing a quote attributed to Archimedes "Give me a place to stand and I hall move the Earth!"

Latour mixes many styles of speech and many ways of speaking. This line alone is something I can imagine as pat of a sermon in a Church or as graffiti on the side of a building - to me it sounds like a dramatic and heroic announcement

One of the reasons I chose this essay for the summary exercise is that there are ample resources/ materials available on the internet discussing many of the terms/ ideas/ concepts that you will come across in this essay. The essay itself has its own wiki page (which is quite rare for an academic essay).

Looking up authors you're about to read is usually a good idea. You can skim their bios as well as brief descriptions of other books or articles that they have written. Doing this can sometimes give you some co-ordinates + orientation to guide your reading.

As we have been discussing in class, one way in which to organize your thinking as well as tackling the readings you have to do now is to keep track of the concepts any author deploys and more importantly keeping track of how the author deploys these concepts.

Although Latour has been talking about Pasteur's work for two whole paragraphs, it is only now that Latour names the concrete problem Pasteur tackled: anthrax. You can google anthrax now (if you like) to get a sense fo what this disease is and what it does.

Why might laboratory studies seem irrelevant to larger problems such as science policy? Here it might be helpful to cycle back to what Latour said earlier "If we are not able to follow-up our participant-observation studies far enough to take in questions outside of the lab, we are at great risk of falling back into the so-called internalist vision of science." Now if I was to try and reformulate what I have read so far in simpler terms for my own understanding, it might go somewhat like this "If we were to just closely follow the day-to-day activities of scientists in labs, then how can we take in questions from outside the laboratory"? It might still not be clear exactly what Latour is talking about, so we read on in the hope that it becomes clearer later

Latour now offers a clean and crisp definition of what he thinks science is.

I think this point now relates to Latour's remark about stiff Victorian Englishmen seeing children everywhere but repressing the idea of sex.

Let us take any simple fact you believe in: say the fact that water is h20 i.e. two hydrogen atoms and oxygen atom -- what networks does such a fact circulate in? How exactly did you end up believing in this fact?

I particularly enjoy the way Latour makes this argument. I think it is simple to understand and easy to grasp.

Are you convinced by Latour's argument that this level does not exist and that laboratories are places where inside and outside relations are reversed?

If this is Latour's definition of what a laboratory is, then what seems to be his definition of science and what might his definition of a scientist be?

Does Latour's argument convincingly change for you how we typically think about science?

Is Latour's point now about collapsing distinctions between different levels - the inside and the outside of the lab or the microscale of the laboratory and the macroscale of French society any clearer now?

'Taking for granted the prior extension of a former science' is an interesting line. You can consider if there are other examples you can think of that this applies to.

Perhaps Latour could offer a few more details here - what exactly was Pasteur even checking for in the first place and exactly what aspects of the farm had to be modified in accordance with laboratory procedures?

Again since this is a point that Latour has been making for awhile now, it is a little incovenient that only now he is offering us solid proof.

Latour is making the same argument yet again but because he used some undefined terms like 'inoculation gesture', I don't quite have a clear picture as to how and to what extent laboratory conditions were extended to other places and other farms outside the lab. Whether or not I buy Latour's argument hinges on this so maybe Latour should have spent more time elaborating how this was done.

In the last class we looked at Weber's definition of a State: "That entity which monopolizes the legitimate use of violence" Weber characterizes a State through its use of violence. Latour now tells us that he is characterizing the spread of science through negotiation between non-equivalent situations.

I hope what Latour means by translation is somewhat clearer now. You can try reformulating what he means by a translation in your own words now. You might have noticed by now that Latour seems to keep repeating himself. In a way this is helpful because if a particular iteration of his argument doesn't make sense, then you can hope that a subsequent iteration will make more sense to you, so once again if something confuses you or doesn't make sense, it might be a good idea to read on.

For my own understanding I am going to try and summarize what I think Latour is trying to say - in my own words.

"At first Pasteur has to try and mimic the conditions found on farms in his lab. So the world inside the lab has to imitate in some respects the world outside the lab. Pasteur then discovers some procedures that seem to work in his lab. Now farmers and farms need to be modified according to these clinical procedures of cleanliness and whatever an inoculation gesture is. So now the farms have to imitate Pasteur's lab in some respects i.e. the world outside the lab has to imitate the world inside the lab.

He has introduced the question he will tackle later while moving onto a separate point entirely. His writing would be a lot easier to follow if he had listed all the reasons the inside/outside boundary is irrelevant together instead of making us (the reader) jump back and forth.

Latour here is once again signalling the question he is going to take up. So you can make note of this question and see where and how exactly he tackles it.

Based on this analogy, what vision of Science might we be repressing?

Here finally we get some explanation of what Pasteur might mean that the farms in France where animals were dying are now transformed to resemble Pasteur's laboratory. A set of laboratory protocols - disinfection, cleanliness, whatever an inoculation gesture is, recording and timing the spread of infections among animals is now to be followed by the farmers. Provided farmers follow these protocols Pasteur devised in his lab, Pasteur's vaccine works to contain anthrax outbreaks.

This is the second time Latour is mentioning this idea that Pasteur transformed the farm back into some version of his laboratory but has he explained or elaborated what he means by this?

Notice the terms through which Latour is describing Pasteur i.e. the scientists work. Typically what are some adjectives through which you describe a scientist's work?

Now look at the adjectives Latour is using. What image or impression of the scientist's work do words like strength and force give you?

You might notice by now that Latour tends to open each section with statements or questions that neatly frame/ hint at the major theme of that particular section

Why does Latour emphasize that it is new but not miraculous?

When Latour says Pasteur is making a translation what might he be translating i.e. So normally when we speak of translations, we tend to speak of translations as occurinng between one language to another. So keeping this usage in mind, what might Pasteur be translating between?

Why do you think Latour might be emphasizing this point?

It usually helps to pay attention to the sub-headings any author uses. This can often give you a sense of the argument they are developing.

Latour repeatedly and with increasing frequency now is using words like translate and construct. These seem to be important key words/ key concepts for Latour so keep an eye out for the re-occurence of these words. What might he mean by it?

This will be a recurring theme in our course but many of the things we take for granted today and many of the things we take to be obvious or factual today were deeply counter-intuitive and had to be established over time. Today it might seem obvious that diseases should be studied in labs but this wasn't always obvious, just as it wasn't always obvious that washing your hands prevents the spreading of germs.

Notice that Latour is sticking words like terrible and proven within quotes. Why might he be doing this?

Here Latour offers a direct and straightforward statement of what he is trying to do in this paper. It is usually good to look out for such sections in any paper that you read and then mark it. This can help orient you as you read further.

We have discussed in class a term for this: incommensurability. Different fields of knowledge develop different methods and tools for the objects they study. So one reason we read that biological explanations cannot be reduced to explanations in chemistry or physics is because these fields are incommensurable.

It seems like Latour is intervening in some debate in the sociology of science. Based on some of the examples he has given in the preceding paragraph, do you get a sense of what debate he is entering? Try hazarding a guess. Guesswork is another inevitable part of reading academic texts. As you read further on or as you read related texts, you can keep adjusting, refining or correcting your initial views and impressions.

Many if not most academic texts are explicitly in conversation with other authors and other texts. So typically usually you might be in the habit of picking up a text and hoping that it is self-contained i.e. that everything you need to understand that text is contained within the pages of that text but academic papers and books don't quite work like this. What Latour means by "nothing scientific goes on in labs" - a blatantly contradictory and absurd claim on the face of it, can only start making sense once you read the author he is referencing - Karin Knorr Cetina. What this means is that in reading any academic text, you have to be open to the possibility that not all of it is going to make sense - immediately at least but that once you start reading more and more texts, you start picking up concepts and ideas that can then help you make sense of a range of texts.

This now seems like the second concept Latour is talking about. Googling internalism, I get the following definition: "Internalism is the view in epistemology that everything needed to provide justification for a belief is immediately available to a person's consciousness without having to resort to external factors." I still don't know what Latour might mean by internalist vision of science so I park this sentence for now and I read on.

This sounds like a concept. Googling it, I get the following definition: "Participant Observation is a research methodology where the researcher is immersed in the day-to-day activities of the participants" Furthermore it says that this research methodology is frequently used in anthropology, sociology, communication studies, human geography, and social psychologist. Now if you were to google Bruno Latour, the author of this piece you'd find that he is a respected philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist in the field of science and technology studies.